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.
Giant Black UFOs Seen Over Baltimore This Week! Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Oct 13, 2019 Location of sighting: Baltimore, Maryland, USA Source: MUFON #103972 Here is a video of the most recent UFO sighting. A person saw several black rectangles moving in and out of the clouds over Baltimore. He managed to get some video of the object moving silently. There are no wings, no ropes, no lights of any kind, no windows...nothing that would signify that this is man made. Its very odd to be over such a populated area, especially a busy shipping port. It almost looks as if one of those cargo boxes on the ships had floated away into the sky. I just wish the person had a newer phone, then maybe the video would have been crystal clear. Scott Waring Eyewitness states:
While Crossing the Key Bridge in the early morning the witness noticed several cylinder objects with what looked like "Spheres" looping around each one. He states "They went up and down, in and out of the clouds, sometimes disappearing only to reappear again." After watching for about 5 min they all went into the clouds. Several seconds later one dropped back out of the clouds, came down a couple hundred feet and stopped. At this point, I started recording on my phone camera. The witness added "The object hovers for about 1-2 minutes and then slowly moves off the right (NE). With the naked eye, I could see the"White Sphere" going beside and around the crane but the video doesn't show it." The witness said that he stopped filming to pick up his mother who was visiting from New Hampshire, but states "On the way back about 1 hour later we noticed 2 of the 3 crafts, however they were much further away. The second time around I did notice something else... I noticed a very large white sphere. I only viewed it for several seconds before it was obstructed by trees.
But don't worry, no laws of physics are being violated.
Green dots show the locations of 186 gamma-ray bursts detected by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) over its first 10 years. New evidence suggests the odd signal showing up in these gamma ray bursts may be a sign that speeding jets of plasma are traveling faster than light in a medium.
In a distant corner of the universe, something is traveling faster than light.
No, the laws of physics aren't being violated: It's still true that nothing can travel faster than light in the vacuum of empty space. But when light travels through matter, like interstellar gas or a soup of charged particles, it slow downs, meaning other matter might overtake it. And that may explain the weird symmetry in pulses of some of the most energetic light in the universe, called gamma-ray bursts.
These cryptic bursts — bright flashes of gamma-ray light that come from faraway galaxies — form when massive stars collapse or when ultradense neutron stars collide. These cataclysms send speeding jets of hot, charged plasma zooming through space.
But these signals have an odd symmetry, and the reason they do is still a mystery.
A gamma-ray burst doesn't brighten and dim in one steady peak, but instead in a flickering pattern, said Jon Hakkila, an astrophysicist at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.
Hakkila has worked on this puzzle for years. Now, he and a collaborator have a solution: plasma traveling both slower and faster than the speed of light could explain this flickering pattern, as they report in a paper published Sept. 23 inThe Astrophysical Journal. If they're right, it may help us understand what's actually producing these gamma-rays.
"I find it a great step forward," that connects the small scale phenomena in the plasma to our large-scale observations, said Dieter Hartmann, an astrophysicist at Clemson University who was not involved in the study.
In the last few years, Hakkila has found that gamma-ray bursts have small fluctuations in brightness on top of their overall brightening and dimming. If you subtract the overarching brightening and dimming, you're left with a series of smaller peaks — one primary peak with smaller peaks in brightness before and after. And this pattern is strangely symmetric. If you "fold" the pattern over at the main peak and stretch one side, the two sides match remarkably well. In other words, the light pattern of a gamma-ray burst's pulse hints at a set of mirrored events.
"Whatever happened on the front side happened on the back side," Hakkila said. "And the events knew to happen in reverse order."
Though astronomers don't know what causes gamma-ray burst emission at the particle scale, they are fairly sure that it happens when jets of plasma traveling near the speed of light interact with surrounding gases. Hakkila had been trying to come up with explanations for how these situations might make symmetric light pulses when he heard from Robert Nemiroff, an astrophysicist at Michigan Technological University.
Nemiroff was studying what happens when an object travels through a surrounding medium faster than the light it emits, called superluminal motion. In previous research, Nemiroff had found that when such an object goes from traveling slower than light to faster than light, or vice versa, this transition can trigger a phenomenon called relativistic image doubling. Nemiroff wondered whether this could account for the symmetric patterns Hakkila found in gamma-ray burst pulses.
So what exactly is "relativistic image doubling?" Imagine a boat creating ripples as it moves across a lake toward the shore. If the boat travels more slowly than the waves it creates, a person standing on the shore will see the boat's ripples hit the shore in the order that the boat created them. But if the boat travels faster than the waves it creates, the boat will overtake the first wave it creates only to create a new ripple in front of that one and so on. In that way, the new ripples created by the boat will reach the shore sooner than the first waves it created. A person standing on the shore will see the ripples hit the shore in a time-reversed order.
The same idea applies to gamma-ray bursts. If the cause of a gamma-ray burst is traveling faster than the light it emits through the gas and matter surrounding it, we would see the emission pattern in reverse chronological order.
Hakkila and Nemiroff reasoned that this could account for half of a gamma-ray burst's symmetric pulse.
But what if the material was first traveling slower than the speed of light, but then accelerated? What if it started fast and then slowed down? In either case, we might see the emission both in chronological order and reverse chronological order right after one another, making a symmetric pulse pattern like the symmetric peaks observed in gamma-ray bursts.
There are still missing pieces to this puzzle. For one, researchers still don't know what's causing these bursts at the microscopic scale. But this proposed model gives researchers one small clue in the hunt to find the ultimate cause of gamma-ray bursts, Hartmann said.
Are gamma-ray bursts signs of Faster-Than-Light space traffic?
Nemiroff was studying what happens when an object travels through a surrounding medium faster than the light it emits, called superluminal motion. In previous research, Nemiroff had found that when such an object goes from traveling slower than light to faster than light, or vice versa, this transition can trigger a phenomenon called relativistic image doubling. Nemiroff wondered whether this could account for the symmetric patterns Hakkila found in gamma-ray burst pulses.
It is unknown whether these flashes or signals came from alien spacecraft or not but it is known that huge cigar-shaped UFO flying throughspace next to the Orion Constellation.
High Altitude Craft With Thrusters Transits The Moon
I've posted this a few years ago, it's pretty incredible footage. I just hadn't seen this video version of it before with the filters.
He's saying the 'thrusters', when they are fired up, they slow the vehicle down. It reminded of something out of control almost, like a vehicle in distress. But that's the thing, who's vehicle is this? be one of ours with thruster technology right? But that's a can of worms in itself. But that's the only that suggests it's ours, nothing else, well aside from the helpless sort of path it's taking, could be alien, who knows. drunk alien? banished alien? human with no real idea how to fly? Who is in that? To fire up the thrusters, or at least what appear to be thrusters, logically it had to be done by someone right? It's certainly not a demon lol. It's a rare capture showing heat and what appears to be in a triangle formation.
A UFO filmed by two different men from different locations in Mexico city on May 22nd 2009 appear to show a UFO releasing a large amount of smaller orbs which shoot out at both ends/sides of the UFO.
Remember UFO only means unidentified Flying Objects, im not saying Aliens, but what the Fck is it..?
Most UFOs of the Orb type can usually be explained away as Weather Balloons, Mylar Balloons, Chinese Lanterns, Military Flares and a couple of other things, but how do you explain whats in that video...
Ive been Into UFOs and the weird and unexplained since i were 8-9 yrs old and next birthday ill be 60, this video that appears to show a large Orb that releases many smaller Orbs is One video that still intrigues me.
Of course there are some who claim the larger Orb is the Mother Ship and is releasing her fleet of smaller ones, well i dunno bout that, i have entertained that thought but i try not to get carried away.
My only UFO experience around 8 or so yrs ago was of bright orbs drifting over the land, but commin from the ocean, 3 of us fishing in a boat watched for around an hr as orb after orb come up from the sea and drifted over the land.
At times there were only 2 orbs present but at times there were as many as 10.
Now and then a Orb or two would stop as if to let trailing Orbs Catch up, they didnt appear to be controlled by any breeze but rather moved at will, this sighting is the reason i am totally interested in Orbs rather than "Nuts and Bolt" type of UFO to this day.
Here is another odd video that looks as though Orbs are being released from a larger UFO, then they break up in spectacular fashion, only a few Orbs seem to be released but at around 10 seconds you can see a few being released.
Thought id try steer DTV back to the more mysterious and unexplained categories.....
Cassini spacecraft photographed something strange, now appears in Earth's atmosphere?
The YouTuber Galactic Hurricane noticed strange anomalies after studying a great portion of the Cassini project photographs.
Strange spheres seemed to literally stretch within the rings of Saturn. Some did follow the spacecraft and seemed to signal to the Cassini craft.
But the strangest thing happened that on September 25, 2019 when Mauricio Lopez filmed exactly the same object above New York what Galactic Hurricane saw on the Cassini's pictures.
Alarming discovery: UFO Hunter Films Massive Alien Fleets Orbiting the Sun
NASA Satellites have been observing alien fleets orbiting the sun. Yes, alien fleets!
This is also supported by UFO hunters. The Alien fleets are reported to be flying near the Earth, going towards the sun in tactical formation. This gave heads up to some researchers who have claimed that maybe our sun is a massive stargate which is being used by alien civilisations. This discovery was made by Streetcap1 who is a UFO hunter.
Streetcap1 examined and analysed the images which were captured by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Satellite, also known as SOHO. This satellite is in orbit around the L1 gravitational point which is between the sun and earth and is used to look out for important information in the Sun.
The European Space Agency and NASA have worked together on this SOHO project. The UFO hunter, Streetcap1 has claimed that the pictures which are captured by the SOHO satellite show a huge alien fleet of UFO's which are heading towards the sun.
The fleet has been appeared to be travelling in a formation, which would be something like an organised military fleet. Streetcap1 believes that after his experience with UFO fleets, he is in no doubt at all that this fleet is a reality. Another UFO hunter, Scot Warring, has also accredited the efforts of Streetcap1.
Even Scot believes that this is something unique, something he has never seen before. Waring also believes that due to the immense size of the fleet, "something big is about to happen." He believes that the Aliens do know that we, humans, are here, and we exist, but they just ignore us as they are possibly more technologically advanced than us.
Some doubters are still examining the picture in further depth so look for malfunctions like dead pixels and processing errors. But, UFO hunters disagree that there might be any errors present.
Even in the past, there have been many anomalies which seemed to be present near the sun. The following video shows how the Sun is a Stargate:
A UFO fleet has been observed orbiting the Sun in a recently-resurfaced NASA Helioviewer photo. The extraordinary claims about the NASA photograph were made by Terry’s Theories YouTube site. The photo in question bears the timestamp of December 18, 2006. The video says the anomalies could be either be some form of extreme astrobiology or alien technology. The space alien enthusiast suggested they could be flying saucers or even ET entities.
Terry went on to say that space could be home to living creatures of its own just like we have wild animals here on Earth.
He also argued that alien anomalies might be fewer than first imagined. Terry said that they appear to have six UFOs surrounding the Sun in the latest image, but there was probably only one or maybe two. He pointed out the phenomena called ghosting where objects are moving so fast that they give the appearance of being more.
NASA Helioviewer has enabled astronomers to look at the Sun through multiple filters since it started operating in May 1996.
The Sun is the black circle at the center of the photo while everything around it is the solar corona.
NASA’s cutting edge photographic technology allows everyone to observe the solar anomalies in great detail.
Terry added that they had ringed surfaces and a hole in the center.
He noted that they are very hot being so close to the Sun, so they must have some feature protecting them from the extreme heat. He suspected they were refueling.
The by-product of the Sun is helium-3, which Terry stressed can be converted into a fuel source.
One of the F/A-18 Navy Pilots on the Controversial Report on UFO Encounters Went on Joe Rogan’s Show
The New York Times’ UFO articles published at the end of 2017 were the perfectly appropriate amount and the best of all time for that matter. These articles document the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which is the now-defunct UFO-monitoring project of Pentagon, and Navy pilots’ historical sightings of still-unidentified, mysterious aircraft. They did something that’s not ever done with reporting on UFOs as the U.S. government took them somewhat seriously.
The release of three videos taken by Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets made these reports more interesting. These pieces of footage each showing a blob with no visible means of propulsion maneuvering in ways impossible for the known aircraft and with a voice-over from very confused pilots.
Until today, there’s no explanation as to what these videos captured. The Navy only confirmed just last month that the videos are authentic, and the phenomena depicted/contained in them remain unidentified. According to the Navy, a patrol that was sent out to investigate a sighting earlier on the 14th of November 2004 off the coast of San Diego captured one of the three videos.
Commander David Fravor was the first F/A-18 pilot who encountered the UFO. He described seeing something vast and strange to the New York Times in 2017.
Fravor talks about his encounter for a good two hours, courtesy of Joe Rogan, and his podcast. For the most part, Fravor reiterates the story of his encounter, but there are some extra tidbits in there. In this particular interview, Fravor describes the boiling water beneath the object as if something beneath the surface about the size and shape of Boeing 737. He further suggests a theory that whatever it was underwater might have been communicating with whatever the UFO was.
Fravor also somewhat agrees or at least does not noticeably disagree with documentary filmmaker Jeremy Corbell’s categorization of the UFOs caught in the three videos possessing some non-reactionary field propulsion system.
Fravor also reveals that the craft in the Gimbal video was not alone, with radar picking up a V-formation of other, similar UFOs. According to Corbell, this particular bit of information has never been released to the public before.
China's three satellites may share this kind of view, as seen from above the International Space Station orbiting Earth.
(Photo: NASA/Handout via REUTERS)
Self-professed UFO expert and conspiracy theorist Scott Waring has once again posted "proof" of alien life, this time on the Red Planet.
Waring, a controversial blogger who regularly posts theories on the existence of aliens, has updated his website with a new entry claiming a new discovery: an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus in a Mars photo captured by NASA. According to the conspiracy theorist, the casket appears to be found in what he can only describe as a burial ground, which has convinced him of an alien civilization existing somewhere on the planet.
The photo, which was taken in 2007 by NASA's Opportunity rover, is one solid proof that aliens have been trying to communicate with us, Waring believes. He says that aliens have left the sarcophagus intentionally to show humans that there are other life forms in space and that they have been leaving us clues for years.
"When looking at a Mars photo I found a long casket similar to what you will find here on Earth. It's a stone casket, much like the larger outer stone boxes for Egyptian golden sarcophagus," Waring wrote. "It has a top stone that is perfectly cut to match the lower case. The casket itself is about 2 meters across."
Other than the supposed casket, Waring claims to have found carvings of faces, unfinished statues and "alien technology" that he thinks were left behind by Martians. Apparently, these extraterrestrial life forms have created statues as an homage to their heritage.
Waring isn't exactly a character you would actually believe, truth be told. His posts are often discredited, and NASA itself said that the photo features the rock formations on the cliff of Cape St. Vincent in the Red Planet's Victoria Crater. And if you ask this UK publication, Waring is nothing but a "bonkers UFO-hunter."
NASA believes that finding life on Mars is a possibility, but the organization is yet to find proof of its existence. To this day, we still don't have enough evidence of alien life. We don't even know what they look like.
As for Waring, he may have pareidolia, a term used to describe the brain's tendency to form shapes or faces out of random objects, or hear hidden messages in songs and whatnot.
Pareidolia often leads to believing something is the truth, when, in fact, it's just your brain playing tricks. This can only explain Waring's false discoveries. Undeniably though, conspiracy theorists are a wild bunch.
Mr. Warning believes it to be 'a statue of a standing figure that has fallen over on its side', he writes on his website . 'This may be a sarcophagus or some type of monument celebrating an important person or moment in their alien history'
'Another strange thing about this is that in another photo taken a few moments later in the same area, there are what looks like two faces carved on the side of the cliff facing the area of the sarcophagus,' explained Mister Enigma
A strange-looking vehicle at an air show in China is getting buzz for an obvious reason: It appears to resemble a UFO.
We don't know much about the vehicle, including which sector of the Chinese military built it, and if it can fly or not.
Both the U.S. Army and Air Force have previously explored similar projects that have failed.
Is the Chinese government making an investment in flying saucers? It looks that way, based on images circulating from this past weekend's5th China Helicopter Exposition, held in the northern Tianjin region. The mockup in this photo sure resembles the classic model of a UFO:
The expo, run by the regional Tianjin government, the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), and the Chinese People's Liberation Army Ground Force, offered a chance for businesses to "demonstrate their innovations and technologies," according to its website. That's common enough for an expo, but the builders of this mockup seem to have gone the extra mile. It's assumed that a subsidiary of the state-owned AVIC built the demonstration, but it's unclear which one.
CHINESE INTERNET
Online translations show that the ship is called a Super Great White Shark.
A rough translation from Twitter provides a description for the vehicle.
[The] Super Great White Shark armed helicopter is a composite wing-body fusion high-speed helicopter configuration designed for the future digital information battlefield. In the initial stage of its design, it refers to the international excellent and mature helicopter design technologies, such as AH-64 Apache, CH-53 Sea Stallion, and Russian Ka-52, Mi-26. While absorbing their respective advantages, it adopts the internationally popular wing-body fusion (BWB) [blended wing body] design and the former. A new type of high-speed helicopter with [a] conceptual design of propeller blades has been successfully applied in helicopter design.
The vehicle certainly looks unconventional, but the Chinese military wouldn't be the first to try out the circular design. The U.S. military has toyed with many circular vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) vehicles, most notably the Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar. A joint collaboration between the Army and Air Force, each division wanted the round flyer for different reasons.
The Army saw it as an all-terrain troop transport and reconnaissance craft, while the Air Force envisioned a craft that could hover below enemy radar and then zoom up to supersonic speed. Builders tried to please both parties, and in the process, they failed both.
Tests with scale models at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, indicated that the cushion of air under the Avrocar would become unstable just a few feet off the ground. The aircraft would be incapable of reaching supersonic speeds, but the testing went ahead to determine if a suitable aircraft could be developed for the Army. The first prototype—the Avrocar on display (serial number 58-7055)—was sent to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. There, wind tunnel tests proved that the aircraft had insufficient control for high speed flight and was aerodynamically unstable.
The second Avrocar prototype underwent flight tests that validated the wind tunnel tests. If it flew more than three feet above the ground, the Avrocar displayed uncontrollable pitch and roll motions, which the Avro engineers called "hubcapping." The Avrocar could only reach a maximum speed of 35 mph, and all attempts to end the hubcapping failed. The project was cancelled in December 1961.
It appears that Chinese builders have gone bigger than the Avrocar ever did; the test models were under 5 feet tall, but had an 18-foot wingspan. Until the vehicle is in the air, however, it's impossible to say if these engineers have solved the problems that others faced over 50 years ago.
A Nobel Prize winning 'planet hunter' who discovered the first planet outside of our solar system predicts humans will discover alien life in the next 30 years.
Astronomer Professor Didier Queloz, 52, from Switzerland, says he is 'convinced' that we are not alone in the universe.
The Cambridge University professor won a Nobel Prize on Tuesday for his work as a 'planet hunter', having discovered hundreds of planets orbiting suns outside of our solar system.
Speaking after the win at the Science Media Centre in London he said: 'I can't believe we are the only living entity in the universe,' The Telegraph reported.
'There are just way to many planets, way too many stars, and the chemistry is universal.
NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS DISCOVERED THE FIRST ORBITING PLANET OUTSIDE OUR SOLAR SYSTEM
Professor Michel Mayor and Professor Didier Queloz, both working in Switzerland, were awarded for discovering the first exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star other than our own in 1995.
51 Pegasi b is a gaseous ball similar to Jupiter and was discovered by the professors at the Haute-Provence Observatory in southern France in 1995.
Since the discovery, over 4,000 exoplanets have since been found – 1,900 of which have been confirmed.
Professor Queloz and Professor Mayor's discovery is now regarded as a pivotal moment in astronomy that changed our understanding of our place in the universe. No planet other than those in our own solar system had ever been found before.
'The chemistry that led to life has to happen elsewhere. So I am a strong believer that there must be life elsewhere.
'Life doesn't just mean a green man coming to you, life started way before animals were crawling on the surface of earth.'
He says he is certain that in 100 years time aliens will be known to us but says that it is very 'realistic' that within 30 years scientists could develop a machine to allow us to detect aliens in distant solar systems.
Professor Queloz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics along with his research partner Dr Michel Mayor, the Swiss duo discovered 51 Pegasi b at the University of Geneva in 1995.
Theirs was the first confirmation of the existence of an exoplanet, which is one which orbits a star other than our Sun.
It is now regarded as a pivotal moment in astronomy because no planet other than those in our own solar system had ever been found before.
Since the discovery, Professor Queloz has successfully developed the Doppler technique to be more precise, leading to the discovery of further 1,900 or so confirmed exoplanets. One 10th of those were discovered by Professor Queloz himself.
The other half of the award was given to James Peebles, from Princeton University, US, 'for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology'.
Professor Michel Mayor (left) and Professor Didier Queloz worked together to discover the planet 51 Pegasi b in 1995, the first one to be discovered orbiting a star which isn't the Milky Way's sun
Professor Queloz said: 'I do hope that this Nobel Prize will help give a further boost for this fascinating question when we think about life on another planet.'
He added that he was convinced of life on other planets and that scientists would not be searching for it, if they did not think it existed.
The now Nobel Prize laureate missed the call from the committee informing him of his win
Both NASA and the European Space Agency are officially searching for life on other planets.
The now Nobel Prize laureate missed the call from the committee informing him of his win while busy in a meeting with colleagues - leaving it to a press officer from Cambridge to break the news to him.
Professor Queloz said: 'This morning I was just a Cambridge professor working with colleagues, and then all of a sudden my life changed entirely.'
He added: 'I was in a scientific meeting, absolutely focused by the scientific meeting. I know it is the week of Nobel Prize, but I didn't pay attention.
'To tell you the truth, people mentioned the Nobel Prize early on when we made the discovery 20 years ago, and after some time it has been said.
Dr Queloz stated that life on other planets 'doesn't just mean a green man coming to you' and may be found in more basic forms that may help us to understand how life on earth started
'In a way you get used to it, but also there are so many great discoveries elsewhere and so many programmes, so it tends to fade away from my mind, and I wasn't expecting it all this morning.
'I was not really in the mood, because I was in the mood for the scientific meeting.'
WHAT ARE THE KEY DISCOVERIES HUMANITY HAS MADE IN ITS SEARCH FOR ALIEN LIFE?
Discovery of pulsars
British astronomer Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was the first person to discover a pulsar in 1967 when she spotted a radio pulsar.
Since then other types of pulsars that emit x-rays and gamma rays have also been spotted.
Pulsars are essentially rotating, highly magnatised neutron stars but when they were first discovered it was believed they could come from aliens.
'Wow!' radio signal
In 1977, an astronomer looking for alien life in the nigh sky above Ohio spotted a powerful radio signal so strong that he excitedly wrote 'Wow!' next to his data.
In 1977, an astronomer looking for alien life in the nigh sky above Ohio spotted a powerful radio signal so strong that he excitedly wrote 'Wow!' next to his data
The 72-second blast, spotted by Dr Jerry Ehman through a radio telescope, came from Sagittarius but matched no known celestial object.
Conspiracy theorists have since claimed that the 'Wow! signal', which was 30 times stronger than background radiation, was a message from intelligent extraterrestrials.
Fossilised martian microbes
In 1996 Nasa and the White House made the explosive announcement that the rock contained traces of Martian bugs.
The meteorite, catalogued as Allen Hills (ALH) 84001, crashed onto the frozen wastes of Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984.
Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike.
Photographs were released showing elongated segmented objects that appeared strikingly lifelike
(pictured)
However, the excitement did not last long. Other scientists questioned whether the meteorite samples were contaminated.
They also argued that heat generated when the rock was blasted into space may have created mineral structures that could be mistaken for microfossils.
Behaviour of Tabby's Star in 2005
The star, otherwise known as KIC 8462852, is located 1,400 light years away and has baffled astonomers since being discovered in 2015.
It dims at a much faster rate than other stars, which some experts have suggested is a sign of aliens harnessing the energy of a star.
The star, otherwise known as KIC 8462852, is located 1,400 light years away and has baffled astonomers since being discovered in 2015
(artist's impression)
Recent studies have 'eliminated the possibility of an alien megastructure', and instead, suggests that a ring of dust could be causing the strange signals.
Exoplanets in the Goldilocks zone in 2015
In February this year astronomers announced they had spotted a star system with planets that could support life just 39 light years away.
Seven Earth-like planets were discovered orbiting nearby dwarf star 'Trappist-1', and all of them could have water at their surface, one of the key components of life.
Three of the planets have such good conditions, that scientists say life may have already evolved on them.
Researchers claim that they will know whether or not there is life on any of the planets within a decade, and said 'this is just the beginning.'
SCIENTIST WINS NOBEL PRIZE, THEN ANNOUNCES BELIEF IN ALIENS
VICTOR TANGERMANN
KRISTIN HOUSER
Numbers Game
Astronomer Didier Queloz is “convinced” aliens exist — and that we could find them before 2050.
“I can’t believe we are the only living entity in the universe,” he said during an event on Tuesday — the same day he found out he’d won the Nobel Prize in Physics — according to The Telegraph. “There are just way too many planets, way too many stars, and the chemistry is universal. The chemistry that led to life has to happen elsewhere.”
ET’s ETA
The Telegraph story quotes Queloz as saying he’s certain we’ll detect signs of alien life within 100 years.
However, he also thinks it’s “realistic” to believe humanity will develop a device capable of detecting the bio-chemical signs of life on exoplanets within just 30 years.
Matter Of Time
Queloz isn’t the only notable scientist to talk aliens this week.
Whether Levin can persuade others to join him in that belief or not, it seems Earth’s time as the only known life-harboring body in the universe could be drawing to an end.
How the second known interstellar visitor makes ‘Oumuamua seem even odder
New observations show that 2I/Borisov looks like a comet, just what astronomers expected
The second mysterious interstellar object found zipping through the solar system, 2I/Borisov, looks like a run-of-the-mill comet. That stands in stark contrast to the first known interstellar object, ‘Oumuamua (illustrated).
The second space rock seen visiting our solar system from another star is proving just how bizarre the first known interstellar object, ‘Oumuamua, really was.
‘Oumuamua raised eyebrows when it appeared in October 2017 looking more like a rocky asteroid than an icy comet (SN: 10/27/17). Because comets form farther from their host stars than asteroids, it should be easier for comets to escape their star’s gravity to wander the galaxy. So astronomers expect the vast majority of interstellar vagabonds to be icy bodies. But ‘Oumuamua didn’t sport the gaseous halo or tail that forms when sunlight vaporizes a comet’s ice.
Now, new telescope images confirm that a second interstellar object called 2I/Borisov (originally dubbed C/2019 Q4 (Borisov)) looks like a garden-variety comet, researchers report online October 14 in Nature Astronomy. The cometlike appearance of this object, first glimpsed August 30, suggests that ‘Oumuamua’s weirdness was a one-off, and that astronomers’ models of planetary systems are on the right track (SN: 9/12/19).
Astronomers observed 2I/Borisov on two nights in September with the William Herschel Telescope in the Spanish Canary Islands and the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii. Those images reveal that, like comets native to our solar system, 2I/Borisov’s core is shrouded in a gaseous halo trailed by a faint, broad stream of gas and dust.
The first known interstellar object, ‘Oumuamua, appeared to be a naked space rock (left, center). But 2I/Borisov (right, center) bears the usual characteristics of a comet: It’s cloaked in a halo of vaporizing gas and trailing a gaseous tail in its wake.GEMINI OBSERVATORY/NSF/AURA; ALAN FITZSIMMONS/ARC/QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY BELFAST, ISAAC NEWTON GROUP, NASA
“It’s kind of relieving that finally we have something that meets our expectations,” says study coauthor Michał Drahus, an astronomer at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. “Now we really can be absolutely sure that ‘Oumuamua was one weird object.”
Whereas ‘Oumuamua vanished within weeks of its discovery, astronomers have several months to take a closer look at 2I/Borisov. Higher-resolution telescope images may tease out the exact size and shape of its core, and inspecting the specific wavelengths of light emanating from the comet could help astronomers flesh out its chemical composition.
Preliminary wavelength observations have already hinted that 2I/Borisov contains cyanogen gas (made of carbon and nitrogen atoms), which is relatively common in comets native to the solar system. Astronomer Alan Fitzsimmons of Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland and colleagues report these findings October 2 at arXiv.org.
An odd couple
The second known interstellar object, a comet currently cruising through our solar system called 2I/Borisov, looks fairly different from the first discovered interstellar visitor — an asteroid-like object called ‘Oumuamua that skirted by Earth in 2017. Here are some of the key distinctions between this pair of galaxy-trotting space rocks.
Differences between the first and second discovered interstellar objects
‘Oumuamua
2I/Borisov
Constellation of origin
Lyra
Cassiopeia
Halo and tail
No
Yes
Width
400 meters
~2 kilometers
Shape
Oblong
Unknown
Closest distance to Earth
0.16 au (astronomical units)
1.9 au
Closest approach to Earth
October 14, 2017
December 28, 2019
Time observable
Weeks
Months
Sources:
P. Guzik et al/Nature Astronomy 2019, ‘Oumuamua ISSI team/arXiv.org 2019, A.M. Hein et al/Acta Astronautica 2019
We have accomplished a lot in our (relatively) short time on Earth. We’ve sent humans to the Moon and to live in space, developed massive and sophisticated telescopes to see the farthest reaches of the cosmos, and even rocketed rovers to Mars and probes to the edge of our solar system. However, a number of organizations have taken humanity’s voyage into the final frontier a step farther. NASA, the European Space Agency, and the research collective behind the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) have been working tirelessly to find out if we are alone, once and for all.
Already, a number of projects exist that scan the stars for signs of intelligent life. And despite the fact that many of them have been looking to the skies for decades, we have yet to make contact. And that’s a bit of a problem.
The Paradox That Started It All
To put it mildly, our solar system is very old. In fact, scientists are still figuring out just how old — clues gathered from meteorites suggest it is almost 5 billion years old, and surrounding star systems are likely billions of years older. While interstellar travel still seems to be a distant dream, new technology is born every year that allows us to scan the skies for signals from civilizations in the most distant corners of the cosmos. The number of known alien worlds and star systems discovered through these technologies continues to rise, but our creative methods of listening to space have not yet revealed anything that resembles extraterrestrial communications or civilizations.
Given the size and age of our universe, it seems like we should have made contact. We, of course, have not.
In the early 20th century, physicist Enrico Fermi asked himself a now-famous question: Given the scope of our universe, why haven’t we found intelligent extraterrestrial life yet (or why haven’t they found us)? This is sometimes called the Fermi Paradox or the Great Silence. Scientists have floated many possible answers in the century since Fermi first asked this question. Here are some of the most plausiblereasons why he haven’t made first contact.
Basic probability asserts that alien life must exist. Since we haven’t made contact yet, one theory goes, there must be something barring life from interstellar travel or, at least, barring it from communicating with other alien species. This barrier is known as the “Great Filter,” and it is a force or event that stops a civilization from getting to the aforementioned point of interstellar travel or communication.
If the theory holds true, there are two primary reasons that we haven’t made contact: Because societies kill themselves off before they reach a state advanced enough to explore the stars or interstellar travel is simply not possible on a technological scale. Neither option is particularly pleasing.
And according to the experts behind the work, the filter event is of equal or greater probability than the existence of alien life itself. This is the point argued by Robin Hanson, a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, in his discussion of the topic.
No alien civilizations have substantially colonized our solar system or systems nearby. Thus among the billion trillion stars in our past universe, none has reached the level of technology and growth that we may soon reach. This one data point implies that a Great Filter stands between ordinary dead matter and advanced exploding lasting life.
Since we have not been able to detect alien life (or leave the solar system much, for that matter), how far are we from being caught up in some event that would bar us from ever finding aliens? “The easier it was for life to evolve to our stage, the bleaker our future chances probably are,” Hanson writes. In other words, the more life there is in the cosmos, the greater the likeliness that we are about to reach a cataclysmic, life-ending event or reach the cosmic limits of technological advancement.
2. Do Not Disturb The Aliens
Another hypothesis asserts that alien civilizations certainly exist, but they’re simply inactive. That’s the “aestivation hypothesis” (aestivation refers to an organism’s state of prolonged inactivity, similar to a bear hibernating or a frog that buries itself in sand during hot weather), which was put forth by researchers from Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade.
The theory, published in a paper in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 2017, states that aliens may be “hibernating” until the environmental conditions are just right to become active and build their super society. The researchers argue that the laws of thermodynamics directly limit computation, as computing technologies need to be cooled in order to function. This makes it exceedingly difficult to create advanced technologies, as keeping them cool at scale quickly becomes prohibitively difficult. So the aliens are falling into a dormant until, to be blunt, the universe cools.
But distilling the development of a civilization to the kinds of conditions that our current, and somewhat imperfect, models can predict could be reductive. What if intelligent extraterrestrial life has found a way around the thermodynamic conditions that limit its ability to compute? “What if there are other forms of value that can be generated?” the study authors write. If they’re wrong about the relationship between thermodynamics and technology, the aestivation hypothesis would be moot. In this case, perhaps one of the other ideas here holds true.
According to the “Gaian Bottleneck” hypothesis, life needs particular environmental conditions to develop, and they’re not so common. Astrobiologists at the Australian National University penned their explanation to the Fermi Paradox in 2016.
Extinction is “the cosmic default for most life that has ever emerged on the surfaces of wet rocky planets in the Universe,” the researchers wrote. That’s because a planet has to be actually inhabited for it to be habitable, because organisms change the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. A Catch-22 emerges: no life without habitability, no habitability without life.
For alien life to persist, the researchers write, it must hang on: “like trying to ride a wild bull. Most life falls off.” Life can only take place with the presence of an unlikely feedback loop. In this case, Earth is the exception to the rule.
4. Trapped In Deep Oceans
In 2015, after nearly a decade in transit, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft became the first to do a close flyby of Pluto. It offered humanity its first look at its icy surface and raised questions about the possibility of subsurface oceans of water, and lots of methane and nitrogen. These questions put Pluto on a short but growing list of worlds with buried oceans trapped under a thick crust of ice and rock (some of the other worlds are Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Titan, as well as Jupiter’s moons Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede).
Those oceans figure prominently into another theory of where life might be lurking, one that Alan Stern, the principal investigator for New Horizons, touches on. Since buried oceans form a much more stable ecosystem than flowing surface streams, changes such as altering tides and dissipationtake place over a longer time period. A hard outer shell protects hypothetical life in the oceans from a harsh climate and a lethal mix of gases on the surface. “Impacts and solar flares, and nearby supernovae, and what orbit you’re in, and whether you have a magnetosphere, and whether there’s a poisonous atmosphere — none of those things matter,” Stern told Space.com.
Any intelligent alien life that forms in these deep oceans would have to overcome a big hurdle to reach inhabitants of other worlds: drilling through that thick, protective crust. All that work would only get them to the surface — sending signals to other planets become even more unlikely.
For the past eighty years or so, we’ve been listening for signs of extraterrestrial life with radio technology. The Allen Telescope Array, situated 470 km (290 miles) northeast of San Francisco, is one of the biggest — since 2007, 42 dishes have stood at the ready to scan the skies regularly in the hope of receiving radio signals from extraterrestrial life.
But what if extraterrestrial life doesn’t operate on those frequencies? Attempts at contact could simply be passing us by simply because we don’t comprehend the right wavelengths.
Instead of using telescope arrays and scanning the skies for radio signals, Duncan Forgan at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland suggests creating a galactic communications network. The same way we blink our high beams to send a signal to other drivers, we could use the shadow that Earth creates when it passes in front of the Sun to send a message to our fellow inhabitants of the universe. Forgan suggests that we build powerful lasers that contain those encoded messages, which are sent out as we pass in front of the Sun.
“If you want to communicate with someone on the other side of the galactic centre, there’s lots of stuff in the way – dust, stars, a big black hole – so you can take the long way around using the network,” Forgan tells New Scientist. Rather than letting intergalactic messages get lost in the vastness of space, civilizations in different galaxies could agree to use this “galactic communications network” to ensure their messages get to their intended recipients – a unified system to cut through the chatter.
6. We Are Being Impatient
We’ve only been actively reaching out for alien life for about a century — a mere blip in the long history of the solar system and of the universe overall. Evan Solomonides, an astrophysics and mathematics undergrad and researcherat Cornell University, suggests that it could take a while — about 1,500 years from now, to be precise — before we hear from any extraterrestrials.
In a paper submitted to the American Astronomical Society, Solomonides examines the probability of finding life. “We predict that under 1 percent of the galaxy has been reached at all thus far, and we do not anticipate to be reached until approximately half of the stars/planets have been reached.” Solomonides believes that we will have explore around half of the Milky Way galaxy before we hear anything, which will take a while since we’ve barely explored our own galactic neighborhood.
Solomonides is careful to note that the 1,500 years is not a deadline. “This is not to say that we must be reached by then or else we are, in fact, alone. We simply claim that it is somewhat unlikely that we will not hear anything before that time.”
Editor’s Note: This article was updated to correct the names of Saturn and Jupiter’s moons.
Here's the reality: We're messing up the Earth and any far-out ideas of colonizing another orb when we're done with our own are wishful thinking. That's according to Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist who was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics this year for discovering the first planet orbiting a sun-like star outside of our solar system.
"If we are talking about exoplanets, things should be clear: We will not migrate there," he told Agence France-Presse (AFP). He said he felt the need to "kill all the statements that say, 'OK, we will go to a livable planet if one day life is not possible on Earth.'"
All of the known exoplanets, or planets outside of our solar system, are too far away to feasibly travel to, he said. "Even in the very optimistic case of a livable planet that is not too far, say a few dozen light years, which is not a lot, it's in the neighbourhood, the time to go there is considerable," he added.
Mayor shared half of the Nobel Prize this year along with Didier Queloz for discovering the first exoplanet in October 1995. Using novel instruments at the Haute-Provence Observatory in southern France, they detected a gas giant similar to Jupiter, which they named 51 Pegasi b. (The other half of the prize was awarded to James Peebles of Princeton University for his work in dark matter and dark energy).
Since then, over 4,000 other exoplanets have been found in the Milky Way, but apparently, none of them can be feasibly reached.
Stephen Kane, a professor of planetary astrophysics at the University of California in Riverside, agrees with Mayor. "The sad reality is that, at this point in human history, all stars are effectively at a distance of infinity," Kane told Live Science. "We struggle very hard as a species to reach the Earth's moon."
We might be able to send people to Mars in the next 50 years, but "I would be very surprised if humanity made it to the orbit of Jupiter within the next few centuries," he said. Since the distance to the nearest star outside of our solar system is about 70,000 times greater than the distance to Jupiter, "all stars are effectively out of reach."
Well, you might say, plenty of things seemed out of reach until we reached them, such as sending aircraft on intercontinental flights. But "in this case, the required physics to reach the stars, if it exists, is not known to us and it would require a fundamental change in our understanding of the relationship between mass, acceleration and energy."
"So that's where we stand, firmly on the Earth, and unlikely to change for a very, very long time," he said.
Mayor told the AFP: "We must take care of our planet, it is very beautiful and still absolutely livable."
Andrew Fraknoi, emeritus chair of the astronomy department at Foothill College in California agreed that we won't be able to travel to these stars in the near future. But "I would never say we can never reach the stars and possible habitable planets," he said. "Who knows how our technology will evolve after another million years of evolution."
Was Venus once covered in a liquid water ocean? A new study suggests it was not, which could diminish hope that eons ago, warm and wet conditions allowed life to arise on the planet.
Today, Venus' climate is far from temperate. The planet is completely shielded by clouds and has a hell-like surface; a runaway greenhouse gas effect makes for lead-melting temperatures of more than 700 degrees Fahrenheit (370 degrees Celsius).
But some scientists argue that the requirements for life could have existed on Venus earlier in the solar system's history. Venus is roughly the same size and mass as Earth and even had plate tectonics. The sun was also dimmer during that epoch, so Venus, despite being closer to the sun than Earth is, was in the habitable zone, or the region where a rocky planet could have liquid water on its surface.
Some scientists suggest that habitability vanished when the sun's radiation grew stronger, causing the Venusian oceans to evaporate and water molecules to be thrown into the atmosphere. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas that would have made it harder for heat to escape from the planet. The wet atmosphere began a cycle of rising temperatures, evaporating oceans and increasing water vapor that made temperatures rise even further.
But the new study suggests that such water oceans were never there in the first place. While previous work hinted at a warm and wet environment based on the chemistry of the atmosphere and the higher regions of Venus, the new research suggests the highlands were made of lava rather than water.
This finding comes down to the composition of the highland rock. Previously, scientists thought the highlands were made up of granitic rock, just like continents on Earth. Granite needs a lot of water to form. But a survey of Venus' Ovda Regio highlands plateau — remapped with radar data gathered by NASA's Magellan mission, which studied Venus between 1989 and 1994 — shows the flow type is more typical of basalt rock.
"We know so little about Venus' surface," team member Allan Treiman, a Universities Space Research Association scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, said in a statement. "If the Ovda Regio highlands are made of basaltic rock as is most of Venus, they were likely squeezed up to their current heights by internal forces, possibly like mountains which result from plate tectonics on Earth."
A study based on the research was published Aug. 9 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
If a disastrousspace junk chain reaction ends up surrounding Earth with a belt of destructive shrapnel, state-of-the-art infrared cameras and gel-based rockets just might help future satellites dodge such debris, a new study finds.
Space debris might not sound dangerous until one realizes that in low Earth orbit — up to about 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) in altitude — such debris collides with an average speed of about 22,370 mph (36,000 km/h), according to NASA. At such speeds, even tiny pieces of space debris can inflict devastating damage.
Collisions with space debris have already led to millions of dollars in losses. For example, on Feb. 10, 2009, an active U.S. communications satellite called Iridium 33 was obliterated when it was struck by a defunct Russian satellite Cosmos 2251 built in the 1960s.
In addition, such disasters can generate more debris that could go on to destroy more objects in orbit, a cascade of destruction that might ultimately create a debris belt around Earth. This worst-case chain-reaction scenario is known as the "Kessler effect" or "Kessler syndrome," a scenario that NASA scientist Donald Kessler predicted in 1978.
Currently about 500,000 marble-size pieces of debris and more than 100 million objects a millimeter or less in size are estimated to orbit Earth, according to NASA. Furthermore, since it has become cheaper than ever to build and launch satellites, companies such as SpaceX, Amazon, OneWeb and Telesat are planning to launch "megaconstellations" into low Earth orbit in the next few years, and each will be composed of hundreds of miniature satellites.
A study in 2017 suggested the collisions one might expect to occur with such megaconstellations might significantly exacerbate the risk of the Kessler effect. In fact, the European Space Agency had to move its Aeolus Earth-observation satellite on Sept. 2 to avoid a potential collision with a SpaceX Starlink satellite, one of 60 such satellites launched at the same time in May of this year.
To prepare for the possibility of the Kessler effect, scientists analyzed how satellites might continue to survive and operate when space debris dominates low Earth orbit.
"Given how a whole bunch of companies are now proposing megaconstellations that would cram up to thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit, it's not a matter of if but when these things start to collide and cause this ripple effect of accidents," Jekan Thangavelautham, an aerospace engineer at the University of Arizona, told Space.com. Thangavelautham is senior author of the new study on space debris, which he and colleagues presented on Sept. 18 at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies Conference in Hawaii.
When it comes to miniature bits of space debris, prior work suggested that satellites could get protected using defenses known as Whipple shields.
These consist of a relatively thin cover over the main wall of a spacecraft, which breaks up and disperses incoming debris. This spreads the energy of the impact over a larger area, making it easier to withstand. However, Whipple shields can only protect against debris 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) wide or smaller, the researchers said.
For big chunks of space debris, ground-based radar and telescopes can remotely track their movements, helping scientists predict their trajectories. Satellites can then get instructed on how to best maneuver to prevent impacts. However, such "remote avoidance" strategies are limited, because NASA and the Department of Defense cannot track objects smaller than 2 inches (5 cm) in size, the new study noted.
The scientists focused on how satellites might deal with debris too small to be tracked from the ground yet big enough to penetrate Whipple shields. They suggested that an onboard thermal infrared camera might help a satellite quickly detect minuscule levels of heat from this mid-size debris on the scale of tens of miles away, all without any input from the ground.
However, even if a satellite could detect incoming space junk from tens of miles away, given the speed at which orbital debris travels, satellites would only have seconds to dodge a collision. The researchers suggested using rockets that use solid propellants, as these are high-thrust, lightweight and reliable, and can activate in a fraction of a second — all for a fast, rough push out of harm's way.
Space junk-dodging cubesat
An illustration of a concept cubesat equipped with gel-based thrusters and infrared cameras to track space junk.
(Image credit: Troy M. Jameson and Himangshu Kalita)
To test their ideas, the scientists proposed developing a cubesat — a satellite based on cubes just about 4 inches (10 cm) wide. They suggested creating a breadloaf-size cubesat the size of three such cubes with 16 solid-propellant thrusters and a thermal infrared camera with a ceramic Whipple shield transparent to infrared rays.
"We want to keep the design fundamentally simple, for a system that doesn't cost an arm and a leg," Thangavelautham said.
The most common type of solid-propellant rockets can each be used only once. Part of the reason the researchers' proposed avoidance system has multiple thrusters is so that it can help a satellite evade multiple potential collisions if necessary.
Alternatively, there are rockets that use solid gels as propellant instead that can each fire many times — "these could increase the number of times a satellite could dodge debris," Thangavelautham said.
RUSSIA’S WORKING ON A LUNAR ROVER WITH A HUMANOID TORSO
IMAGE FROM MILITARY TECHNOLOGY VIA YOUTUBE
KRISTIN HOUSER
Fedor’s Future
In August, Russia sent its gun-toting humanoid robot Fedor to theInternational Space Station, where it spent a couple weeks learning how to be a cosmonaut.
Now that Fedor is back on Earth, the nation’s space agency has revealed that the bot’s next destination is the Moon — but first, they’re going to chop off its legs and attach it to a lunar rover, according to a new story by state-run news service RIA Novosti.
Wheels Up
A source in Roscosmos reportedly told RIA Novosti that the agency plans to send a lunar rover with a wheeled body — pretty standard amongst rovers — and the torso, head, and arms of a Fedor robot to the Moon in three to four years.
Fedor has already proven it can use tools, drive a car, and even shoot a gun, so by adding the humanoid’s top half to a rover, Russia will be creating a bot with incredible dexterity.
Enlarge/ Will Russia really send a centaur-like robot to the Moon?
Walk This Way
The United Kingdom is also rethinking lunar rover design, but its strategy is the opposite of Russia’s — it plans to send a cube-shaped rover with spider-like legs instead of wheels to the Moon in 2021, the idea being that the bot’s legs might allow it to explore terrain a wheeled bot couldn’t reach.
It seems both agencies are working to create rovers that are a little more inspired by human biology — making them the perfect fill-in until we can put real people back on the Moon.
CHINESE LUCHTMACHT KRIJGT BESCHIKKING OVER VLIEGENDE SCHOTEL ( VIDEO )
Het Chinese leger heeft haar nieuwste vliegende concept gepresenteerd en het doet denken aan de gecrashte buitenaardse ufo bij Roswell.
Ze noemen het een stealth helikopter, maar ook hier lijkt het erop dat ze gebruikt hebben gemaakt van buitenaardse technologie.
Niemand weet eigenlijk wat ze moeten denken van de beelden die zijn opgedoken in China van het nieuwste vliegende wapen van de Chinese luchtmacht.
Het is op dit moment een nog niet vliegend prototype, een zogenaamd mock-up (model) en het ziet er als volgt uit:
Het model staat bij een grote Chinese helikoptertentoonstelling en volgens de beschikbare informatie gaat dit model heten: The Super Great White Shark. Op dit moment ziet het er nog niet uit als een witte superhaai, maar het is wel het conceptmodel dat de Chinese luchtmacht verder gaat ontwikkelen. Het wordt een hoge snelheid helikopter, ontworpen voor het toekomstige digitale slagveld, aldus de omschrijving.
Volgens ufoloog Scott Waring kan je gerust aannemen dat wanneer ze hier model 1 van de vliegende schotel tonen, ze allang een model 10 hebben waarmee ze al kunnen vliegen. Hij denkt dat ze de rotors van een normale helikopter hebben vervangen door een aandrijving die je aantreft in buitenaardse schepen en die hij noemt "anti propulsion generators".
Als de Chinezen ook beschikken over buitenaardse technologie, dan is de vraag natuurlijk hoe ze daaraan komen. Voor zover ons bekend is er geen Chinese Roswell, of is die er wel geweest en hebben ze die goed weten te verbergen of zijn wij er simpelweg niet mee bekend. Een andere mogelijkheid is dat ze net als Rusland een verdrag hebben gesloten met een buitenaards ras en zo de beschikking hebben gekregen over de technologie. Dat zou dan vergelijkbaar zijn met de verhalen die over Rusland de ronde doen.
Via Evert Jan Poorterman ontvingen wij een Nederlands ondertitelde video van Paul Hellyer, een man die bij uitstek degene is die weet wat er achter de schermen allemaal gebeurt. Niet alleen de kleine satanische kliek die samenspant tegen de rest van de mensheid, maar vooral ook over buitenaardse zaken.
Paul Hellyer is in verschillende opzichten een bijzonder mens. Niet alleen is hij tot op zeer hoge leeftijd nog actief, maar hij heeft ook een indrukwekkende carrière achter de rug waarbij hij toegang heeft gehad tot veel geheime informatie.
Gedurende de jaren zestig was hij Minister van Defensie in Canada en later in de regering van Pierre Trudeau was hij Minister van Transport en Vice Premier.
In de tijd dat hij een hoge regeringspositie bekleedde en ook daarna vanwege zijn vele contacten, heeft Hellyer toegang gehad tot informatie die voor het doorsnee publiek verborgen blijft.
Na zijn pensionering is Hellyer zich meer gaan verdiepen in buitenaardse aangelegenheden en ijvert hij al jaren voor Full Disclosure.
Hij vertelt onder andere hoe hij aan de informatie is gekomen dat UFO’s en buitenaardse zaken voor de Amerikaanse overheid destijds prioriteit hadden, nóg belangrijker dan de atoombom.
Hoe de Amerikanen na de crash bij Roswell van een buitenaards ruimteschip er inderdaad in zijn geslaagd om via “reverse engineering" dit schip na te bouwen en daarom wel degelijk beschikken over geheime ruimtevoertuigen en -wapens.
Hoe er door president Truman een schaduwregering werd gevormd,Majestic 12, en hoe eigenlijk sinds die tijd het militair-industriëel complex een geheel eigen leven is gaan leiden volledig uit het zicht van de reguliere overheid en de president.
Hoe deze schaduwregering die eigenlijk maar bestaat uit een relatief kleine elite niets anders dan kwaad voor ogen heeft en dat ze via eeuwigdurende oorlogen de New World Order willen realiseren.
Hierna volgt de video en heel bijzonder is dat de je de man rond minuut 22 kunt horen zeggen dat hij toen hij al midden tachtig was, tot de ontdekking kwam dat Allah zijn God is. Hetgeen maar weer eens aantoont dat je nooit te oud bent om je ware roeping te ontdekken, ook al zal zijn keuze nu niet de meest voor de hand liggende zijn voor velen.
En navolgende video van dezelfde Paul Hellyer waar hij kort en bondig vertelt hoe hij onze verhouding ziet tot de aliens.
A scientist who is dying from a muscle wasting disease is taking drastic steps in his bid to become the world's first true cyborg.
Dr Peter Scott-Morgan, 61, from Torquay, Devon, was diagnosed with motor neurone disease two years ago and told it would only take until this year to kill him.
But instead of accepting his fate he decided to challenge what it meant to be human and now hopes to create Peter 2.0.
He is gradually replacing his bodily functions with machinery – an electric wheelchair now enables to him to be upright, sitting or laid down; he has banked his voice on a computer and had his voicebox removed; and is fed through a tube and has a catheter and colostomy bag attached so he doesn't eat or excrete.
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Dr Peter Scott-Morgan, 61, with his husband Francis. Dr Scott-Morgan shared the photo on social media with the caption: 'This is my last post as Peter 1.0. Tomorrow I trade my voice for potentially decades of life'
Dr Scott-Morgan shared the picture with the caption: 'CORE OF CHARLIE (my Cyborg Harness And Robotic Locked-In Exoskeleton), the brilliantly engineered Permobil F5 Corpus VS. As a top-end wheelchair, it stands, lies flat, rises, goes fast. Soon, with lots of added robotic hi-tech, it’ll boldly go where no wheelchair has gone before!'
The most recent phase of Dr Scott-Morgan's transformation has been to make a computer avatar of his face.
The avatar – a computer rendering of his face – is designed to be controlled with artificial intelligence and look like him before he became ill.
He has also rigged up various machines so he can control them with the movement of his eyes, among them a hoist and a motorised bed.
And this week he announced the final procedure in his transition into a robot where he traded his voice for potentially decades of life.
He underwent a laryngectomy, meaning he lost his physical voice, but in doing so, he has removed the danger of saliva entering his lungs and suffocating him.
Dr Scott-Morgan labelled this final procedure as the end of Peter 1.0 with a post this week on Twitter, and wrote: 'This is my last post as Peter 1.0.
'Tomorrow (Thursday October 10) I trade my voice for potentially decades of life as we complete the final medical procedure for my transition to Full Cyborg, the month I was told statistically I would be dead.
'I'm not dying, I'm transforming. Oh, how I love science.'
Dr Scott-Morgan has throughout his career been granted 'unparalleled confidential access' to government organisations, banks and major corporations.
The avatar will help Dr Scott-Morgan express himself with facial expressions when he loses motion in his face
He has been using this scientific expertise to work with cutting-edge technology experts to become Peter 2.0.
Speaking of his transition, he said: 'I'm about to be turned into Peter 2.0. And when I say 'Peter 2.0', I mean 'a Cyborg'.
'And when I say 'Cyborg', I don't just mean any old cyborg, you understand, but by far the most advanced human cybernetic organism ever created in 13.8 billion years.
'I'm scheduled to become the world's very first full Cyborg.
This week he announced the final procedure in his transition into a robot where he traded his voice for potentially decades of life
'Almost everything about me is going to be irreversibly changed - body and brain.
'It goes without saying that all my physical interaction with the world will become robotic. And naturally, my existing five senses are going to be enhanced. But far more importantly, part of my brain, and all of my external persona, will soon be electronic - totally synthetic.
'From then on, I'll be part hardware / part wetware, part digital / part analogue.
'And it won't stop there; I've got more upgrades in progress than Microsoft.. Mine isn't just a version change. It's a metamorphosis.'
The scientist has also been exploring eye-tracking technology, to enable him to control multiple computers using just his eyes.
Among other things, this would mean he could control his own electronic bed and a hoist to help him move.
This eye-tracking technology, means that he could no longer wear contact lenses, and so he has undergone laser eye surgery to enable him to have perfect vision at 70cm- the distance from his computer screen.
The scientist also has a remarkable top-end wheelchair, which he said on Twitter is 'brilliantly engineered' and allows him to stand, lie flat and go fast.
He has undergone further pioneering surgery in what he believes to be the first ever operation of its kind, to insert a feeding tube directly into his stomach, a catheter directly into his bladder and a colostomy bag directly onto his colon.
These procedures will help him to deal with any potential feeding and toileting problems, helping him to maintain his independence.
However, he stressed online that this is an incredibly risky procedure for somebody with MND.
Despite the risks of operations and being terminally ill, Dr Scott-Morgan says he is not interested in how to survive his condition, he intends to 'thrive.'
He remains positive and often, humorous, seeing his situation as a chance to truly embrace scientific capabilities.
In fact, The Scott-Morgan Foundation which he set up with his husband, Francis, seeks to use artificial intelligence, robotics and other high-technology systems to transform the lives of those 'restricted by age, ill-health, disability, or other physical or mental disadvantage.'
On his website Dr Scott-Morgan said this vision is far from just a dream: 'We are within touching distance of changing - everything. I'm not dying - I'm transforming!
'This is terminal disease like you've never seen it before. And as far as I'm concerned, bring it on.
'MND hasn't even begun to bring me to my knees. And even long after I'm locked In, I will still be standing tall.
'Thanks to HiTech - I will talk again. I will convey Emotion and Personality. And I'll reach out and touch the people I love. And I will not be the only one.
'Over time, more and more with MND, with extreme disability, with old age, with a passion simply to break free from their physical straight-jacket, will choose to stand beside me.
And we will all stand tall. And we will stand proud. And we will stand unbowed. And we will keep standing, year after year after year after year after year*
'Because we refuse simply to 'Stay Alive'. We choose to thrive.'
WHAT IS MOTOR NEURONE DISEASE (ALS)?
History
The NHS describes motor neurone disease (MND) as: 'An uncommon condition that affects the brain and nerves. It causes weakness that gets worse over time.'
The weakness is caused by the deterioration of motor neurons, upper motor neurons that travel from the brain down the spinal cord, and lower motor neurons that spread out to the face, throat and limbs.
It was first discovered in 1865 by a French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, hence why MND is sometimes known as Charcot's disease.
In the UK, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is referred to as Motor Neurone Disease, while in the US, ALS is referred to as a specific subset of MND, which is defined as a group of neurological disorders.
However, according to Oxford University Hospitals: 'Nearly 90 per cent of patients with MND have the mixed ALS form of the disease, so that the terms MND and ALS are commonly used to mean the same thing.'
Symptoms
Weakness in the ankle or leg, which may manifest itself with trips or difficulty ascending stairs, and a weakness in the ability to grip things.
Slurred speech is an early symptom and may later worsen to include difficulty swallowing food.
Muscle cramps or twitches are also a symptom, as is weight loss due to leg and arm muscles growing thinner over time.
Diagnosis
MND is difficult to diagnose in its early stages because several conditions may cause similar symptoms. There is also no one test used to ascertain its presence.
However, the disease is usually diagnosed through a process of exclusion, whereby diseases that manifest similar symptoms to ALS are excluded.
Causes
The NHS says that MND is an 'uncommon condition' that predominantly affects older people. However, it caveats that it can affect adults of any age.
The NHS says that, as of yet, 'it is not yet known why' the disease happens. The ALS Association says that MND occurs throughout the world 'with no racial, ethnic or socioeconomic boundaries and can affect anyone'.
It says that war veterans are twice as likely to develop ALS and that men are 20 per cent more likely to get it.
Treatment
There is no cure for MND and the disease is fatal, however the disease progresses at different speeds in patients.
People with MND are expected to live two to five years after the symptoms first manifest, although 10 per cent of sufferers live at least 10 years.
Occupational therapy, physiotherapy and medicines such as riluzole are used to palliate the effects of the the disease.
Lou Gehrig was a hugely popular baseball player, who played for the New York Yankees between 1923 and 1939. He was famous for his strength and was nicknamed 'The Iron Horse'
Lou Gehrig's Disease
As well as being known as ALS and Charcot's disease, MND is frequently referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease.
Lou Gehrig was a hugely popular baseball player, who played for the New York Yankees between 1923 and 1939.
He was famous for his strength and was nicknamed 'The Iron Horse'.
His strength, popularity and fame transcended the sport of baseball and the condition adopted the name of the sportsman.
While the quest to perform the world’s first successful human head transplant seems to have stalled, a man with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as motor neurone disease (MND) or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is set to become the world’s first ‘full cyborg’, saving him from a life of full paralysis. Will it work?
“I’m about to be turned into Peter 2.0. And when I say ‘Peter 2.0’, I mean ‘a Cyborg’. And when I say ‘Cyborg’, I don’t just mean any old cyborg, you understand, but by far the most advanced human cybernetic organism ever created in 13.8 billion years. I’m scheduled to become the world’s very first full Cyborg. Almost everything about me is going to be irreversibly changed – body and brain.”
Dr Peter Scott-Morgan
(Image: @DrScottMorgan /Twitter)
Dr Peter Scott-Morgan might also be called Stephen Hawking 2.0. Hawking also had ALS and lived far longer than most people with the disease. His genius, celebrity status and profits from books allowed him to test and use advanced tools such as a speech-generating device. Sixty-one-year-old Dr. Scott-Morgan learned of his disease much later in life than Hawking (just two years ago) and his knowledge and status as a world-renowned roboticist gave him the ideas and connections to conceive and begin to implement a radical combination of flesh and metal that will turn him into cyborg that is “part hardware, part wetware, part digital, part analogue.” All that will be left of the physical Scott-Morgan is part of his brain — the wetware.
Morgan’s website details his life and what happened after his ALS diagnosis. While he has already been using a state-of-the-art wheelchair that allows him to stand, lie flat and hit high speeds, the first alteration of his body was to have a colostomy for his bowels, a catheter for his bladder and a feeding tube directly into his stomach that eliminate his need to eat or go to the toilet. The first real cyborg operation occurred on October 10th when he solved the breathing problem that kills most people with ALS.
“So he did some more research and found that people with throat cancer sometimes undergo a laryngectomy, in which the oesophagus and trachea are separated. The good news? Nothing that’s not meant to be in his lungs will get into his lungs. The bad news? He will no longer be able to speak.”
He created a remarkably life-like avatar of his face before he lost any muscle
(Image: Embody Digital/Youtube)
Well, bad news for a little while. Scott-Morgan designed an avatar of his face that will duplicate a full range of facial expressions. Next, he teamed with tech companies to replace Hawking’s eye-controlled speech-generator with an AI generator that will learn a variety of responses connected to appropriate facial expressions and vocal inflections that will give emotion to the voice that was revolutionary yet robotic for Hawking.
“When somebody walks into the room, the AI will listen to what they say to me and suggest different options. ‘Wonderful to see you!’ ‘How was your trip?’ ‘You’re looking good!’ And within two seconds I can carry on a spontaneous conversation.”
The avatar also knows what you’re thinking … how is Scott-Morgan paying for all of this leading-edge technology? He says many of the companies are working with him for free and will open-source the technology when it’s completed.
If Peter Scott-Morgan reaches his goal of becoming the first real human cyborg, freed from a body destroyed by a debilitating disease, his story will undoubtedly be made into a feel-good high-tech movie, complete with a romance – Scott-Morgan is supported by his longtime gay partner, Francis. In fact, in an interview with TIME, Scott-Morgan has already written the movie’s ending.
“Here I am, trapped only because of the physical limitations of my body. You imagine how liberating it will be to spend maybe most of my time in virtual reality. Really, really good virtual reality. And suddenly I can walk again. I can fly. I can be anywhere I want to be. And so can you. You can join me. We can explore universes that don’t exist. This is for all of us. I just get the chance to go to some of the places first. But one day, you’ll be there, too.”
Bring plenty of tissues.
Dr Peter B Scott-Morgan@DrScottMorgan
THIS IS MY LAST POST as Peter 1.0. Tomorrow I trade my voice for potentially decades of life as we complete the final medical procedure for my transition to Full Cyborg, the month I was told statistically I would be dead. I’m not dying, I’m transforming! Oh, how I LOVE Science!!!
When looking at accounts of supposed alien encounters, it is hard not imagine that one is about to take a dive into some pretty strange stuff. By its very nature this phenomenon is beyond the norm, and of course about as weird as it gets. Yet, among the many reports of people coming into contact with supposed extraterrestrial beings there are some that stand out as even stranger than the rest, and such cases are not particularly rare, it seems. Here we will look at a selection of some of the most off-the-wall, bonkers cases of purported alien contact there are, and see just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
One incredibly odd and not a little gross account of a bizarre alien encounter supposedly occurred in 1960 in the region of Yssandon, France. On this evening a Mr. and Mrs. Plumauzille were driving along a rural road at around 11 PM when they noticed a fuzzy red light floating above the tree tops only about 100 yards away from them. It was a most unusual sight, and they stopped the car to stare at it for a few moments before some movement caught their attention near the vehicle off to the side of the road. Thinking it was maybe some sort of wild animal they looked to the source of the movement, but this would prove to be no ordinary wildlife.
There to the right of the road and frosted with the glow of the headlights they could see an eery grey-brown, slimy blob-like thing about the size of a sack of potatoes throbbing and pulsating as if alive. It then proved that it indeed was animate, as it proceeded to sort of contract and expand to move itself along across the road, with rippling and movement under its slimy exterior giving the impression of “an animal trapped in a transparent plastic bag,” a nightmarish approximation of life, and it was described as generally looking almost like a giant maggot. As this outlandish creature flopped its way across the road they then noticed several other similar entities, smaller than the first, writhing and whipping around in the grass by the side of the road. This was unsettling enough that the couple decided to get out of there, and it is unclear just what they saw or if it had any connection to the weird UFO in the sky that had originally caught their attention. The case of the “Maggots of Yssandon” has become a rather popular one in French UFOlogy and has made the rounds in many collections of alien encounters over the years, and it remains a baffling head-scratcher.
From the 1950s we have another very weird encounter reported by the renowned UFOlogist and author Albert K. Bender, which he related in his 1962 book Flying Saucers and the Three Men. He claims that it all started in March of 1953 with what appeared to be more of a haunting than anything else, with objects moving on their own, lights and electronics turning on and off by themselves, and various poltergeist-like activity all over his home over the course of a few days, often accompanied by a strange smell like burning Sulphur. He would claim that he investigated the activity and he had then made actual telepathic contact with an entity that ominously warned him, “Please be advised to discontinue delving into the mysteries of the universe. We will make an appearance if you disobey.” As odd as this was, things would get absolutely bonkers from there.
He says that he recorded this all in a notebook, but that this notebook would mysteriously vanish from a locked box, shortly after which things would escalate. One evening he says he awoke to find three humanoid figures standing in his bedroom, wearing robes “like clergymen,” and possessing bright glowing eyes. He says that they concealed themselves under their garments, but that in fact they looked like “hideous monsters” underneath, and these creatures apparently teleported him away to some sort of facility, which they claimed was under Antarctica. The entities then supposedly explained to Bender that they were trying to extract a crucial chemical that they needed from seawater, and that they wished to keep their activities secret. Only when they left this planet was he to come forward with the report. Several more visits to the secret base and massages from aliens in the form of beautiful women (?) later, they left and he then wrote about it all in a book that was largely ignored when it came out. What in the world was going on here?
From the 1960s we have a few accounts that also stand out with their extreme oddness. In November of 1963 a series of strange events unfolded in the area of Kent, England, when two local boys, a 17-year-old John Flaxton and 18-year-old Mervyn Hutchinson, claimed that they one evening saw a glowing orb of light hovering over a rural field. After watching the scintillating orb for a few minutes it allegedly flew off into the woods, and shortly after this a nightmarish entity would emerge from the tangled brush. It was described as having a humanoid body covered in black, shaggy hair and possessing expansive bat-like wings and webbed feet. What made it especially otherworldly is that it seemed to have no head where one should be, and the boys fled in terror. What makes this whole case interesting is that at least two other witnesses also reported seeing the creature and the encounter, and in the coming days there would be some disparate reports describing the same freakish beast.
In 1965 we have a weird report given by radio announcer James Towsley, of station KEYL, in Long Prairie, Minnesota. The witness says that on October 23, 1965 he was driving along a remote stretch of Highway 27 at approximately 7 PM when he came around a bend and noticed a “rocket ship” planted right in the middle of the road, measuring around 30-feet tall and about 10 feet in diameter and resting upon a set of fins. Under this ship were several objects he described as looking like “tin cans,” around 6 inches high and with little tripod like legs upon which they moved about. Towsley would describe his surreal encounter thusly:
They were standing in a big circle of light under the ship. I jumped out of my car and was going to knock one over but then they came at me. They came right up to the car. There were three of them. They had no eyes or anything. Just those tripod legs and the matchstick arms. They were like tin cans. The size of a beer can. I was going to grab one but then I figured that if they could stop my car and put out my lights they could do something awful to me.
So we just stood there looking at each other and then they turned around and scooted back under the ship. The light was so bright I didn’t see where they went. Then there was a high-pitched humming sound and the ship took off straight up. It went up about a quarter of a mile, stopped for a moment and then disappeared. When the lights on the bottom went out after it was up in the air, my car radio and lights came on – and my engine started without having to touch the starter. I drove 90 miles an hour back to Long Prairie to report what I saw, but I wondered if people would believe me. I was sure of two things – the rocket (it towered above the trees along the road) was a spaceship of some kind and the three objects that came out of it were creatures like nothing else in the animal world I’ve ever seen. They definitely were not people as I know them.
The report prompted police to investigate the area, where they found strips of an unexplained oil-like substance smeared across the road, but nothing else. What were these things and did they ever really exist at all? Moving on into the 1970s we have a trove of bizarre encounters. A somewhat well-known such report supposedly happened on the evening of October 25, 1974, in the U.S. state of Wyoming. Local hunter Carl Higdon was hunting deer at a remote place called Medicine Bow National Forest, when he says he suddenly felt as if time had slowed down. It was a very unnerving sensation, and he had a strange experience when he shot at a deer only to witness the bullet stop in midair and drop to the ground. That was when he noticed a damn strange entity lurking in the shadows nearby.
The creature was described as a humanoid figure wearing what looked almost like a skintight scuba diving suit, with some sort of harness and a belt prominently featuring a star-shaped symbol of some sort. Its face was a bizarre combination of tiny eyes, a slit-like mouth, antennae, and hair that looked like a mass of straw, but what was really odd was that it had no ears, eyebrows, or neck. Also odd was that one of its abnormally long arms was tipped with what looked like a drill, while the other seemed to have no appendage at all. The creature then took things to the next level of strange when it spoke to Higdon in perfect English.
The entity introduced itself as “Ausso One,” and it would purportedly whisk Higdon off to its home planet, which the creature explained as being “163,000 light miles” from Earth. Higdon would describe it as a world dominated by massive umbrella shaped structures covered with lights, into one of which the frightened man was taken for some sort of medical examination before being returned to Earth. In the aftermath of this experience his truck would be found mired in a bog several miles away from where he had left it, and his doctor would be surprised to find that he no longer had some scarring of the lungs that had been plaguing him, a remnant of a case of tuberculosis, as well as several vanished kidney stones. Who was Ausso One? Was any of this true at all or was it an elaborate hoax and tall tale? Who knows?
On the evening of November 12, 1976, night watchmen José Maria Trejo and Juan Carrizosa Luján were on a shift at Talavera la Real air force base, Badajoz, Spain, when they saw an intensely bright UFO pass over while emitting an ear-splitting whistling noise akin to static interference. Not long after, another night watchmen named José Hidalgo excitedly came over with his guard dog to say he had seen the same thing. As they talked about what they had seen the sound of breaking twigs and crunching gravel came out from the darkness, and fearing that there was a trespasser on the base the dog was released, only to come back whimpering and cowering in fear.
At that point, out of the night came an almost ghost-like entity that seemed to be formed of green glowing fog and which stood 9 feet high and lacked any hands or feet. Upon its head it wore some sort of helmet, through which could be seen a deformed humanoid face peering back at them. The sight of this massive monstrosity caused Trejo to actually faint, and the remaining two men allegedly opened fire on it, the bullets seeming to pass right through it to hit the wall beyond, while at the same time making it glow more and more brightly before it suddenly vanished, and the same whistling sound they had originally heard pierced the night once again. The creature and its ship were gone. Rather bizarrely, they could find no bullet casings from the rounds they had fired. The case of what is known as the Badajoz Alien has gone on to become one of Spain’s stranger alien encounter reports, and who knows what this thing could have been.
In later years we have an account from the summer of 1975, in which a junior high school science teacher in New York by the name of Tom D’Ercole allegedly had a rather violent encounter with a nebulous, wraith-like entity like no other. D’Ercole purportedly woke up one clear, sunny morning to look outside his Long Island home and see what he at first took to be a small, uncommonly dark cloud that seemed to be hovering towards his house. Things got stranger still when he noticed that it was actually going against the wind to approach his residence, and that it was actually growing in size and changing shape, and as it drew closer he could see that this was in fact no cloud at all. He would say of the strange sight:
This basketball-sized cloud floated back and forth across the peak of the roof, changing in shape from a small globular mass to a larger ovoid and finally becoming an abstract, multi-curved, dark, vaporous ‘something.’ It finally measured about six feet in height and one and a half feet in width.
This is perhaps already alarming and bizarre enough as it is, but things got even weirder still when it further metamorphosed to form a “mouth” complete with “lips,” and began to seemingly inhale, after which it spewed forth a deluge of liquid that covered the teacher and his home and then evaporated into nothingness as if it had never been there at all. D’Ercole went through great efforts to try and preserve some evidence of his odd encounter by placing his wet clothes in a sealed bag, but when analyzed it was found to be nothing but plain water. Although it is unclear what the teacher could have possibly seen, it is an intriguing account in that it comes from a reliable witness in the form of a well-respected science teacher who seems to have no reason at all to have made up such an absurd-sounding story.
Finally, we have a case from Quebradillas, Puerto Rico, where in July of 1977 witness Adrián Olmos saw a 4-foot tall dwarf flying about with a jetpack, which was weird enough as it is, but would get even more so in the coming months. Then on October 20, 1977, Olmos was making a delivery of veterinarian medical products in the small coastal town of Camuy when his head was besieged with a sound he would describe as “reminiscent of the shrieking of monkeys,” only growing in intensity as he tried to continue going about making his deliveries. It got so bad that he felt physically ill, and pulled his vehicle over to the side of the road as that shrieking pounded in his head. It was then that he allegedly saw in front of him an immense ball of light about 13 feet across, which descended to hover above the road before him. From this main light there broke of several smaller lights, and he would say of what happened next:
The lights gave off a sort of gas which coalesced into two small creatures, becoming more and more clearly defined. I realized that the pair were the source of the shrieks, and they appeared to be talking to one another. The creatures had apple-colored faces and were dressed in platinum-white outfits, with diamond-like structures on the foreheads, held in place by black headbands. They resembled lizards, and long red tongues could be seen inside their mouths when they spoke.
He claimed that these lizard monsters wore some sort of boots, and that one of them had in its hands a small, box-like device which it aimed at the terrified man as if it were using it to scan him. One of them then shrieked at him in a probable attempt to communicate, before they all stepped back to meld into the large light, which then ascended into the sky to go flying off, the whole ordeal leaving Olmos feeling weakened and exhausted. In the years after this frightening encounter, Olmos would move away from the area and for years after complain of constant panic attacks and headaches. The rather outlandish case became quite popular among UFO researchers and journalists, and remains much discussed to this day.
This is by far not the extent of the many, many truly outlandish alien encounters on record, merely a selection. In a realm where aliens and interdimensional interlopers are presumed real, I suppose it is par for the course. There is no way something from another world or dimension is exactly going to fit it with our take on reality, and we are bound to get truly off the wall reports like these along with the standard humanoids and “greys.” Of course we have to assess whether any of these cases really happened as described or not, and that is a tricky problem to tackle at the best of times, especially with reports that seem to be one off encounters with outlandish entities that are never seen again. If it this is all real, then we are left to wonder just what is going on here. Are they aliens? Visitors from some other dimension? Pure imagination? Something else? There is no way to know, and such cases serve to add some very strange and very entertaining flavor to the landscape of truly odd encounters.
The U.S. Navy has been in the news for some weird stuff over the last few years. As the only branch of the military which has acknowledged the UFO (or UAP as they insist on referring to it) phenomenon, it’s quite curious that they have recently filed patents for technology that seems a perfect fit if they were attempting to build their own flying saucers. The problem is that a lot of these patents describe things that just simply shouldn’t exist within our known technological capacities. The latest in a series of filed U.S. Navy patents that seem to be beyond the realm of modern physics is a compact nuclear fusion reactor that could potentially fit inside a small craft. Yet nuclear fusion is a “Holy Grail” of energy production which we supposedly can’t figure out how to do at all, let alone create a compact fusion reactor that could fit inside a small vehicle.
Mysterious Universe alumnus Brett Tingley and Tyler Rogoway at The War Zone did a fantastic deep dive into this mysterious Navy patent and why it’s so confusing. The patent comes from Salvatore Cezar Pais, the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division engineer behind other recent mysterious and hard-to-believe patents including room temperature superconductors and a propulsion system that looks eerily similar to classic UFOs.
The nuclear power reactors we use today are fission reactors. Fusion reactors, by contrast, would be much more efficient, produce less radioactive waste, and don’t require enriched nuclear material that could be used to produce weapons. They would be a dramatic and game-changing improvement in every aspect of energy production. The problem is that we can only generate fusion for minutes or seconds in the experimental fusion reactors currently operational, and they’re the size of buildings.
Despite this, people are actively working on compact fusion reactors including Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, the Chinese Government, and now, apparently, the U.S. Navy.
The patent claims that the reactor can produce power in the gigawatt to terrawatt range (1 billion and 1 trillion watts, respectively). By contrast, as Tingley and Rogoway point out, America’s largest nuclear power plant is capable of generating 4 gigawatts of power.
The biggest impediment to nuclear fusion reactors is the containment of the plasma core. In the patent, it states that the plasma core is contained by a signature feature of all Pais’ bizarre inventions, a “controlled motion of electrically charged matter via accelerated vibration and/or accelerated spin subjected to smooth yet rapid acceleration transients, in order to generate extremely high energy/high intensity electromagnetic fields.”
The circular saucer shape probably isn’t an aesthetic choice when you really think about it. There’s gotta be some functionality inherent to such a silly looking thing.
But like Pais’ other UFO patents, it is not clear at all whether this device actually exists or if it is merely theoretical. The Navy has vouched for some of these patents in the past, claiming that a few do indeed already physically exist. If this fusion reactor does exist though, it should be stressed that this would be a game-changer for so many facets society. This is straight up Star Trek prequel future-tech. Of course, it’s also unknown what the Navy plans on doing with it, as well as unknown, and perhaps even doubtful, if we’ll ever see it in action.
On the hunt for extraterrestrials: A forest reserve in central Thailand is attracting UFO seekers who believe Buddhist aliens are visiting the site and sending telepathic communiques. The home of Wassana Chuensamnaun, lead campaigner for the extraterrestrials, is filled with alien artwork, including this statue.
Richard S. Ehrlich
Thailand’s Area 51 is Home to Cooperating ETs from Two Different Planets
In today’s edition of “As the Paranormal Turns Normal,” CNN and Vice – two reputable (send your negative comments to them) mainstream media sources – recently promoted Thailand’s Area 51 as a popular and fun tourist attraction. And there’s no need to storm it because its aliens and UFOs are openly discussed and often encountered. Should you start checking the flight schedule to Bangkok? Let’s find out.
“A hilltop in central Thailand is attracting UFO seekers who believe extraterrestrials hover above a huge Buddha statue, send telepathic communiques, walk across nearby sugarcane fields and use a crocodile-infested lake as a portal from their planets — Pluto and Loku.
It’s all happening three hours by road or rail north from Bangkok in Nakhon Sawan — which translates to “City of Heaven.””
If CNN’s description of Khao Kala hill, the alien-attracting base of the giant Buddha statue near Nakhon Sawan sounds familiar, it’s because that was the site of Thailand’s own Area 51 ‘storming’ in August 2019 … only this one involved the local police storming two meetings of the UFO Kao Kala group who discuss their sightings and encounters with each other and interested parties. While the authorities said they were just making sure the capacity of the room wasn’t exceeded and the visitors didn’t trample the park grounds. That seems reasonable … except there are a lot of people in the area who object to these UFO and alien believers, especially since they link their sightings to Buddhist meditations and philosophies.
“The aliens are described as slender, little, silvery humanoids. Illustrations depict them standing upright on two legs with two arms and a bulbous bald head with a pointy face topped with a single antenna. Huge, glossy, almond-shaped black eyes gaze above a thin nose and miniature mouth. Believers say silvery spaceships appear festooned with colorful lights or resemble the domed, circular, retro-UFOs seen in low-budget 1950s movies.”
If we can get along, why can’t they?
Since CNN Travel is promoting Khao Kala hill as a vacation spot for UFO enthusiasts, it deemphasized the controversies and instead described the aliens, who witnesses say are from Pluto and Loku, a planet orbiting another star in the Milky Way galaxy. Wassana Chuensamnaun, daughter of the first person to encounter the aliens, says both groups can take on physical forms but there’s no guarantee visitors will meet them. However, they may hear from them telepathically – Wassana claims that the Plutonians are looking for a few humans who will survive an upcoming nuclear holocaust and can contact the aliens to come help with the cleanup. (Why not help prevent it? Asking for a friend.)
This might be a good place for Buddhists to visit, since Wassana says the Plutonians think he was “the greatest human mind” and often talk to her about karma, reincarnation and other Buddhist interests. This connection to the religion may also save the UFO Kao Kala group from future raids and complaints by suspicious locals.
Welcome aliens!
The Vice article points out that there are weekend bus tours to the site and plenty of baggy t-shirts plastered with garish alien designs” and other souvenirs and alien-themed food items for sale there. Now THAT sounds more like the other Area 51, especially during the recent storming events. However, that site still doesn’t have alien and UFO encounters – real or telepathic – while Khao Kala hill claims to have them, plus a group that will help visitors attempt to contact the Plutonians and Lokucians (Lokunatics?) themselves.
Which one sounds like a trip worthy of your hard-earned vacation days? Whichever you choose, it’s just another of the growing signs that the paranormal is becoming the normal.
Photoreportage of CNN-travel: peter2011
UFO hotspot: The view from atop Khao Kala hill includes flat sugarcane fields, below where Wassana and other believers say they have seen aliens disembark a UFO, walk around, and then vanish in an atomized puff.
Richard S. Ehrlich
'The UFO spun me': "I felt like my legs and my arms had to spin," says Wassana's brother-in-law, Jaroen Raepeth, seen here re-enacting what he believes was his first encounter with aliens.
Richard S. Ehrlich
Two types of aliens: An artist's conception of alien life is displayed in Wassana's home. "There are two types of aliens," Wassana says. "One group is from the planet Pluto. The others are from a planet named Loku."
Richard S. Ehrlich
Like the UFOs in retro movies: Believers say silvery spaceships appear festooned with colorful lights or resemble the domed, circular, retro-UFOs seen in low-budget 1950s movies, including this portrayal by an artist displayed in Wassana's home.
Richard S. Ehrlich
The team: Wassana [far right] and others involved in championing the extraterrestrials, stand alongside a makeshift UFO and alien displayed in Wassana's home.
Richard S. Ehrlich
Another artist's conception: An artist's depiction portrays aliens with a bulbous bald head with a pointy face topped with a single antenna. Huge, glossy, almond-shaped black eyes gaze above a thin nose and miniature mouth, as seen in this painting displayed in Wassana's home.
Richard S. Ehrlich
A crocodile-infested alien portal: Believers say nearby Bueng Boraphet Lake is a portal from the aliens' planets Pluto and Loku, but villagers warn the water is infested with crocodiles.
Richard S. Ehrlich
An unusual choice: The aliens' purported choice of Khao Kala is unusual because it is the smallest among a cluster of loftier hills. Meditators say they are thankful they don't have to climb very high to reach the top.
Richard S. Ehrlich
Forbidden path: A well-trod path up the hill through a lush forest bursting with small butterflies, tamarind trees and other greenery now includes a wooden gate and big sign warning: "No one is allowed to take over or do any activities which can result in destruction of the forest. If you trespass, legal action will be taken." Defiant seekers walk around the gate.
Richard S. Ehrlich
Hilltop Buddha: A Buddhist Thai woman kneels at a larger-than-life statue portraying Buddha protected by a mythical seven-headed "naga" snake, which has topped the hill for many years and was not associated with any UFOs before the family's tales.
Richard S. Ehrlich
An artist's conception: Follwers describe the aliens as slender, little, silvery humanoids. An artist's conception, displayed in Wassana's home, portrays them standing upright on two legs, with two arms.
Richard S. Ehrlich
UFO sighting?: A recent photograph by Manop Ampan, administrator of the UFOKaoKala Facebook group. Manop was previously Nakhon Sawan province's government Public Relations Department officer.
Paul Bennewitz, an electrical physicist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, engaged in some aggressive radio monitoring of the nearby Sandia Labs, then.
Dulce Base is an alleged secret alien underground facility under Archuleta Mesa on the Colorado-New Mexico border near the town of Dulce, New Mexico.
Dear Viewers, Philip Schneider claimed to be a former US Government Geologist and Engineer, who was involved in producing the underground explosions. This video looks at wars between aliens and the military at an underground facility in Dulce. The underground base in New Mexico definitely has a connection to.
Once we go below the crust of the planet past five or six miles, there’s thousand of miles more, and we don’t know or understand exactly what could be down there, he pointed out.
There’ve long been rumors about a secret underground base at Dulce, NM, and that area has had a large number of strange lights seen on the mesas, Strieber noted, adding that the local Jicarilla tribe has a legend they were created inside the mesa.
A media phenomenon, Coast to Coast AM deals with UFOs, strange occurrences, life after death, and other unexplained (and often inexplicable) phenomena.
Reptillian Face Seen In Earths Orbit From Space Station, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Oct 15, 2019 Location of sighting: Earths Orbit from ISS Source: NASA Live Cams I was watching the live cams trying to catch sight of a UFO and noticed this reptilian face passing below the space station in earths orbit. I believe this was made by an alien living on Earth, who was dreaming or thinking deeply about a distant person. Some alien species minds are so powerful that they can do telekinesis, which is simply the ability to move an object in some manner without coming into physical contact with it. Whats easier to change the shape of than a cloud? In essence, it is the psychic ability to use the power of the mind to manipulate a specific target and conform it to your will. We have just witnessed an alien thinking about someone. We have seen its memory! Scott C. Waring
Giant 'alien-like' squid egg in underwater bubble found by divers in Arctic Ocean
The deep ocean is a mysterious world. Now it appears that Norwegian divers (Ronald Raasch) found a strange bag filled with liquid in the Arctic Ocean.
A huge underwater bubble was discovered by a group of scientists who were studying the state of the ocean. Swimming to the ball, divers lit it with a flashlight, which allowed a closer look at its insides.
While it almost looks like there is an alien-like figure inside the underwater bubble, it turns out that it is a rare jelly-like structure intended to protect the offspring of squid inside.
The discovery of exoplanet GJ 3512b – a planet “too big for its star” – adds fuel to the competition between 2 theoretical models of how planets form. It suggests many more Jupiter-like planets are waiting to be found, orbiting nearby sunlike stars.
Notice the spiral structure here? This isn’t a galaxy; it’s a computer simulation of a newly forming solar system. It’s part of the disk instability model of how planets form, a model that’s been less accepted by astronomers – until now. A new discovery suggests this model may be correct. If so, Jupiter-like worlds may be common around nearby sunlike stars.
Astronomers have discoveredmore than 4,000 exoplanets so far, and the number is still going up. Many are gas giant worlds like Jupiter or Saturn in our solar system, but that’s in part selection bias; the more massive exoplanets orbiting closer to their stars are the easiest exoplanets to find. Now, a new studysuggests that there may be a large population of still-unseen Jupiter-like exoplanets waiting to be found orbiting nearby sunlike stars. The new results, from theorist Alan Boss at Carnegie Institution for Science, relate in a profound way to astronomers’ understanding of how planets form. These results have been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
Boss’s new work is supported by a September 27, 2019, paper, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science, reporting on the discovery of a new exoplanet labeled GJ 3512b. This confirmed, massive, Jupiter-like planet orbits a very low-mass red dwarf star. And thus this planet – sometimes called the planet that shouldn’t exist – belies the previously most-popular theory of planetary formation, which had suggested it was impossible for such a massive planet to form around such a small star. From the September 27 paper:
Surveys have shown that super-Earth and Neptune-mass exoplanets are more frequent than gas giants around low-mass stars, as predicted by the core accretion theory of planet formation. We report the discovery of a giant planet around the very-low-mass star GJ 3512, as determined by optical and near-infrared radial-velocity observations. The planet has a minimum mass of 0.46 Jupiter masses, very high for such a small host star, and an eccentric 204-day orbit … We use simulations to demonstrate that the GJ 3512 planetary system challenges generally accepted formation theories …
It’s the challenge of the “impossible exoplanet” GJ 3512b to the most widely accepted planet-formation model that Boss is now addressing in his new paper.
The new study is supported by, and expands on, the discovery of GJ 3512b, a gas giant that “shouldn’t exist” because current planet formation theory says it is too big for its very small star.
Astronomical theorists – people who’ve spent entire careers studying how planets form – have settled on two scenarios for the formation of gas giant planets. One scenario is called core accretion, and the other is called disk instability. In core accretion, planets slowly form through the collisions of increasingly larger material in the debris disk of gas and dust surrounding a young star, such as dust grains, pebbles, boulders, and eventually larger planetesimals. Meanwhile, the competing theory – disk instability – suggests a rapidly triggered process that occurs when the debris disk is massive and cool enough to form spiral arms.
According to the disk instability model of how planets form, clumps of self-gravitating gas and dust then form and contract and coalesce into a baby planet.
Core accretion has been the dominant theory for some time now, but planets like GJ 3512b represent a challenge to it. Boss has long been a proponent of the disk instability theory. With GJ 3512b now discovered and confirmed, Boss more than ever believes disk instability is the correct model for the formation of gas giant planets, and – if so – that there are many more Jupiter-like planets waiting to be found. According to Guillem Anglada-Escudé, a former Carnegie postdoc who worked with Boss on disk instability models, now at the Institute for Space Studies of Catalonia:
It’s a great vindication for the disk instability method and a demonstration how one unusual discovery can swing the pendulum on our understanding of how planets form.
Alan Boss, a theorist and observational astronomer at Carnegie Institution for Science.
Here’s the big problem with core accretion as an explanation for planets like GJ 3512b. According to core accretion, the mass of a debris disk should be proportional to the mass of the young star around which it revolves. When you have a star that’s much smaller than our sun – hosting a planet that should be too big for it – then either the original debris disk was enormous in relation to this star, or core accretion just didn’t work in this planetary system.
In contrast, in the disk instability scenario, hot debris disks start out as very stable. As they gradually cool down, they form spiral arms around the star – yes, spiral arms similar to those in a galaxy – from which dense clumps eventually form planets. And as it turns out, the gas giants resulting from that process are at similar distances from their stars as Jupiter and Saturn are from the sun. As Boss surmised:
My new models show that disk instability can form dense clumps at distances similar to those of the solar system’s giant planets. The exoplanet census is still very much underway, and this work suggests that there are many more gas giants out there waiting to be counted.
If Boss is right, then disk instability for the creation of planets may be more common than thought, and there should be many more Jupiter-like worlds waiting to be discovered around nearby stars. Finding more planets like GJ 3512b would make that scenario even more compelling.
Artist’s concept of exoplanet GJ 504b, a gas giant 57 light-years away. Similar worlds may be common around nearby stars, according to a new study by theorist Alan Boss.
Image via Goddard Space Flight Center/S. Wiessinger/Sci-News.
Bottom line: A new study from Carnegie Institution for Science suggests there are many more Jupiter-like gas giant planets orbiting nearby stars, waiting to be found. The study expands on the recent discovery of GJ 3512b, a massive planet that should be too large for its small star, and “shouldn’t even exist” according to the current most-popular theory of how planets form.
What is mutilating cows in the Midwest? FBI probed thousands of reports of cattle killed with 'surgical precision' since the early 1970s - with the deaths blamed on satanic cults, the government and ALIENS
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
Since the early 1970s, thousands of cow murders and mutilations have reportedly taken place in the Midwest
Reports include cattle having ears, lips, eyes, noses, anuses and genitalia removed with 'surgical precision'
Conflicting theories abound - some believe either aliens or the government are responsible for the mutilations, or 'mutes', which have also been reported across the US and abroad
The FBI attempted to investigate the incidents but were largely unsuccessful due to 'lack of jurisdiction'
On a bright, sunny morning in the summer of 1973, Ron and Paula Watson, two farmers in Springfield, Missouri, witnessed something that changed their lives forever.
It was an alien abduction, they say. But not of a human – of cattle.
They said they saw a 'green, cone-shaped craft' – next to which two 'silver little beings' were standing over a large black cow.
'I told Ron, 'My god, they got a cow! What are they doing to it?' Paula said. 'It had its eyes open and its tongue was like, hanging out a little bit. But it just laid there and it didn't move.'
She described in detail how she saw the aliens running their hands over the cow and then inspecting their long fingers before they 'floated' it into their large ship in the distance.
Their neighbors never believed their story, though one did admit to having one black cow left unaccounted for. The Watsons' story sounds like something out of an early science-fiction film – but it became one of many stories of alien and UFO sightings used to explain the thousands of cow mutilations reported across the United States in the 1970s.
Since the 1970s, bizarre murders and mutilations of cattle have been reported across the nation, primarily in the Midwest. In this photo (left) of a cow in Saguache County, Colorado in 1975, a female cow's utters have been removed with surgical precision. In the image on the right, a cow was found with its tongue removed in July 2013 on a farm in Missouri
News reports make up the bulk of the FBI's 32 page report on the subject, which is prefaced by a brief explanation that their investigation was hindered by a lack of jurisdiction in most cases
Within the depths of the FBI's database of unsolved mysteries lies the graphic tale of these cattle murders, which outraged and petrified farmers for decades, and is still continuing today.
Speculation surrounding who – or what – might be responsible for the killing and mutilation of thousands of cows has ranged from satanic worshipers, government agents, and even aliens.
The most curious aspect is not that the cattle have died, but the way in which they did. Since the early 1970s farmers have discovered their treasured (and expensive) animals dead with various organs excised – including eyes, noses, tongues, hearts, livers, anuses, and genitalia removed with laser precision.
Though many theories have been offered it's a phenomenon that no one – not even the FBI – have ever been able to solve.
In 1974, newspapers started to catch wind of these bizarre mutilations, which first took place primarily in extremely rural farmlands in the Midwest. Instances were reported across the nation but were mostly scattered among South Dakota, Colorado, Kansas, and Nevada.
The news reports make up the bulk of the FBI's 32 page report on the subject, which is prefaced by a brief explanation that their investigation was hindered by a lack of jurisdiction in most cases.
The FBI told DailyMail.com that this was due to the fact that at the time there was no federal law declaring animal mutilation a federal crime, which didn't allow the department to continue investigating.
Many residents reported seeing helicopters circling the areas where cattle later turned up dead and sliced up with seemingly surgical accuracy. This prompted concerns that the mutilations, nicknamed 'mutes' by those familiar with the subject, were being propagated and covered up by the government.
in this image on the left, the cow's heart was excised with expert care - and was the third of three cattle mutilated on the same farm in Missouri beginning in 2011. Theories of who, or what, might be responsible have ranged from satanic cults, aliens, and the government. In the image on the right, ranchers found an animal with its sex organs and anus removed
Linda Moulton Howe is a former Miss Idaho turned investigative journalist and regional Emmy-winning filmmaker who has been a primary proponent of the 'alien argument'
This was around the same time of the height of alien paranoia in the United States – when UFOs, or balls or discs of floating light, were being spotted in similarly rural areas, often preceding or following the cow mutilations.
Many who have dedicated their lives to the subject believe, in fact, that aliens are responsible for the mutilations and that the government has been attempting to cover up their crimes (and existence) for years.
One such person is Linda Moulton Howe, the regional Emmy-winning filmmaker who the Watsons shared their story with for her documentary Earth Mysteries: Alien Life Forms. She has been one of the most steadfast supporters of the alien argument.
Her research conjures the images of what we picture as the stereotypical alien abduction – flying saucers beaming animals up into space with light.
At least two people even reported being abducted by aliens at that time – including one woman named Judy Doraty and her daughter Cindy.
In a 1990 symposium proceeding Howe wrote: '…I found in so many eyewitness accounts of orange glowing objects the size of football fields hovering above pasturelands where mutilated animals were later found. Or beams of light observed shining down from 'silent helicopters' that lighted pastures 'brighter than daylight' and the next day mutilated animals were found. And eyewitness reports of strange craft and/or non-human creatures involved with animals.
'There was Judy Doraty who in 1973 watched a brown and white calf rise in a pale beam of yellow light. Inside the craft, she saw tissue cut from the eye, tongue and testicles by two small grey-skinned creatures. They had four fingers, instead of five, and those long, thin fingers tapered into dark nails. Their eyes had vertical pupils like a cat or a crocodile's.
'Judy's daughter, Cindy, also described in a 1990 hypnosis session seeing a calf rising in a beam of yellow light.'
In a rare winter mutilation, this calf was found in Hooper, Nebraska in 1975 with its jaw completely cut out all the way up to its right eye socket. Eyewitnesses often reported seeing beaming lights or suspicious helicopters near where mutilated cows were later found
US Senator Floyd Haskell from Colorado pleaded with the FBI to become involved with the mutilations in August 1975 after receiving more than 130 cases in the state alone, and farmers had taken to arming themselves out of fear
Supernatural explanations were the only ones that made any sense at the time – given that the technology of the era was not advanced enough to have performed what appeared to be the use of localized lasers.
The areas surrounding the excisions, often around the anus of the murdered animals, had a blackened and burned appearance to them – suggesting the use of a high-powered laser. Other researchers, however, proposed different conclusions.
Christopher O'Brien, an author and investigative journalist on the subject, said that in his 200 cases of dealing with cattle death, about 40 of those were done by 'something with intelligence'.
Christopher O'Brien, an author and who has investigated the subject for decades, said that in his 200 cases of dealing with cattle death, about 40 of those were done by 'something with intelligence'. He is pictured researching left in 1993 and right in 2012
This Hooper, Nebraska calf also had its anus cut in a 10-inch wide diameter and 18-inch deep. O'Brien told DailyMail.com that he didn't believe aliens were responsible - because 'who would fly thousands of light years to collect cow butts?'
He is more skeptical of the alien explanation – saying that Howe's research doesn't incorporate many of the scientific findings that have been made.
He told the DailyMail.com that when a cow decomposes, the vegetable matter contained in one of its four stomachs makes the animal bloat. As the moisture leaves the body it then starts to deflate – causing the exposed edges of the animal to stay hard and darkened.
'To someone who doesn't know what they're looking at – it looks like a burn,' he said.
O'Brien feels that the alien argument is one used to sensationalize the topic and are only looking at a small portion of the total data.
He can't deny, however, how disturbing the number of 'high strange' cases are that he's seen – the ones that involve otherworldly circumstances.
On one occasion which O'Brien calls his 'strangest case' – he was called to the scene of a mutilated calf in Del Norte, Colorado.
'It was really freaky, it wouldn't rot,' he said. 'It was found in a complete pristine, five inch snow field without one drop of blood on the snow. All the blood had been taken from the animal. The heart and liver had been expertly excised and left in the body cavity.
'The chief medical veterinary pathologist said "it wasn't an animal that did this",' he continued.
In O'Brien's book, Stalking the Heard, he writes that the month-old calf was also missing its spine from the hips to the skull and the brain was gone. It's right front leg was also gone, and the vast majority of its ribs, both eyes, ears, intestines, reproductive tract, and lungs had been removed. Its rectum was also mutilated.
Two witnesses also reportedly saw a large beam of light near the house the previous evening before the calf was found.
O'Brien's 'strangest case' was this month-old calf that was missing its spine from the hips to the skull and the brain was gone. It's right front leg was also gone, and the vast majority of its ribs, both eyes, ears, intestines, reproductive tract, and lungs had been removed. Its rectum was also mutilated and its heart and liver were excised but left inside the body cavity
He hits on another popular argument for the cattle deaths – though arguably the least plausible explanation. Many believe that the excisions were being done simply by other animals – scavengers such as vultures or coyotes.
O'Brien is quick to discredit this based off of his own experience.
'The first thing I look for is cut hair follicles,' he said. 'When birds or coyotes rip they rip between the lines of hair they don't cut the hair. If I find a 2-3 inch section of cut hair follicles I know that someone or something with a sharp implement did that. It wasn't done by birds or scavengers.'
These 'high strange' cases are less likely to be reported by ranchers, according to O'Brien.
'The freakier the case the less likely the rancher is to report it – they're so freaked out they won't even tell their family or neighbors. He doesn't want people in the community to think he's been singled out and victimized by some supernatural thing. That's why they're very reluctant to come forward.
'It's only when they see the hundreds and hundreds of helicopters being reported around these sites – mostly military helicopters – it's only when they see that that they feel like they've been targeted or victimized by their government and that pisses them off.'
Though the occurrences in the United States have considerably slowed down since they were at their height in the early 1970s, they certainly haven't stopped. O'Brien notes that they have seen a consistently high number of cases in South America, especially Brazil and Argentina.
O'Brien says that throughout his decades of studying mutilations, he's noticed that there's been a shift to South America, where he believes they've had more than 4,000 cases since 2002. A news report included in an FBI briefing stated that more than 1500 cattle in 22 states were killed and mutilated from 1973 to 1976 in the United States
He claims that since 2002, there have been more than 4,000 cases of cattle mutilation in South America - and are still reporting anywhere from three to a dozen cases a week.
Back in the United States, just before the New Year in 2016, and again a few days afterwards, two cows were mutilated in nearby rural towns in Kansas.
In McPherson County, Carla and John Shearer discovered one of their pregnant cows dead with one eye removed and both her top and bottom eyelids and eyelashes excised.
'We lose animals, but not like this,' Shearer told the Kansas Agland. The couple believes whoever killed their $4,000 cow used a tranquilizer or stun gun to immobilize it before killing it.
'She died in motion – she was walking and she just went straight down,' Shearer added.
Carla and John Shearer on McPherson County, Kansas discovered one of their pregnant cows dead with one eye removed and both her top and bottom eyelids and eyelashes excised in January 2017
The bull found in nearby Harvey County was found dead with its genitals removed – also cut with surgical precision.
It is O'Brien's opinion that the mass mutilations – of which there were thousands reported in the 1970s alone – are a part of a secretive government effort to research animal plagues such as mad cow or prion disease.
'We've seen this many, many times throughout history – where one case will happen and then within a week there will be a dozen. I think they're looking for something – that's the best explanation I can give. And I think they're looking for something within the food chain.
'Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is the most horrendous affliction that you could possibly imagine. It's 100% fatal – it produces large holes in the brain tissue and creates holes like Swiss cheese in the neuron system and the brain synapses start to misfire. You forget to breathe and your autonomic system starts to break down.
'That I think is the basic underpinnings of it – we're dealing with a group that is interested in keeping an eye on the food chain. The beef industry is the largest, most powerful industry that you never hear about. I think we're dealing with something that's being protected by some quasi-governmental group,' he said.
Though tempting to indulge in the possibility of space creatures invading the planet to study our animals, O'Brien finds this explanation a bit too impractical.
'It sounds like bad science fiction,' he said. 'Who would fly hundreds of light years to come and gather cow butts?'
Scientists working with the Curiosity rover have found salt-enriched rock at a place called Sutton Island on Mars. The rocks suggest ponds with briny water on Mars, billions of years ago.
The video above provides concise background on insights obtained so far via NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has been exploring Gale crater on Mars since 2012. Curiosity has joined other Mars explorers in providing evidence that the red planet must once have been warmer and wetter, likely with liquid water on its surface. Could life have gotten a foothold there? Maybe, and that’s part of what has scientists so intrigued. This week (October 7, 2019), Curiosity scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, announced another new study about Mars water, published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience.
A statement about the new work painted a vivid picture of Mars, billions of years ago:
Imagine ponds dotting the floor of Gale Crater, the 100-mile-wide (150-kilometer-wide) ancient basin that Curiosity is exploring. Streams might have laced the crater’s walls, running toward its base. Watch history in fast forward, and you’d see these waterways overflow then dry up, a cycle that probably repeated itself numerous times over millions of years.
That is the landscape described by Curiosity scientists …
The authors of the new paper interpret the rocks found by Curiosity – enriched in mineral salts – as evidence of shallow briny ponds that existed on Mars’ surface billions of years ago. The rocks provide evidence that these ponds on Mars went through episodes of overflow and drying. NASA commented:
The deposits serve as a watermark created by climate fluctuations as the Martian environment transitioned from a wetter one to the freezing desert it is today.
View larger. | Possible mud cracks preserved in Martian rock. Earthly scientists call this Martian rock slab Old Soaker. It might have formed from the drying of a mud layer more than 3 billion years ago. The view spans about 4 feet (1.2 meters) left-to-right and combines three images taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on the arm of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover.
William Rapin of Caltech is the lead author of the new paper. He said:
We went to Gale Crater because it preserves this unique record of a changing Mars. Understanding when and how the planet’s climate started evolving is a piece of another puzzle: When and how long was Mars capable of supporting microbial life at the surface?
Rapin and his co-authors describe salts found across a 500-foot-tall (150-meter-tall) section of sedimentary rocks called Sutton Island, which Curiosity visited in 2017. The mud cracks at one location look so much like a dry lakebed that the scientists have nicknamed the location Old Soaker. NASA said:
… the team already knew the area had intermittent drier periods. But the Sutton Island salts suggest the water also concentrated into brine.
Typically, when a lake dries up entirely, it leaves piles of pure salt crystals behind. But the Sutton Island salts are different: For one thing, they’re mineral salts, not table salt. They’re also mixed with sediment, suggesting they crystallized in a wet environment – possibly just beneath evaporating shallow ponds filled with briny water.
Given that Earth and Mars were similar in their early days, Rapin speculated that Sutton Island might have resembled saline lakes onSouth America’s Altiplano[in west-central South America, the place where the Andes are widest]. Streams and rivers flowing from mountain ranges into this arid, high-altitude plateau lead to closed basins similar to Mars’ ancient Gale Crater. Lakes on the Altiplano are heavily influenced by climate in the same way as Gale.
Rapin added:
During drier periods, the Altiplano lakes become shallower, and some can dry out completely. The fact that they’re vegetation-free even makes them look a little like Mars.
View as panorama. | This self-portrait of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity combines 66 exposures taken by the rover’s MAHLI imaging system during the 177th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity’s work on Mars (February 3, 2013).
Curiosity’s science team is now seeing a cycle of wet-to-dry across long timescales on Mars. Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada of JPL said:
As we climb Mount Sharp, we see an overall trend from a wet landscape to a drier one. But that trend didn’t necessarily occur in a linear fashion. More likely, it was messy, including drier periods, like what we’re seeing at Sutton Island, followed by wetter periods…
This animation illustrates the Sutton Island model of drying lakes on Mars. Sutton Island is a 500-foot-tall (150-meter-tall) section of sedimentary rocks on Mount Sharp – the central mountain in Gale Crater – where Curiosity has been exploring since 2012. The model suggests stream flow from Mount Sharp to the floor of Gale Crater. Salty ponds might have been left behind as the region dried out over time. The rocks enriched with mineral salts, found here by Curiosity, suggest that water vanished slowly, and they suggest a possible, persistent cycle of drying and overflow.
Image via ASU Knowledge Enterprise Development/Michael Northrop/NASA.
Bottom line:Scientists working with the Curiosity rover have found salt-enriched rock at a place called Sutton Island on Mars. The rocks suggest ponds with briny water existed on Mars, billions of years ago.
Based on estimates of trajectory, which are constantly becoming more accurate as technology develops, the rock will passt within about 9,700 kilometres of Earth.
While that may seem like a safe distance, the moon is more than 383,000 kilometres away.
Alien artifacts from ancient Egypt found in Jerusalem & kept secret by Rockefeller Museum
Alien enthusiasts have been left fascinated by reports of ancient Egyptian artifacts that were discovered in the home of famous Egyptologist Sir William Petrie. The artifacts are believed to be the ultimate proof of alien contact and are said to rewrite not only Ancient Egyptian history but the history of the entire planet. Like many other ‘controversial objects’ these mysterious artifacts were also kept a secret.
So, where do we start?
A YouTube video posted by Paranormal Cruciblepurports to show alleged ancient Egyptian artifacts and sculptures which were found at the Giza plateau. These items were reportedly taken away from Petrie’s home in Jerusalem by ‘officials belonging to the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum’ after the discovery was made reports popular UFO portal UFO Sightings Daily.
The reports of the alleged artifacts captured the internet as you would expect.
According to Intellihub News, the alleged ‘otherworldly’ artifacts were discovered in a secret room in the home of Sir William Petrie.
According to UFO researchers, among the artifacts were some that contained ‘otherworldly’ symbols.
It is sad that the renowned Egyptologist had found ultimate proof of alien life before he died in 1942, but instead of sharing the discovery, for some reasons he decided to hide the artifacts away in his home.
Now, according to reports, these items have been taken by the Rockefeller Museum and like many other discoveries that contradict mainstream history, these too could be hidden from society.
Interestingly, the Inquisitr decided to dig further and was able to confirm that the prestigious Petri Museum of Egyptian Archaeology has in their possession a grandiose collection of ancient Egyptian and Sudanese items which include ancient Egyptian “firsts,” such as the “oldest linen” and “oldest dress” from ancient Egypt (5,000 B.C.).
The Petri Museum also displays some of the earliest examples of Metallurgy in Ancient Egypt.
However, as the Inquisitr indicates they were NOT able to confirm that the museum has displayed ‘Alien Artifacts’ discovered in Egypt, nor recovered from a secret room in Petrie’s residence in Jerusalem.
But this may be because these items contradict history and mainstream beliefs say ufo researchers who believe in the story. Like many other things that go against the beliefs of mainstream scholars, these artifacts too have been locked away from society.
As always, sensational stories require sensational evidence.
According to the editor of Intellihub News, the Ancient Egyptian artifacts found in Petrie’s residence in Jerusalem directly link the ancient Egyptian civilization to an advanced civilization, not from Earth.
Among the artifacts –now in possession of the Rockefeller museum— are two alleged mummified bodies of approximately four feet in height. Some have even speculated that these mummified bodies could be the remains of ‘alien’ visitors.
According to reports from Intellihub News, the physical features of the alleged mummified bodies indicate their possible alien nature. According to the editor of the website, the anomalous skeletons have “stereotypical alien “elongated heads, large eye sockets, and long spiral arms.”
But as if the mummified bodies weren’t enough, it is said that among the artifacts were “highly advanced” mechanical devices and a golden spherical object with strange writings.
Intellihub News’ editor indicates that the high-tech devices have “an intricate mechanism which is surrounded by gold spiral tubing that has several small gold orbs and crosses attached to it.” Is it possible that the alleged artifacts are part of ‘interstellar navigational devices’?
Intellihub News points towards Abydos and the temple built by Seti I, and his son Ramses II, where we can observe the so-called Flying machines of Abydos.
There, we are able to ‘spot’ what seem to be representations of modern day vehicles like Helicopters, submarines, and aircraft.
The only problem is that these inscriptions are believed to be thousands of years old.
Scientists believe these are not aircraft but the result of a psychological phenomenon called pareidolia.
However, there are more mysteries when it comes to Ancient Egypt and Aliens.
But is it just because we would love to find a connection between one of the greatest civilizations to inhabit Earth and alien visitors?
Well, it is a possibility, but there are more interesting details worth looking at.
An Ancient Egyptian text called the Tulli Papyrus mentions a fascinating story during the reign of Thutmose III when an alleged mass UFO sighting occurred over ancient Egypt.
The ancient text reads (translated):
“In the year 22, of the third month of winter, sixth hour of the day […] among the scribes of the House of Life it was found that a strange Fiery Disk was coming in the sky. It had no head. The breath of its mouth emitted a foul odor.
Its body was one rod in length and one rod in width. It had no voice. It came toward His Majesty’s house. Their heart became confused through it, and they fell upon their bellies. They [went] to the king, to report it. His Majesty [ordered that] the scrolls [located] in the House of Life be consulted. His Majesty meditated on all these events which were now going on.
After several days had passed, they became more numerous in the sky than ever. They shined in the sky more than the brightness of the sun, and extended to the limits of the four supports of heaven […] Powerful was the position of the Fiery Disks.
The army of the King looked on, with His Majesty in their midst. It was after the evening meal when the Disks ascended even higher in the sky to the south. Fish and other volatiles rained down from the sky: a marvel never before known since the foundation of the country. And His Majesty caused incense to be brought to appease the heart of Amun-Re, the god of the Two Lands. And it was [ordered] that the event [be recorded for] His Majesty in the Annals of the House of Life [to be remembered] for ever.”
Ons sterrenstelsel zit mogelijk vol met buitenaardse micromachines. Zo kunnen we ze spotten
In 2015 suggereerden astronomen dat het vreemde gedrag van de ster KIC 8462852, beter bekend als Tabby’s ster, verklaard zou kunnen worden door een Dysonbol, een buitenaardse megastructuur.
Uit het nieuwste onderzoek blijkt dat de helderheidsdipjes van de ster waarschijnlijk worden veroorzaakt door een exomaan.
Alienjagers hebben nu hun hoop gevestigd op zogeheten von Neumann-sondes, vernoemd naar wiskundige John von Neumann.
Kopieën
Von Neumann-sondes zijn ruimteschepen die aliens in staat stellen om de ruimte vanaf hun thuisplaneet te verkennen.
Deze sondes vliegen door de ruimte en maken daarbij kopieën van zichzelf, waardoor ze exponentieel toenemen in aantal en steeds grotere gebieden kunnen verkennen.
Je kunt je afvragen waarom we ze dan nog niet hebben waargenomen.
Piepklein
In een paper op preprintserver arXiv stelt astrofysicus Zaza Osmanov van de Vrije Universiteit van Tbilisi in Georgië nu dat deze machines waarschijnlijk piepklein zijn, ongeveer een nanometer lang.
Deze microscopische ruimteschepen hebben maar weinig materiaal nodig om zichzelf te kopiëren en daarnaast kunnen ze zich voortbewegen door middel van waterstofatomen in interstellaire stofwolken.
Zichtbaar
Volgens Osmanov zijn alleen mega-zwermen von Neumann-sondes zichtbaar voor ons, als we tenminste met een infraroodtelescoop in de juiste richting kijken.
Deze nanomachines lichten namelijk op als ze in contact komen met protonen, stelt de astrofysicus.
Nanoscale alien robots could be a thing. Barry Keily reports.
With the exception of folk in America's agricultural states, the search for Alien life has so far turned up no evidence - but it doesn't stop people theorising.
COLIN ANDERSON PRODUCTIONS PTY LTD
It has long been an unspoken tenet of astrobiology that in the absence of confirmed alien technologies it’s necessary to imagine some.
This is far from a frivolous pursuit. Rather, it is an attempt to resolve one of the more baffling aspects of human existence, generally summed up as the Fermi Paradox.
In 1950 the famous nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi came up with an interesting point. Given the size and age of the Milky Way, he said, any alien civilisation just a bit cleverer than humanity should by now have had ample time to explore and colonise all of it.
Why, then, with the obvious exception of a couple of dozen befuddled folk in America’s more agricultural states, has no one ever seen evidence thereof?
Scanning the skies for the sounds of extraterrestrial radio broadcasts – the basis of the long-running Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project – has thus far turned up squat. Other research avenues, at least since Fermi’s implicit challenge, have focussed on the search for technological evidence.
If ET is out there, the logic runs, she or he or it must have somehow arrived wherever there is, and must be somehow surviving – and for those things to happen, some type of whizzbang alien machinery must be involved.
All that has to be done, therefore, is work out a way to detect the tech, which is not easy when the object of any such search is completely unknown.
This has led to some not entirely fanciful imagining. Flying saucers were an early example, although, despite attempts to build them here on Earth, the engineering challenges inherent in the design appear fatal.
Dyson spheres were, and remain, a much stronger candidate. Named after the man who thought of them in 1960, English mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson, these bits of mega-kit comprise enormous energy-absorbing panels placed around entire stars.
An artists illustration of a Dyson sphere.
MARC WARD/STOCKTREK IMAGES
Each sphere, the theory goes, could capture, convert and transmit enough energy to power a far-flung galactic empire. Speculation grew over the past couple of years that an actual alien Dyson sphere had been located.
Such a thing, astronomers suggested in 2015, would explain the eccentric light variations observed in a star classified as KIC 8462852, but better known as Tabby’s Star.
The most recent research, sadly for enthusiasts, suggests that the irregular and sudden dimming of KIC 8462852 is most likely caused by a rogue exomoon – otherwise known as a ploonet – getting in the way.
Hope, however, springs eternal for extraterrestrial tech hunters, and the other best-favoured hypothetical example is known as a von Neumann probe, named after a mathematician called John von Neumann, who came up with the idea.
These hypothetical machines overcome one of the principle objections to Fermi’s Paradox – that it assumes ET would actually want to physically colonise the galaxy. Von Neumann probes allow aliens to explore across vast distances while staying at home.
Essentially, they are self-replicating devices that whizz off and then make copies of themselves, thus rapidly – indeed, exponentially – increasing in numbers and range.
In terms of Fermi’s notion, however, von Neumann probes simply kick the can further down the road. The idea might explain why humans have never seen an alien, but fails to explain why it has never seen an alien machine.
Objections to the probe idea come in several forms. The machines would need materials to build their doppelgangers, some researchers note, and there may simply be not enough well-placed asteroids or rocky planets to allow this to happen often enough.
Others cite evolutionary theory. As the probes make copies of codes needed for them to operate, mistakes are bound to occur. Some probes might thus turn into predators, hunting and destroying others, or perhaps at a particular point in time, the accumulated errors render most of them dysfunctional.
Recently, however, the idea has been tweaked, because, well, of course it has.
In a paper lodged on the preprint site arxiv, astrophysicist Zaza Osmanov of the Free University of Tbilisi in Georgia suggests that theorists have been thinking about von Neumann probes at entirely the wrong scale.
Using some very detailed calculations, Osmanov concludes that the probe idea works best if the machines are microscopic – about one nanometre long.
At that size, he notes, they would not require the substantial resources of rocky planets to reproduce, but could instead power up using hydrogen atoms whirling around in the interstellar dust. He calculates that this is altogether more efficient and much, much faster, with replications happening in a matter of a few years rather than the rather longer timescales thought necessary for macro-scale machines.
Furthermore, nano von Neumanns would very quickly – at least on galactic timescales – become very numerous. Osmanov estimates that by the time descendants of an initial population of 100 had travelled one parsec – about four light years – they would number roughly 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or 1 x 1033).
And that sort of mega-swarm, he suggests, might make them visible, if only someone was looking in the right direction. The nano machines, he says, by encountering and collecting protons, would produce luminous emissions.
Each individual emission would be tiny, but collectively they would add up to something observable, given that the mature von Neumann swarm, assuming they are in a level formation and comprise a “wave” at their leading edge, would collectively have the “typical mass of a comet having a length scale of several kilometres”.
At least in the infrared part of the spectrum, Osmanov calculates, that constitutes a target worth looking for.
“All the aforementioned results indicate that if one detects a strange object with extremely high values of luminosity increment, that might be a good sign to place the object in the list of extraterrestrial Von-Neumann probe candidates,” he concludes.
(It is also possible, of course, referencing Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker books, that a huge and tightly packed swarm of nano von Neumanns has already swooped down through the atmosphere to take a closer look at Earth, only to be swallowed by a yawning dog.)
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover may have just captured a snapshot of the Red Planet's long-ago Great Drying.
Curiosity has detected relatively high levels of sulfate salts in the rocks of Gale Crater, a new study reports. Gale hosted a lake-and-stream system in the ancient past, and the newfound salts were likely concentrated by evaporation during a period of low water levels, researchers said.
This period may have been part of a normal cyclical fluctuation, a regular climatic change perhaps driven by recurring shifts in Mars' axial tilt or orbital parameters. "Alternatively, a drier Gale lake might be a sign of long-term, secular global drying of Mars, posited based on orbital observations," the scientists wrote in the new study, which was published online today (Oct. 7) in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Mars was once a relatively warm and wet world, complete with rivers and lakes and, most researchers believe, an ocean covering a large swath of the planet's northern hemisphere.
But things began to change around 4.2 billion years ago. Mars lost its global magnetic field, which had protected the planet's atmosphere from the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing continuously from the sun.
As a result, Mars lost the vast majority of its air to space by about 3.7 billion years ago, causing the planet to become much colder and drier. Today, Mars' air is just 1% as dense as Earth's atmosphere at sea level. (Luckily for us, Earth still has its global magnetic field.)
This NASA animation shows salty ponds and streams that scientists think may have been left behind as Gale Crater, home of the Curiosity rover, dried out over time. The crater's floor is seen at bottom of this image, with a central peak at left..
(Image credit: ASU Knowledge Enterprise Development (KED), Michael Northrop)
The Curiosity rover is helping scientists better understand the Red Planet's history, including its dramatic transformation.
The car-size rover landed inside the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater in August 2012, tasked primarily with assessing the area's past habitability. Curiosity quickly found lots of evidence of long-ago liquid water. Indeed, the mission team has determined that Gale's floor is an ancient lake bed, and that the area could have supported Earth-like life for long stretches — perhaps hundreds of millions of years at a time — in the ancient past.
In September 2014, Curiosity reached the base of Mount Sharp, the bizarre, 3.4-mile-high (5.5 km) mountain that rises from Gale's center. The rover has been climbing the mountain's foothills ever since, examining younger and younger sediments as it goes. And that brings us to the new study.
The researchers analyzed measurements Curiosity made while exploring the upper Murray Formation, an assemblage of exposed sedimentary rock near Mount Sharp's base thought to be 3.3 billion to 3.7 billion years old.
They found that these rocks are strongly enriched in sulfate salts — much more so than the deposits Curiosity had previously examined on the crater floor. (Those older rocks indicated an aqueous environment with water so fresh it was probably drinkable, mission team members have said.)
"Bulk enrichments" of calcium sulfate are widespread through about 500 feet (150 m) of the Murray Formation, the new study reports, while nuggets of high magnesium sulfate concentration speckle a thinner section of rock layers.
These salts were probably deposited along the margins of the Gale Crater basin, where the water was shallow. The deposits may trace back to multiple ponds on the fringes of the central lake, the researchers said.
Still, these salty ponds may have been habitable, the researchers added, noting that hypersaline lakes here on Earth teem with life. Indeed, the nature of the detected salts is intriguing from an astrobiological point of view.
"Sulfur is a basic element for life," study lead author William Rapin, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, told Space.com. "And we show that there was sulfate available in the water."
This animation shows a proposed route for NASA's Curiosity rover, which is climbing lower Mount Sharp on Mars. The annotated version of the map labels different regions that scientists working with the rover would like to explore in coming years.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/University
of Arizona/JHUAPL/MSSS/USGS Astrogeology Science Center.
It's possible that the Gale Crater lake system was drying out for good around the time these salty deposits were laid down, Rapin said.
"Maybe habitable environments had started to become niche," he said. "Maybe large regions of Mars were already too arid."
But there's also that other possibility — that Mars was in a temporary dry spell but would become wet again when its axis of rotation, or its orbital eccentricity, changed.
Curiosity's work could soon help solve this mystery. Mars orbiters have detected sulfate salts higher up on Mount Sharp. Curiosity is making its way toward those deposits and should start encountering them in the next year or two, if all goes according to plan, Rapin said. (The newfound salt deposits were not spotted by Mars orbiters.)
What the rover finds there, and along the way, should help researchers piece together the evolution of the Gale Crater lake system, he added.
"We know we're going to have an answer — maybe a big answer — about what happened next, including with the sulfate deposits, in the years to come," Rapin said.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated byKarl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcom orFacebook.
The Mystery Behind What Caused the Tunguska Explosion May Have Been Solved
Russian scientists believe that a piece of decorative glass that sat in the bottom of a schoolteacher’s fish tank for the past 35 years might have been a part of the meteor that caused the Tunguska event, a multi-megaton explosion that occurred over Russia’s remote Tunguska region in 1908. If this proves to be true, the sparkling meteorite fragment could hold the key to unraveling the 111-year-old mystery of what caused the massive blast over Siberia.
The meteorite in question was discovered by the husband of schoolteacher Lidiya Korshunova in the early 1980s, while on a hike with friends celebrating his birthday. Korshunova’s husband happened upon the translucent green stone, assuming it to be an artificial piece of glass discarded from one of the mines in the region. Along with another, similar stone, it wound up as a decoration in the family fish tank, where the stones sat for the next 35 years.
After reading the papers of Soviet mineralogist and geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, Korshunova, herself a historian and geologist, began to suspect that there was more to the translucent stones adorning her fish tank than previously assumed, especially considering that the area where they were found—deep in the taiga on the banks of the Krasnoyarsk region’s Metlyakovka River—was rich in precious stones such as emeralds. Consulting with experts in Moscow, it was discovered that the strange stone wasn’t an emerald, but it was indeed extremely strange.
The material making up the stone was indeed glass, but it was no ordinary industrial slag: once analyzed, the piece was found to be 7.5 times richer in nickel, 6 times in copper, 20 times in zinc, 3 times in cobalt, 3 times in titanium, and had 40 times more chrome than what would be found in ordinary, man-made glass. This finding ruled out the possibility that the glass that made up this stone was artificial in origin.
However, similar compositions have been found in glassy tektites—blobs of glass formed by the heat of meteorite impacts—a connection that has led former chief specialist for the Russian Space Agency, Evgeny Dmitriev, to speculate that the glassy rock might have been an orbital travelling companion of the Tunguska meteor which exploded over Siberia on 30 June 1908. Indeed, much smaller, albeit similar, stones with identical compositions have been found around the epicenter of the Tunguska explosion, a blast that flattened more than 2,000 square kilometers (770 square miles) of taiga, the type of forest that grows in the remote Siberian region.
“The scientists were able to conclude that these stones are part of the Tunguska meteorite, because the chemical elements that were in the area of Tunguska are almost entirely in line with our stones,” Korshunova said in an interview with the Russian RT Network. She went on to say that an unnamed institute offered to buy her stones, but she declined, because “this stone is priceless, because it has no analogues in Russia.”
We've Got New Photos of That Weird Substance China Found on The Moon
VICTOR TANGERMANN, FUTURISM
China's Yutu-2 lunar lander just sent back new images of a strange substance it found near a small crater on the far side of the Moon.
Last month, the team behind the lunar rover claimed it had found a "colored mysterious substance" as described in the rover's diary, which claimed that the material's "shape and color is significantly different from the surrounding lunar soil."
A new post released by the team over the weekend shows new images of the strange substance — though it's unfortunately located in the middle of a crater, making it difficult to reach.
(CNSA/CLEP)
The images were taken by the rover's obstacle-avoidance camera, which makes sure the rover doesn't bump into anything. The red and green shapes in the image above are most likely artifacts of the rover's Visible and Near-Infrared Spectrometer, Space.com reports.
(CNSA/CLEP)
So what is it? The best guess we have so far is that it's a piece of lunar glass that formed during a meteor impact.
It's likely that the Chinese researchers will release more images and spectrometer readings of the mysterious substance in the future.
It will have to — at the very least — wait for the Sun to rise again to continue its investigation. And that's roughly a week from now.
This article was originally published by Futurism. Read the original article.
We haven't seen scenes like this because space travel is harder than it looks
(Image: Getty)
Where is everybody? The question, famously asked by pioneering nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, is one that many people have wondered about at one point or another.
Our planet is teeming with life. Even in the most inhospitable environments; deep underground, in the depths of freezing Antarctic lakes, life will always find a way.
But as yet there is no hard evidence of life anywhere else in the universe.
SETI started actively searching for aliens in 1984
(Image: Getty)
Unless Copernicus was wrong, the Earth is not special. There are planets just like ours scattered throughout the Universe.
Even if breaking the light speed barrier is completely impossible, and there isn’t an interstellar empire thriving somewhere in our galaxy, we should be able to perceive the signs of alien megastructures and listen in on extraterrestrial communications.
Why not?
Statistically, the Universe should be teeming with life(Image: Getty)
Some theorists have suggested that there is a "Great Filter" that most habitable planets don’t make it through: either a purely biological one like the transition from single-celled to multicellular life, or a more technical one, like the difficulty of sustaining an industrial civilisation without succumbing to runaway climate change.
But maybe the answer to that question is simpler than that. Maybe we’re just looking in the wrong places.
We have already detected a number of ocean worlds, where the surface is either mostly or completely covered with water.
Enceladus, a moon orbiting Saturn, is thought to have a vast ocean beneath its icy 'shell'(Image: Getty)
NASA’s Alan Stern thinks that water worlds would provide the kind of stable environment that intelligent life would thrive in: shielded from radiation and all but the biggest asteroid impacts, undersea life could evolve in peace.
"Impacts and solar flares, and nearby supernovae, and what orbit you're in, and whether you have a magnetosphere, and whether there's a poisonous atmosphere — none of those things matter," he told Space.com.
Despite widespread rumours, no hard evidence of alien visitors has ever been produced(Image: Getty)
But that liquid "suit of armour" is also a prison. "If they have technology, and let's say they're broadcasting, or they have city lights or whatever — we can't see it in any part of the spectrum, except maybe very-low-frequency [radio]," he said.
Stern, who works on NASA’s long-range New Horizons space probe, adds that intelligent sea creatures would naturally have less interest in the stars than us, and their spacecraft – filled as they would be with water – would be very heavy and hard to launch.
It would be even harder to get off the ground if you lived on a Super-Earth.
Inhabitants of Super-Earths would need something more than a regular rocket(Image: Getty)
Super-Earths – rocky planets with a mass between two and ten times that of Earth – appear to be very common in the Universe.
Since first being discovered in 1992, many more have been identified. Of the 1,000 or so exoplanets so far mapped, over 300 of them are Super-Earths.
Many of these are in what scientists consider to be the "Goldilocks Zone" of their parent star – not too hot and not too cold for liquid water: and therefore candidates for life.
Since the launch of the Kepler telescope over 1,000 exoplanets have been discovered(Image: Getty)
Not only habitable, they could be "super-habitable" with denser atmospheres providing better shielding against cosmic menaces such as asteroids and solar flares.
"On more-massive planets, spaceflight would be exponentially more expensive," says astronomer Michael Hippke. "Such civilisations would not have satellite TV, a moon mission or a Hubble Space Telescope.”
He says that humans are very lucky to live on a comparatively "lightweight" planet with a gravitational pull that’s weak enough to escape.
"Other civilisations, if they exist,” he says “might not be as lucky."
Other intelligent aliens could be 'trapped' on their worlds(Image: Getty)
To launch a 1 tonne satellite from Kepler-20b (a Super-Earth about 1.87 times Earth's radius and 9.7 times its mass), a conventional-fuel rocket would need to be about 3 times the size of the Saturn V that carried Neil Armstrong and his crew to the Moon – a payload of around 45 tonnes.
If our imaginary Super-Earth dwellers actually wanted to stage their own equivalent of the Apollo programme, they’d need a rocket in the region of 400,000 metric tons, or roughly the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
In a paper published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, Dr Hippke drily notes that a pyramid-sized rocket "is probably a realistic limit for chemical rockets regarding cost constraints."
Until we actually find extraterrestrial life we won’t know.
But as author and satellite communications pioneer Arthur C Clarke pointed out: “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
As the northern lights danced and glowed in the night sky this past Labor Day weekend, skywatchers in places like Alaska and Canada may have spotted a rose-tinted streak amidst the dazzling display. But this pink-ish ribbon isn't an aurora — it's STEVE!
STEVE (the Strong Thermal Emissions Velocity Enhancement) is a spectacular and colorful celestial phenomenon that was first spotted 2016. Scientists have studied the particles associated with STEVE for decades, but only recently have they witnessed the phenomenon in the sky. This past summer, a research team led by University of Calgary researcher D.M. Gillies confirmed that, despite its colorful appearance, STEVE isn't a type of aurora but something entirely unique.
In May, researchers confirmed that STEVE is not an aurora. But this new research expands our understanding of the strange phenomenon even further.
"The big thing is, we can clearly say now it's [a] not regular aurora," study co-author Don Hampton, a researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said in a statement. "It's a new phenomenon; that's pretty exciting."
One characteristic that distinguishes STEVE is its mauve hues, which are different from the typically green, purple, blue and yellow beams of auroras. Additionally, STEVE is visible from latitudes much farther south than auroras usually are.
The researchers used a spectrograph, which they built at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, to study the light coming from STEVE which they observed on April 10, 2018 at Lucky Lake in Saskatchewan, Canada. They analyzed its emissions to determine its wavelengths, patterns and other properties. A spectrum acts as an identifier, so by determining STEVE's spectrum, the team hopes to further understand and categorize the phenomenon.
"We need to understand what the spectrum looks like and therefore understand the physics behind it," Hampton said in the statement.
Alberta Aurora Chasers captured STEVE in April in British Columbia, Canada. STEVE is the narrow ribbon of white-purple hues overhead, and the vibrant green light on the right is an aurora located further north.
Green optical structures, often described as "picket fence" structures because of their distinctive shape, can be seen jutting through STEVE at lower altitudes, and in studying the wavelengths of the emissions from STEVE and these green structures, the team found that the green emissions have a much different spectrum from STEVE.
The team determined that the green columns which appear alongside STEVE are caused by particle precipitation, which occurs when energetic particles like electrons, protons, neutrons and ions are accelerated through the atmosphere. This makes these green streaks a type of aurora very similar to a typical auroral structure. However, because they have a very different spectrum, STEVE is in a category of its own, the researchers concluded.
"When we looked at the spectrum of STEVE, it had none of those distinct wavelengths … Instead, it's a very broad band of light," Hampton said in the statement. "When you turn your electric stove on, those coils get red hot, right? If you look at it with a spectrograph, you would see broadband emissions … So this is like very, very warm atmosphere emissions of some sort."
Scientists will continue to study STEVE, what exactly it is and what causes it. Understanding STEVE is more than just an important scientific pursuit, however. Phenomena in the atmosphere can disrupt radio communications between spacecraft and humans back on Earth, so understanding this strange, pink phenomenon could have immediate, practical applications.
This research was published in a study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
NASA satellite spots a mysterious green light that quickly disappeared
A green space blob flashed into existence and then... it was gone.
NASA's NuSTAR X-ray observatory has spotted something a little weird. While imaging the Fireworks galaxy, NuSTAR spotted several mysterious bright sources of X-ray light, appearing as green and blue spots. Within days, the blobs had disappeared.
The main goal of the NuSTAR observations was to examine a supernova -- a huge star explosion. The green blob, known as an ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX), shown at the bottom of the galaxy in the image above didn't appear during the first observation, but showed up during a second one 10 days later. Another space telescope, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, then looked again and found the object, ULX-4, had quickly disappeared.
"Ten days is a really short amount of time for such a bright object to appear," Hannah Earnshaw, a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and lead author on the study, said in a statement. "Usually with NuSTAR, we observe more gradual changes over time, and we don't often observe a source multiple times in quick succession. In this instance, we were fortunate to catch a source changing extremely quickly, which is very exciting."
It's possible the light was from a black hole consuming another object like a star, the study suggests. When objects get too close to a black hole, they can get torn apart by gravity, and their debris is pulled into a close orbit around the black hole. Material at the disk's inner edge moves so quickly that it "heats up to millions of degrees and radiates X-rays," NASA says. For reference, the surface of the sun is around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Most ULXs last for a long time because they're formed by dense objects like black holes that "feed" on a star for a long time. Short-lived X-ray sources like this ULX aren't as common, so its appearance could be explained by a scenario such as a black hole quickly destroying a small star.
There could be other possible explanations for the green blob's appearance. The study's authors suggest its source could be a neutron star, which is an extremely dense object created from the explosion of a star that wasn't big enough to create a black hole. The mass of a neutron star is similar to that of the sun, but it's only around the size of a large city. Therefore, neutron stars can pull in material and cause debris to move really quickly in a disk, similar to a black hole. These can create slow-feeding ultraluminous X-ray sources, but the processes that make the X-ray light differ slightly from those in ULXs formed by black holes.
Neutron stars can create strong magnetic fields that form "columns" and take material to the surface. In the process, they generate strong X-rays. However, if the star is spinning super-fast, material can't reach the surface and create these X-ray bursts. It's kind of like an invisibility cloak -- astronomers can't see the neutron star's X-ray signature. But if material does somehow sneak through, the invisibility cloak fails. That could explain why ULX-4 quickly appeared and then disappeared.
"This result is a step towards understanding some of the rarer and more extreme cases in which matter accretes onto black holes or neutron stars," Earnshaw said in the statement.
Behold: the most powerful searchlights in the universe.
BILL SAXTON, NRAO/AUI/NSF
So in the middle of the 20th century, after we first invented radio telescopes, we found all sorts of surprises. It turns out that the universe is pretty loud, full of all kinds of interesting radio sources. Some of them were familiar, and some of them were quite odd. As you can imagine, it was a pretty exciting time to be a radio astronomer.
Out in the middle of the English countryside, two particularly excited people were Antony Hewish and his grad student Jocelyn Bell Burnell. They were hunting for quasars, relatively new characters on the astronomical scene, which were at the very at the time poorly understood. All we knew then is that they were very loud radio sources and very far away.
In their hunt for quasars they instead found something absolutely remarkable and unprecedented in the history of astronomy: they found a single source in the sky that flashed. Perfectly. Every 1.33 seconds. This source, whatever it was, pulsed a burst of radio energy. And then turned off. And then did it again, exactly 1.33 seconds later
It was astounding. How could something in nature produce something so regular and periodic?
Hewish and Burnell didn't really believe that they had found evidence for an extraterrestrial alien civilization, but you never know, right? As an "inside joke" within the community they dubbed this source LGM-1. That stands for Little Green Men (and the first such one to be encountered).
Whatever it was, there was a lot of excitement around it. But once another similar source was discovered on the opposite side of the sky, and then another, and then another, and then another, astronomers sadly put away the LGM moniker. They got a new name: pulsars, short for pulsating quasar. It turns out that pulsars have absolutely nothing to do with quasars, but you can't fault astronomers in the 1960s for not really knowing what was going on. Especially after coming off the high of potentially finding alien life.
The theoretically minded folks in the community quickly devised a solution to explain their behavior. They had known for some time of a hypothetical object called a neutron star, formed when a massive star dies and compresses its core down to crushing extremes. At the time they were just hypothetical objects, but the pulsar provided a way to test if they were real.
Because of their extreme gravity coupled with extreme electric and magnetic fields, these neutron stars could rotate up to incredible speeds and shoot out jets of radiation from their poles. These jets sweep around like a lighthouse, with the Earth sometimes getting caught in the blast. From our perspective we won't see the beam all the time, just a brief flash as the it washes over us.
A pulsar.
One of the most extreme, exotic objects in the known universe. Second only to - and perhaps exceeding - the strangeness of black holes themselves. The odd, repeating signal Burnell and Hewitt found in the 1960s wasn't an alien, but it just might be more fascinating after all.
We humans can now peer back into the virtual origin of our universe. We have learned much about the laws of nature that control its seemingly infinite celestial bodies, their evolution, motions and possible fate. Yet, equally remarkable, we have no generally accepted information as to whether other life exists beyond us, or whether we are, as was Samuel Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, “alone, alone, all, all alone, alone on a wide wide sea!” We have made only one exploration to solve that primal mystery. I was fortunate to have participated in that historic adventure as experimenter of the Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment on NASA’s spectacular Viking mission to Mars in 1976.
On July 30, 1976, the LR returned its initial results from Mars. Amazingly, they were positive. As the experiment progressed, a total of four positive results, supported by five varied controls, streamed down from the twin Viking spacecraft landed some 4,000 miles apart. The data curves signaled the detection of microbial respiration on the Red Planet. The curves from Mars were similar to those produced by LR tests of soils on Earth. It seemed we had answered that ultimate question.
When the Viking Molecular Analysis Experiment failed to detect organic matter, the essence of life, however, NASA concluded that the LR had found a substance mimicking life, but not life. Inexplicably, over the 43 years since Viking, none of NASA’s subsequent Mars landers has carried a life detection instrument to follow up on these exciting results. Instead the agency launched a series of missions to Mars to determine whether there was ever a habitat suitable for life and, if so, eventually to bring samples to Earth for biological examination.
NASA maintains the search for alien life among its highest priorities. On February 13, 2019, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said we might find microbial life on Mars. Our nation has now committed to sending astronauts to Mars. Any life there might threaten them, and us upon their return. Thus, the issue of life on Mars is now front and center.
Life on Mars seemed a long shot. On the other hand, it would take a near miracle for Mars to be sterile. NASA scientist Chris McKay once said that Mars and Earth have been “swapping spit” for billions of years, meaning that, when either planet is hit by comets or large meteorites, some ejecta shoot into space. A tiny fraction of this material eventually lands on the other planet, perhaps infecting it with microbiological hitch-hikers. That some Earth microbial species could survive the Martian environment has been demonstrated in many laboratories. There are even reports of the survival of microorganisms exposed to naked space outside the International Space Station (ISS).
NASA’s reservation against a direct search for microorganisms ignores the simplicity of the task accomplished by Louis Pasteur in 1864. He allowed microbes to contaminate a hay-infusion broth, after which bubbles of their expired gas appeared. Prior to containing living microorganisms, no bubbles appeared. (Pasteur had earlier determinted that heating, or pasteurizing, such a substance would kill the microbes.) This elegantly simple test, updated to substitute modern microbial nutrients with the hay-infusion products in Pasteur’s, is in daily use by health authorities around the world to examine potable water. Billions of people are thus protected against microbial pathogens.
This standard test, in essence, was the LR test on Mars, modified by the addition of several nutrients thought to broaden the prospects for success with alien organisms, and the tagging of the nutrients with radioactive carbon. These enhancements made the LR sensitive to the very low microbial populations postulated for Mars, should any be there, and reduced the time for detection of terrestrial microorganisms to about one hour. But on Mars, each LR experiment continued for seven days. A heat control, similar to Pasteur’s, was added to determine whether any response obtained was biological or chemical.
The Viking LR sought to detect and monitor ongoing metabolism, a very simple and fail-proof indicator of living microorganisms. Several thousand runs were made, both before and after Viking, with terrestrial soils and microbial cultures, both in the laboratory and in extreme natural environments. No false positive or false negative result was ever obtained. This strongly supports the reliability of the LR Mars data, even though their interpretation is debated.
In her recent book To Mars with Love, my LR co-experimenter Patricia Ann Straat provides much of the scientific detail of the Viking LR at lay level. Scientific papers published about the LR are available on my Web site.
In addition to the direct evidence for life on Mars obtained by the Viking LR, evidence supportive of, or consistent with, extant microbial life on Mars has been obtained by Viking, subsequent missions to Mars, and discoveries on Earth:
Surface water sufficient to sustain microorganisms was found on Mars by Viking, Pathfinder, Phoenix and Curiosity;
Ultraviolet (UV) activation of the Martian surface material did not, as initially proposed, cause the LR reaction: a sample taken from under a UV-shielding rock was as LR-active as surface samples;
Complex organics, have been reported on Mars by Curiosity’s scientists, possibly including kerogen, which could be of biological origin;
Phoenix and Curiosity found evidence that the ancient Martian environment may have been habitable.
The excess of carbon-13 over carbon-12 in the Martian atmosphere is indicative of biological activity, which prefers ingesting the latter;
The Martian atmosphere is in disequilibrium: its CO2 should long ago have been converted to CO by the sun’s UV light; thus the CO2 is beingregenerated, possibly by microorganisms as on Earth;
Terrestrial microorganisms have survived in outer space outside the ISS;
Ejecta containing viable microbes have likely been arriving on Mars from Earth;
Methane has been measured in the Martian atmosphere; microbial methanogens could be the source;
The rapid disappearance of methane from the Martian atmosphere requires a sink, possibly supplied by methanotrophs that could co-exist with methanogens on the Martian surface;
Ghost-like moving lights, resembling will-O’-the-wisps on Earth that are formed by spontaneous ignition of methane, have been video-recorded on the Martian surface;
Formaldehyde and ammonia, each possibly indicative of biology, are claimed to be in the Martian atmosphere;
An independent complexity analysis of the positive LR signal identified it as biological;
Six-channel spectral analyses by Viking’s imaging system found terrestrial lichen and green patches on Mars rocks to have the identical color, saturation, hue and intensity;
A wormlike feature was in an image taken by Curiosity;
Large structures resembling terrestrial stromatolites (formed by microorganisms) were found by Curiosity; a statistical analysis of their complex features showed less than a 0.04 percent probability that the similarity was caused by chance alone;
No factor inimical to life has been found on Mars.
In summary, we have: positive results from a widely-used microbiological test; supportive responses from strong and varied controls; duplication of the LR results at each of the two Viking sites; replication of the experiment at the two sites; and the failure over 43 years of any experiment or theory to provide a definitive nonbiological explanation of the Viking LR results.
What is the evidence against the possibility of life on Mars? The astonishing fact is that there is none. Furthermore, laboratory studies have shown that some terrestrial microorganisms could survive and grow on Mars.
NASA has already announced that its 2020 Mars lander will not contain a life-detection test. In keeping with well-established scientific protocol, I believe an effort should be made to put life detection experiments on the next Mars mission possible. I and my co-experimenter have formally and informally proposed that the LR experiment, amended with an ability to detect chiral metabolism, be sent to Mars to confirm the existence of life: non-biological chemical reactions do not distinguish between “left-handed” and “right-handed” organic molecules, but all living things do.
Moreover, the Chiral LR (CLR) could confirm and extend the Viking LR findings. It could determine whether any life detected were similar to ours, or whether there was a separate genesis. This would be a fundamental scientific discovery in its own right. A small, lightweight CLR has already been designed and its principle verified by tests. It could readily be turned into a flight instrument.
Meanwhile a panel of expert scientists should review all pertinent data of the Viking LR together with other and more recent evidence concerning life on Mars. Such an objective jury might conclude, as I did, that the Viking LR did find life. In any event, the study would likely produce important guidance for NASA’s pursuit of its holy grail.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Ex-NASA-wetenschapper: we hebben al leven gevonden op Mars. Dit is de smoking gun
Er zijn onderhand miljarden gespendeerd om antwoord te krijgen op één simpele vraag: is er leven op Mars?
Voormalig NASA-wetenschapper Gilbert Levin schrijft in een opiniestuk voor Scientific American dat we tijdens de Vikingmissie in 1976 al leven hebben ontdekt op de rode planeet.
NASA stuurde twee Vikinglanders naar Mars om experimenten uit te voeren.
Positief
De smoking gun volgens Levin: tijdens het experiment dat hij leidde werden tekenen van leven gevonden.
De lander vermengde bodemmateriaal met een oplossing bestaande uit voedingsstoffen.
Als er micro-organismen in de bodem zaten, dan zou er tijdens het experiment koolstofdioxide vrijkomen, zo was de gedachte.
Beide Marslanders testten positief op micro-organismen, aldus Levin.
Allerlei ontdekkingen
Maar volgens de NASA leverden andere experimenten ‘geen duidelijk bewijs op voor de aanwezigheid van levende micro-organismen in de bodem nabij de landingsplaatsen’.
Ook na de Vikingmissies zijn er allerlei ontdekkingen gedaan op Mars die wijzen op de aanwezigheid van leven, stelt Levin.
Wormen
Hij noemt onder meer de ontdekking van water, methaan, ammoniak en een soort ‘wormen’ die op foto’s van Marsrover Curiosity zijn te zien.
Levin benadrukt dat de NASA sinds de missies in 1976 verzuimd heeft om te zoeken naar direct bewijs voor buitenaards leven.
A large cluster of glowing lights was filmed over North Carolina’s largest coastal lagoon recently by a man who was traveling by ferry, sparking theories about the origin of the unusual glowing objects.
The observer, William Guy, was crossing Pamlico Sound via ferry from Ocracoke Village on North Carolina’s Outer Banks to Swan Quarters, according to the UFO Sightings Hotspot YouTube Channel, which featured Guy’s video of the objects. The incident occurred on September 18, 2019.
“Look, nothing in the sky, at all,” Guy can be heard saying as he pans the camera along the horizon, before framing the objects and asking, “Can anybody tell me what that is?”
The Daily Star added to the conspiracy speculation, quoting viewers online who advised that “Earth is under heavy observation,” implying that the objects were alien spacecraft.
So what were the objects?
In likelihood, the lights were nothing more than a military training operation being undertaken over the coast. As to the specific source of these lights, they appear to resemble chaff flares, a variety of countermeasure that is commonly used during training exercises, as can be seen in the video below:
According to a North Carolina Military Affairs Commission Map Atlas for 2016, much of the air space above the Outer Banks is a designated Protection Area for the Marine Corps, the primary use for which involves helicopter flight operations. “The Marine Corps has three bases along North Carolina’s southeastern coastline, and uses several auxiliary fields for flight operation training,” the Atlas states. “The Marines have two air stations in the area and helicopter training is a big part of their operations.”
More relevant to the observation of lights over Pamlico Sound, the Atlas further notes that, “The Marine Corps Protection Areas encompass several counties around the Pamlico and Neuse rivers and also includes some flight routes between the Marine bases and Raleigh, where some helicopter operations occur.” It notes that additional flight routes exist in the southern part of North Carolina, which are also included with the designated Protection Areas.
Incidentally, the lights over Pamlico Sound were filmed on the 72nd birthday of the U.S. Air Force, as it traditionally recognizes Sept. 18, 1947, as its birth date.
It is also worth noting that earlier in the month, the Army had announced it would be conducting a series of “unconventional warfare exercises” in 21 North Carolina counties. According to the Charlotte Observer, these operations are called Robin Sage training, which “can be likened to live-action role playing in the extreme, with hostile engagement playing out between Special Forces students, volunteer civilians and soldiers.”
However, these training exercises concluded on September 12, and appear to have been conducted mainly with civilians and soldiers on the ground, rather than by air. Nonetheless, this is further indication that the various branches of the military often do conduct training exercises that it sometimes deems “unconventional,” which may at times give rise to misinterpretation or confusion.
In the case of the lights filmed over Pamlico Sound, it’s all too tempting to speculate that we’re “seeing them aliens,” although the more likely cause is just another military exercise over one of the Marine Corps’ designated Protection Areas. Of course, that’s not to say that unusual things of the aerial variety don’t turn up in military airspace from time to time.
While the U.S. government seems to be preoccupied with tariffs on conventional Chinese goods, someone needs to be keeping an eye on that country’s future products. Why? Well, for one thing … it’s China, the country which put the first rover on the far side of the moon. When that country unveils a flying saucer it calls the Super Great White Shark … is it too late?
Could this be the future of air travel ?
Image Credit: Chinese Internet
“According to published technical data, the “Super Great White Shark” armed helicopter can carry 2 crew members, with a length of 7.6 meters, a height of 2.85 meters, a rotor diameter of 4.9 meters, a maximum takeoff weight of 6 tons, and a maximum flying speed of 650 thousand per hour. Meter, the practical ceiling is 6000 meters.”
Classic non-cake-pan flying saucer
The Chinese news source thepaper.cn reported on the 5th China Tianjin International Helicopter Expo held last week at the China Aviation Helicopter Industry Base of Tianjin Binhai New Area Airport Economic Zone under the headline: “”UFO” debut, “Super Great White Shark” armed helicopter.” Calling it a helicopter doesn’t change the obvious – it looks like a two-person flying saucer that would definitely be a UFO. OK, it’s more like a two-person flying cake pan (see it here and here), but perhaps that’s a diversionary tactic to make the rest of the world believe that China thinks a flying cake pan is a “Super Great White Shark.” In fact, thepaper.cn quotes an unnamed source who hints that there’s much more going on.
“At the moment, there are many different explorations for future helicopter designs, some of which are sci-fi, but this is not a slap in the air. This kind of exploration is beneficial.”
The Drive reports that helicopters are losing their usefulness over the battlefield – especially at high altitudes — and all of the superpowers are trying new designs to replace them. It also points out that the flying saucer design is not new (like the real Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar and the alleged Nazi flying saucers) but the technology of drones may finally be ready to upscale successfully … and be large enough and safe enough to accommodate human pilots.
But, but … it still looks like a flying cake pan! Or a flying robotic vacuum cleaner!
That may be why the Chinese are emphasizing the Super Great White Shark’s teeth (planned armaments include a 20mm automatic cannon, air-to-ground precision-guided munitions and air-to-air missiles) because it didn’t demonstrate its fins and tail (maximum altitude of 19,700 feet and top speed of 400 miles per hour). The prototype at the helicopter show did not get off the ground, even enough to make one think it’s just a sophisticated hovercraft – which it also looks like (see for yourself here).
As David Letterman might ask after reviewing the coverage of the “UFO” “Super Great White Shark,” is this anything?
It’s from China. You’d better believe it is. Will we find out if it’s a real flying saucer before it’s too late? That depends on whether the other superpowers develop one before China does. Could it already be operational somewhere? Perhaps that’s a question for the pilots from the USS Nimitz.
Elon Musk Says SpaceX Is Still Building a Third Drone Ship – for Falcon or Starship?
Unprovoked on October 9th, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted “A Shortfall of Gravitas” – the name of a third drone ship settled on a year and a half ago – and reaffirmed that plans were still afoot to build a third rocket recovery vessel.
This is the first update on SpaceX’s newest drone ship in more than a year and comes just a few months after drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) – formerly stationed in California – was sent through the Panama Canal. News that A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG) is still in the works raises the questions: what’s the holdup and what role(s) will the new drone ship play in SpaceX’s rocket recovery fleet?
Back in July 2018 and just shy of half a year after ASOG’s development was revealed, CEO Elon Musk indicated that the drone ship could be completed and ready for recovery operations as early as “next summer”, or Q3 2019. Now two weeks into Q4 2019, this can be interpreted in several ways, with the most likely explanation being that SpaceX’s naval contractor of choice is running behind schedule while building the new drone ship.
That’s the simplest explanation and operates under the assumption that Musk’s February 2018 comments remain true, meaning that ASOG is first and foremost (if not entirely) meant to support dual side booster landings for future Falcon Heavy launches and an increased Falcon 9 flight rate. However, recent developments give reason to believe that this may no longer be the guiding motivation behind SpaceX’s construction of a new drone ship.
Most notably, over the last several months of 2019, it has become increasingly clear that SpaceX plans (or hopes) to shut down its West Coast Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB) launch facilities for anywhere from 9 to 18 months. In just the last few days, word broke that Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) believes that it will be able to open an East Coast polar launch corridor (essentially the same thing VAFB offers) just months from now, and SpaceX hopes to be its first user as soon as February 2020.
Along those lines, SpaceX took the step of sending West Coast drone ship JRTI on a several-week journey across the Panama Canal. The drone ship has since stopped in Louisiana for what is assumed to be maintenance and it remains unclear if JRTI will head to Port of Brownsville (Texas) to support Starship test flights or to Port Canaveral to essentially fill the role ASOG was initially meant to.
Major activity in Morgan City for Just Read the Instructions!
The cut-off wings have been lifted off of the droneship by a crane and are now sitting to the side.https://t.co/y7W4goawbI
After passing through the Panama Canal, JRTI headed East, only to stop in Morgan City, Louisiana for what is assumed to be maintenance and possible upgrades.
As such, it’s no longer clear if SpaceX actually has a need for ASOG, at least as it was described last year. If SpaceX is moving JRTI east for the indefinite future, OCISLY and JRTI could easily support the Falcon 9 launch rates needed for Starlink and dual Falcon Heavy side booster recoveries, although Falcon Heavy is not scheduled to fly again until late-2020.
This leaves one obvious option left to explain ASOG’s continued existence and delayed debut: SpaceX may have paused work for a variety of reasons and changed ASOG’s design to account for a new role in the recovery fleet. That new role would likely center around the extremely rapid progress SpaceX is making with Starship as it pursues a series of ambitious flight tests that could begin before the end of 2019.
Starship heads towards orbit atop a Super Heavy booster.
(SpaceX)
Of note, an August 2019 Draft Environmental Assessment (EA) of East Coast Starship launches revealed that SpaceX’s initially plans to land all Super Heavy boosters on a drone ship stationed a few miles off the Florida coast. Starship may also require drone ship landings in the early stages, at least until SpaceX is able to complete the environmental review and licensing process needed before it can begin to land Starship/Super Heavy at Pad 39A and Landing Zones 1 and 2.
For now, we’ll have to wait and see where drone ship JRTI heads after its Louisiana interlude and hopefully find out soon whether ASOG is a drone ship copy or something else entirely.
Check out Teslarati’s newsletters for prompt updates, on-the-ground perspectives, and unique glimpses of SpaceX’s rocket launch and recovery processes.
Mount Shasta is a very powerful beacon to the indigenous peoples of northern California and southern Oregon. It is also the rumored home of Bigfoot, citizens of Lemuria, The Great White Brotherhood, and regular UFO sightings.
Towering Mount Shasta is the prominent centerpiece of northern California, rising like a glimmering diamond in a field of evergreens. Mount Shasta is situated at the intersection of three western mountain ranges: the Sierra Nevada to the southeast, the Cascades extending north to British Columbia, and the western Klamath Range. At 14,162 feet (4,249 m), Shasta is the second highest of the Cascade Range volcanoes and is home to California’s five largest glaciers. Mount Shasta rises more than 10,000 feet (3,300 m) from its base, soaring abruptly over a landscape of relatively level ground. Because it is physically unconnected to any nearby mountain Shasta is visible for a hundred miles in all directions on a clear day. This cone-shaped stratovolcano is relatively young, as is evident by the lack of extensive glacial erosion. Tiny sulfur vents just below the summit suggest this dormant volcano is merely taking a geological nap. Long regarded as a place of intense energy, the “Gentile Giant” Mount Shasta possesses a visible and majestic presence. New Age mystics believe it represents our planet’s version of the human being’s first or root chakra, located near the base of our spine. This theory then expounds that the mountain connects to our collective survival.
Also included in the extensive list of Shasta mysteries are unexplained mound clusters at different locations around the mountain. Some mounds near Goose Lake were created by Ducks Unlimited for birds to nest, but others defy rationalization. Archaeologists and geologists are in stark disagreement with one another, each claiming the other must explain the mounds. Large boulders are oddly found at the top of some mounds, rather than rolling down over time by the forces of gravity. Many of the mounds do not show signs of deterioration or erosion. What’s more, no Native American group claims responsibility, nor do any such groups have a history of creating mounds in this part of the world. At a twin cluster of mounds near the small town of Tennant there are mounds surrounded by interconnected moats. Although the moats are usually dry it is clear that water somehow interacts with the two clusters. Seen from above, the Tennant Water Mounds take on the appearance of crop circles because of their unusual geometric shapes. Nature certainly does not create anything this perfect. It is possible that an eccentric rancher with a penchant for sacred geometry created the mounds with a bulldozer as a watering hole for his livestock. By why go to so much trouble? Those who believe in the underground city of Telos offer another explanation. When the dew point reaches an optimum level, the moats around the mounds are filled by a channel connecting to an underground water source. When filled, the water molecules are excited to the point that they can self-regulate the mounds by clearing the moats of any debris. Once in operation the water mounds serve the purpose of creating lenticular cloud cover for entering or exiting spacecraft. It wouldn’t be the most far out Shasta theory. After all, unexplained sightings of ape-men, UFOs and hooded phantoms are reported every year. Such stories only enhance the mystery and legend of this powerful mountain.
Brad Olsen is author of nine books including two in his Esoteric Series: “Modern Esoteric” and “Future Esoteric.” An award-winning author, book publisher and event producer, his keynote presentations and interviews have enlightened audiences at Contact in the Desert, Human Origins, UFO MegaCon, DisclosureCon, and dozens of radio (including Coast to Coast, Ground Zero, and Fade to Black) and television shows (including Ancient Aliens, America Unearthed, Beyond Belief, and Mysteries of the Outdoors). Brad is a founder and co-producer of the How Weird Street Faire in the SOMA neighborhood of his home-base San Francisco. The Chicago native’s esoteric writing continues to reach a wide audience while he continues breaking ground in alternative journalism, public speaking, illustration and photography.
Special Report: Clones (The Missing and the Human Genome Project)
This Report was only accomplished through my tireless efforts to uphold my indigenous rights and freedoms to practice my culture privately and unimpeded. – Sovereign Crown Denderah
(Note on LQ video: Those labels on the children in the playground were superimposed on to them. It was not on the original video. They are NOT Citizens. They Are Indigenous!)
The Human Genome Project (HGP) was the international, collaborative research program whose goal was the complete mapping and understanding of all the genes of human beings. All our genes together are known as our "genome."
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