Why The Ark of the Covenant Is The Most Extraordinary Ancient Artifact in History

COAST TO COAST AM - The Ark of the Covenant has to be one of the most extraordinary artifacts in history. In the latter half of the show, historical detective Graham Phillips presented evidence that this remarkable relic really existed and was discovered by the crusader knights, the Templars, during the Middle Ages and brought back to Europe and Phillips now believes he knows where it’s located.

“I think there’s enough information, enough evidence that there was a historical artifact that was considered holy by the ancient Israelites,” he said. Phillips detailed the biblical story of the origin of the Ark, which was purportedly built by the Israelites to house the Ten Commandment tablets.

Why The Ark of the Covenant Is The Most Extraordinary Ancient Artifact in History

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

Secret Space Program Antigravity Programs Are Real and Active

COAST TO COAST AM – Author and lecturer Mike Bara discussed the alleged secret space program, as well as anti-gravity propulsion programs, secret flying saucer crafts developed by the military, and anti-gravity breakthroughs.

Early in his research, Bara says that he encountered what appeared to be a secret U.S. space program separate from NASA that was begun within the “military intelligence complex.” He believes this was done because the government was afraid that we might find evidence of extraterrestrials on the moon or other planets.

Bara asked the listeners to consider that UFOs may have technology that is not thousands or hundreds of years ahead of us, but possibly only fifty.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

Massive UFO Recovered Intact with Occupants in Aztec NM, Major Cover-up, Latest

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

We know that the government is covering up many things in Antarctica but now the ice melts it is really hard for them to cover it up anymore.

Near the Heritage Range in Antarctica seems to be a large base that is completely blurred out.

A large trail from the station leads to a huge strange object that at first sight looks like it crashed there a long time ago.

Without claiming that the object is a crashed UFO, we may wonder why the people who work at the station pay a lot of attention to the object, so what the government is trying to hide?

The base is about 470 x 260 meters.
The bigger (black) part of the object is about 90 x 40 meters.
Google Earth coordinates: 80°17'24.11"S 81°53'15.22"W

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

UFO flying low & slow over Augusta, Georgia 20-Dec-2019

This strange video of something that looks like two-linked objects was caught on tape in Augusta, Georgia on Friday, 20th December 2019.

Here’s the video:

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

1,000-yr-old Untouched Mayan “Ritual Cave” Found Full of Precious Relics

It remained unknown and undisturbed until 2018, when it was rediscovered again.  This time the Balamku was found by an explorer from National Geographic, along with his team.  They were part of the Great Maya Aquifer Project, and were trying to find the water table beneath the Mayan city.

While he was creeping his way through a series of small tunnels, the explorer, Guillermo De Anda, suddenly came upon a sizable cache of vases, incense burners, and many other objects that had been left as offerings by the ancient people of Chichen Itza.  Even more of a surprise, the collection was in a remarkable state of preservation, despite being surrounded by stalagmites.

Since De Anda found that first cache, seven chambers holding ritual offerings have been discovered in the caves. The chambers are deep under the city, and can presently only be accessed by traveling through a long series of tunnels, many of which are so narrow and low that researchers have to go through on their stomachs.

Despite the difficulty of getting to the chambers, the first archaeologist to visit the caves back in the ‘60s also clearly made the trip.  His original report was finally found not very long ago by an archaeologist from University of California.  That report noted that there were more than 150 objects in the cave, many of them bearing images of the Toltec rain god and other sacred symbols.

A similar cave was found not far away, back in 1959.  It also held sacred objects, but less than half as many as at this site.  That find was also more accessible.  De Anda thinks that’s important.  He remarked that while quantity isn’t more important than information, he found it telling that such a huge repository of artifacts was located in a place that was so hard to get to.

De Anda’s rediscovery of the find means that Modern archaeologists who specialize in Mayan culture may be able to learn some new things about the level of contact and interaction between different Mesoamerican cultures of the time, and other information about the history of the Mayan people prior to the city’s fall. None of that answers the question, however, of why Pinto decided to reseal the caves back in the ‘60s, rather than study them.

A similar cave was found not far away, back in 1959.  It also held sacred objects, but less than half as many as at this site.  That find was also more accessible.  De Anda thinks that’s important.  He remarked that while quantity isn’t more important than information, he found it telling that such a huge repository of artifacts was located in a place that was so hard to get to.

De Anda’s rediscovery of the find means that Modern archaeologists who specialize in Mayan culture may be able to learn some new things about the level of contact and interaction between different Mesoamerican cultures of the time, and other information about the history of the Mayan people prior to the city’s fall. None of that answers the question, however, of why Pinto decided to reseal the caves back in the ‘60s, rather than study them.

Historians do know that among the Mayan people, a ritual cave was considered entrances to the underworld, and were thus considered extremely sacred, even to the extent that they played a role in social organization and site planning, according to Mayan archaeology expert Holley Moyes.

The technology available to scientists has improved dramatically since the middle of the last century, which means that they may be able to get a lot more useful information by using methods like 3-D mapping.  That information could help answer questions about not only the sorts of rituals that went on in the caves, but also about the city above them.

According to De Anda, it’s not currently known why Chichen Itza declined and fell, but Balamku should be able to help answer that question with its collection of artifacts and organic matter. It’s been speculated that the area was devastated by severe droughts. Some researchers further believe that the extreme weather cycles in the area were exacerbated by deforestation further south.

• Related Article: Laser Mapping Reveals Bizarre New Rituals of the Ancient Mayans

Once the contents of Mayan ritual cave have been fully catalogued and analysed, the actual circumstances of the time will be much clearer. In fact, it may even offer some insights into the sustainability of cultures during periods of environmental instability, which has modern-day applications, despite its historic roots.

{ https://www.thevintagenews.com/ }

Pyramid seen in NASA images of Moon - conspiracists CONVINCED it means aliens came to Egypt

A PYRAMID has been spotted on the Moon and conspiracy theorists are claiming it was built by the same being which built the iconic monuments in Egypt.

Giant Gas 'Halos' Fed Hungry Black Holes at the Dawn of the Universe

11 People Who Made 2019 An Outstanding Year in Science

From incredible discoveries to bringing attention to important issues, these people made a difference in 2019.

By  Marcia Wendorf

Science journal Nature just released its "Ten People Who Mattered in Science in 2019" list, and it features some people who you should get to know. There are also some people who aren't on the list but we thought it would be a good idea to include.

1. Quantum computer builder - John Martinis

Physicist John Martinis works both at Google and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has spent the last 17 years fine-tuning the hardware that is Google's first quantum computer — Sycamore.

Quantum computer Source: Steve Jurvetson/Flickr

Sycamore is comprised of superconducting units known as qubits. They are quantum systems that can simultaneously represent zeros, ones, or any point in between. The vast power of quantum computing will someday allow computers to do things that are not possible today, such as searching previously unsearchable databases and cracking encryption.

2. Protector of the Amazon - Ricardo Galvão

Ricardo Galvão is a fusion physics professor who, until July 2019, was head of Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in São Paulo. The organization uses satellite imagery to gauge the amount of deforestation in the Amazon River Basin.

Amazon fires Source: NASA/Wikimedia Commons

After INPE released a report on July 19, 2019, Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro, accused its scientists of lying, and Galvão of being in cahoots with environmentalists. The 72-year-old Galvão was stunned by the accusation.

Weeks later, just as the burning season began in the Amazon, Galvão was relieved of his position. Farmers burn the rain forest to clear land for agriculture, and President Bolsonaro’s anti-environmental stance has allowed them to do it with impunity.

Figures released by INPE on November 18, 2019, showed that 9.762 square kilometers (3769 sq miles) of land had been cleared just between August 2018 and July 2019.

Since being fired, Galvão has returned to doing fusion research at the University of São Paulo.

3. The first image of a black hole - Katie Bouman

When the 2014 movie Interstellar came out, audiences were blown away by the image of the black hole at the heart of the story. Far from being entirely black, this black hole was surrounded by halos of light, and it was the brainchild of visual effects company Double Negative VFX and the astrophysicist Kip Thorne. Thorne was one of the recipients of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.

A year before Interstellar came out, a group of some 200 researchers began trying to image a black hole using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of 8 radio telescopes scattered around the globe.

Joining that group was a 23-year-old Ph.D. student in computer science and artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) named Katie Bouman. Bouman was tasked with creating an algorithm that would analyze the data coming from the various telescopes and turn it into an image of a black hole.

In April 2019, the result of all that hard work was announced when the first image of a black hole popping up on Bouman's computer screen was released to the world. And, just as predicted by Thorne, the black hole was outlined by light.

The Spectator Index@spectatorindex

IMAGE: Reaction of Katie Bouman, who led the creation of an algorithm to produce first image of black hole.

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4. Catching fast radio bursts - Victoria Kaspi

In southern British Columbia sits CHIME, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment. It sounds like it has a pretty prosaic intent, mapping hydrogen emissions from distant galaxies, but it is actually doing something much more interesting.

Artist's impression of a FRB Source: ESO/M. Kornmesser/Wikimedia Commons

CHIME is searching the Universe for fast radio bursts (FRBs), which are mysterious flashes of radio energy. So far, CHIME has discovered hundreds of bursts, more than any other telescope.

The first FRB wasn't discovered until 2007, and in 2013, four more flashes were found. Kaspi, whose area of expertise is neutron stars, and who is an astrophysicist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, realized that CHIME could not only study fast-rotating neutron stars, it could also detect FRBs.

But first, CHIME would have to be upgraded because 16,000 different frequencies would have to be gathered 1,000 times per second. Kaspi went to work networking and seeking additional funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

In 2016, for her efforts, Kaspi was awarded Canada's highest science prize, the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. She used the $760,000 prize money to hire students and postdocs for CHIME.

In 2019, Kaspi landed a $2.4 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to build additional "outrigger" telescopes 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) away from CHIME to aid in pinpointing FRBs.

5. Bringing brains back to life - Nenad Sestan

In 2016, researchers at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut were working with dead pigs' brains in an effort to learn how to better preserve human brain tissue for research.

The human brain Source: Bruce Blaus/Wikimedia Commons

The researchers infused the dead pigs' brains with ice-cold preservatives and oxygen, and amazingly, the organs began to show widespread electrical activity, which might indicate consciousness.

Sestan immediately shut down the experiment and contacted the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funds his research, and bioethicists at Yale. Before restarting the experiment, Sestan's team anesthetized the pigs' brains to prevent neurons from firing in unison, a precursor to consciousness.

Sestan's research showed that brains that suffer oxygen deprivation are not damaged nearly as badly as previously thought. Despite concerns from animal-rights activists, Sestan wants to continue his research, but he says any future research will be decided by a committee. Sestan told Nature, "When you explore uncharted territory, you have to be very, very thoughtful."

6. Protecting the world's biodiversity - Sandra Díaz

On May 4, 2019, Sandra Díaz, along with 144 other scientists, announced their findings on the world's biodiversity. The conclusions of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) were explosive: due to human activities, 1 million species are heading toward extinction.

Biodiversity Source: Sasata/Wikimedia Commons

As one of the group's three co-chairs, Díaz, who is an econologist at Argentina’s National University of Córdoba, coordinated the work done by experts in 51 countries.

Their conclusion states that nations must make huge changes in their economies. Díaz told Nature, "We cannot live a fulfilling life, a life as we know it, without nature." Díaz remains optimistic however, because she says, "there is no Plan B."

7. Ebola warrior - Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum

As a young man in 1976, Muyembe Tamfum traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in response to an outbreak of a new disease.

Ebola Source: CDC/Wikimedia Commons

Around him, nurses were dying, and Muyembe Tamfum noticed that when he took blood samples from patients, the punctures continued to bleed. Welcome to Ebola.

In August 2018, a new outbreak of the disease began that has since killed over 2,200 people. In July 2019, Muyembe Tamfum was assigned to lead a response.

Muyembe Tamfum's approach is to get communities to trust him, to respectfully bury the dead in a way that minimizes the spread of infection, and to search for effective drugs and vaccines.

His most recent breakthrough is the use of antibody-based drugs, especially mAb114, which is derived from a survivor of a 1995 Ebola outbreak.

Before he retires, Muyembe Tamfum wants to find one last puzzle piece — the animal that serves as Ebola's vector. A vector is a living organism that transmits an infectious agent from an infected animal to a human or another animal. Vectors are frequently arthropods, such as mosquitoes, ticks, flies, fleas, and lice.

8. Shaking our family tree - Yohannes Haile-Selassie

In February 2016, a goat herder found a jawbone in the northern Woranso-Mille area of the Ethiopian desert. Following right behind the goat herder was Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a palaeoanthropologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio.

Australopithecus anamensis Source: Ghedoghedo/Wikimedia Commons

Lying 3 meters away from the jawbone was a skull, and together, they formed a nearly complete hominin skull dating to 3.8 million years ago. Most importantly, the skull and jawbone belonged to the oldest and most elusive of all known human relatives — Australopithecus anamensis.

Announced to the world in August 2019, the skull, known as MRD, is from the Pliocene Era, between 5.3 million and 2.6 million years ago, a period that was empty of fossils, and MRD has shaken up our family tree.

Previously, researchers had thought that Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old fossil of species Australopithecus afarensis had evolved from Australopithecus anamensis, but MRD's features suggest that A. anamensis and A. afarensis overlapped for at least 100,000 years.

Haile-Selassie has celebrated MRD's discovery by getting a license plate with that designation.

9. Climate warrior - Greta Thunberg

On December 12, 2019, President Donald Trump put out the following tweet about Swedish 16-year-old Greta Thunberg: "Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old-fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!"

Caption Source: European Parliament/Wikimedia Commons

What's making Thunberg, who has Asperger's syndrome, angry is climate change. In September 2019, Thunberg addressed a U.S. Congressional hearing on climate change, telling the Congressmen: "I don’t want you to listen to me, I want you to listen to the scientists. I want you to unite behind the science and I want you to take real action."

In July 2019, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Thunberg's protests "drove us to act" when Merkel announced sweeping measures to reduce carbon emissions. In December 2019, Time Magazine named Thunberg its Time Person of the Year, and placed her on its cover.

This possibly rankled President Trump who has long displayed a fake Time Magazine cover featuring himself at several of his golf clubs, including Doral, Florida, Loudoun County, Virgina, Doonbeg, Ireland, and Turnberry in Scotland.

Thunberg's greatest contribution has been her mobilization of young people to protest climate change. Thunberg organized a "school strike for the climate," and on March 15, 2019, an estimated 1.4 million students from 112 countries joined Thunberg and walked out of their classrooms for a day.

Students marched across Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea, Philippines, India, Mauritius, Nigeria, Kenya, Luxembourg, Italy, France, Sweden, Spain, Iceland, Ukraine, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Chile, Poland, the Czech Republic, Israel, and South Africa.

10. CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing system - Hongkui Deng

In 2019, at his laboratory at Peking University in Beijing, Hongkui Deng showed that CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing can be used to create immune cells impervious to the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

CRISPR–Cas9  Source: NIH/Flickr

Doctors had determined in the 1990s that those people who have a genetic mutation that disables CCR5, a protein that HIV uses to infect immune cells, were immune to HIV. Deng decided to try to edit CCR5 directly using CRISPR–Cas9.

Deng's test on a patient showed that CRISPR–Cas9 edited cells were safe when included in bone-marrow transplants and that the modified cells persisted in the patient's blood.

A biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, Fyodor Urnov, announced that he thought that Deng's approach was premature, but Deng hopes to continue his work.

11. Making sure transplants are ethical - Wendy Rogers

In February 2019, Wendy Rogers, who is a bioethicist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, blew the lid off the practice of using non-consenting donors for organ transplants in China.

Transplant  Source: Global Panorama/Flickr

Rogers' team's report prompted Chinese researchers to retract more than two dozen reports of transplants that had been published in professional journals. The journal PLoS ONE retracted 19 of the 21 papers it published, and the journal Transplantation retracted 7.

Rogers activism stemmed from a 2016 conference at which the documentary Hard to Believe was screened. It showed forced organ donations by political prisoners in China. Rogers and her team found over 400 instances in which organs from prisoners were probably used between the years 2001 and 2017.

{ https://interestingengineering.com/ }

Star of Bethlehem: The astronomical explanations

 

Image caption Some astronomers suggest the star was two bright objects 'in conjunction'

It might seem churlish to dissect such an enduring image of Christmas as the star of Bethlehem, but a quiet astronomical debate has been bubbling away for decades. Could some real cosmic event have drawn "three wise men" on a journey to find a newborn king?

This debate requires one very big assumption - that the story of the star and the journey is true.

Prof David Hughes, an astronomer from the University of Sheffield, first published a review of the theories on the famous star in the 1970s.

Who were the three wise men

• The Three Wise Men, or Three Kings are believed to have been based on the Magi - Persian sages able to read the stars

• In Spain and Spanish speaking countries they are a much-celebrated part of Christmas. It is actually the three wise men (Los Reyes Magos) who have the task to bring gifts to all children on the Epiphany (6 January). Traditionally, children send their wish lists to the wise men. Children are also told that they will receive coal instead of presents if they behave badly. Edible sweet coal is widely available in shops

• People leave their shoes out in the living room, under which they will find their presents the next morning. It's also traditional to leave some food and water for the kings and their camels

• A parade of the three wise men takes place on the evening of the 5 January in all major Spanish cities and towns. The kings are seen riding their camels and throwing sweets into the crowd.

Having spent many years studying the astronomical explanations and reviewing the associated biblical stories, he is now an expert on the subject.

But there are some intriguing historical parallels.

The three kings were religious scholars known as the Magi - revered Babylonian astronomers and astrologists. They studied the stars and planets, interpreting the meaning behind cosmic events.

Anything very unusual was considered an omen, so the star must have been both rare and visually spectacular. And, says Hughes, it would have had a very clear message for the Magi.

This leads the astronomer to conclude that the star of Bethlehem was probably not a star at all, and that it was more than one single event.

"If you read the Bible carefully," says Hughes, "the Magi saw something when they were in their own country - [probably Babylon] - so they travelled to Jerusalem and had a word with King Herod."

According to the story, the Magi told Herod of the sign they had seen and, says Hughes, "when they left Jerusalem [for] Bethlehem, they saw something again".

Reading the stars

By Dr Helen JacobusUniversity College London

The tradition of celestial events signifying events on earth originated in Mesopotamia more than 3,000 years ago.

Astronomer-astrologers reported omens to the king; these were anything unusual - perhaps the moon moving in front of a planet, or a lunar eclipse. Their job was to interpret the meaning of these phenomena.

There was also an elite class of Babylonian diviners who created nativity charts. They recorded the positions of the planets, the Sun, the Moon and other astronomical data at the time of a child's birth, in order to make predictions about that person's life.

About 2,000 years ago the Greeks turned this into the sort of horoscope we would recognise today, charting the zodiac signs in which the Sun and Moon rose, as well as the planets that rose in the east for each moment in time.

Some believe that the wise men from the East, or the "Magi" of the nativity, were astrologers from Mesopotamia, and that the star rising in the east was the horoscope that predicted the birth of a king.

If so, they were reading a nativity chart in reverse; they had the prediction and sought to find the child who had been born at that precise moment.

• Ancient astrology: How sages read the heavens

Hughes's best explanation for this series of events is something known as a triple conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn - with the two planets coming close together in the sky three times over a short period.

"[This happens when] you get an alignment between the Sun, the Earth, Jupiter and Saturn," says Hughes.

Tim O'Brien, associate director of Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, suggests this would have looked striking. "It's remarkable how much your attention is drawn when two very bright objects come together in the sky," he explains.

And once the planets lined up in their orbits, Earth would "overtake" the others, meaning that Jupiter and Saturn would appear to change direction in the night sky.

"At that time, people would have set great store by the motions of the planets," says O'Brien.

Even more significantly, the event is believed to have been in the constellation Pisces, which represents one of the signs of the zodiac.

"You would [only] get a triple conjunction like this about every 900 years," he says, so for astronomers in Babylon 2,000 years ago, it would have been a signal of something very significant.

"A triple conjunction of this kind ticks all the boxes."

The second favoured explanation is a very bright comet.

While certainly spectacular and ethereal in appearance, comets are essentially "big, dirty snowballs" flying through space.

"When they come close to the Sun, this ice melts - solar wind blows this material out into space, so you get a tail of matter coming off the comet," explains O'Brien.

Image caption Comets can appear to "stand over" the horizon

This tail, which points away from the Sun, is one of the things that has made the comet idea popular, explains Hughes.

"Quite a few people have said that comets seem to 'stand over' the Earth, because of their coma and tail sometimes looking like an arrow," says Hughes.

The most timely record was of a bright comet appearing in the constellation of Capricorn in 5BC, which was recorded by astronomers in China.

A less likely, but more famous candidate was Halley's comet, which was visible around 12BC.

Those who favour this theory point out that the 5BC comet would have been in the southern sky as seen from Jerusalem, with the head of the comet close to the horizon and the tail is pointing vertically upward.

"Quite a lot of people liked the comet idea, so it crops up in quite a lot of Christmas cards," says Hughes.

"The snag is that they're not that rare. They were also commonly associated with the 'four Ds' - doom, death, disease and disaster," he suggests. "So if it did contain a message, it would have been a bad omen."

Another theory is that the star was light from the birth of a new star, or nova.

There are records - again from astronomers in the Far East - of a new star in the small, northern constellation of Aquila in 4BC.

Hughes says: "People who like this theory say this new star would have been [positioned] directly over Jerusalem."

Dr Robert Cockcroft, manager of the McCallion Planetarium at McMaster University in Ontario says a nova is "a good candidate" for the star of Bethlehem.

A new star, or nova, could have given the three wise men something to follow

"It can 'appear' as a new star in a constellation, and fade again over the following months," he explains.

"It is also not too bright, explaining why we don't have any records of it in the west." Cockcroft suggests that this might also have given the three wise men something to follow.

While other "omens" would have been needed to cause the Magi to set out on their journey west to Jerusalem, he says , it would take them months to get there, "by which time Aquila [and the new star could have] risen in the sky to appear in the south.

"Bethlehem lies due south of Jerusalem, so that Magi could 'follow' the star to Bethlehem."

Other more improbable but entertaining theories have been proposed over the years, says Hughes.

One he describes as particularly far-fetched was suggested in a 1979 academic paper by the Greek astronomer George Banos. He proposed that the Christmas star was actually the planet Uranus.

Banos suggested that the Magi discovered the planet 1,800 years before the astronomer William Herschel formally recorded the discovery in 1781.

"His idea was that the Magi discovered Uranus, that this was the star of Bethlehem and they then tried to hush up the discovery," Hughes explains.

'It wasn't behaving within the normal laws of physics': Navy pilot who shot the famous 'Tic Tac' UFO video breaks his silence 15 years after the encounters near USS Nimitz

• Retired Navy pilot Chad Underwood spoke out in interview on Thursday
• He is the one who shot the famous 'Tic Tac' UFO video over Pacific in 2004
• Unusual objects had been tracked by the USS Nimitz carrier group for days
• Pilots of Navy Super Hornet fighter jets subsequently made visual contact
• They described the object as a white oblong shape with no wings or windows 

By KEITH GRIFFITH FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

The former Navy pilot who shot famous video footage of a UFO encounter near the USS Nimitz carrier group has broken his silence 15 years after the incident.

Chad Underwood spoke out in an interview with New York Magazine published on Thursday, detailing for the first time his experiences over the Pacific in November 2004.

Underwood is the one who coined the description 'Tic Tac' for the oblong, wingless object, and it was his in-flight video that caused a sensation in 2017 when the Pentagon confirmed that the footage was authentic.

In the new interview, Underwood gives a detailed description that backs up other personal accounts of the incident, and admits that to this day he can't be sure whether the object he encountered was from this world or another.

Scroll down for video 

Chad Underwood spoke out in an interview with New York Magazine published on Thursday, detailing for the first time his experiences over the Pacific in November 2004

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The incident unfolded during carrier group exercises in the Pacific, off the coast of Mexico.

For about two weeks, the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Princeton, part of Carrier Strike Group 11, had been tracking mysterious aircraft intermittently for two weeks on an advanced AN/SPY-1B passive radar.

The radar contacts were so inexplicable that the system was even shut down and restarted to to check for bugs — but operators continued to track the unknown aircraft.

Then on November 14, Commander David Fravor says he was flying in an F/A-18F Super Hornet when he made visual contact with the object, which seemed to dive below the water, resurface, and speed out of sight when he tried to approach it.

As Fravor landed on the deck of the Nimitz, Underwood was just gearing up to take off on his own training run. 

Fravor told Underwood about the bizarre encounter, and urged Underwood to keep his eyes open. Underwood replied that the Princeton's radar crew had already reported an object that they wanted the fighters to attempt to track.

'So, we go out to where our designated training area is. We’re not necessarily looking for something, but the Princeton had a specific object that they wanted us to hunt, for lack of a better word. And all of a sudden, I got this blip on my radar,' Underwood recalled in the new interview.

Underwood was flying in an F/A-18F Super Hornet as part of the USS Nimitz (above) carrier group when he encountered an 'unidentified aerial phenomena'

Navy Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Jim Slaight had been flying about 100 miles off the coast of San Diego (pictured) in each of their F/A-18F Super Hornets (pictured) when they encountered an unidentified flying object described as a 'Tic Tac'

Underwood estimated the object was about 20 miles away, and he was able to pick it up on his infrared gun-pod camera (FLIR).

'The thing that stood out to me the most was how erratic it was behaving. And what I mean by “erratic” is that its changes in altitude, air speed, and aspect were just unlike things that I’ve ever encountered before flying against other air targets,' Underwood told the magazine.   

'Because, aircraft, whether they’re manned or unmanned, still have to obey the laws of physics. They have to have some source of lift, some source of propulsion. The Tic Tac was not doing that. It was going from like 50,000 feet to, you know, a hundred feet in like seconds, which is not possible,' he said. 

'If it was obeying physics like a normal object that you would encounter in the sky — an aircraft, or a cruise missile, or some sort of special project that the government didn’t tell you about — that would have made more sense to me. The part that drew our attention was how it wasn’t behaving within the normal laws of physics,' Underwood continued.

'Normally, you would see engines emitting a heat plume. This object was not doing that. The video shows a source of heat, but the normal signatures of an exhaust plume were not there. There was no sign of propulsion,' he said.

Underwood said that the object was flying far to high to be birds, and dismissed the notion of a weather balloon because of its erratic and sudden movements.

Underwood estimated the object was about 20 miles away, and he was able to pick it up on his infrared gun-pod camera

(FLIR)

Underwood joins Fravor as well as these former Nimitz and Princeton crew members in speaking out about the unexplained encounter in 2004

The Navy flyer also scoffed at the notion that it was some kind of weather event, given the multiple radar and visual contacts made by both the Princeton and multiple Hornet pilots.

Underwood wasn't able to rule out the notion that the object was some kind of highly advanced, classified U.S. military project — but he did note that he was not given a debriefing warning him of the secret project, as he had in other scenarios as a pilot when he'd accidentally encountered classified planes. 

To this day, Underwood isn't sure what the object was, and he refuses to speculate. 

'I’ve never said that this is what I think it was or speculate as to what I think it was,' he said. 'That’s not my job. But I saw something. And it was also seen, via eyeballs, by both my commanding officer, Dave Fravor, and the Marine Corps Hornet squadron commanding officer who was out there as well.'

'At no point did I want to speculate as to what I thought this thing was — or be 'associated with, you know, “alien beings” and “alien aircraft” and all that stuff. I’m like, “No. I do not want to be part of that community.” It is just what we call a UFO. I couldn’t identify it. It was flying. And it was an object. It’s as simple as that,' he said.

'I’ll let the nerds, like, do the math on what it was likely to be. I just happened to be the person that brought back the video.'

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

Well, well, well. Yet more proof that, if nothing else, the universe has a deep and savage sense of irony. “Swamp gas” went from a dismissive write-off of UFO encounters to a ubiquitous running joke among the UFO community and public at large. Even if you know absolutely nothing about UFOs you know they’re all either balloons or swamp gas. Now a new study has found that phosphine, the toxic chemical that makes swamp gas so nasty, is a definite indicator of anaerobic life (life that doesn’t use oxygen) and could be one of the best signs of extraterrestrial life. It all comes full circle, eventually.

Phosphine is a foul-smelling, highly flammable, and generally unpleasant toxic gas found in dung piles and in putrid bogs and swamps. It might also be the best biosignature of alien life. According to a press release from MIT, researchers found that there are only two ways phosphine can be produced. In the intensely high-pressure storm systems of gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, and by anaerobic life. According to the researchers, finding phosphine on a rocky alien planet would be a definite indicator that there was life there.

Lead author of the new paper, MIT researcher Clara Sousa-Silva says:

“Here on Earth, oxygen is a really impressive sign of life. But other things besides life make oxygen too. It’s important to consider stranger molecules that might not be made as often, but if you do find them on another planet, there’s only one explanation.”

Clara Sousa-Silva and colleagues at MIT have amassed a database of over 16,000 possible alien biosignatures. Most of these biosignatures are unreliable and could be the byproduct of other forces besides life. But Sousa-Silva has spent the last 10 years studying phosphine in particular, and now concludes that phosphine would be a definite indicator of life.

Phosphine exists on Earth in bogs, swamps, and other unpleasant places.

Phosphine was discovered in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn in the 1970s. Due to its composite elements, phosphine is a molecule that won’t come together by chance except in the high-energy, high-pressure, violent storms that swirl through gas giants.

Sousa-Silva wondered if phosphine was could be produced here on Earth, specifically by life on Earth. Sousa-Silva says:

“So we started collecting every single mention of phosphine being detected anywhere on Earth, and it turns out that anywhere where there’s no oxygen has phosphine, like swamps and marshlands and lake sediments and the farts and intestines of everything. Suddenly this all made sense: It’s a really toxic molecule for anything that likes oxygen. But for life that doesn’t like oxygen, it seems to be a very useful molecule.”

Sousa-Silva and her team spent the last several years trying to figure out if anything besides life can create phosphine. They found that, on a rocky planet like Earth, there are no forces powerful enough to create the molecule besides life. She says:

“At some point we were looking at increasingly less-plausible mechanisms, like if tectonic plates were rubbing against each other, could you get a plasma spark that generated phosphine? Or if lightning hit somewhere that had phosphorous, or a meteor had a phosphorous content, could it generate an impact to make phosphine? And we went through several years of this process to figure out that nothing else but life makes detectable amounts of phosphine.”

Finding out aliens smell like a putrid swamp wouldn’t be great for our ego as a species.

Sousa-Silva and her team determined that if phosphine was produced by alien life on some faraway rock, it would be detectable even if it was at the quantities produced here on Earth. That means that although phosphine is an indicator of anaerobic life, detecting it may lead researchers to an alien ecosystem as varied as ours. Or at least a big swamp.

Now the real question is when UFO and alien sightings were first being dismissed as swamp gas, were they really being dismissed? What if the aliens have actually been swamp gas this whole time.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Diego Maradona claims he was abducted by aliens in a UFO and lost his virginity at 13 to an 'older woman who was reading a newspaper'

• Diego Maradona, 59, has claimed that he has been abducted by a UFO
• The former football star also revealed he lost his virginity aged 13 'in a basement'
• Made the comments in an interview with Argentine sports channel TyC Sports

By WILLIAM COLE FOR MAILONLINE

Footballing legend Diego Maradona has claimed he was once abducted by a UFO and went missing for three days.

The 59-year-old retired midfielder had also said he lost his virginity aged 13 'in a basement with an older lady' who was reading a newspaper at the time.

He recently made the comments in an interview with Argentine sports channel TyC Sports.

Footballing legend Diego Maradona, 59, has claimed he was once abducted by a UFO and went missing for three days

Interviewers had asked Maradona if he believed in UFOs, with the ex-Napoli star saying: 'Why make things up? Once, after a few too many drinks, I was missing from home for three days.

'I got home and said that UFOs had taken me. I said "They took me, I can’t tell you about it".'

In a rather revealing interview, he was also asked when he lost his virginity.

'At 13 years old, in a basement with an older lady. I was on top and she was reading a newspaper,' said the star, according to the Sun. 

Maradona retired his playing career in 1997, and has moved into management, currently coaching Gimnasia de La Plata in his native Argentina

Maradona retired his playing career in 1997, and has moved into management, currently coaching Gimnasia de La Plata in his native Argentina.

But during his time on the pitch he also revealed that he had played 'several times' without having slept the night before.

He also added that his ideal guests for a dinner party were Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Lula (a former Brazilian President), Nestor Kirchner (former Argentine President), Alberto Fernandez (former Argentine President), and Cristina Kirchner (former Argentine President).

Read more:

• News, sport, celebrities and gossip | The Sun

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

When you’re known worldwide by one name, it generally means you’re a famous entertainer or a star athlete, usually in the field of football (soccer). Say the name “Maradona” anywhere in the world and you’ll generally get a look of recognition followed by a favorite memory of the Argentine soccer star – winning the 1986 World Cup or kicking the “Goal of the Century, to name a few. Is the name Maradona known beyond Earth? In a recent interview, the diminutive former star, now a manager, admitted to being abducted by a UFO. If so, he’s not the only one-named athlete with this tale. If not … well, everyone also remembers his adventures with adult substances. Which one was it?

“Why make things up? Once, after a few too many drinks, I was missing from home for three days. I got home and said that UFOs had taken me. I said, ‘They took me, I can’t tell you about it’.”

Is there a Universe Cup? Was some team from Alpha Centauri looking for a playmaker? In an interview with the Argentine sports channel TyC Sports, ‘Diego Armando’ Maradona was asked if he believed in UFOs and he blurted out his surprise answer. Well, Maradona was a well-known abuser of cocaine and alcohol during his playing days but the UFO part was a surprise. It doesn’t appear that he’s ever made any other references to UFOs or aliens. However, he seems sincere (although typically jovial) in his other responses about his sex life and memories of the game and fellow players, so there’s at least a possibility he’s sharing a real close encounter, not a blackout excuse.

Another one-name athlete who revealed many close encounters is Ali – that’s Muhammad Ali. On September 7, 1973, he appeared on The Tonight Show with host Johnny Carson and brought up his UFO experiences, which began on a training run in 1970. According to UFO investigator Timothy Green Beckley, by the time Ali died in 2016 he had 16 UFO sightings, many while training.

“I happened to look up just before dawn, as I often do while running, and there hovering above us was this brilliant light hanging as if by an invisible thread.”

While ‘Canseco’ never reached the one-name level of Maradona or Ali, there’s only one Jose Canseco, and earlier this year he talked about his knowledge of time travel which he claimed was given to him by aliens. He also said he’d considered running for president but aliens told him he was better suited for fighting the ‘aliens’ in government as a private citizen/celebrity.

It’s often said that aliens choose to communicate with creative people like artists because they’re more open to unusual possibilities, or perhaps that openness allows creative types to see aliens, spirits and like which are already in our midst. Should an active imagination be ridiculed — “She’s just a daydreamer. What are you smoking?” — or respected? While they may not follow sports, extraterrestrials might seek out creative athletes who have one-name status in hopes that they are believable spokespersons. Is that the case with Maradona, Ali and Conseco?

Let’s ask Renaldo and Serena.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

As a follow-up to the current controversy concerning Jacques Vallee and bogus alien abductions in South America, I thought I would share with you a couple of cases that suggest such things haven’t just been performed in South America. Consider the following: On May 5, 1980, Myrna Hansen was driving to her Eagle’s Nest, New Mexico, home from a trip to Oklahoma with her young son. Hansen suddenly found herself in a nightmarish world. Under hypnosis she recalled a classic alien abduction in which she was taken on board a UFO, undressed, and subjected to a physical examination. While on board, she also witnessed a “struggling cow sucked up into its underside in some sort of ‘tractor beam.’” More controversially, Hansen stated that after the abduction, she had been taken to an underground base, had seen “body parts” floating in vats, and felt that some sort of “device” had been implanted in her body so that the aliens could monitor and control her thoughts.

When details of Hansen’s description of the underground base were relayed to Kirtland Air Force Base security personnel, they immediately recognized that Hansen was describing a fortified, highly classified section of one of its facilities: the Manzano Weapons Storage Complex, which, at the time, was the largest underground repository of nuclear weapons in the Western world. I find it highly unlikely that aliens would have abducted Hansen to Kirtland Air Force Base (to say the least!), but maybe a military unit – engaged in a faked alien abduction scenario – might have done exactly that.

An example of a case of alleged alien abduction that appears to have been part of a sophisticated mind-control operation is described by Alison, a woman from Arizona, who lives on a ranch not too far from the city of Sedona. From the age of twenty-seven to thirty-one, Alison was subjected to at least five kidnappings that bore all the hallmarks of the classic alien abduction scenario. On each occasion, she was in her living-room, either reading or watching TV, when her two pet dogs – Lucy and Summer – began to act in a distressed fashion, pacing around the room and whimpering. At that point, things always became a blur, and Alison would later find herself in a different part of the house with several hours of time having passed. She would always awake feel groggy, and with a pounding headache and dry mouth.

For days after the weird experiences, she would dream of the moment when things would begin to go awry – which always resulted in a complete loss of electricity inside the house, a deep humming noise emanating from outside the large living-room window, and powerful and intensely bright lights enveloping the room. In her semi-conscious state, Alison would see small shadowy figures scuttling around the room. They would then carry her outside onto a small craft where she was subjected to a gynecological examination and some form of nasal probing. She would then be returned to another part of the house and the aliens would leave. It was only after the aliens had departed that the intense humming noise would cease.

On what Alison believes to have been the fifth abduction, however, the mysterious humming sound abruptly came to a sudden halt, only a few seconds after her cosmic visitors had entered the room. At that point, Alison recalled – significantly, not in a later dream on this occasion but in real time – she began to slowly regain her senses. And, very surprisingly, so did the aliens. In their place was not a group of frail-looking bald-headed, black-eyed “Grays,” but a number of large and burly men wearing what looked like suspiciously like black military fatigues. According to Alison, the men then suddenly started to back away slowly. And, as Alison began to regain her senses, one of them held his hand up “as if to say ‘stay where you are,” and continued to do so until they had exited the ranch house. Alison made her still-slightly-groggy way to the living-room window – just in time to see the group men jump climb aboard not a state-of-the-art extra-terrestrial spacecraft, but instead a very terrestrial-looking black helicopter. At a height of several hundred feet, a powerful lamp was suddenly turned on by someone aboard the helicopter that lit up the dark sky around her property.

Today, Alison has cast aside her ufological beliefs, and firmly believes that as a result of a combination of subliminal hypnosis, mind-altering technologies, and perhaps even non-lethal weaponry designed to temporary disable her nervous system and bodily movement, she was ingeniously made to think she was an alien abductee. But that in reality, she was merely the guinea-pig for the testing of sophisticated weaponry designed to affect and manipulate both mind and body. These are just two examples of several dozen similar cases I have on file. They all suggest that at least some alien abduction events are nothing of the sort. They are far more down to earth in nature.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Alien Face Found On Mars Next To NASA Rover, Dec 24, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: Dec 24, 2019
Location of discovery: Mars, Sol 5084-5102
Source photo: 

• http://www.gigapan.com/galleries/13640/gigapans/211334
  

I was searching a Mars photo and found this face smack in the center of it. The face really looks human-like. It has a chin, upper and lower lips, nose, nose nostril, eye, brow, hair or hat, cheeks and jaw line. It just seem so old. Sure its a sculpture made from the materials there, but maybe this object was smooth and beautiful when it was made, but over thousands or millions of years degraded. This is 100% proof that not only did intelligent aliens exist on Mars, but...they looked similar to humans. 
Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

Two unknown anomalies have been caught on camera while flying through space. Both anomalies would have been invisible to human eyes.

Wilbur Allen who captured the objects respectively on December 18 and 21, 2019 believes that the anomalies could be "cloaked" spaceships referring to the tic tac anomalies since several files associated with these anomalies support this assumption.

  

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

Something Massive Shows Up On Google Earth

The so-called enormous 300-foot object has gained attention over the internet after the discoverer, and popular YouTuber shared it online. A bizarre, mysterious object has been reportedly discovered on Google Earth in the middle of Antarctica.

The alleged large dark object seems to be different from anything else found nearby. The discoverer and YouTuber MrMBB333 pointed out in a video that the object could measure 277 feet across and around 260 feet high. MrMBB333 further speculated that the melting glaciers in the area might have made the strange object to appear.

One conspiracy theory believer commented on the video saying there’s something strange going on down there, and because of it, the world’s government has made Antarctica off-limits, and only very few individuals can go to certain parts for scientific research.

 Another one suggested the massive object was spotted on the unedited Google Earth application and would not be surprised if the object won’t be there anymore when Google updates Google Earth.

Others pointed out the snow being disturbed in front of the unusual object, leading some to speculate it could a crash landing or secret hanger.

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

Galaxy types via qproject

Surprisingly, over the course of most of humanity’s existence, we had no idea that other galaxies even existed. All we could see was our own little corner of the universe. It wasn’t until the early 1900’s that the nature of the so-called “Andromeda nebula” was discerned. Edwin Hubble settled the galaxy vs. nebula debate in 1925, and it was finally revealed that this “nebula” was actually a galaxy containing some 400 billion stars and not simply an extension of our own galaxy. Almost 100 years later, our reality (and relative insignificance) is well known, as we are now aware of the fact that the universe contains several BILLION large galaxies, many of which are similar to our own (current estimates guess that there are 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the Universe). With that revelation, we’ve learned that galaxies come in all shapes and sizes too. “So what other kinds of galaxies are there,” you might ask? 

Here are the main types:

Elliptical Galaxies:

First and foremost, we have elliptical galaxies: the largest (and arguably most dull) of the bunch. Generally, galaxies of this type are older and have no overly defined structure (they usually resemble an American football, and are about 6 million light-years across). In addition to this, they don’t contain many star forming regions, as they have used the bulk of their stellar material early in their formation. The massive size of galaxies of this type can be attributed to several galactic mergers, an event prone to advancing star formation activity. During these mergers, many massive stars are formed, which typically live fast and die hard, ejecting mass quantities of heavy metals into the interstellar medium.

 

Spiral Galaxies:

Next, we have spiral galaxies. Our galaxy, and our closest neighbor (Andromeda), are among this type. Galaxies of this type tend to be structured similar to a pinwheel, with a large central bulge, expansive disks, and a halo. They have bright central regions, where intricate filaments of stellar materials extend from. Some of their arms can extend several hundreds of thousands of light-years across (the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across, all in all), and they have stars of various ages scattered about. The material is organized in a way that is conductive to star formation, as something called “density waves” cause the material to circulate through the spiral arms like circling waves, where they ultimately squeeze and collapse, giving life to new stars.

Oddly enough, this classification has two flavors. There are ordinary spiral galaxies and barred spiral galaxies. The Milky Way was long thought to merely be a spiral galaxy, but recently, we found that the Milky Way is actually a barred spiral galaxy. This means that in our central region, we have a large bar near the nucleus where the spiral arms (one contains our solar system) branch out from. Barred-galaxy types usually have spiral arms that are tightly wound. Whilst the ordinary spiral galaxies are looser and less defined.

 

Lenticular Galaxies:

A lenticular galaxy is the love child of spiral and elliptical galaxy, usually containing a central bulge with no spiral arms (sometimes, they are even referred to as “armless spiral galaxies”  (take from that what you will). Many astronomers believe they are the evolutionary bridge between a spiral and elliptical galaxy. They can often be misidentified as either/or, depending on our frame of reference (if we are seeing the galaxy edge or face-on)

Irregular Galaxies:

All galaxies are separated by large expanses of empty interstellar space, but most are anchored together by immense gravitationael forc. Because of this, galaxies that are millions of light-years apart can be drawn toward one another, eventually coming within several thousands of light-years of one another. Some of these galaxies merely interact, before one darts off. Whilst others actually merge, forming newer (more spectacular) galaxies. The result of such a collision is almost always beautiful, but they still leave lasting scars.

As such, many galaxies that have interacted or merged do not have predictable structures. They come in many flavors. Some resemble birds or cigars (like M82, or the Cigar Galaxy), while others look like giant blobs of glowing dust (like the one seen here). Following this similar classification, irregular galaxies often look very similar to peculiar galaxies. Only some of them can develop unusual features (such as jets emanating from the central region in two opposite directions).

 

Dwarf Galaxies

Lastly, we come to the smallest rung on the latter: dwarf galaxies. There might be TRILLIONS of them in the universe, most in orbit around other galaxies. The Milky Way may have as many as 26 of them bound to it (The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds were once thought to be, but recent observations indicate that the small galaxies are traveling to fast to be anchored to us.)

{ https://futurism.com/ }

{ https://futurism.com/ }

Artist’s concept of the just-launched CHEOPS space telescope, which will study hundreds of exoplanets in greater detail than ever before.

Image via ESA/ ATG medialab/ DLR.

After a one-day delay, the European Space Agency (ESA) successfully launched its CHEOPS mission last week, on the morning of December 18, 2019, from the spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. CHEOPS is the first ESA mission dedicated to studying exoplanets, those distant worlds orbiting other stars. NASA’s planet-hunting space missions, first Kepler and now TESS, have been finding new exoplanets. CHEOPS will study hundreds of exoplanets already known to exist – out of 4,000-plus now confirmed – to determine their sizes, masses, densities and possible atmospheres.

In this way, CHEOPS will take us some steps along the road of finding out what many exoworlds are actually like, not an easy task.

CHEOPS stands for CHaracterising ExOPlanets Satellite. The telescope will reside in a sun-synchronous orbit around Earth at an altitude of more than 400 miles (700 km). Kate Isaak, CHEOPS project scientist, said in a statement:

We are very excited to see the satellite blast off into space. There are so many interesting exoplanets and we will be following up on several hundreds of them, focusing in particular on the smaller planets in the size range between Earth and Neptune. They seem to be the commonly found planets in our Milky Way galaxy, yet we do not know much about them. CHEOPS will help us reveal the mysteries of these fascinating worlds, and take us one step closer to answering one of the most profound questions we humans ponder: are we alone in the universe?

Watch the launch below:

Heike Rauer, Director of the DLR Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin, said:

More than 4000 exoplanets have been discovered in the Milky Way, yet we still know far too little about these distant worlds in our cosmic neighborhood. We are all eager to see which ‘faces’ the planets characterized by CHEOPS will show us.

So how does CHEOPS observe these planets?

Like some other telescopes, it will watch as the planets transit in front of their stars, as seen from Earth. As Juan Cabrera Perez, Head of the Extrasolar Planets and Atmospheres Department at the DLR Institute of Planetary Research, explained:

We could describe this fluctuation in brightness as a ‘mini stellar eclipse’, as the transiting exoplanet reduces the intensity of the light from the star for a short time. This fluctuation can be measured and analyzed – an area in which we can contribute suitable tools and many years of experience.

• EarthSky 2020 lunar calendars are available! They make great gifts. Order now. Going fast!

Cool photo of CHEOPS launch, December 18, 2019.

Image via ESA/ S. Corvaja.

CHEOPS will focus on some of the most common exoplanets discovered so far, ranging in size from Earth to Neptune, or about approximately 6,000 to 30,000 miles (10,000 to 50,000 km) in diameter. Using data from the transits, CHEOPS can determine the size, mass and density of the planets. All of these are important in order for scientists to figure out the planets’ compositions. Some will be rocky like Earth, while others will have deep, gaseous atmospheres like Neptune or even Jupiter or Saturn. Knowing this will also help scientists determine which of these worlds might be potentially habitable. Of course, rocky planets similar in size to Earth, or a bit larger – super-Earths – would be the most interesting in this regard. Nicola Rando, CHEOPS project manager, said:

Both CHEOPS instrument and spacecraft are built to be extremely stable, so as to measure the incredibly small variations in the light of distant stars as their planets transit in front of them. For a planet like Earth, this amounts to the equivalent of watching the sun from a distant star and measuring its light dim by a tiny fraction of a percent. Now we are looking forward to the first part of the operational activities, making sure that the satellite and instrument perform as expected, ready for scientists to perform their world-class science.

CHEOPS will also be able to find out which of these planets do have atmospheres and whether they have clouds. This will help differentiate between deep, gaseous primordial atmospheres with no real solid surface beneath them, and thinner atmospheres like those on terrestrial planets such as Earth, Venus or Mars.

CHEOPS is just the first of three planned ESA missions to study exoplanets.

The Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) space telescope, expected to launch in 2026, will focus on searching for “Earth-like” planets, ones that are rocky and about the same size as Earth orbiting in their stars’ habitable zones. So far, most such worlds have been found orbiting red dwarf stars, the most common type of star in our galaxy. CHEOPS, however, will look for these planets around sun-like stars. It will also be able to determine the age of these planetary systems with more accuracy than possible before.

A couple of years later, in 2028, ESA will launch the Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (ARIEL) mission, which will study the atmospheres of exoplanets. As well as atmospheric composition, this will help scientists develop a comprehensive catalog of exoplanetary orbits, radii, masses, densities and ages.

All three of these exciting missions, and others, will greatly increase our knowledge of these exotic, far-off worlds.

View larger. | Timeline of ESA and NASA exoplanet missions, including CHEOPS.

Image via ESA.

As Günther Hasinger, ESA Director of Science, said:

CHEOPS will take exoplanet science to a whole new level. After the discovery of thousands of planets, the quest can now turn to characterization, investigating the physical and chemical properties of many exoplanets and really getting to know what they are made of and how they formed. CHEOPS will also pave the way for our future exoplanet missions, from the international James Webb Telescope to ESA’s very own PLATO and ARIEL satellites, keeping European science at the forefront of exoplanet research.

The CHEOPS mission is a partnership between ESA and Switzerland with additional contributions from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the U.K. More than 100 scientists and engineers are involved. The nominal mission is expected to last 3 1/2 years. While the CHEOPS science team has the bulk of observation time, 20% of the time is reserved for other scientists from around the world.

CHEOPS and the coming follow-up missions will open an exciting new chapter in exoplanetary study. What fascinating discoveries will they make?

• Bottom line: ESA has successfully launched its CHEOPS space telescope to study hundreds of exoplanets in more detail than ever before.
• Via ESA
• Via German Aerospace Center (DLR)
• Read more: Visit CHEOPS website

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

Area 51: Which aircraft would the US Air Force not admit may have been involved in a fatal crash

The 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight

By Alexander Rose 

On the western flank of the Hoover Dam stands a little-understood monument, commissioned by the US Bureau of Reclamation when construction of the dam began in 01931. The most noticeable parts of this corner of the dam, now known as Monument Plaza, are the massive winged bronze sculptures and central flagpole which are often photographed by visitors. The most amazing feature of this plaza, however, is under their feet as they take those pictures.

The plaza’s terrazzo floor is actually a celestial map that marks the time of the dam’s creation based on the 25,772-year axial precession of the earth.

I was particularly interested in this monument because this axial precession is also the slowest cycle that we track in Long Now’s 10,000 Year Clock. Strangely, little to no documentation of this installation seemed to be available, except for a few vacation pictures on Flickr. So the last time I was in Las Vegas, I made a special trip out to Hoover Dam to see if I could learn more about this obscure 26,000-year monument.

I parked my rental car on the Nevada side of the dam on a day pushing 100 degrees. I quickly found Monument Plaza just opposite the visitor center where tours of the dam are offered. While the plaza is easy to find, it stands apart from all the main tours and stories about the dam. With the exception of the writing in the plaza floor itself, the only information I could find came from a speaker running on loop, broadcasting a basic description of the monument while visitors walked around the area. When I asked my tour guide about it, he suggested that there may be some historical documentation and directed me to Emme Woodward, the dam’s historian.

I was able to get in touch with her after returning home. As she sent me a few items, I began to see why the Bureau of Reclamation doesn’t explain very much about the monument’s background. The first thing she sent me was a description of the plaza by Oskar J. W. Hansen, the artist himself, which I thought would tell me everything I wanted to know. While parts of it were helpful, the artist’s statement of intention was also highly convoluted and opaque. An excerpt:

These [human] postures may be matched to their corresponding reflexes in terms of angle and degree much as one would join cams in a worm-gear drive. There is an angle for doubt, for sorrow, for hate, for joy, for contemplation, and for devotion. There are as many others as there are fleeting emotions within the brain of each individual who inhabits the Earth. Who knows not all these postures of the mind if he would but stop to think of them as usable factors for determining proclivities of character? It is a knowledge bred down to us through the past experience of the whole race of men.

It is pretty hard to imagine the US Bureau of Reclamation using this type of write-up to interpret the monument… and they don’t. And so there it stands, a 26,000-year clock of sorts, for all the world to see, and yet still mired in obscurity.

While I may never totally understand the inner motivations of the monument’s designer, I did want to understand it on a technical level. How did Hansen create a celestial clock face frozen in time that we can interpret and understand as the date of the dam’s completion? The earth’s axial precession is a rather obscure piece of astronomy, and our understanding of it through history has been spotty at best. That this major engineering feat was celebrated through this monument to the axial precession still held great interest to me, and I wanted to understand it better.

I pressed for more documentation, and the historian sent me instructions for using the Bureau of Reclamation’s image archive site as well as some keywords to search for. The black and white images you see here come from this resource. Using the convoluted web site was a challenge, and at first I had difficulty finding any photos of the plaza before or during its construction. As I discovered, the problem was that I was searching with the term “Monument Plaza,” a name only given to it after its completion in 01936. In order to find images during its construction, I had to search for “Safety Island,” so named because at the time of the dam’s construction, it was an island in the road where workers could stand behind a berm to protect themselves from the never-ending onslaught of cement trucks.

I now had some historical text and photos, but I was still missing a complete diagram of the plaza that would allow me to really understand it. I contacted the historian again, and she obtained permission from her superiors to release the actual building plans. I suspect that they generally don’t like to release technical plans of the dam for security reasons, but it seems they deemed my request a low security risk as the monument is not part of the structure of the dam. The historian sent me a tube full of large blueprints and a CD of the same prints already scanned. With this in hand I was finally able to re-construct the technical intent of the plaza and how it works.

In order to understand how the plaza marks the date of the dam’s construction in the nearly 26,000-year cycle of the earth’s precession, it is worth explaining what exactly axial precession is. In the simplest terms, it is the earth “wobbling” on its tilted axis like a gyroscope — but very, very slowly. This wobbling effectively moves what we see as the center point that stars appear to revolve around each evening.

Presently, this center point lies very close to the conveniently bright star Polaris. The reason we have historically paid so much attention to this celestial center, or North Star, is because it is the star that stays put all through the course of the night. Having this one fixed point in the sky is the foundation of all celestial navigation.

But that point near Polaris, which we call the North Star, is actually slowly moving and tracing a circle through the night sky. While Polaris is our North Star, Hansen’s terrazzo floor points out that the North Star of the ancient Egyptians, as they built the great pyramids, was Thuban. And in about 12,000 years, our North Star will be Vega. The workings of this precession are best explained with an animation, as in figure 1. Here you can see how the axis of the earth traces a circle in the sky over the course of 25,772 years.

Unfortunately it is a bit difficult to see how this all works in the inlaid floor at Monument Plaza. The view that you really want to have of the plaza is directly from above. You would need a crane to get this view of the real thing, but by using the original technical drawing as an underlay I was able to mark up a diagram which hopefully clarifies it (Fig. 2).

In this diagram, you can see that the center of the circle traced by the axial precession is actually the massive flag pole in the center of the plaza. This axial circle is prominently marked around the pole, and the angle of Polaris was depicted as precisely as possible to show where it would have been on the date of the dam’s opening. Hansen used the rest of the plaza floor to show the location of the planets visible that evening, and many of the bright stars that appear in the night sky at that location.

By combining planet locations with the angle of precession, we are able to pinpoint the time of the dam’s completion down to within a day. We are now designing a similar system — though with moving parts — in the dials of the 10,000 Year Clock. It is likely that at least major portions of the Hoover Dam will still be in place hundreds of thousands of years from now. Hopefully the Clock will still be ticking and Hansen’s terrazzo floor will still be there, even if it continues to baffle visitors.

I would like to thank Emme Woodward of the US Bureau of Reclamation for all her help in finding the original images and plans of Monument Plaza. If you have further interest in reading Hansen’s original writings about the plaza or in seeing the plans, I have uploaded all the scans to the Internet Archive.

{ http://longnow.org/ }

China made an artificial star that's 6 times as hot as the sun, and it could be the future of energy

DAVID ANDERSON, SHIRA POLAN

Scientists are trying to open a portal to a parallel universe

By THE SUN

Noah Schnapp as Will in “Stranger Things.”

(THE SUN) — Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in eastern Tennessee are trying to open a portal to a parallel universe.

The project — which has been compared to the Upside Down in the Netflix blockbuster “Stranger Things” — hopes to show a world identical to ours where life is mirrored.

Leah Broussard, the physicist leading the experiment, told NBC the plan is “pretty wacky” but will “totally change the game,” ahead of a series of experiments she plans to run this summer.

Broussard’s experiment will fire a beam of subatomic particles down a 50-foot tunnel. The beam will pass a powerful magnet and hit an impenetrable wall, with a neutron detector behind it.

If the experiment is successful, particles will transform into mirror images of themselves, allowing them to burrow right through the impenetrable wall.

This would prove that the visible universe is only half of what is out there, Broussard said, but she also admitted that she expects the test to “measure zero.”

In “Stranger Things,” portals began opening, connecting a US town to a dark alternate dimension called the Upside Down.

In reality, if a mirror world exists, it would have its own laws of mirror physics and its own mirror history, according to NBC.

However, there wouldn’t be an alternate version of you. Current theory, the outlet explains, only hypothesizes that mirror atoms and mirror rocks are possible — and perhaps even mirror planets and stars.

{ https://stlucianewsonline.com/ }

NASA Hails Historic Landing by Boeing's Starliner Capsule, But Next Steps Still Murky

Boeing's first CST-100 Starliner spacecraft on the ground at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, shortly after landing on Dec. 22, 2019.

(Image: © NASA/Bill Ingalls)

"It was an absolute bullseye, better than I think anybody anticipated," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said of the landing during a news conference today. "That's good for the agency, it's good for Boeing; that's good for the United States of America."

But not everything went smoothly on OFT. The mission was supposed to last eight days and feature an automated rendezvous and docking with the International Space Station (ISS), demonstrating Starliner's ability to ferry astronauts to and from the orbiting lab and clearing the way for a crewed test flight next year.

But an error with Starliner's onboard timing system, which manifested shortly after liftoff on Friday morning (Dec. 20), nixed that original plan. The timing problem prevented the capsule from properly performing a pivotal engine burn, trapping Starliner in the wrong orbit, NASA and Boeing representatives have said.

So Starliner ended up circling Earth on its own for about 48 hours and then coming home, leaving some original mission objectives unachieved. But that doesn't necessarily mean the capsule will have to refly OFT before astronauts can climb aboard, NASA officials said.

Indeed, going straight to the Crew Flight Test (CFT), which will carry three astronauts to and from the ISS, is definitely still on the table, NASA Commercial Crew Program deputy manager Steve Stich said during today's news conference.

"To me, there's good data out there to suggest that, once we go through it, maybe it's acceptable to go, next step, fly the Crew Flight Test," Stich said. "But we have to go through the data first."

That good data includes a nominal launch and landing, the two most important milestones to check off on a human spaceflight, Stich and Bridenstine both said. And Starliner seems to have performed very well in orbit, Jim Chilton, senior vice president of Boeing’s Space and Launch Division, said during a news conference yesterday (Dec. 21). And today, Chilton estimated that Starliner may end up meeting about 85% of the original OFT objectives, after all data analyses are complete.

But all three men stressed that the NASA and Boeing teams need to perform those analyses before any decisions can be made about Starliner's next flight. 

"I think we're into January, pretty deep into January, before everybody has a thorough understanding" of the OFT data, Chilton said today.

CFT is currently targeted for liftoff sometime next year. If it is decided that Starliner must fly another version of OFT first, the CFT timeline would probably shift to the right by at least three months. That's the estimated minimum amount of time it would take for Boeing to get ready for another OFT, Chilton said today. 

(The Starliner vehicle that landed today won't fly CFT, by the way. This capsule will perform Boeing's first contracted ISS crew mission for NASA. And the crew of that mission, which will be commanded by NASA astronaut Suni Williams, has named the capsule "Calypso," after the ship of ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau.)

Boeing has been developing Starliner with funding from NASA's Commercial Crew Program, most notably a $4.2 billion contract that was announced in September 2014. That deal also pays for six operational, crew-carrying flights to and from the ISS.

SpaceX got a similar, $2.6 billion contract at the same time. The California-based company's Crew Dragon capsule aced its version of OFT, called Demo-1, this past March. SpaceX is now gearing up for a key in-flight test of Crew Dragon's emergency-escape system next month; if all goes well with that demonstration, Crew Dragon will be cleared to perform a crewed test flight to the orbiting lab.

Getting one of these private vehicles up and running will end NASA's dependence on Russian Soyuz spacecraft for crewed trips to the ISS, which has been total since the space shuttles were grounded more than eight years ago. And having both of them operational is vital to ensure stable, uninterrupted access to space, Bridenstine said.

"We need to have dissimilar redundancy for how we fly astronauts into space," he said. 

NASA also wants to be just one of many customers that use private American spacecraft to get to and from low-Earth orbit, Bridenstine added. 

"We want to have numerous providers that are competing against each other on cost and innovation, driving down cost and increasing access," he said. "And today was really a great milestone in that eventuality."

• Boeing's CST-100 Starliner Space Capsule (Infographic)
• Boeing in Space: The Latest News, Images and Video
• How Boeing's Starliner Orbital Flight Test Works: A Step-By-Step Guide

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

{ https://www.space.com/ }

Earth's Magnetic North Pole Continues Drifting, Crosses Prime Meridian

By Stephanie Pappas

Earth’s magnetic field protects us from the solar wind by deflecting the charged particles.

(Image: © Shutterstock)

Earth's magnetic north pole, which has been wandering faster than expected in recent years, has now crossed the prime meridian. 

Magnetic north has been lurching away from its previous home in the Canadian Arctic toward Siberia at a rate of about 34 miles (55 kilometers) a year over the past two decades. The latest model of the Earth's magnetic field, released Dec. 10 by the National Centers for Environmental Information and the British Geological Survey, predicts that this movement will continue, though likely at a slower rate of 25 miles (40 km) each year. 

This model is used to calibrate GPS and other navigation measurements. 

Earth's magnetic field is produced by the churning of the planet's iron outer core, which produces a complex, but largely north-south magnetic field. For reasons not entirely understood but related to the planet's interior dynamics, the magnetic field is currently undergoing a period of weakening. That's why magnetic north is drifting. 

As of February 2019, magnetic north was located at 86.54 N 170.88 E, within the Arctic Ocean, according to the NCEI. (Magnetic south similarly does not line up with geographic south; it was at at 64.13 S 136.02 E off the coast of Antarctica as of February 2019.) 

Scientists release a new version of the World Magnetic Model every five years, so this 2020 update was expected. In February 2019, though, they had to release an update ahead of schedule due to the fast clip of magnetic north's movements. The 2020 model shows the "Blackout Zone" around magnetic north where compasses become unreliable and start to fail because of the proximity of true north. The new maps also show magnetic north east of the prime meridian, a boundary the pole crossed in September 2019, according to Newsweek. The prime, or Greenwich, meridian is the meridian that was set as the official marker of zero degrees, zero minutes and zero seconds in 1884;iIt runs through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in England. 

• Related: What If Earth's Magnetic Poles Flip?

It's currently unclear whether Earth's magnetic poles are headed for a flip-flop — switching north and south — or whether the magnetic field will soon strengthen again. Both events have happened in Earth's history without any notable effect on biology. However, modern navigation systems rely on magnetic north and will have to be recalibrated as the poles continue to wander. Already, for example, airports have had to rename some of their runways, which have names based on compass directions. 

• Photos: The World's Weirdest Geological Formations
• In Photos: The UK's Geologic Wonders
• Aurora Photos: See Breathtaking Views of the Northern Lights

Originally published on Live Science.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

Mystery as 100 Stars Disappear in the Night Sky

What’s going on now in space?

A comparison of old and new star catalogs shows that some objects seem to have gone missing.

The universe holds many mysteries that baffle astronomers from dark energy to cosmic rays to our own solar system… We live in a cosmic oddity as shown by the many alien sounds recorded out there. Now in a new science paper, a group of scientists compared star maps from the 1950s with recent images from the same spots, and discovered that 100 previously catalogued stars cannot be found anymore. Pretty baffling, no?

Many Stars Have Disappeared

The new data compiled by project ‘Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO)’ were gathered by comparing mapped stars listed in the U.S. Naval Observatory Catalogue (USNO) B 1.0, dating from the 1950s, with those in the more recent sky catalog of Pan-STARRS Data Release (DR1).

Among the 600 million stars found in the older catalog, 150,000 objects had no readily identifiable counterparts in the new star survey, although the Pan-STARRS can detect much fainter light sources than present in USNO.

The authors visually inspected 24,000 candidates of these 150,000 anomalies and discovered that 100 of these point sources of light had disappeared in the night sky.

How Do Stars Disappear From the Sky?

There are certainly natural phenomena – extremely flaring dwarf planets, failed supernova, or stars that might directly collapse into a black hole – behind the disappearance of several of those stars.

But 100 vanishing stars in less than 50 years is a lot and it would be an amazing surprise if they all can be explained by a natural phenomenon.

The authors themselves discuss the possibility that these mysterious disappearances could be the result of unknown phenomena, or the relics of technologically advanced civilizations, particularly the theoretical mega-engineering projects known as Dyson spheres.

What Are These Missing Stars?

Perhaps the missing objects are signs of an advanced civilization. But they’re probably not Dyson spheres.

First, it would be hard to explain why and how such a giant construction project, completely shading out the light of the host star, could be done within the short period of less than a century.

But more importantly, “traditional” Dyson spheres are not gravitationally stable. Even if one could be built near a star like our Sun, it would require more total mass than is available in all our Solar System’s planets, moons, and asteroids.

A few of these missing stars might be explained as flaring stars whose brightness dropped below the detection limit, or stars that collapsed directly into a black hole.

A large portion, however, might represent new stages in the life cycle of certain stars or new stellar phenomena that have not yet been seen. That by itself would be an exciting topic to investigate.

Where Are the Missing Stars?

Are they at the same location, just not emitting light anymore? Or perhaps they’ve moved to some other location.

If the latter, could some of these represent huge starships, the size of moons or planets, that moved outside the field of view?

This, of course, is a highly speculative suggestion. But it would address the hotly discussed Fermi Paradox, and would, in principle, be testable.

If these “missing” light sources represent giant starships, some should appear in new star surveys in some other part of the sky. In an ideal case, we might even be able to track their trajectories through time.

A new direction of future research would be to search for clusters of missing stars, which, if they exist, could be related to new natural phenomena in a particular region of space, or perhaps to activities of an extraterrestrial civilization.

I would on light sources that suddenly appear in new star surveys, and see whether they can be correlated to the stars that vanished. Either way, the authors have turned up something that may become very important for both astrophysical and SETI investigations. Continue reading Strange Sounds or visit Steve Quayle for more extraterrestrial headlines. [ApJ, Air and Space]

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Simulated Alien Abductions: the CIA, a Hot Hooker, and Secret Experiments

In a new article posted at his The UFO Trail blog (titled “Vallee declines to Substantiate Claims of CIA Simulating UFO abductions“) Jack Brewer wrote, on December 19: “Dr. Jacques Vallee declined to attempt to fully substantiate the assertion contained in his book, Forbidden Science – Volume Four, that he secured a document confirming the CIA simulated UFO abductions in Brazil and Argentina. ‘I felt a duty to call attention to the issue,’ Vallee explained in a Dec. 17 email, but chose not to share the document or address pertinent questions surrounding its circumstances.” As you’ll see from the information contained in the link above, Vallee and Brewer had an interesting discussion about all of this – although at this stage it appears not to have been resolved, in relation to what the “document” is and how all of these matters relate to those “simulated UFO abductions in Brazil and Argentina.”

There’s a distinct possibility (maybe, even, a probability) that this all relates to a very weird and highly controversial affair that went down in Brazil way back in the 1950s. Antonio Villas Boas was a Brazilian man who claimed, in late 1957, to have had wild sex with an equally wild babe from the stars, after having been kidnapped and taken on-board a UFO. An early alien abduction? Yep. Or maybe not. In the late-1970s, UFO researcher Rich Reynolds had contact with a man named Bosco Nedelcovic, who had links to the world of intelligence, who spent time working in South America, and who claimed that the Villas Boas affair was not what it appeared to be. He told Rich that, in reality, Villas Boas was the unwitting player in a new and bizarre experiment. According to Nedelcovic, the UFO that Villas Boas saw over his family’s property was really a helicopter. Not only that, Villas Boas was supposedly hit by some kind of mind-altering aerosol spray that quickly placed him into an altered state, after the pilot of the helicopter flew right over him and at a low level. As for the girl from the stars, she was said to have really been a hooker, a girl hired to take Villas Boas on the closest encounter of all. But, it was all a ruse: a mind-bending event designed to fabricate a UFO incident.

Like it or not, but the fact is that Villas Boas’ own words suggest strongly that he was indeed taken on-board a helicopter. Read Villas Boas’ very own words carefully. The craft, he said, was “like an elongated egg.” On the top of the craft there was, “something which was revolving at great speed and also giving off a powerful fluorescent reddish light” (rotor-blades? Probably, yes). As the craft took to the skies, it made a loud noise, “a sort of beat” (which is a perfect description of the noise associated with a helicopter). Put all those factors together and it sounds very much like Villas Boas was hauled aboard a helicopter. And not onto a flying saucer.

As the Washington Post noted Nedelcovic was “…a linguist with the American Defense College at Fort McNair and a tenacious promoter of building a Utopian society that blended elements of socialism and free market capitalism.” The Post further noted that Nedelcovic died of prostate cancer on December 25, 1999 at the Northern Virginia Hospice. As you will see from this link, Nedelcovic had correspondence with the CIA. Other correspondence between Nedelcovic and the CIA exists, but it is not online – at least, the bulk of it isn’t. For the record, Nedelcovic also told Rich Reynolds that he knew of other simulated/faked cases of alien contact. One of them, said Nedelcovic, involved a man named Arthur Bryant, who claimed a Contactee-type close encounter in April 1965. Bryant died just a few years later from a particularly aggressive brain tumor. The inference was that Bryan’s exposure to microwave-based technology of a government agency had caused the tumor. You can read the whole story in a very strange, but highly readable, 1967 book written by UFO investigator Eileen Buckle. It is called The Scoriton Mystery: Did Adamski Return? Running to slightly more than 300-pages in length, the book is essential reading for those who may want to pursue this whole saga further. It’s pretty rare and not cheap to buy. It will be interesting to see where all of this is going to lead, given the breaking news from Jack Brewer and the words of Jacques Vallee.

One final thing: Rich Reynolds told me a couple of days ago that Jacques Vallee was the first person that he (Rich) mailed the Nedolcovic material to. For the record, that was decades ago. So, while I don’t want to make too many assumptions or guesses, I do think that the document that is being discussed here at Mysterious Universe and at The UFO Trail blog is one of two things: (A) the “document” is something we haven’t seen before; or (B) it’s the package of material that Rich sent to Vallee years ago – and which is very interesting, but which has been discussed in the UFO research community for a number of years. If it’s a CIA document, that is being discussed, it’s a potentially big thing. If, however, it all traces back to Nedelcovic (who is long dead) then it’s down to the claims he made, and which should be pursued.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Classic Disk UFO Seen Flying Past Black Orb Over Kent, Washington, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: July 6, 2019

Location of sighting: Kent, Washington, USA

 

Now this round UFO was recorded a few months ago, however they missed so much more. Several other UFOs shoot past this round black object in the sky. At 58 sec mark a grey metallic disk shoot below and up near the black orb. To see it you must put the video into a slower speed of .25 so that it is easier to see. I don't believe anyone saw it yet. The disk has a round thin hump on its top, signifying it as a classic disk. 100% real, nothing to even argue about here. Its amazing. 

Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

Blue UFOs Recorded Over Scottsdale, Arizona On Dec 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: December 17, 2019
Location of sighting: Scottsdale, Arizona, USA

The eyewitness caught several blue glowing UFOs over Scottsdale, Arizona last week. The objects were lined up and flashing brightly. You can hear the excitement in the guys voice as he records the UFOs passing over head. When I made a screenshot of one of the objects, I notice that there is a metallic like object at its center. There are no wings, no propellers or visible engines, no windows, nothing that might identify this strange object. I do believe what we are seeing in this video is a genuine UFO fleet over Arizona. 
Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

Tall White Aliens Recorded Flying Disk Over Las Vegas, Nevada On Dec 19, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.

I added contrast to the photo above to see the disk better. 

Date of sighting: Dec 19, 2019
Location of sighting: Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

I have heard about flying disks and orbs over Las Vegas for over ten years...because people would email me reporting them to me with video and photos. What you are seeing in this recent video is a UFO...from an alien species called the Tall Whites, stationed in an underground base within the confines of the back mountian range of Nellis AFB. 

What the people don't know is that there is currently a Tall Whites (yes, thats the name the USAF calls them) alien base behind the old shooting range of Nellis AFB. This is on the edge of Las Vegas...along the hills. They are said to walk funny...due to the knee of the alien moving both ways. Some have even said they saw a few go into Las Vegas to play. They are dangerous if you touch one. They also don't like to be laughed at and might kill you for that. They are tall, but one is not considered an adult until after its 400 years old...by then it has grown taller than 2 meters. They have a set lifespan of 700 years...although they could expand it...their culture determined it to be that way. I will put a actual photo I found taken by google by accident of a young tall white visiting a pyramid in Mexico. I will also put Charles Hall video below for you to hear in his own words what he saw and did. 
Scott C. Waring 

Eyewitness states: 

I shot this video from my backyard in the Summerlin area of Las Vegas, Nevada on the night of December 19, 2019. I am making this video to show how incredible this gigantic UFO was. Anyone who watched the entire video must know that this is anything but a helicopter. So far I have at least four witnesses who watched this in detail and described the same thing I did. Nobody heard any sound at all and the UFO could have covered a fifty-mile span in three minutes.

Charles Hall Talks about working with the Tall Whites At Nellis AFB, in video below. 

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

On December 21, 2019 approx. 4.45 pm. when Joshua Studdard was leaving his last tower for the day he spotted a series of weird flashing lights in the sky over North Dakota on which he pulled over to catch a quick video of the lights that vanished moments after the video ends.

It definitely wasn't a plane, helicopter, drone or a flare so what else could it be?

  

Other videos of flashing lights ( peter2011 )

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

8 Scary Alien & Ufo Encounters Caught on Camera!

8 Scary Alien & Ufo Encounters Caught on Camera! Join me Rick as we take a look at what some people claim are real Aliens & UFOs. We’ll analyze the footage. Let’s take a close look at this mysterious phenomena.

Other videos, selected by peter2011

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

Brand-New Type of Explosion in the Solar Corona Discovered

Scientists have just discovered a brand-new type of explosion in the solar corona, the atmosphere of the Sun.

The ‘forced magnetic reconnection’ could help explain why the corona is hundreds of times hotter than the surface of the Sun.

The sun is entering a new Solar Cycle. We are entering the Grand Solar Minimum. Up to now researchers had no evidence suggesting an external driver for magnetic reconnection. But now, analysing new available data from May 2012, scientists have observed that it could be forced by solar eruptions.

What Is A Magnetic Reconnection?

Observations in May 2012 showed erupted material from the surface of the Sun, a so-called prominence, slamming into magnetic lines.

The interactions caused a dramatic realignment of the tangled magnetic field lines, releasing energy very quickly and causing an explosion.

The realignment of field lines is a studied featured of the Sun and it is known as magnetic reconnection.

Spontaneous vs Forced Magnetic Reconnection

The spontaneous magnetic reconnection requires very specific conditions.

On the other side, the forced one appears to be less strict so they can happen more often, given that there is something to supply the material.

Solar eruptions, flares and coronal mass ejections could be equally effective in forcing magnetic reconnection.

In other words, scientists believe that forced reconnection is everywhere. But they still have to prove it.

Mystery of the Corona Temperature

Forced magnetic reconnections heat up material to high temperatures more efficiently than the spontaneous counterpart.

This is why, solar scientists suspect it might have something to do with the mystery of the corona temperature.

The surface of the Sun has a temperature of around 5,499°C (9,930°F) but the corona is over 1 million °C (1.8 million °F).

Time will tell. Meanwhile please continue visiting Strange Sounds and Steve Quayle. [APJ, NASA]

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Las Vegas resident spots ‘unidentified object’ over city

By: Jordan Gartner

Photo by: UFOs Over Vegas/YouTube

• Please note: This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

{ https://kion546.com/ }

Black Knight Satellite Seen Near Jupiter - Live Recording UFOs On the Moon

https://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

CAPTAIN MARK RICHARDS & THE SECRET SPACE PROGRAM, A REPTILIAN WAR IN THE HEAVENS, WHO'S REALLY RUNNING THE PLANET? TRUMP'S SPACE FORCE(END OF DAYS)

Jo-Ann Richards is the Executive Director of educational non-profit, Earth Defense Headquarters. Her husband, Mark Richards, and his father, Ellis Loyd Richards, were involved with top-level military intelligence operations since World War II, many including on-world and off-world contact and battles with various alien species. Jo-Ann herself got started in this field after she’d been with Mark for several years. He gave her some reports to read related to his involvement with top-secret space and alien-related missions. 

In 2004 he suggested she go to a UFO conference. The next year she had a booth at it. Marks’ family history includes some very interesting bloodlines and personal connections. Both of his grandfathers worked with Nikola Tesla. Grandfather Richards worked on the Manhattan Project. Marks’ father spent summers with Tesla, Goddard, and Hubble. Both he and Mark were involved with top-secret things since they were teens. It runs in the family. In 1984, Mark was falsely convicted of murder and has been incarcerated ever since. The family now believes it was to keep him quiet about what he knows and to keep him from fighting the New World Order. 

Since approximately 1980, a secret space fleet code named ‘Solar Warden’ has been covertly operating in our skies. In fact, this has been the testimony shared by various whistleblowers and reporters all over the world. Before Solar Warden, there had been multiple “space programs”, dating back to the ’60s. 

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

The next video shows a number of interesting images, including various huge UFOs on and above the moon recorded by BruceSeesall, recently.

One UFO which seems to be parked next to a mega artificial structure is about 25 km long according to Bruce who captured the images with his telescope. (3.40 mark)

Two other UFOs can be seen moving above the lunar surface (11.20 mark).

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

AMAZING UFO video filmed over Las Vegas, Nevada – December 2019

Check out this amazing footage of a huge craft flying in the sky above LA on 19th December 2019.

Witness report:

 I shot this video from my backyard in the Summerlin area of Las Vegas, Nevada on the night of December 19, 2019. After reading hundreds of distasteful and tacky comments I decided to try one more time to show people that they are wrong about this amazing UFO being a helicopter. When I mapped out where I thought this began and ended it was approximately a 50-mile trip. If you look at the clock on the video you will notice it made that trip in 3 minutes and that was from a dead stop when it began. A helicopter would have to be going a thousand miles an hour to do that. Let’s just say it only went 25 miles in 3 minutes. That would be 500 miles per hour which is basically the speed you would be traveling at on a passenger jet at 32,000 feet. The bottom line is that this thing was large and it was moving fast. There’s No visible structure to this object like on an actual helicopter and at one point towards the end Of the video, it makes a sharp turn without slowing down.

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

Navy Pilot Who Filmed the ‘Tic Tac’ UFO Speaks: ‘It Wasn’t Behaving by the Normal Laws of Physics’

David Aragorn

In the 15 years since Chad Underwood recorded a bizarre and erratic UFO — now called “the Tic Tac,” a name Underwood himself came up with — from the infrared camera on the left wing of his F/A-18 Super Hornet, he’s become a flight instructor, a civilian employee in the aerospace industry, and a father. But he has not yet spoken publicly about what he saw that day, even now, two years after his video made the front page of the New York Times. As he explained before speaking with Intelligencer, Underwood has mostly wanted to avoid having his name “attached to the ‘little green men’ crazies that are out there.”

{ http://earthmysterynews.com/ }

Space Force: Trump officially launches new US military service

President Donald Trump has officially funded a Pentagon force focused on warfare in space - the US Space Force.

The new military service, the first in more than 70 years, falls under the US Air Force.

At an army base near Washington, Mr Trump described space as "the world's newest war-fighting domain".

"Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital," he said.

"We're leading, but we're not leading by enough, but very shortly we'll be leading by a lot."

"The Space Force will help us deter aggression and control the ultimate high ground," he added.

• France announces new space defence command
• Space Force: Trump 2020 asks supporters to vote on logo
• Four reasons India is going big on space

The funding allocation was confirmed on Friday when the president signed the $738bn (£567bn) annual US military budget.

The launch of the Space Force will be funded by an initial $40m for its first year.

What will the Space Force actually do?

It is not intended to put troops into orbit, but will protect US assets - such as the hundreds of satellites used for communication and surveillance.

It comes as US military chiefs see China and Russia making advancements in the military final frontier.

Vice-President Mike Pence previously said the two nations had airborne lasers and anti-satellite missiles that the US needed to counter.

"The space environment has fundamentally changed in the last generation," he said. "What was once peaceful and uncontested is now crowded and adversarial."

Space Force will build on the work of the existing US Space Command (SpaceCom), which was created in August to handle the US military's space operations.

Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett said the Space Force would comprise around 16,000 Air Force and civilian personnel.

It will be led by Air Force General Jay Raymond, who currently runs SpaceCom.

Earlier this month, Russia's President Vladimir Putin suggested US expansion in space posed a threat to Russian interests, and required a response from Russia.

• Putin warning over US space force plans
• Russia 'tried to spy on France in space'

"The US military-political leadership openly considers space as a military theatre and plans to conduct operations there," Mr Putin said.

{ https://www.bbc.com/news }

Return to sender: problemen met Boeing-capsule ‘Starliner’, die astronauten naar het ISS moet vervoeren - HLN.be

Eerste Boeing-ruimtevaartuig in verkeerde baan gekomen, keert zondag terug naar aarde

Bron: Belga, ANP, NY Times

 AFP  De CST-100 Starliner moet in de loop van volgend jaar mensen naar de ruimte brengen. De laatste keer dat de Verenigde Staten een bemande vlucht uitvoerden, was in juli 2011, bij de laatste spaceshuttlemissie. Sindsdien zijn de Amerikanen afhankelijk van de Russen.

UPDATE De geplande reis van de Boeing-ruimtecapsule Starliner richting het internationaal ruimtestation ISS is mislukt. Het tuig zal onverrichterzake terugkeren naar aarde, zo is vandaag op een persconferentie bij NASA gezegd.

De Starliner (CST-100 in het jargon) werd vandaag om 6.36 uur lokale tijd (12.36 uur Belgische tijd) voor een eerste testvlucht gelanceerd richting het ISS, met behulp van een Atlas-V draagraket. Als de test zou slagen, zouden er binnen afzienbare tijd astronauten mee van en naar het ruimtestation kunnen worden vervoerd.
Aan boord waren nu dus nog geen astronauten, wel een pop die Rosie werd gedoopt, een knuffel Snoopy, en zowat 300 kilogram aan voorraden en uitrusting voor de bemanning van het ISS. Morgen zou de capsule daar normaal moeten aanmeren, een week later zou het gevaarte weer naar de aarde terugkeren.

Phil Amato

✔@PhilAmatoANjax

Make sure to tune into Action News Jax at 6:36am. That’s when Boeing’s Starliner capsule is scheduled to launch on top of a Atlas 5 rocket at Cape Canveral. It’s an Orbital Test Flight that will eventually take astronauts to the ISS. A mannequin named Rosie is also on board.

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Boeing Space

✔@BoeingSpace

 · Dec 20, 2019

The zero-gravity indicator on Rosie’s flight is a flying ace. #AstronautSnoopy is on board! Snoopy's space experience dates back to #Apollo50 and is rocketing into the future on the @NASA_SLS Artemis mission.

Boeing Space

✔@BoeingSpace

Check out @Snoopy in #Starliner before launch.

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Lees ook

Crew Dragon van SpaceX met succes gelanceerd. Nu brengt hij dummy ruimte in, deze zomer volgen echte astronauten

Verkeerde baan

De lancering vanop Cape Canaveral in Florida zelf verliep vlekkeloos, de capsule maakte zich ook zoals gepland los van de draagraket. Maar helaas, de verdere reis van Starliner richting het ISS verliep niet probleemloos. Integendeel. Na de lancering kwam het vaartuig in een verkeerde baan rond de aarde terecht. “De ontsteking die nodig was voor de afspraak met het ISS vond niet plaats”, verduidelijkte NASA-baas Jim Bridenstine op Twitter. De capsule was wel “onder controle”. 

“Er was een anomalie aan boord van het tuig, waardoor de Starliner dacht dat hij op de goede baan zat. Maar de capsule heeft meer brandstof verbruikt dan voorzien om de controle te behouden. Daardoor kan er niet aangemeerd worden bij het ISS. Op dit moment vliegt de Starliner in een veilige baan”, zo klonk het later op de persconferentie. 

Daar werd ook aangekondigd dat ze de Starliner zondag zullen proberen terug op aarde te laten landen. Nadien wordt verder gekeken wat het exacte probleem was.

 AP  De Boeing-ruimtecapsule zou normaal zaterdag aanmeren aan het ISS en er een week blijven.

SpaceX

Boeing is een van twee ondernemingen die door de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA zijn aangeduid om ruimteschepen te bouwen die zullen worden ingezet tussen de aarde en het ISS. De tweede is SpaceX, waarvan de Crew Dragon in maart een succesvolle onbemande testvlucht naar het ISS ondernam. Zowel Boeing als SpaceX willen volgend jaar voor het eerst een bemande vlucht uitvoeren.

Sinds het einde van de Space Shuttle in 2011 voeren de Amerikanen geen eigen bemande ISS-ruimtevluchten meer uit. Amerikaanse astronauten zijn momenteel voor missies in het ISS aangewezen op de Russische Sojoez als transportmiddel.

Boeing

Het grotendeels mislukken van de testvlucht is de zoveelste tegenslag dit jaar voor het geplaagde Boeing. Na bekendmaken van het nieuws ging het aandeel verder in de min, hoewel dat volgens sommige analisten meer te maken heeft met de problemen rond de Boeing 737 MAX. 

Het ene na het andere land sloot in maart van dit jaar het luchtruim voor dit type vliegtuig na een serie dodelijke ongelukken met het toestel waar een softwarefout aan ten grondslag bleek te liggen. Verschillende maatschappijen schrapten hun orders bij Boeing en tot op de dag van vandaag wordt er niet met het toestel gevlogen. 

AP 

De bedoeling is dat de capsule binnen afzienbare tijd astronauten van en naar het ruimtestation vervoert.

 EPA

Memphis_Tom ///@memphis_tom

Incredible view of the Starliner launch as it passed over #pawleysislandsc including the first stage separation.

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REUTERS

{ https://www.hln.be/ } 

Oude muur die boeren moest beschermen tegen stijgende zeespiegel teruggevonden op bodem van Middellandse Zee - HLN.be

Bron: Sciencemag

Zeven tot negen millennia geleden steeg het zeeniveau aanzienlijk omdat de gletsjers – die tijdens de ijstijd flink in omvang waren toegenomen – terug aan het smelten waren. De zeespiegel steeg jaarlijks zo’n vier tot vijf millimeter. Omdat ze zich bedreigd voelden door de zeeën die stilaan dichterbij kwamen, probeerde men zichzelf te verdedigen tegen het zoute water. Met muren bijvoorbeeld.

Lees ook

Dendermonde eind deze eeuw onder water? “Ook zelf inzetten op acties om kinderen en kleinkinderen te redden”

Boerendorpje

Achter de 7.000 jaar oude muur verschool zich een boerendorpje. Van dat dorpje schieten nu nog wat ruïnes, twee begraafplaatsen en gereedschap over. Dankzij de menselijke overblijfselen in de begraafplaatsen konden archeologen met koolstofdatering bepalen dat het dorp zo’n 7.000 jaar oud moet zijn.

De muur - die inmiddels zo’n vier meter diep in de zee begraven ligt - was in zijn volle glorie ongeveer honderd meter lang en gebouwd met stenen die wel 1.000 kilogram konden wegen. Vermoedelijk zeulden de dorpsbewoners de kolossen van een riviertje, zo’n vier kilometer verderop, helemaal richting de zee.

En al beschermde de indrukwekkende muur hen even tegen zeestormen, moeten “de inwoners na een tijd beseft hebben dat ze daar weg moesten”, gelooft Jim Leary, archeoloog aan de universiteit van New York. Tot slot was de muur niet bestand tegen de groeiende zandduinen en het zoute water dat in hun waterputten sijpelde. “Ze probeerden zich aan te passen. Maar uiteindelijk hadden ze toch niet voldoende middelen om de zee te stoppen”, aldus hoofdonderzoeker en archeoloog aan de universiteit in Haifa Ehud Galili.

Les

“Mensen reageerden 7.000 tot zelfs 8.000 jaar geleden op precies dezelfde manier als nu”, aldus Amy Gusick, archeoloog aan het Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. “Laat het een les voor ons zijn”, zo stelt ze nog. De meeste dorpjes ‘verdronken’ immers, samen met hun muren.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }