Hello, Venus! Parker Solar Probe Makes Second Planetary Flyby.

By Meghan Bartels 

An artist's depiction of NASA's Parker Solar Probe flying past Venus.

(Image: © NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)

The sun is right there in the name of NASA's Parker Solar Probe, but a second mission of opportunity may make the spacecraft just as vital to Venus scientists as to those studying our local star.

Parker Solar Probe launched in August 2018, destined to spend seven years looping ever closer to the sun in hopes of sorting out some of the hottest mysteries about our star. But to do so, the spacecraft needed a carefully choreographed trajectory, one that included seven flybys of Earth's evil twin, Venus. And Venus scientists, who haven't had a dedicated NASA spacecraft since the mid-1990s, were not about to let that opportunity fly past them.

"The Venus flybys are like, if you have like a 48-hour layover in Paris, not leaving the airport," Shannon Curry, a planetary physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Space.com. "It would be crazy not to turn on [the instruments]." Curry and her colleagues made her case, and the Parker Solar Probe will gather its second batch of Venus data today (Dec. 26), as the probe makes its closest approach to the planet at 1:14 p.m. EST (1814 GMT).

• Related: The Strange Case of Missing Lightning at Venus

Of course, Parker Solar Probe's instruments are designed to study a star, not a planet. They focus mostly on plasma, the hot mess of charged particles that makes up the sun. Traditionally, planetary scientists want very different instruments on their spacecraft: radar devices to map the surface, spectrometers to identify chemicals and the like. But that doesn't make plasma data superfluous.

Two dedicated Venus missions have carried plasma detectors to the world: NASA's Pioneer Venus Orbiter and the European Space Agency's Venus Express. But those spacecraft were built decades ago. "The stuff that they were able to put on [Parker] Solar Probe takes measurements faster, better, stronger, like the whole deal," Curry said.

And she and her colleagues have plenty of questions about Venus that plasma data could help answer. For today's flyby, the team is particularly interested in a feature called the bow shock, where the planet's neighborhood meets the solar wind of charged particles that constantly stream off the sun.

The precise location of the bow shock varies based on how active the sun is, which changes over the course of the 11-year solar cycle. "We're not positive it'll cross the shock or not, but that's actually important because it'll tell us physically where the shock is at this point in the solar cycle," Curry said. "It tells us a lot about what the sun's doing, and the shock is a nice gauge of that."

And the environment on either side of the bow shock differs dramatically. Outside the shock is the pristine solar wind and the effects of solar storms. But if Parker Solar Probe crosses inside the shock, scientists should be able to better understand how quickly Venus is losing its atmosphere.

"The magnetic fields pile up and actually sort of drag the atmosphere off. It's almost like a slingshot," Curry said. "That's one of the biggest ways the atmosphere of Venus gets removed, the sun's magnetic field lines."

Venus scientists are interested in a more detailed measurement of atmosphere loss, because atmospheric pressure affects what state water takes; it's Earth's even 1 bar of pressure that helps keep our oceans liquid. "At some point, maybe liquids could exist again [on Venus], or maybe they did before and we just don't know," Curry said.

But the Venus atmospheric-loss measurements will really crank up during Parker Solar Probe's next two flybys, in July 2020 and February 2021. These two visits will carry the spacecraft right through what scientists call the tail of Venus, which is where the atmosphere slips away from the planet.

"Those are going to be the super-important ones. I think these first two are almost — not like dress rehearsals, but it's really important to make sure we get everything right," Curry said. "Flybys 3 and 4 will tell us mountains about atmospheric escape at Venus and then a lot of other dynamics we just don't understand."

Curry said that Parker Solar Probe may be able to solve a long-standing mystery about the surface of Venus: whether the planet sports small, patchy crustal magnetic fields. So far, Mars is the only planet where scientists have seen this phenomenon. "It's like a little magnetic rash on its belly, like little bubbles with magnetic fields," Curry said. But no one's gotten a close enough look at Venus to check for them. "We might not [see them], and they might not even be there. We just don't know."

The results of the first Venus flyby, which took place in October 2018, prove the importance of practice. During the pass, the spacecraft ended up shutting its instruments down, convinced that they were pointing straight at the sun, which they aren't meant to do.

"We're just looking at Venus, not the sun. Venus is just a superbright planet the way it reflects," Curry said. "That's why the instruments got confused." Now, Curry said, the project team believes it's figured out how to keep that error from happening again.

And the Venus work is benefiting from a science bonus discovered by the main Parker Solar Probe team, which realized that the spacecraft could gather and send back more data than originally anticipated. Curry had been willing to fight for even just an hour of data on a flyby; during the first maneuver, the team got about 10 hours of observations.

Curry is hoping to build similar Venus collaborations with the European and Japanese team running the BepiColombo mission en route to Mercury and with Europe's Solar Orbiter mission. Like Parker Solar Probe, both of these spacecraft also need to make Venus flybys to reach their targets.

"These are the only measurements of Venus we're going to have for, frankly, it might be the next decade," Curry said. "We have nothing planned to go to Venus." And the missions NASA is considering don't carry plasma instruments like Parker Solar Probe does, so questions like atmospheric loss might go unanswered even then.

Combine those two factors, and the mission's accidental planetary science looks even more precious. "With Venus science," Curry said, "anybody who gets data is a hero."

• Should We Land on Venus Again? Scientists Are Trying to Decide
• Life on Venus? Why It's Not an Absurd Thought
• Can Venus Teach Us to Take Climate Change Seriously?

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

The Biggest Alien Planet Discoveries of 2019

By Sarah Wells

The year did not disappoint.

An artist's depiction of exoplanets.

(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC-Caltech))

As 2019 comes to a close, it's time to review some of the biggest space science stories of the year. 

From a world with three suns in its sky to lots of possibly habitable real estate, the past year has seen some incredible exoplanet discoveries. Here are 10 of the most memorable.

• Related: The Greatest Spaceflight Moments of 2019
• More: Kaboom! The Biggest Space Bloopers of 2019

10. Teegarden's Star

This graphic shows a comparison of the habitable zones of several alien planets, and how the Teegarden's Star planets measure up. (Image credit: C. Harman)

In June 2019, researchers reported that they had found two Earth-like exoplanets circling a red dwarf known as Teegarden's Star, which lies only 12.5 light-years from Earth. 

The newfound worlds complete one lap around their host star in just 4.9 and 11.4 Earth days, respectively. Despite these close orbits, they're still thought to reside in the "habitable zone" — the range of distances from a star that can support the existence of liquid water on a world's surface — because Teegarden's star is so dim. 

From the data collected so far, scientists believe there might be more exoplanets to find in this system too.

9. Ploonets 

An artist's illustration of a potentially habitable exomoon orbiting a giant planet in a distant solar system. Such worlds could get stripped of their host planets and orbit stars independently, becoming "ploonets."  (Image credit: NASA GSFC/Jay Friedlander and Britt Griswold)

Who said space isn't adorable? In a preprint paper published on the website arXiv in July 2019, scientists gave a fanciful name to a class of wandering exomoons. In the scenario described in the paper, these exomoons were ripped from the gravitational pull of their host planet and pulled toward their host star. 

No longer just a moon, but still not quite an exoplanet, these weird exomoons needed a special name. Previous research had thrown around "moonmoon," but the paper published in July landed on the much cuter "ploonet." 

Ploonets are purely theoretical right now, but the paper showed how their journeys (and subsequent slow deaths) around their host stars might leave recognizable light signals. The researchers think that this light signature might explain some previously unexplained astronomical observations. 

8. Three suns! 

An artist's depiction of the view from a moon's surface of a gas giant and three suns. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Thanks to a little help from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), scientists discovered a strange new exoplanet in a three-star system with a surface temperature around 320 degrees Fahrenheit (160 degrees Celsius.) The exoplanet, called LTT 1445Ab, is 22.5 light-years from Earth and, despite having stars in triplicate, appears to make an orbit around one of them every five days. The other two red dwarfs simply loom in the exoplanet's sky.

In addition to its novel setup, scientists say that the exoplanet would be a perfect candidate for future atmospheric exploration thanks to its positioning between the stars and Earth. Scientists believe this would make it possible for even ground-based Earth telescopes to make observations about the exoplanet. 

7. Gassy preteen with two suns 

An illustration of Kepler-47, an exoplanet that, like DS Tuc Ab, orbits, two suns. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)

In March 2019, scientists used TESS data to discover a gassy, preteen exoplanet that researchers believe to be a mere 43 million years old. The exoplanet, called DS Tuc Ab, orbits one star in a two-star system once every eight days. 

And because DS Tuc Ab is still relatively young, scientists are interested in learning more about what this world's history could tell us about the formation of planets in our own solar system. For example, DS Tuc Ab still experiences considerable losses of its atmospheric gas due to radiation from its host star. Scientists hope to extrapolate this knowledge about DS Tuc Ab to imagine what might happen to Earth and other planets closer to home if they were to lose their atmospheres. 

Related: 10 Things That Blasted Through Space in 2019

6. GJ 357 d: A habitable world?

In July 2019, scientists used TESS data to find yet another treasure trove of possibly habitable exoplanets. The data identified three exoplanets in the dwarf star system GJ 357, which lies 31 light-years from Earth.

Two of the planets — GJ 357 c and d — can be classified as "super-Earths," worlds slightly bigger than our own. Meanwhile, GJ 357 b is something called a hot Earth, meaning that, while its size might be Earth-like, its surface gets much hotter (about 490 degrees Fahrenheit, or 254 degrees Celsius) than that of our own planet.

GJ 357 d in particular has grabbed a lot of attention, because it may well fall into the coveted habitable zone. This planet completes one lap around the host star every 55 Earth days. 

5. A snowball's chance

An artist's impression of a "snowball Earth." (Image credit: NASA)

Scientists have been peering into Earth's baby book to learn a little more about a kind of exoplanet deemed a "snowball." At certain points in their lives, snowballs can become tidally locked with their host star, always showing it the same face, and as a result develop huge, eyeball-like icy oceans on that face. 

Earth itself went through its own snowball phases as a younger planet. Because of this fact, scientists have speculated that snowball exoplanets may well be capable of sustaining life — and research published in July 2019 suggests they might even be better at it than originally imagined.

The paper focused on what might be happening on the land of these snowball planets instead of just their oceans. The study found that snowball planets would likely have relatively temperate inland zones, where temperatures hover around 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) and above — something that Earth-like life could easily handle.

4. Football-shaped world 

The top of WASP-121b's atmosphere is heated to a blazing 4,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,500 Celsius), hot enough to boil some metals. (Image credit: G. Bacon (STSci)/NASA/ESA)

In August 2019, scientists reported finding a strange, football-shaped exoplanet shedding its atmosphere at a rapid rate — and losing heavy metals like iron and magnesium along with it. This big, puffy exoplanet, called WASP-121b, is something called a "hot Jupiter," and it orbits so close to its sun that its temperature is hotter than any other known planet  — a whopping 4,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,538 Celsius) in the upper atmosphere. 

The proximity to its star not only heats up the exoplanet but also causes its football-like bulge as the star's gravity literally threatens to tear the exoplanet apart. Scientists were able to make this original observation using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope but hope to investigate the exoplanet further using the agency's James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in 2021.

3. Exoplanet water-vapor drama 

A clash over exoplanet data ruffled a few feathers in September 2019 as scientists raced to be the first to report findings of alien-world water vapor. 

The data in question was collected by a Université de Montréal-led team in 2016, 2017, and 2018 and suggested that the air of an exoplanet called K2-18 b features water vapor and clouds — a huge point of excitement for those searching for signs of alien life. But a team from University College London posted an analysis of this data around the same time the Canadian researchers did.

While such scientific scooping is not illegal — the data was open-access — some astronomers saw it as poor form. And the Canadian team leader said he wished the London team had consulted him about their plans. 

The two studies interpreted the data somewhat differently, but both concluded that there is water vapor in K2-18 b's atmosphere. And that's a good thing, all the drama notwithstanding. 

Related: Kaboom! The Biggest Space Bloopers of 2019

2. Starless exoplanets may orbit black holes 

Planets orbit a supermassive black hole named Gargantua in the 2014 sci-fi blockbuster "Interstellar." A new study suggests that thousands of starless planets could orbit every such black hole. (Image credit: Paramount Pictures)

Using a computer model, scientists determined in October 2019 that starless, Neptune-like planets could form around and orbit supermassive black holes. Instead of calling a cozy solar system home, these exoplanets would live on the edge of, or about 10 to 30 light-years away from, a light-eating black hole and would be comprised of icy dust left in its wake. Based on their model, the scientists said that such voracious black holes could be host to tens of thousands of planets. 

At least in theory, anyway; detecting such exoplanets would be extremely challenging. For example, astronomers couldn't use the most prolific planet-detection strategy, the transit method, to find such worlds. The transit method looks for dips in light that result when an exoplanet passes in front of its host start. But, because black holes eat light instead of emitting it, this obviously wouldn't work. So, scientists might have to rely on models and indirect methods for now.

1. Exoplanet collision?

(Image credit: NASA/SOFIA/Lynette Cook)

Scientists have been observing a lot of warm dust in the star system BD +20 307, which is about 300 light-years from Earth. And they're starting to get excited, because this dust might be evidence of a fairly recent planetary collision. The observations were first made a decade ago and then reaffirmed in April 2019. 

For scientists, this exciting possibility represents an opportunity to learn more about how such impacts affect the formation and evolution of planetary systems. This hits close to home, as it's believed that Earth's moon formed after a giant impact. 

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to reflect the correct distance to the exoplanets of GJ 357. The correct distance is 31 light-years from Earth, not 31 million light-years.

• 7 Ways to Discover Alien Planets
• The Strangest Alien Planets (Gallery)
• TESS: NASA's Search for Earth-Like Planets

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

Of the many and varied documents that have surfaced under the terms of the U.S. government’s Freedom of Information Act, one of the most fascinating is a 33-pages-long report on psychic phenomena titled “Paranormal Phenomena — Briefing on a Net Assessment Study.” Written in January 1973 by P.T. Van Dyke and M.L. Juncosa (of RAND) for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), it makes for notable reading. It should be noted that over the years and decades, U.S. military- and intelligence-agencies have (A) tried to use dogs to psychically locate landmines on battlefields; (B) studied out-of-body phenomena; (C) attempted to determine if both animals and people have souls; and (D) studied the possibility of that psychic phenomena can cause heart-attacks. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But, now, let’s get back to that “Paranormal Phenomena — Briefing on a Net Assessment Study.”

Without doubt, the most intriguing section of the document is the one that is titled Possible Military Applications. The section is split into four different parts. The first is titled “Long- and Short-Distance Information Transfer.” It states: “For a variety of reasons, including apparent violations of some basic principles of communication theory, the probability of long-distance telepathic communication being confirmed as a real phenomenon appears rather low; however, these considerations may not apply with equal force to the possibility of short-range information transfer by telepathic means (of the order of a few meters). It should be noted, though, that long-distance telepathic phenomena occupy a paramount place in modern experimental research, but that their confirmation and theoretical explanation would require a modification of known laws of physics.”

The second part goes by the heading of “Equipment Control and System Damage.” It provides the following: “It would not be conceptually difficult, for example, to imagine the utility of psychokinesis (if feasible) in disrupting the electrical systems associated with an ICBM’s guidance program.” This is particularly intriguing as,  in some ways, it ties in with some of the incredible claims that have been made concerning how, in decades past, UFOs have been able to disable ICBMs and affect nuclear-missile-launch facilities. Now, let’s move on.

Part-three has an eye-opening title: “Man-Machine Interactions.” We are told that, “These entail an application of both telepathy and psychokinesis to produce a quasi-symbiotic relationship between man and, say, computing equipment on a more intimate basis than is presently feasible.” Although I don’t buy into the story that the late Philip J. Corso presented in his 1997 book, The Day After Roswell, he certainly addressed this matter: “Were all of this to be true, could it not be argued that the silicon wafers we recovered from Roswell were the real masters and space travelers and the EBE creatures their hosts or servants? Once implanted successfully on Earth, our culture having reached a point of readiness through its development of the first digital computers, would not the natural development stream, starting from the invention of the transistor, have carried us to the point where we achieve a symbiotic relationship [italics mine] with the silicon material that carries our data and enables us to become more creative and successful?”

“Body Control and Healing” is the title of part-four. In relation to those “possible military applications,” Van Dyke and Juncosa said: “One may envision an application of both autogenic phenomena (voluntary control of the autonomic nervous system) and what is traditionally known as ‘faith healing’ to battlefield injuries. There is, in fact, some evidence that certain individuals may accelerate organic healing processes through various psychosomatic effects. The ability to resist normally intolerable conditions, such as torture or brainwashing in captivity, might be another application of these phenomena.”

The conclusions were driven by the concerns that the Soviets might have gotten ahead of the U.S. The “general conclusions” of Van Dyke and Juncosa were as follows: “Over forty years of research in the United States have failed to significantly advance our understanding of paranormal phenomena; in several areas, U.S. research is beginning to track Soviet research; there is much Soviet interest in U.S. work, especially in possible military-oriented research; visible U.S. and Soviet levels of effort appear roughly equal;  there is some evidence of Soviet government funding of certain areas of research; published information on Soviet experimental design and analysis tends to be vague and incomplete; Soviet research is much more oriented toward biological and physical theorizing than is U.S. research; if paranormal phenomena do exist, the thrust of Soviet research appears more likely to lead to explanation, control, and application than is U.S. research.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

As if Elon Musk needs yet another reason for people to hate his guts, here’s one more that has nothing to do with Teslas, Mars, cave rescues, politics or the dangers of artificial intelligence. Beginning in January, Musk’s SpaceX will conduct regularly-scheduled launches of batches of 60 communications satellites at a time, with a goal of about 1500 by the end of the year, joining the two batches of 60 launched in 2019. Those two raised the ire of astronomers and star-gazers – especially the second batch which are in a low 280 km orbit and clearly visible in the night sky. (Video here and here.) If astronomers think 60 is bad and 1,500 is worse, SpaceX already has approval for a total of 12,000 satellites and has filed paperwork to launch 30,000 more. THIRTY-THOUSAND! No wonder they’re angry.

Radio telescope

Dhara Patel, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, vented disdain to the BBC. Dr. Dave Clements, an astrophysicist from Imperial College London, explained that the moving satellites will mess with telescopes that are taking large surveys of the sky, comparing it to “like someone’s walking around firing a flashbulb every now and again.” The bright lights will also hide anything and everything behind them “whether that’s a nearby potentially hazardous asteroid or the most distant Quasar in the Universe.”

Musk’s mayhem in the midnight sky is already causing problems for ufologists. On December 23rd, a number of people in northern Italy reported seeing a line of at least 25 UFOs. Dr. Jen Golbeck of the Italian astronomical observatory actually sounded excited when she tweeted the explanation for the UFOs:

@jengolbeck
If you saw a row of UFO like lights in the sky in IL, IA, MI (like this but spaced out), that was SpaceX Starlink Satellites! You’ll be able to see them in the next few days, too!
Check here for a map (and set the time back to see their track today)
https://t.co/wtkU9xSFY9

This still sucks.

Who will win this fight for the skies? SpaceX claims it is working on a special coating to make the satellites less reflective, although less is still more when you’re talking 42,000 satellites. The UK company OneWeb is looking to put as many as 2,000 satellites in orbit. While touting its work with astronomers to minimize their influence on the skies, Ruth Pritchard-Kelly, vice president of OneWeb, may have given the best answer to the “Who will win?” question:

“There is no question that the entire world is entitled to be connected to the internet…. So it’s going to happen. And probably three or four of these systems are going to happen.”

So … it’s going to happen. Perhaps Musk can make peace with astronomers by giving them and their telescopes a free trip to nearly-satellite-free Mars.

Het paleis werd ontdekt op de archeologische site van de oude stad Kuluba, vlak bij Cancún, in het uiterste oosten van het schiereiland Yucatán. Het was een belangrijke plaats tot de komst van de Spaanse ontdekkingsreizigers. De afmetingen zijn indrukwekkend, het paleis was maar liefst 6 meter hoog, 55 meter lang en 15 meter breed. 

Foto's van het eeuwenoude paleis. Bron: Mauricio Marat, INAH.

MAUMARAT

Een archeologe aan het werk.

Bron: Mauricio Marat, INAH

{ https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/ }

Archaeologists found an ancient Mayan palace that was probably used by elite members of society over 1,000 years ago. The palace was discovered in the ancient city of Kuluba which is not far from Cancun, Mexico.

The large structure was found in the eastern part of the Kuluba archaeological zone which is a pre-Hispanic site located in the Yucatán state. Excavations at the site revealed the large palace that measured 180 feet long by 50 feet wide and 20 feet in height. According to the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), it was inhabited by locals during two lengthy time periods between 600 and 1050 A.D.

In addition to the palace, four other structures were discovered. They found an altar, remains of two residential buildings, and a round shaped structure which they think was an oven. There is still much more work that needs to be done, though. “This work is the beginning, we’ve barely began uncovering one of the most voluminous structures on the site,” archaeologist Alfredo Barrera said in a video statement.

Chichen Itza

According to the INAH, conservationists are looking to reforest certain parts of Kuluba in order to protect the site against sun and wind damage.

The ancient city of Kuluba had very important connections with other Maya cities like Ek’ Balam and Chichen Itza as it was part of their network of trade and territory.

The Mayan civilization prospered in Central America for approximately 3,000 years – reaching their peak between 250 and 900 A.D. Today, their descendants still live throughout different Maya areas. The Mayans created very advanced architecture and art in addition to having the only completely developed written language in that area during that time.

Mayan calendar

They are also famously known for their astronomical and mathematical systems. In fact, they had extensive knowledge of the stars and relied on astrological cycles in order to figure out when to plant their crops. It is believed that they even built their cities to coincide with the stars. The pyramid at Chichen Itza, for example, was constructed in accordance to the position of the sun during the spring and fall equinoxes. When the sun sets on those two days, the pyramid casts a shadow upon itself which aligns perfectly with the head carving of the Mayan’s serpent god. The serpent’s body is created by the shadow which makes it look as though it’s crawling towards the ground during the setting of the sun.

This new discovery of a Mayan palace is just one of the many astonishing remains that have been found throughout the years created by an incredibly fascinating civilization. Pictures of the palace can be seen here.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

It looks like Russian President Vladimir Putin got what he wanted from Santa for Christmas – a working hypersonic missile that can travel at up to 27 times the speed of sound. At that speed (33339.6 km/h or 20716.3 mph), which arrived on Putin’s roof first – Santa or the missile?

“The Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation, Army General Sergei Shoigu, reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin on setting up on December 27 from 10:00 on combat duty the first missile regiment armed with the latest strategic missile system with the Avangard hypersonic planning winged warhead.”

Interfax reports that the first Avangard missile is in the Yasnensky Missile Division, which is deployed in the Orenburg region at the southern end of the Ural Mountains in southwestern Russia. That’s very close to Europe, although its range is likely to be farther than that. The Moscow Times reports that the Avangard was tested in December 2018 and hit a practice target 6,000 km (3,728 miles) away. But the Avangard is much more than just the world’s fastest missile. It’s a ‘boost-glide’ system, which means it’s launched like a ballistic missile but then quickly re-enters the atmosphere at a lower trajectory and glides unpowered for thousands of kilometers.

It was there a blink of an eye ago.

But wait … there’s more!

“It is not so much the speed of the hypersonic weapon alone that counts. It is its extraordinary maneuverability as it glides towards its target. This poses a huge problem for existing anti-missile defense systems. Indeed the glide vehicle’s trajectory, “surfing along the edge of the atmosphere” as one expert put it to me recently, presents any defensive system with additional problems. Thus, if Russia’s claims are true, it has developed a long-range intercontinental missile system that may well be impossible to defend against.”

Jonathon Marcus, the BBC’s defence correspondent says the Avangard could put Russia ahead of both China and the U.S. in this technology. As Vladimir Putin himself put it:

“Not a single country possesses hypersonic weapons, let alone continental-range hypersonic weapons. The West and other nations were “playing catch-up with us.”

Being the nice guy that he is, Putin allowed a team of U.S. inspectors to see a demonstration of the Avangard as part of transparency measures under the New START nuclear arms treaty with the U.S., which is up for renewal in 2021. According to Aljazeera, U.S. defense secretary Mark Esper says the Pentagon is working on the development of hypersonic weapons but it will be “probably a matter of a couple of years” before one is tested – after the New START treaty is renewed … or not renewed.

Say it again — who’s Number 1?

What does Russia’s deployment of the Avangard mean? Jonathon Marcus puts it bluntly.

“With a whole new generation of nuclear weapons at the threshold of entering service, many believe not just that existing agreements should be bolstered, but that new treaties are needed to manage what could turn into a new nuclear arms race.”

Merry Christmas from your pal Vladimir.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

New Theory Explaining The “Dark Energy” Phenomenon

Does the Universe have borders?

The International Journal of Modern Physics has published an article by the IKBFU Physics and Mathematics Institute Artyom Astashenok and the Institute’s MA student Alexander Teplyakov. The article refers to the issue of the “Dark Energy” and an assumption is made that the Universe has borders.

Artyom Astashenok said, “The fact that our Universe is expanding was discovered almost a hundred years ago, but how exactly this happens, scientists realized only in the 90s of the last century, when powerful telescopes (including orbital ones) appeared and the era of exact cosmology began. In the course of observations and analysis of the data obtained, it turned out that the Universe is not just expanding, but expanding with acceleration, which began three to four billion years after the birth of the Universe”.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

Linda Moulton Howe: Alien Agendas That Are Hostile Enemies

Professional controlled remote viewers, who have worked for the CIA and DIA, report that this universe is teeming with life and consciousness. Alien agendas that are hostile enemies.

Emmy and Peabody Award-winning investigative journalist Linda Moulton Howe has received insights from several whistleblowers and scientists. Join Linda for this exclusive opportunity to learn where the celestial battle lines are being drawn.

Linda Moulton Howe is a graduate of Stanford University with a Masters Degree in Communication. She has devoted her documentary film, television, radio, writing and reporting career to productions concerning science, medicine and the environment. Ms. Howe has received local, national and international awards, including three regional Emmys, a national Emmy nomination and a Station Peabody award for medical programming.

Linda’s documentaries have included A Strange Harvest and Strange Harvests 1993, which explored the worldwide animal mutilation mystery. Another film, A Prairie Dawn, focused on astronaut training in Denver. She has also produced documentaries in Ethiopia and Mexico for UNICEF about child survival efforts and for Turner Broadcasting in Atlanta about environmental challenges.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

Cultural Evolution Caused Broad-Scale Historical Declines Of Large Mammals Across China

Local extinction of 5 megafauna taxa from much of China over the past 2 millennia were found to be closely linked to filtering effects driven by cultural evolution rather than climate change.Cultural evolution has been the dominant driver of range contractions in megafauna taxa across China since the beginning of Common Era, with little or no direct importance of climate. A research team led by Aarhus University along with collaborators from Nanjing University analyzed maps of megafauna distribution dynamics and societal development based on Chinese archival records alongside data on climate across China from 2 to 1953 CE.

Human activities are now playing a dominant role in driving changes in Earth’s biodiversity and are responsible for the incipient sixth mass extinction, but the historical processes leading to this situation are poorly understood, often without emphasis on cultural evolution as a potential key process underlying anthropogenic impacts. A team of researchers from Aarhus University and Nanjing University has now shown that cultural evolution overshadowed climate change in driving historical broad-scale biodiversity dynamics.Map of the northern boundary of Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) in the study area over the past four millennia, based on multiple archaeological and historical sources. The distribution dynamics were inconsistent with the trend of mean annual temperature across the study area. Oracle bone scripts were used for divination by a cultural group recognized as Chinese ancestors ruling much of the North China Plain. The significant similarity between these scripts and their modern forms for the large mammals supports the past wide distribution of these taxa in ancient China.

Credit: Shuqing Teng

The Sumatran rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) was widely distributed in eastern China in historical times, but was extirpated due to increasing human pressure — and process that has continued to the present day in its remaining range in southeast Asia, threatening to cause the complete extinction of this species, with likely less than 80 individuals surviving, all in Indonesia.

The study provides clear evidence that cultural evolution historically has overshadowed past climate change in shaping broad-scale megafauna patterns, in contrast to the common belief that human societies were unimportant in driving biodiversity dynamics at such large spatiotemporal scales until recent time frames such as the Industrial Revolution or the Great Acceleration of the 20th century.

This finding highlights the importance of culture’s role in filtering current ecological assemblages from historical species pools. Perspectives through the lens of cultural filtering should also stimulate thoughts on what is natural – notably helping to overcome the Shifting Baseline Syndrome, the tendency to accept an already degraded state as natural due to lacking recognition of earlier declines – and which natural world we aim to conserve or restore.

Furthermore, modification of cultural filters will be key to respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene biodiversity crisis, as it is fundamentally culturally driven, as shown by this study of historical China, and how to achieve this is an important research challenge.

Contacts and sources:

• Jens-Christian Svenning
  Aarhus University

Citation:

• Long-term effects of cultural filtering on megafauna species distributions across China Shuqing N. Teng, Chi Xu, Licheng Teng, and Jens-Christian Svenning. PNAS first published December 23, 2019 
• http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1909896116 
• https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/12/17/1909896116

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

Fleet Of UFOs Shoot Past Earths Sun Recorded By NASA Satellite, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Dec 11, 1999

Location of sighting: Earths sun

Source: Heloiviewer.org 

 

Here is a great video taken from the NASA satellite recording our sun. It happened back in 1999, but the evidence is still on the Helioviewer site today. Found by Youtuber Wireeye, these object are obviously not solar material from the sun, but instead seem to be heading towards our sun. Its an entire UFO fleet. Some of the ships are incredibly huge and unusual in shape...three like a butterfly or winged creatures. 

 

Its refreshing to see something I have not seen before...here are a few ships together that demonstrate that alien fleets do exist in our solar system, flying together for safety. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

500 Meter Long UFO Over Kazakhstan, Dec 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: December 2019

Location of sighting: Kazakhstan 

 

A passenger in a plane over Kazakhstan caught sight of a glowing disk in the distance. The disk is above the cloud ceiling. Even a low cloud ceiling is about 6000 meters high or 6km high. So its impossible that this was a roof of a building. This was recorded at sunset and as I have said before, most UFO sightings occur during sunset. Even cloaked UFOs will become visible at this time due to the angle of the sun, person and UFO...makes the UFO visible for a few seconds to a few minutes. This is such an example and the UFO looks to be very long, about 1/2km long or 500 meters across. Incredible and absolute proof that aliens are flying over us, quietly recording and observing our activities. 

Scott C. Waring-Taiwan 

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

Rex Finfgeld, experienced an NDE in 2011 when he fell 26 feet and landed, head first, on concrete. Sometime while comatose and crashing, he had an NDE.

He says, "I experienced my own pure being. I was still me but I was also pure being itself. For a moment I was the all of everything. I was pure love, life, and the mind and imagination that gives rise to all of creation."

Since his NDE, he now sees and thinks in ways he never thought possible -- especially regarding consciousness, divinity, the unified field, and a prospective multi-universal reality.

  

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

Alien brooch giveaway!

20 people that will Like, Share and leave a comment this Facebook post will get this alien brooch shipped to their home address, WORLDWIDE!

End date: 1st January 2020!

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

The Denver Post first reported them on December 23rd. Most expected the organization or people behind them to be discovered and hopefully revealed by the authorities within a day or so. Nearly five days later, the mysterious fleet of at least 17 large non-Christmas-present drones with six-foot wingspans continues to fly in formation every night over a sparsely populated area spanning Yuma and Phillips counties in northeast Colorado. Unleash the conspiracy theories!

“They’ve been doing a grid search, a grid pattern. They fly one square and then they fly another square.”

Phillips County Sheriff Thomas Elliott observed the drones and reported them to the FAA (no information) and the U.S. Air Force (not ours). The Denver Post called the Drug Enforcement Administration (not ours either), the U.S. Army Forces Command (unaware of any military drones in that area) and the Department of Defense (no response). Undersheriff William Myers witnessed eight drones flying near the intersection of U.S. 385 and County Road 54 and received calls at the same time of one hovering motionless 25 miles away over Paoli and eight more ten miles from Paoli over Haxtun. They appear to be at an altitude of 200 feet to 300 feet, fly at steady speeds of up to 40 mph, appear regularly at about 7 pm and disappear by 10 pm. While all of this sounds pretty suspicious, Undersheriff Myers is cautiously openminded.

“They do not seem to be malicious. They don’t seem to be doing anything that would indicate criminal activity.”

He also warns any residents who see the giant drones not to shoot them down – while the drones themselves don’t appear to be breaking any local or federal laws, destroying one is a federal crime and can cause a fire … or worse, if it’s some sort of secret weapon.

While Denver-based aerial photographer, drone pilot and drone school operator Vic Moss thinks it’s probably a local drone company, he’s suspicious that they haven’t notified local authorities – something he claims all of the ones he knows would do. Tyler Rogoway over at The Drive, who keeps a close watch on suspicious military activities, is especially doubtful about this being routine land surveillance.

“The airspace where this is occurring is peculiarly desolate, as well, making it ideally suited for such a task, but the flights are not legally occurring, which makes the whole affair quite suspicious. The fact that the activity is happening after sundown is even more intriguing and adds to the notion that whoever is doing this knows it is outside the bounds of FAA regulations.”

He points out that this could be a nefarious group rehearsing for a drone operation similar to the “game-changing attack on Saudi oil facilities in September” and points out that drones with 6-foot wingspans are capable of carrying weapons and explosives. They’re extremely difficult to follow or track because they can fly without lights – illegal but possible. He also notes that seventeen drones could swarm one location or hit up to 17 separate targets.

Uh-oh.

Colorado is home to numerous military bases, the U.S. Air Force Academy … and a number of people who like to hide out in the mountains. These suspicious giant drone operations have been going on for five days without ending and with no resolution. They’re worth keeping an eye on.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

In 1997 I interviewed the well-known British UFO investigator, Jenny Randles, regarding a strange series of events she found herself in, back in late 1986 (you can find the story in Randles’ From Out of the Blue book). It was a very curious saga involving allegedly classified documents, dead aliens, crashed flying saucers, and much more. It all began in October 1986, when Randles came into contact with a man who had then recently left his employment with the British Army. According to the man, he had in his possession a large stash of still-classified material on UFOs that he had acquired under very controversial circumstances. The story that “Robert” told was as remarkable as it was inflammatory. Roughly a year or so earlier, an American individual, employed by the U.S. military and working at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, came across the computerized files while engaged in repairing one particular system at the base. And we’re not talking about just a few pages of material. According to what Robert told Randles and Hough, the number of pages was huge. The man allegedly printed around six hundred pages of material, which wasn’t even anywhere near the overall total. It turns out that – allegedly – the man in question was friends with Robert’s commanding-officer in the British Army; the two having met on an exchange-program. Fearful about what he had got himself into, the computer-specialist gave the hundreds of pages of material on those aforementioned crashed saucers and alien autopsies to the CO. From there, they reached Robert.

One of the papers referenced the autopsy of a strange body. Randles also said: “There was a lot of material about Roswell, including photographs of the UFO and of the aliens. One of the most detailed files was an autopsy report – that ran close to 200 pages in length – of the bodies recovered from the Roswell crash. Robert remembered the name of the doctor who had written it. His name was Dr. Frederick Hauser, a name I’d never seen connected with UFOs in any way whatsoever. Robert said that there was a very detailed account that was mostly filled with medical jargon about the autopsy which he didn’t understand, and there was a photograph of this entity with a slit right down the middle from the neck to the navel.”

And there was still more to come, as Jenny Randles demonstrated to me: “One of the first things Robert said was that the aliens were very human-looking. He said that the head was completely bald, but the most unusual feature of the face was the nose, which was almost flush into the face, almost unnoticeable. He couldn’t tell from the photographs, but the autopsy report made it clear that the beings were slightly smaller than average human size – about five feet in height.” Time to look into that Dr. Hauser, methinks. So far, I’ve not seen anyone dig deep into the man and his life.

Moving on, there’s the matter of an undeniably controversial document that surfaced in the 1990s from UFO researcher, Timothy Cooper. He, Cooper, claimed to have received a large number of old, secret documents that were focused on crashed UFOs, dead aliens, and the usual UFO conspiracy fodder. As for that document, it is titled the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary. It states that on “…3 July 47, radar stations in east Texas and White Stands Proving Ground, N.M., tracked two unidentified aircraft until both dropped off radar.” Still with the IPU summary paper, we are told the following concerning the bodies: “From what descriptions the team was able to learn and from photographs taken by intelligence photographers, the occupants appear in most respects human with some anatomical differences in the head, eyes, hands and feet. They have a slight build about five feet tall, with grayish-pink skin color. They have no hair on their bodies and clothed with a tight fitting flight suit that appears to be fire proof (some of the bodies looked as if they had been burned on head and hands). Their overall stature reminds one of young children. It is believed that there were male and female genders present, but hard to distinguish.”

The descriptions of the aliens in the IPU document sound very similar to those contained in Robert’s files, suggesting a possible (maybe likely) connection between the two, in terms of their origins. The same document states that, “…Dr. Detlev Bronk has been asked to assist in the autopsy of one well preserved cadaver .”  As for Bronk, there’s this from The Majestic Documents website: “A native of New York City, Bronk was born on 13 August 1897, attended Swarthmore College, the University of Michigan, and from 1929 to 1940 was Professor for Medical Physics at the University of Pennsylvania. Later in 1940 he was appointed Professor of Physiology and Bio-physics at Cornell Medical School, NYC. Favorable investigations were undertaken of Bronk by the FBI for government-related work in both 1941 and 1947. According to FBI papers of 1961 on Bronk, ‘…he is a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee and has been President of Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, NYC, since 1953. He has served on many government committees in a consultant capacity and is recognized throughout the country as one of the nation’s top scientists.’ During his working life, Bronk also served as Chairman of the National Science Board, President of the National Academy of Sciences and National Research Council.”

Personally, I don’t believe that the IPU document is a real, government document – mainly because I don’t believe aliens crashed at Roswell. Either it’s a sophisticated hoax or carefully crafted disinformation to muddy the Roswell waters. So, I think we can write-off Bronk as having been involved in the autopsy of an alien in the 1940s. Maybe, though – for those who cling onto the belief that there were some real autopsies of aliens back then – it’s perhaps time to dig into the life of the mysterious Dr. Hauser, whose name popped up in those files that Jenny Randles’ was told of by her British Army source in 1986.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

In an interview with New York Magazine, U.S. Navy pilot Chad Underwood finally came forward for the first time and spoke about his encounter with the infamous tic-tac shaped UFO that was filmed off the coast of California in 2004. The incident has been widely recognized as the “Nimitz UFO encounter”.

The bizarre footage of the unidentified flying object was captured on Underwood’s radar pod on the F/A-18 Super Hornet that he was flying that day. As for why it took fifteen years for Underwood to come forward with his story, he said that “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.’”

He did, however, admit to seeing something very mysterious and unexplained that day back in November of 2004. “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. Part of the reason why the encounter was so bizarre was that the object was flying at approximately 50,000 before suddenly dropping down to around a hundred feet above sea level in just a few seconds without making a sonic boom or expelling any exhaust plumes. He added that the craft had “no method of propulsion that was keeping it airborne: no wings, no heat, keeping it airborne or aloft.”

One of the many theories circulating is that they witnessed a bird, but Underwood said that it’s not possible. “You don’t see birds at 5,000 or 10,000 or 20,000 feet. That’s just not how birds operate,” he explained.

As for the theory that it was a top-secret military test craft, Underwood claimed that if it was a test aircraft, he had the clearance to know about it. “You know, I’ve got top-secret clearance with a ton of special-project clearances. So, it’s not like I wasn’t cleared to know. But, as I’m sure you’ve found in your research, to have clearance to know something, you have to have both the clearance that it’s elevated to and you have to have the ‘need to know’ it. And, clearly, whatever it was, if it was a government project, I did not need to know.”

In addition to that, there is no known aircraft on this planet that could have maneuvered in that manner. “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,” he said, adding, “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.”

The entire interview that New York Magazine conducted with Chad Underwood can be read in full here.

So, what exactly was the tic-tac shaped object? Nobody seems to know and the military even spent weeks attempting to figure out for themselves what Underwood and his co-workers saw that day. The mystery continues…

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

China test raket die volgend jaar verkenner naar Mars moet sturen - HLN.be

Bron: ANP

De lancering van vrijdag gebeurde vanaf het lanceercomplex Wenchang op het zuidelijke eiland Hainan. Volgens de autoriteiten was ze “een compleet succes”. De vorige lancering van een Lange Mars 5, in juli 2017, mislukte nog. Daardoor werd de reis naar Mars uitgesteld, van dit jaar naar komende zomer. Een nieuwe tegenslag zou nog meer vertraging hebben veroorzaakt.

Lees ook

Jill Peeters: “Ik heb 19 jaar lang als een tornado geraasd, maar ik kan dat niet nog eens opbrengen”

Bodem

De Marsverkenner van volgend jaar heet Huoxing-1. Hij moet onder meer zoeken naar moleculen in de bodem van Mars om te kijken of er sporen van leven zijn. 


De Lange Mars 5 moet eind volgend jaar ook een missie naar de maan lanceren. Die robot, Chang’e 5, moet bodem en stenen van de maan ophalen en terugbrengen naar de aarde.

 AFP

AFP

VIDEOS, selected by peter2011

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

Tom Horn & LA Marzulli: The Secret Alien Agenda

What happens when you put three of the brightest Christian minds together in one room to discuss the strange and supernatural events in the Bible? Sparks fly as Gary Stearman interviews fellow UFO experts, Tom Horn and LA Marzulli on the darkest and most confusing of subjects for many believers. The Alien Agenda is a comprehensive review of the biblical fallen angels and their Luciferian agenda.

Beginning with the fall of Lucifer, this trio of experts delves into Genesis 6 and explains the fallen angels nightmare like you’ve never heard it explained before. You’ll hear about their dastardly deeds as angels took human wives and created a race of hybrid giants. When Joshua, Caleb and the other 10 spies entered the Promised Land to scout out the territory for the first time, they saw the offspring of these fallen angels and proclaimed, “We were like grasshoppers in their sight.”

These genetic hybrids interfered with both the human genome as well as the animal kingdom, creating a race of gigantic, hybrid animals as well. Because of their rebellion, God was forced to destroy all living creatures in Noah’s flood, saving only Noah and his family, referred to as “perfect in their generations, and 1 of each undefiled animal, male and female. Today, with the massive proliferation of UFO sightings, mysterious crop circles, blatant and demonic cattle mutilations and genetic tampering in laboratories across the world, we felt it was necessary to address these phenomenon from a biblical perspective.

Nothing is held back as Gary, Tom and LA share their insights from many years of research and personal insight. From Lucifer, to alien abductions, angels and demons and the coming UFO deception; it’s all in here. The prophecies of Apollyon and Revelation 9 and the war with Satan in Revelation 12 take on new meaning in The Alien Agenda.

Part 4 – 8 can be found here on YOUTUBE

Other videos, selected by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

Tom Horn: Wormwood! Right Out of the Book of Revelation! Andromeda Strain Alien Micro Organism Heading Toward Earth

In this final part of the month long WORMWOOD investigative series, Dr. Thomas Horn discusses the terrifying “hitchhiker” possibility on the Apophis asteroid that could poison one-third of the Earth’s waters.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

What Do They Know? The U.S. And Russia Have Both Been Developing Plans To Deal With Incoming Asteroids

Michael Snyder is the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog, The American Dream Blog and The Truth. You can follow him on Twitter right here

When the Russians take decisive action, it is usually for a reason.  As you will see below, the Russians have suddenly decided that now is the time to create an organization that will be tasked with detecting, tracking and potentially destroying incoming asteroids.  Are they doing this now because they have finally decided that this is a good idea, or has something gotten their attention?  Of course they are not likely to publicly admit if they have come to the conclusion that a gigantic space rock is heading directly toward us.  Just like the U.S. government, the Russian government is very interested in maintaining social order, and so they would probably delay telling the public about a potential asteroid impact for as long as possible.

In life, what people do is far more important than what they say, and the new center that the Russians have just created will not just be watching giant space rocks.  According to Futurism, this new organization will be in charge of making sure “they don’t collide with Earth”…

Russian space agency Roscosmos is creating a center devoted to monitoring meteors, comets, and asteroids to ensure they don’t collide with Earth — even it means having to blow them up in space.

“As part of the creation of a monitoring system and information support for the safety of space activities in near-Earth space, we plan to launch the Russian Center for Small Celestial Bodies, whose main task will be to detect and track celestial bodies approaching Earth,” Igor Bakaras, a senior official at Roscosmos subsidiary TsNIIMash, told Russian-owned news agency Sputnik.

Certainly nobody can fault the Russians for allocating resources toward this purpose.

Our solar system is full of potentially dangerous giant space rocks, and a big enough impact could literally end our civilization.

But why now?

According to a British news source, this new organization will be evaluating whether it is better “to destroy celestial objects or steer them on to new trajectories and away from Earth”…

Roscosmos, the Russian equivalent of Nasa, wants to work out if it’s possible to destroy celestial objects or steer them on to new trajectories and away from Earth.

This could involve slamming a ‘kinetic impactor’ craft in the rock or using a satellite to drag it onto a new course. Nukes could also be sent into space to blow up the rocks.

A new department at Roscosmos called the Russian Centre for Celestial Bodies will be tasked with looking into space to find comets and asteroids approaching Earth.

Once again, nobody can argue with the value of such a major project, but isn’t NASA already doing all this?

Couldn’t the Russians just sit back and let us Americans do all the work?

I wish someone would ask Vladimir Putin that question.

And this sudden move by the Russians comes just one year after the U.S. issued a “National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan”…

In 2018, The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a new report titled the “National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan”.

The 18-page document outlines the steps that NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will take over the next 10 years to both prevent dangerous asteroids from striking Earth and prepare the country for the potential consequences of such an event.

Maybe U.S. officials suddenly decided last year that having a plan for incoming giant space rocks was a great idea, and maybe the Russians decided that it was such a great idea that they should copy us.

Or maybe both governments know something that they aren’t telling us yet.

Of course the truth is that NASA has not even identified most of the giant space rocks that are floating around out there.  For example, back in July a very large asteroid came very close to hitting us…

A 427-foot-wide asteroid whizzed within 45,000 miles of Earth on Thursday.

While that may sound far away, 45,000 miles is what astronomers consider a close shave: It’s less than 20% of the distance between Earth and the moon. This was the closest we’ve come to an “Armageddon”-like scenario in at least a few years.

If that asteroid had actually hit our planet, it would have been the worst disaster that any of us have ever seen by a very wide margin.

And according to leaked emails, officials at NASA only knew about it the day before it whizzed by us…

Travelling at 55,000mph and measuring 426 feet by 187ft (130m x 57m), NASA only realised 2019 OK was coming 24 hours before it passed.

Experts say that had it hit, it would have devastated an entire city like London with over 30 times the energy of the atomic blast at Hiroshima.

So the truth is that we could be hit by a giant space rock at any time, and none of us may have any idea that it is even coming.

With that being said, there are a couple of enormous asteroids that scientists do know about that could potentially be major problems over the next decade.

The first one that I want to discuss is 2007 FT3.  That is not a fancy name, and not that much is known about the asteroid, but apparently there is a chance that it “might hit the planet on Oct. 2, 2024”…

In the case of 2007 FT3, Sentry reported that the asteroid could hit Earth between the years 2024 and 2116. During these years, Sentry recorded a total of 164 potential Earth impacts caused by the asteroid. As noted by the monitoring system, there’s a chance that 2007 FT3 might hit the planet on Oct. 2, 2024.

By the way, Rosh Hashanah begins on the evening of October 2nd, 2024.  I don’t know if that is important, but I thought I would throw that out there.

According to NASA, this asteroid would hit at a speed of approximately 46,000 miles per hour, and it would “create a crater that’s several miles long”…

Based on the data collected by Sentry, the asteroid has an estimated diameter of about 1,115 feet, which makes it almost as tall as the Empire State Building. The monitoring system noted that it could breach Earth’s atmosphere and hit the planet at a velocity of around 46,000 miles per hour.

Given the asteroid’s speed and size, it is certainly capable of causing high levels of destruction if it ends up colliding with Earth. Upon impact, it would create a crater that’s several miles long. The energy that will be released from the asteroid’s explosion would be powerful enough to level an entire city as well as its neighboring areas.

2007 FT3 is not getting much publicity at all, but a slightly larger asteroid that could potentially hit us in 2029 is getting far more attention.

On April 13th, 2029, it is being projected that Apophis will pass by our planet at a distance that is “ten times closer than the moon”.  The following comes from Wikipedia…

The closest known approach of Apophis comes on April 13, 2029, when the asteroid comes to within a distance of around 31,000 kilometres from Earth’s surface. The distance, a hair’s breadth in astronomical terms, is ten times closer than the moon, and even closer than some man-made satellites.^[23] It will be the closest asteroid of its size in recorded history. On that date, it will become as bright as magnitude 3.1^[22] (visible to the naked eye from rural as well as darker suburban areas, visible with binoculars from most locations).^[24] The close approach will be visible from Europe, Africa, and western Asia. During the approach, Earth will perturb Apophis from an Aten-class orbit with a semi-major axis of 0.92 AU to an Apollo-class orbit with a semi-major axis of 1.1 AU.

NASA insists that it will not actually hit us, but other independent researchers are skeptical.

And if Apophis doesn’t hit us then, NASA has listed ten other future dates when it potentially could…

• April 12, 2060
• April 11, 2065
• April 12, 2068
• October 10, 2068
• April 13, 2076
• April 13, 2077
• April 13, 2078
• October 10, 2089
• April 13, 2091
• April 14, 2103

Over in Russia, they are so concerned about this asteroid that they have “developed intercontinental ballistic missiles that aim to destroy asteroid Apophis”…

In what sounds like an elevator pitch for an Armageddon sequel, Russian scientists announced that they’ve developed intercontinental ballistic missiles that aim to destroy asteroid Apophis, which is going to swing by Earth in 2036.

Also referred to as 99942 Apophis, it measures 210-330 meters (690-1080 feet) in diameter. According to a Slate article by astronomer Phil Plait an encounter with Earth would mean not so fun times for our planet; “it would release the energy equivalent to more than 1 billion tons of TNT exploding, at least 20 times more than the largest nuke ever detonated!”

Russian scientists have also warned that Apophis could have “hundreds of opportunities to hit the Earth over the course of the next century”.

But for now, both American and Russian scientists are assuring us that everything is just fine and that there is no reason to panic.

Do you believe them?

Maybe they are telling us the truth.

Maybe there is nothing to be concerned about at all.

But of course both governments have a long track record of being loose with the truth, and it wouldn’t be much of a surprise at all if they weren’t exactly being straight with us.

About the Author:

I am a voice crying out for change in a society that generally seems content to stay asleep. My name is Michael Snyder and I am the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I have written four books that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The End, Get Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. (#CommissionsEarned) By purchasing those books you help to support my work. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but due to government regulations I need those that republish my articles to include this “About the Author” section with each article. In order to comply with those government regulations, I need to tell you that the controversial opinions in this article are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the websites where my work is republished. This article may contain opinions on political matters, but it is not intended to promote the candidacy of any particular political candidate. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions. Those responding to this article by making comments are solely responsible for their viewpoints, and those viewpoints do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of Michael Snyder or the operators of the websites where my work is republished. I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help.

Michae Snyder is the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog, The American Dream Blog and The Truth. You can follow him on Twitter right here

Source: 

• http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/what-do-they-know-the-u-s-and-russia-are-both-developing-plans-to-deal-with-incoming-asteroids

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

Randall Carlson is a master builder and designer, a geologist, anthropologist and historian. He specializes in sacred geometry, ancient civilizations, climate and environmental change, myths, legends, cosmic cycles and catastrophes.

He is a proponent of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, and has theorized about the extinction of historical advanced human civilizations.

Dailygrail explains that the video below takes the audio (and some video) from one of Randall's lectures, and combines it with illustrations and stock video footage to bring what he's saying to life.

In the lecture Randall discusses the fact that there have been many 'apocalyptic' events over the last 150,000 years - the period of 'modern humans' - and that they appear to happen in a regular, cyclic manner.

For the reasons he outlines in the lecture, this means that we today are walking around amongst the ruins of many lost civilisations.

We literally have built our own world in our own social system on top of and out of the wreckage of former worlds.

Videos, selected by peter2011

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

Young Pilot Mysteriously Disappeared After Reporting A UFO Sighting

Aerial travel to an island off Tasmania resulted in a terrifying radio call and a disappearing pilot. Forty years later, there’s still no explanation.

Pilot Frederick Valentich mysteriously disappeared without a trace after saying, “it is hovering, and it is not an aircraft.” After those words, his radio cut off, and he, as well as the aircraft he was piloting, was never seen again.

A 20-year-old Valentich rented a single-engine plane out of Moorabbin Airport in Victoria on October 21, 1978, with plans heading to King Island in Tasmania to catch seafood.

Things got a terrifying twist when he noticed another aircraft tailing him.

It has been 40 years since the mysterious disappearance of the young Aussie pilot over the Bass Strait. No one has come any closer to figuring out what took place until today.

The only evidence of the incident was a radio conversation between Valentich and Steve Robey, the Melbourne Airflight Service Controller.

It was 7 pm when the pilot radioed in to ask if there were any aircraft in the area, just after something zoomed above him.

Robey answered that there was no known traffic in the area. He then inquired as to what type of plane the pilot was noticing.

Valentich said that he could not affirm, but he described it as something with four visible bright lights. He added that the aircraft just passed over him at least a thousand feet above.

Things got even unnerving after Valentich reported that the unknown craft was playing with him some game. He said that the UFO was flying over him two, three times, at speeds he could not identify.

The controller tried to get more information about the object as their conversation continues.

Valentich further described the thing as long, metallic, and with a green light. He added that the aircraft vanished at one point before suddenly reappeared on his other side. At this point, Valentich said his final words: “It is hovering, and it is not an aircraft.” After 17 seconds of silence, the transmission suddenly cut off.

An extensive search of the water and any surrounding land was conducted, but any indication of a crash site nor Valentich was ever found.

A plaque at Otway lighthouse is all that remains now of Valentich’s mysterious disappearance.

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

NASA has released never-before-seen photos of the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov during its closest approach to the sun earlier this month. The Hubble Space Telescope captured the breathtaking photographs that include the most recent one on December 9^th.

This is a one-time visit that 2I/Borisov is making to our solar system. It is travelling at a tremendous speed of 100,000 miles per hour. In fact, it is travelling at such a high speed that the sun’s gravity won’t have any effect on it, meaning that it will leave our solar system and continue on its way.

Comet 2I/Borisov is the second interstellar object that has been seen in our solar system (along with Oumuamua) and has been tracked for the past several months by the Hubble telescope. It was first discovered on August 30, 2019 by Crimean amateur astronomer, Gennady Borisov.

Oumuamua

The Hubble took a photograph of Comet 2I/Borisov on October 12^th when it was 260 million miles from Earth. Then on November 16^th, another image was taken when the comet was 203 million miles from our planet. This photo, however, was even more exceptional as it was passing in front of a distant spiral galaxy. The most recent photograph, taken on December 9^th, shows the comet travelling at its closest approach to the sun and 185 million miles from Earth. Comet 2I/Borisov will make its closest approach to Earth later this month at a distance of 180 million miles before making its way out of our solar system. Images of the comet captured by the Hubble Space telescope can be viewed here.

Scientists say that the comet’s nucleus is made up of a mixture of ice and dust and is probably no bigger than 3,300 feet (or one kilometer) in diameter. David Jewitt, who is a UCLA professor of planetary science and astronomy, stated, “Hubble gives us the best upper limit of the size of Comet Borisov’s nucleus, which is the really important part of the comet,” adding, “Surprisingly, our Hubble images show that its nucleus is more than 15 times smaller than earlier investigations suggested it might be. Our Hubble images show that the radius is smaller than half-a-kilometer.”

Comet (Not 2I/Borisov or Oumuamua)

He went on to say, “Knowing the size is potentially useful for beginning to estimate how common such objects may be in the solar system and our galaxy.” “Borisov is the first known interstellar comet, and we would like to learn how many others there are.”

Even though only two interstellar objects have been discovered so far, scientists think that they in fact visit our solar system on a regular basis. It’s hard to detect them because they travel exceptionally fast and are often quite dim.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Nasa building supersonic plane that goes as fast as Concorde – without the sound

Nasa's X-59 space plane, capable of flying faster than the speed of sound without the loud boom that comes with supersonic flight, is finally nearing completion, reports The Independent.

The plane will be the first large scale, piloted X-plane that Nasa has launched in more than 30 years when it is finally put together.

It could also herald a new era in fast space travel, as it attempts to overcome the problems that have blighted previous attempts like Concorde. 

Normally, supersonic planes create a loud boom when they reach the speed of sound and have as a result been banned from flying over populated areas – but the creators of the X-59 claim it will be almost silent.

And the space agency has announced that it is cleared for final assembly and "integration of its systems" after being looked over by senior managers.

The plane – which has the full name X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST) – is being put together by Lockheed Martin, which will now work to complete it ahead of testing.

It should be approved for its first flight in 2020, and the actual launch will come a year after that.

“With the completion of KDP-D we’ve shown the project is on schedule, it’s well planned and on track. We have everything in place to continue this historic research mission for the nation’s air-traveling public,” said Bob Pearce, Nasa’s associate administrator for aeronautics, in a statement.

Nasa says that the new plane will make a boom that will only be audible as a "gentle thump", or might be entirely silent. It is able to do because of its precise shape, which looks something like an even more sharp version of the Concorde.

It will fly nearly as fast as its lookalike, with a cruising speed of 1.42.

That will be put to the test when the plane is ready to fly. The trials will see it sent over "select US communities" in test flights that will allow Nasa to measure it using sensors and people on the ground who will "gauge public perception" of the sound of the plane.

{https://www.dhakatribune.com/ }

Indonesian Cave Art Demands Human Cultural Evolution Overhaul

A major discovery has been made in a limestone cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia - the earliest known hunting scene in the world has been identified on a hard to reach cliff face. At least 43,900 years ago someone decided to climb up into the cave and depict a group of human-like figures hunting pigs and buffaloes. Unlocking the meaning behind the artist’s symbolic system is near-impossible without access to a time machine, but there is much that can still be learned from the Indonesian cave art .

The panel of art was discovered in the Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 cave and the researchers wrote in the journal Nature that “This hunting scene is—to our knowledge—currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.” That means it’s a pretty big discovery for people interested in human cultural evolution.

Sulawesi hunting scene.

(Credit: Ratno Sardi)

Human-Like Figures on a Hunt

What they found is a 4.5-meter-wide (14.76 ft.) panel of cave paintings depicting eight small human-like figures armed with spears or ropes accompanied by two Sulawesi warty pigs and four dwarf buffaloes known as anoas, which the researchers have described as “small but fierce bovids that still inhabit the island’s dwindling forests.” It appears to be a hunting narrative. All of the beings seem to have been painted with the same artistic style and technique and dark red pigment.

• Ten Amazing Caves of the Ancient World
• Archaeologists Identify First Prehistoric Figurative Cave Art in Balkans - It’s Symbolic!
• Did Humans Speak Through Cave Art? Ancient Drawings and Language's Origins

When Ancient Origins contacted Adam Brumm, study co-author and associate professor from the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE), to find out more about the discovery and what it may have meant to the prehistoric artist or artists who created it, he stated that there are indications that the cave art “could reflect the handiwork of a single artist, but we can’t intuitively rule out the involvement of other individuals at this stage.”

The anthropomorphic figures are referred to as therianthropes because they have some animalistic features such as long lower faces which resemble snouts or muzzles. One of the researchers, PhD student Adhi Agus Oktaviana, explained their appearance in more detail in a Griffith University press release , stating, “The hunters represented in the ancient rock art panel at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 are simple figures with human-like bodies, but they have been depicted with heads or other body parts like those from birds, reptiles, and other faunal species endemic to Sulawesi.”

Cave Art for Ritual or Spiritual Purposes?

When asked about the significance of the location of the painting, Brumm said:

“The cave itself shows no other signs of human habitation apart from the paintings. This observation, and the fact that it is located in a difficult-to-reach spot in a cliff face several metres above the ground. This could possibly suggest the cave site itself (and/or the act of creating art in what would appear to be a liminal location) had some sort of special cultural/ritualistic significance and meaning.”

The cave art panel.

(Credit: Kim Newman)

This idea is further promoted by the depiction of therianthropes, which the study authors suggest in the press release “may also be the oldest evidence for our ability to imagine the existence of supernatural beings , a cornerstone of religious experience.” Or, the archaeologists suggest the images show the artist was probably pondering the human-animal connection, possibly in a spiritual frame of mind.

In the press release, Brumm explored this notion even further, “The images of therianthropes at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 may also represent the earliest evidence for our capacity to conceive of things that do not exist in the natural world, a basic concept that underpins modern religion,” he said and continued:

“Therianthropes occur in the folklore or narrative fiction of almost every modern society and they are perceived as gods, spirits, or ancestral beings in many religions worldwide. Sulawesi is now home to the oldest image of this kind – earlier even than the ‘Lion-man’ from Germany, a figurine of a lion-headed human, which, at 40,000 years old, was until now the oldest depiction of a therianthrope.”

Therianthrope figure of a human with a tail.

(Credit: Ratno Sardi)

In the Nature article the authors reject the suggestion that the human-like figures were meant to depict camouflaged hunters because “this would have the improbable implication that hunters were disguising themselves as small animals such as birds.” Instead they write:

“The conspicuousness of therianthropes in the oldest recorded hunting scenes also offers hints at the deeply rooted symbolism of the human–animal bond and predator–prey relationships in the spiritual beliefs, narrative traditions and image-making practices of our species.”

Cave Popcorn for Painting Dates

Brumm informed Ancient Origins that while the cave art’s location itself wasn’t appropriate for archaeological excavations, “There is not anywhere to excavate inside the cave art site Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 as an archaeological deposit did not form within it,” he said “But we have excavated some other cave art sites in the nearby region. Unlike Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, these sites are located at ground level and our excavations have revealed abundant archaeological evidence dating back to the time of the earliest rock art .”

Hollow bone tube (top) with red and black pigments, made from the long bone of a bear cuscus, may have been used as an ‘air-brush’ to create human hand stencils on rock surfaces (bottom). 

( (Top) Michelle Langley (bottom) Yinika Perston )

That means that there were no artifacts to use to help date the cave art which was discovered in 2017 but is appearing now in the Nature article. However, they had another method – and it involved something the researchers refer to as ‘cave popcorn.’

The Griffith University press release states that the researchers used Uranium-series analysis to date the ‘mineral growths (‘cave popcorn’) that had formed on the cave painting ’ and obtained results ranging from 35,100 to 43,900 years ago. As a comparison, the dates for Upper Paleolithic cave art in Europe are generally given as between 21,000–14,000 years ago.

Professor Aubert expressed the importance of thinking about how artistic culture evolved in the press release, “The cave painting from Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 suggests that there was no gradual evolution of Palaeolithic art from simple to complex around 35,000 years ago –at least not in Southeast Asia. All of the major components of a highly advanced artistic culture were present in Sulawesi by 44,000 years ago, including figurative art, scenes, and therianthropes.”

Therianthrope – human figure with bird features.

(Credit: Ratno Sardi)

Local Views and Next Steps

Professor Brumm also worked with fellow Griffith University archaeologist Professor Maxime Aubert, and Sulawesian archaeologist and Griffith University PhD student Basran Burhan. Brumm told Ancient Origins a little about the local perspective on the caves where the paintings are located, he said:

“The local Bugis-Makasar people are generally all devout Muslims but they still have a rich and presumably centuries-old folklore associated with the many limestone caves and rock-shelters in this part of Sulawesi. Most often the caves are viewed as the abode of ghosts or spirits and many people avoid entering them if possible. Local religious specialists (dukun) are often still called in to conduct rituals in the caves to ward-off spiritual dangers before we excavate or do other scientific research in them.”

• Were the Chislehurst Caves Originally Created By Druids?
• Krubera Cave - Journeying to the Depths of Georgia in One of the World’s Deepest Caves
• What Really Went on in the Sculptor’s Cave Where Hundreds of Bronze Age Child Remains Were Unearthed?

Brumm told Ancient Origins that there are plans to continue exploring the area around where the cave art was discovered “this Maros-Pangkep limestone karst region is a very rich rock art province and it is likely there are many more spectacular cave paintings awaiting discovery,” he said.

Maxime Aubert and Adam Brumm with the Indonesian cave art.

(Kinez Riza)

As is the case in many areas in the world, the archaeologist also expressed concern that the team is racing against time in their search. In this situation it’s the natural elements and their role in deteriorating the cave art which is the main source of worry. But Brumm expressed the hope “to learn as much as possible about the people who created it, through careful study and dating of the imagery itself and also by excavating the cave art sites to further unlock the mysteries of this ancient artistic culture ” by continuing to explore the rich prehistoric art which may still be awaiting discovery in the region.

Top Image: The Indonesian cave art hunting scene panorama. Source: Credit: Adam Brumm, Agus Oktaviana

By Alicia McDermott

{  https://www.stellanovus.com/ }

When a Mega-Tsunami Drowned Mars, This Spot May Have Been Ground Zero

The 75-mile-wide crater could be something like a Chicxulub crater for the red planet.

An artist’s impression of how Mars may have looked about four billion years ago, with an ocean in its northern hemisphere. Credit...ESO/M. Kornmesser

By Robin George Andrews

Today, Mars is a cold, dry world, home to dust devils and robotic explorers. But many scientists suspect it was once waterlogged.

Earlier reporting on Mars and water

• NASA Mars 2020 Rover Gets a Landing Site: A Crater That Contained a Lake -- Nov. 19, 2018

 

• A Large Body of Water on Mars Is Detected, Raising the Potential for Alien Life --July 25, 2018

• Mega-Tsunamis Wiped Away Shoreline of a Martian Ocean -- May 19, 2016

• Mars Shows Signs of Having Flowing Water, Possible Niches for Life, NASA Says --Sept. 28, 2015

{ https://www.nytimes.com/ }

Restanten van 385 miljoen jaar oud oerbos gevonden in staat New York - HLN.be

Bron: ANP

Christopher Berry, paleobotanist aan de Universiteit van Cardiff in het Verenigd Koninkrijk, was aanvankelijk sceptisch over de vondst en dacht dat een recente boom in de rots was gegroeid en weggehaald. Eenmaal ter plaatse erkende hij dat de fossielen ” heel, heel veel ouder” waren. Het onderzoeksteam veronderstelt dat het bos door een catastrofale overstroming is vergaan. Bij de grootste bomen zijn ook fossielen van vissen gevonden.

Lees ook

Nog vrij van massatoerisme: dit is het groenste eiland van de Canarische archipel

De ontdekking biedt een momentopname van een van de grote overgangsperioden van de planeet, tussen een aarde zonder bossen en een aarde die bedekt is met bossen, zegt Berry. De nu ontdekte fossielen zijn ongeveer 140 miljoen jaar ouder dan de eerste dinosaurussen die over de aarde zwierven. Het oudst bekende insect leefde ongeveer 400 miljoen jaar geleden.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

2010 - 2020:  Wat hebben we geleerd? 16 wetenschappelijke lessen uit het afgelopen decennium

Beeld Hilde Harshagen

Het klimaat begint voelbaar te veranderen en insecten leggen massaal het loodje. Traditiegetrouw zetten we aan het eind van elk jaar de opmerkelijkste lessen op een rij – deze keer blikken we meteen maar terug op het hele decennium. Er is ook vrolijker nieuws: de duurzame revolutie komt op gang, traumatherapie werkt echt en we gaan niet meer dood aan ziekten die tien jaar geleden nog fataal waren.

In de jaren tien veranderde de opwarming van de aarde van een ietwat abstracte statistiek tot voelbare werkelijkheid. Dit is nog maar het begin, zeggen kenners eenstemmig.

Les 2: De wetenschap is niet onfeilbaar

Fraude, scoringsdra­ng, opschepperij: niets menselijks bleek wetenschappers vreemd in de jaren tien. Heeft de strijd tegen broddelwetenschap al iets opgeleverd?

Les 3: Astronomen openen nieuw venster op de kosmos via trillingen van ruimte en tijd

Sinds 2015 beschikken sterrenkundigen over een nieuwe manier om naar het heelal te kijken: zwaar­tekracht­golven. Zo is het heelal niet meer alleen te zien, maar ook te horen.

Les 4: We gaan anders dood

Ziekten waaraan patiënten tien jaar geleden nog overleden, zijn – soms dankzij biomedische hoogstandjes – ineens niet meer dodelijk.

Les 5: Kunstmatige intelligentie is de mens steeds vaker te slim af

Kunstmatige intelligentie kan steeds beter diagnoses stellen, creditcardfraude detecteren, muziek componeren en teksten vertalen. Is AI op weg de mens te overvleugelen?

Les 6: Insecten leggen massaal het loodje

Een Duits-Nederlandse studie zette de dramatische afname van het aantal insecten op de kaart. En nu is de klimaatverandering eens niet de grootste verdachte.

Les 7: Onze natuurwetten staan stevig op hun sokkel (maar dat is niet per se goed nieuws)

Terwijl het standaardmodel van de deeltjesfysica bijna alle fundamentele natuurkrachten beschrijft, is er nog wel één grote ontbrekende: de zwaartekracht.

Les 8: Een radicaal nieuwe supercomputer wordt eindelijk werkelijkheid

Rekenen met de regels van Moeder Natuur zelf. Dat is de belofte van de quantumcomputer, het langverwachte rekenbeest dat tot voor kort vooral een gedachtenexperiment was.

Les 9: Microplastics zijn niet te vermijden, maar we weten nog niet hoe schadelijk ze zijn

Ze komen het lichaam binnen via de lucht, drinkwater, voedsel of cosmetica. Er zijn verontrustende signalen over wat microplastics daar doen, alleen is niet bekend wat die waard zijn.

Les 10: Na een hartoperatie kun je binnen een dag thuis zijn

Te oud voor een openhartoperatie? Met een vernuftige ingreep via de lies is een aortaklep tegenwoordig óók te vervangen. En je hoeft er niet eens voor onder narcose.

Les 11: De schaduwzijde van de geschiedenis komt steeds meer in het licht

Tien jaar geleden was er nog geen Zwarte Pietendebat, geen discussie over termen als de Gouden Eeuw of figuren als J.P. Coen. Kunt u het zich nog voorstellen?

Les 12: Elke ziekte heeft haar festival

Met een collectebus langs de deuren voor onderzoek naar een (obscure) ziekte? Kansloos. Wie de aandacht van donateurs wil, denkt groot en organiseert een gala.

Les 13: Duurzame energie komt sneller op dan verwacht

Hernieuwbare energie kan inmiddels op prijs concurreren met fossiele en wint sneller terrein dan werd voorspeld. Maar het aandeel ervan in het totale  energieverbruik is nog beperkt, zeker in Nederland.

Les 14: In uw dna ijlt de geschiedenis nog na

Het was het decennium waarin archeologen ons beeld van de geschiedenis op zijn kop zetten. Niet door te graven in de grond – maar in ons dna.

Les 15: Levende wezens kun je programmeren

Opeens was er ‘Crispr-Cas’, een vervreemdende genetische techniek die de wereld op zijn kop zet. Verwacht mensdieren, genetisch gemanipuleerde baby’s en wondergenezingen op maat. Of wacht: die zijn er al. 

Les 16: Therapeuten kunnen trauma’s al in één sessie genezen

Wat nog altijd niet lukt bij depressies, burn-outs en fobieën, lukt wel bij ptss. Emdr-therapie verhelpt trauma’s snel en bewezen effectief. Een revolutie, zegt psycholoog Ad de Jongh.

{ https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap }

Kunstmatige intelligentie is de mens steeds vaker te slim af

Bron: De Volkskrant

{ https://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap }

The real reasons the US government is so secretive about UFOs

Pole Shift: NASA Contractor Has Dire Warning of Magnetic Pole Reversal, North Pole Has Passed Prime Meridian

Mr. Allison is currently the Program Manager for the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5) High Altitude Lift-Off (HALO) Program, and as President of the High Altitude Research Corporation (HARC). In these capacities Mr. Allison is actively developing cheap access to space technologies.

Earth’s Magnetic North Pole Is Moving Faster Than Ever, Leaving Scientists Baffled

Mr. Allison has worked on the International Space Station Program for Grumman as a systems engineer specializing in robotics, for the Mevatec Corporation as an electrical power systems integration engineer, and for Teledyne Brown Engineering as a payload integration engineer for external space station experiments.

Mr. Allison is currently working for Hernandez Engineering as a safety and product assurance engineer on such projects as Orbital Space Plane, X-37 and HyTEx. Mr. Allison also studies means to defend Earth from asteroids, and the construction of large-scale space stations.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

Scientists Uncover World’s Oldest Forest

Scientists have discovered remnants of the world’s oldest fossil forest in a sandstone quarry in Cairo, New York.

It is believed the extensive network of trees, which would have spread from New York all the way into Pennsylvania and beyond, is around 386 million years old.

This makes the Cairo forest around 2 or 3 million years older than what was thought to be the world’s oldest forest at Gilboa, also in New York State and around 40 km away from the Cairo site.

All these trees reproduced using only spores rather than seeds.

The team also reported a ‘spectacular’ and extensive network of roots which were more than eleven meters in length in some places which belonged to the Archaeopteris trees.

It is these long-lived woody roots, with multiple levels of branching and small, short-lived perpendicular feeder roots, that transformed the interactions of plants and soils and were therefore pivotal to the co-evolution of forests and the atmosphere’, the researchers state.

Until this point in time, trees such as the cladoxylopsids only had ribbon-like and mostly unbranched roots which had to be constantly replaced as the plant above ground grew.

They believe the forest was eventually wiped out by a flood due to the presence of many fish fossils that were also visible on the surface of the quarry.

“It is surprising to see plants which were previously thought to have had mutually exclusive habitat preferences growing together on the ancient Catskill delta,” said co-author of the study Dr Chris Berry from Cardiff University’s School of Earth and Ocean Sciences.

“This would have looked like a fairly open forest with small to moderate sized coniferous-looking trees with individual and clumped tree-fern like plants of possibly smaller size growing between them.”

The research team say that the Cairo forest is older than the one at Gilboa because the fossils were lower down in the sequence of rocks that occur in the Catskill mountains.

“In order to really understand how trees began to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, we need to understand the ecology and habitats of the very earliest forests, and their rooting systems.” continued Dr Berry.

“These remarkable findings have allowed us to move away from the generalities of the importance of large plants growing in forests, to the specifics of which plants, in which habitats, in which types of ecology were driving the processes of global change. We have literally been able to drill into the fossil soil between the trees and are now able to investigate geochemical changes to the soil with our colleagues at Sheffield University.

“We are really getting a handle on the transition of the Earth to a forested planet.”

Contacts and sources:

• Dr Chris Berry
• Cardiff University

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

I’ve written a few articles over the course of the past week, and into this week, on the matter of what have rapidly become known as “simulated UFO abductions.” The theory is that these “abductions” – primarily in the 1950s onward – were not the work of aliens, but the work of intelligence agencies, possibly to determine how easy (or difficult) it might be to fabricate an alien encounter. After all, if you can hoax an E.T. incident then maybe you can fabricate something amazing on the battlefield and, in the process, freak out the enemy. In that sense, perhaps the abductions amounted to forerunners of bigger, far grander plans. We’re talking about the likes of the CIA’s controversial MKULTRA “mind-control” program. One person who read my article of December 23 asked if agencies, in the 1950s, had the ability to pull something like this off – and to do so 100 percent successfully. The guy asked: “Didn’t the CIA’s MKultra not start til early-middle 50s? Would they have time [to pull such a thing off]?” Well, yes, that’s a very good point. But, it’s a lesser known fact that the CIA’s mind-control ops actually kicked off at the very start of the 1950s. Also, further programs, run by other agencies, began back in the 1940s! Let’s see what history tells us all about that.

It was during August 1977 that The Senate MKULTRA Hearings were organized by what became known as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Committee on Human Resources. It turns out that as the committee dug deeper it found that there were similar programs which predated MKUltra. They were Artichoke and Bluebird. The Committee revealed what it had uncovered: “The earliest of the CIA’s major programs involving the use of chemical and biological agents, Project Bluebird, was approved by the Director in 1950. Its objectives were: (a) discovering means of conditioning personnel to prevent unauthorized extraction of information from them by known means, (b) investigating the possibility of control of an individual by application of special interrogation techniques, (c) memory enhancement, and (d) establishing defensive means for preventing hostile control of Agency personnel.”

CIA headquarters

As for Artichoke, there are these words for the committee: “As a result of interrogations conducted overseas during the project, another goal was added – the evaluation of offensive uses of unconventional interrogation techniques, including hypnosis and drugs. In August 1951, the project was renamed Artichoke. Project Artichoke included in-house experiments on interrogation techniques, conducted ‘under medical and security controls which would ensure that no damage was done to individuals who volunteer for the experiments. Overseas interrogations utilizing a combination of sodium pentothal and hypnosis after physical and psychiatric examinations of the subjects were also part of Artichoke. Information about Project Artichoke after the fall of 1953 is scarce. The CIA maintains that the project ended in 1956, but evidence suggests that Office of Security and Office of Medical Services use of ‘special interrogation’ techniques continued for several years thereafter.”

A special procedure, designated MKDelta, was established to govern the use of MKUltra materials when specifically utilized in overseas operations. Such materials were used on a number of occasions. According to the Committee: “Because MKUltra records were destroyed, it is impossible to reconstruct the operational use of MKUltra materials by the CIA overseas; it has been determined that the use of these materials abroad began in 1953, and possibly as early as 1950.” The Committee revealed more on MKDelta: “Drugs were used primarily as an aid to interrogations, but MKUltra/MKDelta materials were also used for harassment, discrediting, or disabling purposes. According to an Inspector General Survey of the Technical Services Division of the CIA in 1957 – an inspection which did not discover the MKUltra project involving the surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting, non-volunteer subjects – the CIA had developed six drugs for operational use and they had been used in six different operations on a total of thirty-three subjects. By 1963 the number of operations and subjects had increased substantially.”

The Committee discovered that the U.S. Army had been working on such programs, too. In its 1977 report, the Committee revealed the following: “There were three major phases in the Army’s testing of LSD. In the first, LSD was administered to more than 1,000 American soldiers who volunteered to be subjects in chemical warfare experiments. In the second phase, Material Testing Program EA 1729, 95 volunteers received LSD in clinical experiments designed to evaluate potential intelligence uses of the drug. In the third phase, Projects Third Chance and Derby Hat, 16 unwitting non-volunteer subjects were interrogated after receiving LSD as part of operational field tests.”

Moving on, there is what the committee learned about an operation called Chatter: “Project Chatter was a Navy program that began in the fall of 1947. Responding to reports of amazing results achieved by the Soviets in using truth drugs, the program focused on the identification and the testing of such drugs for use in interrogations and in the recruitment of agents. The research included laboratory experiments on animals and human subjects involving Anabasis aphylla, scopolamine, and mescaline in order to determine their speech-inducing qualities. Overseas experiments were conducted as part of the project. The project expanded substantially during the Korean War, and ended shortly after the war, in 1953.”

MKNaomi was yet another operation on which the committee found a lot. It was designed: (a) To provide for a covert support base to meet clandestine operational requirements; (b) To stockpile severely incapacitating and lethal materials for the specific use of TSD [Technical Services Division]; (c) To maintain in operational readiness special and unique items for the dissemination of biological and chemical materials; (d) To provide for the required surveillance, testing, upgrading, and evaluation of materials and items in order to assure absence of defects and complete predictability of results to be expected under operational conditions.”

Under an agreement reached with the Army in 1952, the Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick was to assist CIA in developing, testing, and maintaining biological agents and delivery systems – some of which were directly related to mind-control experimentation. By this agreement, the CIA finally acquired the knowledge, skill, and facilities of the Army to develop biological weapons specifically suited for CIA use. The Committee also noted: “SOD developed darts coated with biological agents and pills containing several different biological agents which could remain potent for weeks or months. SOD developed a special gun for firing darts coated with a chemical which could allow CIA agents to incapacitate a guard dog, enter an installation secretly, and return the dog to consciousness when leaving. SOD scientists were unable to develop a similar incapacitant [sic] for humans. SOD also physically transferred to CIA personnel biological agents in ‘bulk’ form, and delivery devices, including some containing biological agents.”

In addition to the CIA’s interest in using biological weapons and mind-control against humans, it also asked SOD to study use of biological agents against crops and animals. In its 1967 memorandum, the CIA stated: “Three methods and systems for carrying out a covert attack against crops and causing severe crop loss have been developed and evaluated under field conditions. This was accomplished in anticipation of a requirement which was later developed but was subsequently scrubbed just prior to putting into action.”

The Committee concluded with respect to MKNaomi that the project was “…terminated in 1970. On November 25, 1969, President Nixon renounced the use of any form of biological weapons that kill or incapacitate and ordered the disposal of existing stocks of bacteriological weapons. On February 14, 1970, the President clarified the extent of his earlier order and indicated that toxins – chemicals that are not living organisms but are produced by living organisms – were considered biological weapons subject to his previous directive and were to be destroyed. Although instructed to relinquish control of material held for the CIA by SOD, a CIA scientist acquired approximately 11 grams of shellfish toxin from SOD personnel at Fort Detrick which were stored in a little-used CIA laboratory where it went undetected for five years.”

Given that Project Chatter was quietly created way back in 1947, it’s not at all impossible that by the mid-to-late 1950s those “simulated UFO abductions” couldn’t have been working very well and convincing people they had been abducted when they weren’t – or, at least, not by extraterrestrials.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Dark UFO Seen During Sunset As Scream Is Heard, Dec 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Dec 24, 2019
Location of sighting: Syracuse, New York, USA
Source: MUFON 

This dark UFO was recorded passing over the trees and over a lake in Syracuse yesterday. The UFO was seen during sunset and the video is a bit blurry and difficult to make out detail. I am a bit surprised that people today still use phones from 5 years ago or older. Even my son has an iPhone 7 which is 4 years old but takes better video than this. Also, must UFOs are seen during sunset. Odd, but true fact. 
Scott C. Waring 

 { https://www.etdatabase.com/  }

Orb Fleet Over Rochester, New York During Day On Dec 25, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Dec 25, 2019
Location of sighting: Rochester, New York, USA
Source: MUFON 

These orbs were recorded flying around the white clouds during the day over Rochester. The person was able to get a little bit of video using a phone, but there was no sound. These are defiantly controlled objects and they are also very similar to the white orb UFOs that news recorded over the area about 9 years ago. Absolutely amazing that they are back!
Scott C. Waring

 { https://www.etdatabase.com/  }

Letter B And Alien Base Found On Mars, 100% Proof Of Alien Life, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: Dec 25, 2019
Location of discover: Mars
Mission: HiRISE  ESP_023488_2050 "Mwarth Vallis" 
Source photo: 

• http://www.midnightplanets.com/web/MSL/sol/02218.html
  

While searching through a Mars photo I found a rugged area of terrain that seemed to have been dug up from mining. Then I found a huge structure along a hillside, with other structures nearby. There was also the capital letter B on a hillside. The B might be an entire word in their language or an important symbol. This is absolute proof that intelligent aliens lived, thrived and died on Mars. 
Scott C. Waring

 { https://www.etdatabase.com/  }

Black UFO Hovers Near Power Lines In New York! Dec 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Dec 24, 2019
Location of sighting: Rome, New York, USA
Source: MUFON 

Here is a great UFO video that was reported to MUFON today. The black UFO is not a disk, but more of a flying cylinder. The UFO was seen for for a few minutes near a power line before the eyewitness pulled out a phone and recorded a bit. Absolutely 100% proof that aliens are interested in New York.
Scott C. Waring

 { https://www.etdatabase.com/  }

During a flight from the city Almaty to Petropavlovsk in Kazakhstan on December 23, 2019, a passenger noticed a strange rectangular glow above the clouds on which he decided to film it.

It is unclear what the strange glow could have been but it is quite possible that it was a tall building sticking out of the cloud formation.

The tallest building in Kazakhstan is Emerald Towers 1 in Nu-Sultan which is 240 meters high, the Esentai Tower in Almaty is 200 meters high. The construction of both towers as well as other tall buildings are similar to the rectangular glow.

Image left: Esentai Tower - Image right: Emerald Towers 1 in Kazakhstan

The exact location, the altitude of the plane as well as the altitude level of the cloud formation at the moment the passenger noticed the glow is unknown but could it be that he has filmed the roof of a tall building reflected by the sunset or was it something else?

  

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

This day in UFO history: The 1980 UFO Landings In Rendlesham Forest

England holds one of the most compelling UFO landing accounts. In late December 1980, invasion of unidentified flying objects over a period of several nights took place in the joint air bases of Bentwaters and Woodbridge, situated within the vast Rendlesham Forest in late December.

Description of alien beings added to the controversial stories of the twin air bases. The hype took into another level with anomalous radar readings, electromagnetic effects, and surrealistic atmospheric conditions. Professionals, deemed to be credible, have been coming forward revealing their knowledge of the real alien event on the Bentwaters and Woodbridge Air Force Bases.

Uncorrelated object showed on the radar screens at RAF in Norfolk shortly after midnight on December 27, 1980. The thing then suddenly vanished in the area of the Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk. Bentwaters RAF radar also picked up the object.

The bases were allegedly housed a large stockpile of nuclear weapons, and the Woodbridge was the base of the 67th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron.

The radar operator that night, Mal Scurrah, said that they did not have any idea of what they captured on their radar. They checked the air traffic agencies and found out that there should have been nothing in the vicinity at the time. They sent a jet aircraft to investigate, and the pilot reported seeing a dazzling light in the sky in front of them after getting within about a quarter of a mile.

They saw on radar the object was stationary and it moved off in seconds. In just five minutes the UFO reached 90,000 feet and higher, and they had lost it in the radar scope.

The Woodbridge/Bentwaters started their extraordinary events with the sighting of a massive glowing object by three security guards of the twin bases. They followed the lights into the forest with initial thought that it was a commercial or military aircraft that crash landed.

The patrol was stunned to see a saucer-like craft with small beings with large heads suspended by a type of beam from the bottom of the craft. The beings reportedly performing a repair to their craft unaware of the three men watching their activities.

The guards radioed the base headquarters and requested emergency help. Assistance reportedly arrived headed by senior officers of the base. Later, there would be off record reports that they encountered strange anomalies, such as reality-bending, time displacement, and surreal atmospheric conditions.

Some of the senior officers allegedly communicated with the alien beings.

Called out on the second night of the sightings was then the now famous Colonel Halt. The group of Colonel Halt was reportedly one of the groups to chase the glowing UFO in the forest. He made an audio recording of the details of his trek into the woods.

Patrolmen Jim Penniston, John Burroughs, and Larry Warren later co-wrote a book about the incident, titled Left at East Gate.

Other men who were present during the encounter later revealed that there was an underground theater where soldiers were interrogated, sworn to secrecy and threatened. They also revealed that they were shown several films featuring UFO recoveries around the world. It was also reported that an alien being was there in one of the meetings.

OTHER VIDEOS, selected by peter2011

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

The Asteroids Might Remember a Forgotten Giant Planet

By Paul Sutter 

We have much to learn from the rocks of the asteroid belt.

An artist's illustration of the asteroid belt.

(Image: © ESA/ATG medialab)

• Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of "Your Place in the Universe." Sutter contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. 

The formation of the solar system is a deeply perplexing puzzle. We're left with clues all over the place: the positions and sizes of the planets, the members of the asteroid belt, Kuiper Belt, and Oort Cloud and the populations of moons around the planets. But how did we get to this from a vague disk of gas and dust billions of years ago? 

Simulations and models lead the way, and recently researchers have turned to the asteroid belt for more help: the asteroids living closest to the sun actually preserve a memory from when the solar system was still evolving, and might even offer clues to the hypothesis that we once had five giant planets.

• Related: The Asteroid Belt Explained: Space Rocks by the Millions (Infographic)

Baby solar systems

Billions of years ago, our solar system was just a bunch of random gas and dust floating around as a nebula. As it collapsed, it formed a rapidly spinning merry-go-round of a flat disk around the young and hungry proto-sun. Over the course of 100 million years, that disk somehow became the planets and other smaller denizens of our home system.

Computer simulations of the disk-to-planet process are fantastically difficult, due to all the rich and complex physics involved, but they have a few general features. The innermost worlds tend to be small and rocky, while the outermost planets tend to be big and gassy and/or icy. Plus the process of formation leads to a bunch of random junk floating around.

Another general feature is that newborn planets tend to move quickly into resonant motion, meaning that orbits become integer multiples of each other. For example, Mars might orbit four times for every Jupiter orbit, and Jupiter might orbit twice for every turn around the sun that Saturn gets. 

And when it comes to our solar system in particular, in simulations the giant planets tend to form much closer together, and much closer to the sun, than they are today.

So then the question becomes: Once we've got a batch of baby planets formed from our protostellar disk, how do we get those planets in their modern-day positions?

• Related: Our Solar System: A Photo Tour of the Planets

It's Nice out there

Enter the Nice Model, named after the city in southern France where a few sun-baked researchers cooked up the idea in 2005. In the bare-bones version of the model, the too-close-for-comfort giant planets are surrounded by a disk of leftovers: tiny planetesimals that never got to play the planet game and had to hang out in the outskirts of the solar system.

But not for long. Every so slowly, over the course of 100 million years, the outermost giant planet (usually thought to be Neptune, but in some versions of the model it's Uranus) drifts close to one of those leftovers. Close enough to interact gravitationally, doing a little orbital dance where the planet pulls the bit of rock inward to a smaller orbit, and in exchange sends itself farther out. 

And then that little scattered rock encounters the next planet in and does the same thing. And then it approaches Saturn and repeats the process again, going ever sunward and spreading out three of the giant planets.

And then that plucky little planetesimal finds Jupiter, who is generally in no mood for games and doesn't like to be told what to do. Instead of nudging the rock inward, the massive bulk of our system's largest planet just sends that unlucky bit of debris out of the solar system altogether. That doesn't come without a price, however; the energy needed to eject the planetesimal reduces Jupiter's own orbit, sending it slightly closer to the sun.

This model is able to explain in large part the modern-day positions of the planets, and how they were able to get there from their birthplaces. And since 2005, more sophisticated versions of the Nice Model have appeared, trying to explain finer details of our system's makeup, including the possibility that we once were home to a fifth giant planet that got lost in all the gravitational reshuffling.

Look to the asteroids

But all versions of the Nice Model have a particular problem with the asteroid belt. All that orbital dancing in the outer system can have big impacts on the inner worlds and their own population of planetary leftovers. The on-again-off-again gravitational resonances that the outer planets experience as they migrate to and fro in the outer reaches destabilize members of the nascent asteroid belt, scattering them into all sorts of crazy orbits.

In particular, the various versions of the Nice Model tend to send the innermost belt members (the chunks of rock within 2.5 astronomical units) into orbits with high inclination, meaning that they're angled with respect to the rest of the solar system. (One astronomical unit, or AU, is the average Earth-sun distance — about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.) And yet, we find most asteroids are on an even keel with the major planets, so we must be getting something wrong in our models.

Recently, a team of researchers took a more refined approach to the simulations, looking especially at the interactions of Jupiter and Saturn as they waltzed together in the early days of the solar system. The scientists found that during the process of planetary migration, Jupiter and Saturn approach a 5:2 resonance, meaning that Jupiter orbits five times for every two orbits of Saturn. 

They don't stay in that resonance for long. But the details of Saturn's orbit while near the resonance give it just the right gravitational effect on the inner system to clear away any high-inclination wannabes in the asteroid belt.

And what about the more exotic models, like early solar systems including a fifth giant planet? It too has an effect on all the resonances, which means that the modern-day asteroid belt may actually be a fossil record, remembering what the young system was like. And the more we study those little leftover asteroids, the more we can learn about our own origins.

Read more: "A record of the final phase of giant planet migration fossilized in the asteroid belt's orbital structure"

• The Asteroid Belt May Be a 'Treasure Trove' of Planetary Building Blocks
• Asteroid Basics: A Space Rock Quiz
• How Did the Solar System Form?

You can listen to the Ask A Spaceman podcast on iTunes, and on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com.

Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman, or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook

{ https://www.space.com/ }

Methane Mystery on Mars May Get a Partial Answer Soon

By Mike Wall 

NASA's Curiosity rover just made some important measurements.

NASA's Curiosity rover has detected several intriguing spikes of methane in the air of Mars' Gale Crater.

(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

SAN FRANCISCO — NASA's Curiosity rover may have just taken a big step toward cracking at least part of the Mars methane mystery.

Curiosity's measurements show that methane levels cycle seasonally inside the Red Planet's 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater, which the rover has been exploring since August 2012. The six-wheeled robot has also detected several big surges of the gas, which is a possible (though far from definitive) sign of Mars life.  

But here's where the mystery comes in: The view from above is very different. The European-Russian Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), which was designed to sniff out low-abundance gases such as methane, has found the Martian air to be virtually free of the stuff. 

• Related: The 7 Biggest Mysteries of Mars

For example, TGO recorded an upper limit of 0.012 parts per billion (ppb) methane during its first four months of full science operations, which lasted from April through August 2018. That's about 35 times lower than the background methane levels Curiosity measured inside Gale over the same period. 

And neither TGO nor Mars Express, a European probe that has been orbiting the planet since December 2003, spotted the most recent methane spike that Curiosity detected. During that event, which occurred on June 19 of this year, methane concentrations at the rover's location rose to a whopping 21 ppb — the highest levels that Curiosity had ever recorded. (Mars Express did, however, independently observe the first methane surge that Curiosity spotted, in June 2013.)

The discrepancy between ground measurements and orbital data has the Curiosity team "mystified, just like everyone else," mission principal investigator Ashwin Vasavada said here last week during a media roundtable at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). 

Perhaps something in the Martian atmosphere destroys methane very quickly, scrubbing away most of the gas that rises above Curiosity and therefore leaving little for TGO or Mars Express to detect, said Vasavada, who's based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. But that's not the only possible explanation.

"Maybe the expansion and contraction of the atmosphere every day from solar heating is responsible," he told Space.com after the roundtable.

Curiosity's previous methane measurements — which the rover makes using its Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, or SAM — have been gathered at night, Vasavada said. That's not surprising, considering how busy the rover is during the day studying rocks in minute detail and/or driving across the rugged Red Planet landscape. But it means that Curiosity had sniffed only when the atmosphere was relatively dense and the methane concentrated as a result.

During the day, as the atmosphere expands, the methane becomes more mixed and diffuse — perhaps diffuse enough to explain, at least in part, why the orbiters' observations are so different. 

• Related: Amazing Mars Photos by NASA's Curiosity Rover (Latest Images) 

The Curiosity team is testing this idea. Over this past weekend, the rover was scheduled to make its first-ever detailed daytime methane measurement.

"This rare experiment is a chance to get some exciting science observations, but we'll need time after the experiment to analyze the data; we don't expect to have any takeaways right away," science team member Catherine O'Connell, a planetary geologist at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, wrote in a mission update on Friday (Dec. 13). 

The results, whatever they may be, will not solve the entire Mars methane mystery, for it's a multilayered one. For example, scientists don't know how the gas was produced. Most of the methane in Earth's air was emitted by living creatures, but the stuff can be created abiotically as well — specifically, by reactions involving hot water and rock.

And even if Mars' methane is biogenic — a very big if — there's no guarantee it's a sign of active life. The gas may have been generated billions of years ago in underground pockets, from which it's now slowly seeping, mission team members have said.

The Curiosity team also recently announced intriguing results about another possible biosignature gas. The rover's measurements show that oxygen levels rise considerably higher than expected in the spring and summer and drop below predicted concentrations during the Gale Crater winter.

"As it always has been, both methane and oxygen are a mystery," Vasavada said during the AGU roundtable. "It's telling us that there's things about the atmosphere that we don't understand. How methane and oxygen are produced, and how they're destroyed — both are not fitting our current models of atmospheric chemistry."

The main goal of Curiosity's $2.5 billion mission involves assessing the habitability of Gale Crater. The rover has already accomplished that objective, finding that Gale hosted a long-lived lake-and-stream system in the ancient past. 

Since September 2014, Curiosity has been picking its way up Mount Sharp, the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) mountain that rises from Gale's center, searching for clues about Mars' long-ago transition from a relatively warm and wet world to the cold, dry planet it is today.

• The Search for Life on Mars: A Photo Timeline
• Photos: Ancient Mars Lake Could Have Supported Life
• Ancient Mars Lakes & Laser Blasts: Curiosity Rover's 10 Biggest Moments in 1st 5 Years

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/ }

Alien hunters discover 'UFO highway' across America

NASA airborne campaign catches the drift of snow water

by Jessica Merzdorf, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

{ https://phys.org/ }

Mexico built on top of this lost city? Thousands of discovered artifacts unfold mystery

7,000 objects, including sculptures, votive offerings and skulls of sacrificed victims were discovered from that particular area

By Bhaswati Guha Majumder

10 Facts About the Aztec Empire

{ https://www.ibtimes.sg/ }

The CIA Simulated UFO Abductions In Latin America As Psychological Warfare Experiments

 Published By Arjun Walia

Throughout history, the field of ufology and the examination of the extraterrestrial hypothesis has, without a doubt, been overcome with a plethora of disinformation. Those who have dived into the depths of ufology know this best, as it’s well documented that ‘outsiders’ from intelligence agencies and governments have infiltrated the field for the purposes of deceiving researchers and people who are interested in the topic for one simple reason, to keep them away from the truth. On top of these disinformation campaigns, which still seem to be in operation today, there has long been an “official campaign of ridicule and secrecy” (Roscoe Hillenkoetter, Ex CIA director)  associated with the subject. This is why I encourage all those reading who dive into this subject to stick with facts, data, and evidence rather than entertain what seem to be outlandish claims that in no way, at all, can be verified.

I’d like to draw your attention to Dr. Jacques Vallee, who holds a master’s degree in astrophysics and a Ph.D. in computer science. The subject of UFOs first attracted his attention as an astronomer in Paris. He subsequently became a close associate of Project Blue Book’s J. Allen Hynek and has written several books on the UFO enigma. He is currently a venture capitalist living in San Francisco. Vallée co-developed the first computerized map of Mars for NASA in 1963. He later worked on the network information center for the ARPANET, a precursor to the modern Internet, as a staff engineer of SRI International’s Augmentation Research Center under Douglas Engelbart.

He’s a researcher that’s had a very interesting life, to say the least, with regards to researching the topic of UFOs. He’s come into contact with and had meetings with most experts in the field, politicians from around the world, high ranking military personnel and much more. His journey into the subject has led him to investigate an uncountable amount of case reports regarding UFOs and supposed extraterrestrial beings, and he’s been a major player with regards to bringing the mainstream scientific community forward to look at the evidence and data that’s involved with such a serious subject, that, in his time, was largely ridiculed. He is an important reason why the phenomenon has gained as much credibility as it has today.

Valle is one of many who have written about and documented the startling evidence that well-constructed hoaxes and media manipulations have misled UFO researchers, diverting them from the UFO phenomenon itself, what’s really going on.

In one of his latest books, Forbidden Science 4, he shares a record of his private study into unexplained phenomena between 1990 and the end of the millennium, during which he was traveling around the global pursuing his professional work as a high-technology investor. It’s a bit of a diary, documenting his experiences and encounters/meetings as he tries to examine and explore the phenomenon.

In an entry dated Thursday 26 March 1992, Valle writes:

I have secured a document confirming that the CIA simulated UFO abductions in Latin America (Brazil and Argentina) as psychological warfare experiments.

Reading this line from his book triggered me back to earlier in his book when he mentions one of many conversations he’s had with Ron Blackburn.

On Monday 16 April 1990, he writes:

Over lunch again with Colonel Ron Blackburn (Air Force) at the Gatehouse in Palo Alto he revealed that the “Secret Onion” group started in 1985 in the classified tank located in his basement at the Lockheed Skunk Works. Colonel John Alexander had brought him a list of the people in the inner circle. They divided the world into layers of concentric trust and ability. John introduced Blackburn to Ed Dames. Blackburn and I have a firmed up our plants to ravel to New Mexico on May 4th, up the high mesa – supposedly to meet some Aliens.

It’s interesting to note that Colonel John Alexander army writes about Blackburn in his book, “UFOs, myths, conspiracies and realities.”

Among the people I met was Dr. Ron Blackburn, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel who was then working at the Lockheed Skunk Works in Burbank. It was Blackburn who first asked me if I had ever heard of the infamous Area 51. In the early 1980s, this facility was still not widely known inside the military, let alone the general public, even though it had been functional for decades…Among areas of common interest between Blackburn and me were UFOs. We discussed many possibilities related to who might be in charge of UFO research. We both thought that there was some organization, probably within the U.S. Air Force, which had the responsibility. But we acknowledged that whoever had the ball, there must be a an interagency effort as well. Our assumption was that somebody must be in charge, and we were well aware of all the prevailing stories and rumours. Roswell, we assumed, was a real UFO event.

Fast forward to Friday, May 4th, 1990, Valle writes about Blackburn:

“I’m convinced the government is working on UFOs,” he told me. “What are the chances some witnesses are being fooled by special effects developed by psychological warfare?” I countered. Thinking of cases like Bentwaters in the UK or Cergy-Pontoise in France. “They’re pretty good,” he admitted. “Suppose you shine a week infrared laser into people’s eyes; it won’t hurt them but may induce a hallucinatory state. Experiments have been done where you send a microwave beam through someone’s brain; you pick up the transmitted energy pattern. You can influence people this way, even make them hear things. Holograms have been used too,”

fIt’s interesting to note the conversation Valle had with Blackburn in 1990, and then in 1992 writes that he had received a document that the CIA had been involved with staging UFO (alien abductions). Combine this information with Blackburn mentioning that holograms have been used, and technology exists to produce “hallucinatory” states.

This is just one of many examples and pieces of evidence many researchers in the field point to suggesting that there are staged abductions happening for reasons unknown, and that it’s continuing today.  It’s not surprising either if you’ve ventured down the road of CIA mind controlled tactics, programs like MK ultra and their desire to manipulate the perception of the masses with regards to various topics. It’s not surprising if you’ve looked into the black budget world, a world that’s far more advanced that the mainstream world with regards to technology.

Dr. David Jacobs, a retired university professor, is one of many experts who has hypnotically regressed people who claim to have had ET abduction experiences. After thousands of people, they all share the same story. Many filled with forced impregnation, and ‘hybrid’ children, among other things. Could many of these forced abduction experiments simply be deep black projects that are being conducted by rogue government agencies? Now we know that yes, many of them could be. Are all of them? There are stories floating around out there without much evidence, like the idea that Eisenhower made a deal with certain extraterrestrial groups, that they could abduct a certain amount of humans for the exchange of technology. Based on the idea that that forced abductions may be military operations, this supposed meeting is called into question.

Valle writes of Jacobs in his book:

I am trying to read Jacob’s Secret Life.’ The author appears obsessed with what he views as a massive Alien invasion, his analysis is no longer balanced.

This may explain why there is a whole array of people who claim to have had experience with beings from somewhere else, but these experiences did not involve forced abductions, but rather, simple contact experiences. Remember, the key nuance here is we’re talking about human and ET contact, vs forced abductions which are often quite aggressive or terrifying for people.

I’ve written previously about the work of Jacobs, you can read that article here. I’ve been in this field for more than a decade now and the more I learn, the more I have to unlearn and consider other possibilities. I wrote that article being aware that many abduction cases could be military operations, but I did not mention it. I’ve come across the work of many who have interviewed abductees and, from their experiences, there also seems to be a military component as well, or a feeling of military personnel appearing as ‘Aliens.’

How Deep Does The Misinformation Go?

Richard Doty is also mentioned multiple times in Valle’s book. He is a retired Air Force Special investigations officer (AFSIO), and his job was to spread disinformation about the UFO subject during his time with the Air Force. Spreading disinformation about the reality of UFOs is no secret, and in Doty’s case, he admitted to infiltrating UFO circles along with his colleagues to feed ufologists and journalists lies and half truths so that they would never understand any real truth.

So, as you can see, this type of narrative has many interesting sources. You can read more about Doty and watch an interview with him here.

Regardless, There Is Something Going On Here

Valle, and all others in this field are quite aware that something real is going on, and something quite possibility extraterrestrial and inter-dimensional. This article is not meant to shed doubt on the phenomenon itself as well as the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Credible information with regards to sightings, crash retrieval, and possible bodies and contact experiences with ‘aliens’ are out there and can be examined. That being said, there is obviously a lot of disinformation out there as well, ridiculous claims as well as charlatans who are in the field spreading lies and fake stories for the purposes of making money, or perhaps to do what Doty was once tasked with, to spread disinformation, are out there.

With all that being said, the fact remains that:

There is a serious possibility that we are being visited and have been visited for many years by people from outer space, from other civilizations….This should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation and not the subject of ‘rubishing’ by tabloid newspapers.

– Lord Admiral Hill-Norton, Former Chief of Defence Staff, 5 Star Admiral of the Royal Navy, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee (source)

{ https://www.collective-evolution.com/ }

Over the last few days there has been a significant amount of online debate about alien abductions, mind-altering technologies, and the possibility that some alien abductions may have been the work of the CIA and not of extraterrestrials. In his December 19, 2019 article (titled “Vallee Declines to Substantiate Claim of CIA Simulating UFO Abductions”) Jack Brewer wrote the following: “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.”

Jason Colavito said at his blog: “A few months ago, Jacques Vallée, the longtime UFO researcher and scientific advisor to space-demon-hunting billionaire Robert Bigelow, published the fourth volume of his diaries, Forbidden Science, covering the 1990s. In that book, Vallée made the shocking allegation that the CIA staged fake alien abductions in Latin America and that there were documents that supported the allegation: ‘I have secured a document confirming that the CIA simulated UFO abductions in Latin America (Brazil and Argentina) as psychological warfare experiments.'”

And, there’s my own article on this subject, here at Mysterious Universe. The article is titled: “Simulated Alien Abductions: the CIA, a Hot Hooker, and Secret Experiments.” As I say: “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.”

All of this brings me to another famous alien abduction case: the October 11, 1973 alien abduction of Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker at Pascagoula, Mississippi. The case has become a classic in UFO research circles. It’s a little-known fact, though, that just a few miles from where Parker and Hickson were taken is a stretch of land called Horn Island. It looks pleasant and inviting, which it is. But, that wasn’t always the case. When the Second World War was still raging, Horn Island was home to top secret research in the fields of chemical- and biological-warfare. Less than a decade later, the U.S. Army’s Chemical Corps used the island for its early research into hypnosis, mind-control, and psychedelics – in essence, to see how the human mind could be altered, and radically so, too.

The history books state that all such work on Horn Island was halted in the 1960s – amid rumors that some of the locals ended up in altered states of mind after being accidentally hit by powerful aerosol-based hallucinogenic substances carried by the wind. But try asking the locals about when things really ended and you’ll get a very different response. There are tales of the Army secretly employing the use of BZ in the area, in the early 1970s. And what might BZ be? Known as “Buzz,” it’s a powerful, mind-mixer, the official title of which is 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate. Graphic hallucinations are typical. As are states of unreality. Cognitive dysfunction soon sets in. As does incapacitation. H.P. Albarelli, Jr., in his 2009 book, A Terrible Mistake (on the controversial death of a bacteriologist named Frank Olson, who was an expert in the field of mind-altering drugs, including LSD) states the following: “In Mississippi, Olson made one visit, along with several other researchers, including Dr. Gerald Yonetz, to Horn Island, ten miles off the small town of Pascagoula, Mississippi.”

The city of Pascagoula, Buzz, alien abductions, Frank Olson at Pascagoula, and more all make for a heady brew, indeed.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Images and a video showing strange green lights seemly flying in the sky over Long Beach and Willow Creek in California.on December 24, 2019.

While the witness in Long Beach captured images of several green and yellow objects in the sky, the witness in Willow Creek managed to take a video of many green lights moving around at high altitude.

I have no idea what these objects could be, but instead of thinking of UFOs or alien probes could it be static electricity?

Some scientists think that static electricity in the earth's atmosphere may be the key to predict large earthquakes.

They suggest that Earth’s crust may give hints before it ruptures, in the form of charged particles from deep below the earth migrate to the surface into the atmosphere that occur days before an earthquake.

Although other scientists have yet to agree on a mechanism by which the crust could create static electricity signals, maybe it is a good idea to keep an eye on these strange greenish particles in the sky.

  

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