Chris Mellon: Our Government Is “Lethargic And Risk Averse” In Assessing Possible Threat From UFOs

JAZZ SHAW

Chris Mellon was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. He’s also a policy advisor for To the Stars Academy. The guy has been working on military intelligence and policy for a long time from both inside and outside of the halls of the federal government. In other words, when it comes to the military, he knows a thing or two.

One thing that Mellon knows now is that he’s getting frustrated with the seeming lack of coherent response on the part of the Pentagon to the revelations of incredible craft that have been seen violating our military airspace, first revealed to the public in December of 2017. These UFOs (and we should just be calling them that because that’s what they are) are described in detail by Mellon in a new article he’s published at the website of the American Legion titled “A threat unmet.” But despite all of the available data and expert military witnesses, Mellon finds that almost everyone in the United States government and the upper echelons of our military is turning a blind eye to what he sees as a very real, potential threat to our national security. The lack of action on the part of so many agencies that should be cooperating in the collection and analysis of data has led to a condition Mellon describes as “paralysis.” (Emphasis added)

This paralysis is occurring at a time when the scientific community increasingly recognizes the possibility of humanity encountering probes from spacefaring civilizations. In fact, last year the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology directed NASA to begin looking for “technosignatures,” by which it means alien space probes. This is happening because many exobiologists now recognize probes are more efficient and effective than radio waves for purposes of space exploration or contact. As unlikely as it may seem, there is no denying the possibility that some UFO/UAPs encountered by our military are probes launched by distant civilizations.

While military personnel such as [Cmdr. David] Fravor and Lt. Ryan Graves – an F-18 pilot who said UFOs followed his Navy strike group for months – are awed by the technology they observed, they are undeterred, eager to give chase both literally and figuratively. Reflecting on his encounter, Fravor told me, “I want to fly that thing!” He naturally expects his country to figure out where these things come from, why they are here and how they work. Fravor and his colleagues at least still have the right stuff, even if the hierarchy above them is lethargic and risk-averse.

I wanted to highlight that portion of Mellon’s article in particular because you’ll notice that he’s coming out and saying what so many people have been thinking since this story first began developing. At least some of the UFO/UAPs our military has been running into may indeed be “probes launched by a distant civilization.” In other words… aliens. There. We said it.

This is something that a few of us were batting around on social media this week. Virtually nobody with a deep background in either science or the military really thinks that those things were built by the Russians or the Chinese at this point. If either of those countries had developed the technology to build aircraft that can defy gravity and fly at Mach 25 deep in the atmosphere without us catching up, they’d have attacked us by now. Or at least shown off their cool new technology to impress everyone. And the Navy and the Pentagon have already said they aren’t ours.

So if that’s not our hardware and it’s not Russia’s and it’s not China’s… then what? I don’t care if you want to say it’s aliens, time travelers from the future or humans from some parallel dimension. As Mellon says when quoting Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for the deputy chief of naval operations, “whatever they are, they are real, they aren’t ours, and they continue to violate U.S. airspace with impunity.” We have identified a technology gap between us and someone (or something) and our government has an obligation to try to close it.

For my part, I will just say that I’m not entirely convinced that the Pentagon is doing as little as Mellon says. He’s been out of the loop there for a while and there could well be things going on that he’s simply not aware of. Of course, that’s because they keep this huge veil of secrecy over everything and anything to do with the UFO topic, as we’ve discussed here repeatedly. And even when they do tell us something, they frequently contradict themselves and obfuscate when they’re not flat-out lying.

So what does Mellon want to see happening? He would like to see a coordinated effort across multiple agencies including NASA, the National Reconnaissance Office, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, the DIA, and DHS to develop a process for collecting and integrating pertinent information about UFO/UAPs. We need to assess the level of the risk that’s presented. (The pilots who went up against the tic-tac during the Nimitz encounter told Mellon “We didn’t stand a chance against it.”) And then, with all the available data being coordinated, figure out a plan as to what we’re going to do about it.

If I can add one more item to Mellon’s wish list it would be to tell the government that the public has a right to know what’s going on and what they’re doing, particularly if they’re fairly sure it’s not the Russians or the Chinese. They should come out and tell us everything they know short of exposing sources or methods.

{ https://hotair.com/ }

It was a hot and humid evening on August 19, 1952, and hardware store clerk and Boy Scout Scoutmaster Dunham Sanborn “Sonny” DesVergers was driving a group of Boy Scouts home on a coastal highway near West Palm Beach, Florida, that winds right alongside the vast swamp wilderness of the South Florida Everglades. As he made his way down a darkened side road towards the home of one of the boys, his attention was captured by a bright flash in the sky out over the gloomy swamp near a dense grove of palmettos. His first thought was to just keep on driving, but then it occurred to him that an airplane had possibly gone down out there in the wilderness, so he turned back, stopped the car, and after some moments of thought peering into the dimness of the swamp he decided to grab a machete and start hacking his way through towards where he believed the accident to have occurred. And so would begin a strange odyssey that has remained one of the weirder UFO encounters on the books.

DesVergers told the Boy Scouts to stay behind, and if they did not hear from him in 15 minutes they were to make their way to a farmhouse off the road and fetch help. He then gripped his machete, hoisted his flashlight, and began penetrating the murky, snake and alligator infested wilderness. As he progressed through the choking brush he allegedly noticed an unpleasant smell in the air, which got steadily worse as he progressed. He continued hacking his way through the vegetation and thickets through the fog of stench that pervaded the air until he reportedly came to a clearing, where he signaled to the boys with his flashlight and then turned to notice what he would describe as an intense heat, as if an enormous oven door had suddenly opened to belch forth its fire. Disoriented, he looked up to see something blocking out the sky above, which he claimed was a large disc-like object measuring around 30 feet in diameter and ringed with glowing lights, and when the beam of his flashlight hit it he could ascertain that it was smooth, metallic, and had a concave bottom. This is where things would get really weird.

As the frightened scoutmaster started backing up in a growing panic, he claims that he heard a grinding sound like metal upon metal, which he soon realized was a hatch of some sort opening on the side of the unearthly craft. From within emerged what he describes as an intense red light that approached him and then transformed into a red mist, which engulfed him and caused him to instinctively cover his face. According to him, he then lost consciousness. Back at the car, the Boy Scouts, who had been tracking their scoutmaster’s progress by watching the glow of his bouncing flashlight beam in the gloom, purportedly saw a “big red ball of fire” through the trees, as well as “a series of red lights … a lot like flares.” That was when they decided to go for help.

Police arrived on the scene not long after, and were about to launch a search through the swamp for DesVergers when he came stumbling out of the thicket in a kind of daze, disoriented, mumbling incoherently and quite obviously very shaken, to the point that deputy sheriff Mott Partin would later say, “In all my 19 years of law-enforcement work, I’ve never seen anyone as terrified as he was.” Closer inspection of the man showed that his skin seemed lightly burned and the hair on his forearms singed, as well as a strange series of three burn marks in his scoutmaster’s cap. Making it all even odder still was that when some of the officers went to the clearing that DesVergers had come from they found his flashlight lying on the ground and a flattened ring of grass they could not explain.

DesVergers would be brought back to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office and that was when the case would attract the attention of Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who was at the time part of the U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book, which was with investigating and analyzing UFO-related incidents in the name of national security. Ruppelt, who would later call it “one of the weirdest UFO reports that I came up against,” took his team to Florida in order to interview the witnesses and investigate the area of the alleged UFO encounter. Talking to the Boy Scouts he learned that they stood by their story of seeing bright red lights, and DesVergers also seemed very sincere, which impressed Ruppelt at first and of which he said he had the “immediate impression he was telling the truth.” The team also were able to find anomalous singed grass in the clearing where it had all gone down, which lab tests were unable to find an answer for, especially since in many instances the samples showed burned roots but intact upper leaves. Nor was there any conventional medical explanation for the victim’s singed hair, slightly burned skin, which was determined to have been caused by a “flash heat source,” or his damaged cap, thought to have been the work of “sparks of some kind,” all of which made it all even more promising, but cracks would slowly start to reveal themselves.

Red flags started going up when DesVergers began drumming up media attention for his alleged encounter, even going so far as to hire a press agent, and the story got more and more exaggerated the more he told it, adding in details such as that he had seen alien beings and even fought with them. A little digging into DesVergers’ past also brought up some warning signs, as he was found to be an insufferable teller of tall tales and as well as having gone AWOL during military service and also a convicted car thief. In other words, honesty was not really his thing, and although dishonest people can still potentially have a strange UFO encounter, Ruppelt was starting to get suspicious. Although there were certainly many oddities that could not easily be explained, and he couldn’t see how they could have been faked, Ruppelt would nevertheless eventually label it “the best hoax in UFO history.” He would go on to write of the account in his 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, and as much as he liked to think of it as a hoax, some of the aspects have never been satisfactorily explained, such as the weirdly singed grass roots and physical evidence, and so the debate has remained open as to whether it really happened or not, with one researcher Jeffrey Wilson saying:

Something unusual happened to the guy, and the physical evidence backed him up. That’s why I put the effort into checking this out. Why would you go to the trouble of faking something like this?” Why, and how, would he stage that? It doesn’t make any sense.

The case is still quite remarkable for the physical evidence left behind and the assertion by the witness even in later years in the face of withering criticism that this was all real. Regardless of whether DesVergers was a known liar or not, there seems to be a lot to unpack here, and it is important to remember that strange phenomena do not always necessarily happen to the most honest or reliable of people. What are we to make of his burns or the scorched grass, or the corroborating reports of the Boy Scouts he was with at the time? Was this perhaps a real event that he merely embellished and took advantage of over time, or was it merely the rantings and scheming of a known liar? The case was certainly enough to catch the attention of Project Blue Book and other researchers since, still unexplained, and whether it is real or not has managed to lodge itself firmly within some of the more curious and puzzling UFO cases there are

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

A great name for a band, an intriguing plot for a movie … but a scary thing to find out your military has developed. Yes, they claim it’s for bomb-sniffing … just like gunpowder was originally developed for medicinal purposes. What could possibly go wrong? Let’s find out.

“Finally, we developed a minimally-invasive surgical approach and mobile multi-unit electrophysiological recording system to tap into the neural signals in a locust brain and realize a biorobotic explosive sensing system. In sum, our study provides the first demonstration of how biological olfactory systems (sensors and computations) can be hijacked to develop a cyborg chemical sensing approach.”

“Hijacked to develop a cyborg chemical sensing approach” means the brains of locusts – made famous by so many plagues – are connected via electrodes in their brains to tiny packs on their backs which transmit sensory images picked up by the locusts’ antennae and send them to a computer, which monitors the signals and sees when the grasshoppers detect the vapors of one of many different explosives, a process that takes a mere few hundred milliseconds, thanks to the 50,000 olfactory neurons in those sensitive antennae. That’s a brief summary of “Explosive sensing with insect-based biorobots,” a non-peer-reviewed paper published this week in BioRxiv describing four years of research by a team led by Baranidharan Raman, associate professor of biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis.

If you refuse to let them go, I will bring locusts into your country tomorrow. They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen. They will devour what little you have left after the hail, including every tree that is growing in your fields. They will fill your houses and those of all your officials and all the Egyptians—something neither your fathers nor your forefathers have ever seen from the day they settled in this land till now.
— Exodus 10:3–6

7- They will come out of the graves with downcast eyes like an expanding swarm of locusts.
(54- The Moon, 7)

And as when beneath the onrush of fire locusts take wing to flee unto a river, and the unwearied fire burneth them with its sudden oncoming, and they shrink down into the water; even so before Achilles was the sounding stream of deep-eddying Xanthus filled confusedly with chariots and with men.
The Iliad

Yeah, yeah, yeah … they know all about your biblical, Quran and Iliad locust plagues, but that didn’t stop the U.S. Office of Naval Research from investing $750,000 back in 2016 to develop cyborg locusts … or was that the reason for the investment? While it’s accepted that cheap bomb detectors are in demand by police, the military and airport security for dealing with terrorists, and by governments like Vietnam and South Korea who still have active minefields left over from not-so-recent wars, it’s easy to imagine other uses for these bionic bugs whose main claim to fame is not bomb-detection but swarming crop devastation of the plague kind. Back in 2016, Raman saw other uses for the cyborg locusts as well.

“But the real key, he says, is the relative simplicity of the locust’s brain. That’s what allows it to be hijacked, which, if all goes right, will allow for remote explosive sensing. Raman believes that eventually cyborg locusts could be used for other sniff-centric tasks, even medical diagnoses that rely on smell.”

Send them to countries with bombs and mines right before the crops are ripe. Have them do their jobs detecting the explosives, then reward them by letting the cyborg locusts detect the wheat fields and let the destruction begin.

What could possibly go wrong?

“Something neither your fathers nor your forefathers have ever seen from the day they settled in this land till now.”

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

DE MAGISCHEGEBEURTENISSEN  RONDOM MOUNT SHASTA ( VIDEO )

Er zijn van die speciale plekken op aarde en één daarvan is de Amerikaanse vulkaan Mount Shasta in Californië. 

Er wordt gezegd dat er zich onder de vulkaan een buitenaardse basis bevindt en de Indianen die ooit het gebied bevolkten spraken van de mystieke krachten van Mount Shasta.

De vijfde chakra (gerelateerd aan onze keel), is gelegen in het gebied genaamd Mount Shasta, Noord-Californië. De eigenschappen van de keelchakra zijn communicatie, uitdrukking en verbinding tussen je geest, emoties en ziel. Wij hebben veel mensen horen vragen waarom Amerika het centrum van nieuwe ideeën en gedachten lijkt te zijn. De energie van Mt. Shasta is de poort waardoor communicatie kan worden gechanneld in ons collectief bewustzijn. Wij hebben het nu over communicatie van een hoger bewustzijnsniveau, communicatie over de geest en communicatie over het menselijk potentieel. Enkele van de zeer fundamentele leringen kwamen uit de streek van Mt. Shasta. Dus, de verantwoordelijkheid van Mount Shasta is het kanaliseren van de energie van wereldwijde communicatie.

De Mount Shasta is een vulkaan in de Cascade Range in Noord-Californië, VS. Hij heeft een hoogte van 4.317 m. De kegelvormige top is in sterke mate vergletsjerd en vertoont een zeer symmetrische vorm. In de buurt van de top vindt men verschillende zeer hete zwavelbronnen.

Er zijn vele engelen, lichtmeesters en hoger dimensionale wezens aanwezig en er is een sterke verbinding met Lemurië voelbaar, welke je ook kunt voelen en ervaren in Nederland op de Elohim Krachtplaats.

Zes jaar geleden schreven wij het volgende over Mount Shasta:

We hebben het afgelopen jaar veelvuldig voorbeelden gezien van UFO activiteit rondom vulkanen. Zoals de spectaculaire opnames rond de Popocatepetl vulkaan in Mexico.

In Amerika hebben we ook een vulkaan die veelvuldig in verband wordt gebracht met UFO activiteiten en dat is de Mount Shasta in de Amerikaanse staat Californië. Het is niet alleen bekend vanwege UFO’s, maar wordt ook wel één van de heilige plaatsen op deze planeet genoemd. Dit was reeds het geval in de tijd dat de indianen dit gebied bevolkten en ook vandaag de dag worden er mystieke krachten toegeschreven aan Mount Shasta.

Ook hier gaan al decennialang geruchten dat er zich onder Mount Shasta een buitenaardse basis zou bevinden en er worden uiteraard ook regelmatig UFO’s waargenomen.

Een voorbeeld hiervan zie je op de volgende foto, die geloof het of niet, gemaakt is door Google.

En nu komt Mount Shasta weer in het nieuws vanwege een bijzondere foto die op sociale media werd geplaatst door een medewerker van de Amerikaanse overheid.

Het is een foto die valt in de categorie: wolken die allesbehalve wolken lijken te zijn en waarvan we recentelijk meerdere voorbeelden hebben gezien. Wolken in een meestal wolkeloze hemel soms helemaal geen wolken blijken te zijn.

Wat het ook moge zijn, het is een prachtige opname en voor ufo onderzoeker Scott Waring bestaat er dan ook geen enkele twijfel en hebben we hier te maken met een gecloakt buitenaards ruimteschip.

In het licht van alle mysterieuze zaken rond Mount Shasta, geen vreemde conclusie en in de volgende video vertelt hij meer waarom hij denkt dat we hier te maken hebben met een ruimteschip.

Hij vertelt verder over het enorme ondergrondse gangenstelsel dat zich onder Mount Shasta bevindt en hoe daar op mysterieuze wijze mensen zijn verdwenen. Compleet verdwenen zonder dat er ooit iets van hen is teruggevonden. 

Soms komen er volgens Scott mensen uit de tunnels die geheel in het wit gekleed zijn en omringd door een vreemd gloeiend licht. Deze mensen worden in verband gebracht met Saint Germain en er schijnt zelfs een soort complete religie te zijn rondom Mount Shasta.

Voor Scott is duidelijk dat degene die voor Saint Germain wordt aangezien niemand anders is dan een buitenaardse die afkomstig is van de ET basis diep onder de vulkaan.

En tot slot nog een deel uit een eerder artikel over iemand die een buitenaardse ontmoeting heeft in de buurt van Mount Shasta.

Ik reed op Highway 31, afkomstig van Klamath Falls. Toen ik het stadje Merril binnenreed zag ik een fel vierkant licht dat vanuit "iets" naar buiten scheen. Het licht leek te fel om afkomstig te kunnen zijn van een keukenvenster ofzo.

Op de achtergrond zag ik de silhouetten van een aantal huizen. Het licht leek afkomstig te zijn uit een veld dat ongeveer 25 meter bij mij vandaan lag, langs de kant van de weg. Alhoewel het donker was kon ik zien dat er een object stond dat de vorm had van een bord/schotel met een doorsnee van ongeveer 7 meter waarbij het leek alsof het aan één kant een soort inkeping had.

Het was ook aan die kant van het object dat ik meer dan twee, maar niet meer dan vier, kleine personen ontdekte. Ik kreeg de indruk dat ze aan het werk waren. Ik besteedde er niet al te veel aandacht aan, maar begon toch langzamer te rijden om beter te kunnen kijken.

Plotseling kreeg ik een gevoel dat ze geschrokken waren omdat ik ze had gezien. Ik tuurde in het donker, maar kon ze niet goed zien. Ik dacht dat het misschien een mix was van volwassenen en tieners. In ieder geval stopten ze met wat ze aan het doen waren en bleven stilstaan.

Ondertussen was ik de stad ingereden en verloor ik ze even uit het zicht. Ik reed in een gehuurde bestelbus met daarachter een aanhanger. Waarom weet ik niet, maar ik besloot om te keren en terug te gaan om beter te kunnen kijken. Het viel niet mee om om te keren met die aanhanger en tegen de tijd dat ik weer op die plek terug was, waren er ongeveer drie minuten verstreken.

Tot mijn verbazing was het object weg, er hing alleen nog een soort mist. Ik hing met mijn hoofd uit het raam om naar de lucht te kijken en ik zag een rood knipperend licht zoals je dat ziet op torens en dergelijke, als waarschuwing voor vliegtuigen. Het hing ongeveer op een hoogte van twintig meter. Ik staarde ernaar en besefte dat er niets was waar dit licht aan vastzat, het was alsof het los in de lucht zweefde.

Toen stopte het licht met knipperen en verschenen er rode en witte lichten rondom de hele omtrek van het object. Ze flitsten aan en uit in een bepaalde volgorde, waardoor het leek alsof de lichten bewogen rondom het object. Dat was het moment waarop ik zeker wist dat het een schotel was.

De voorkant, tenminste ik neem aan dat het de voorkant was, hing onder een hoek van 20 graden naar beneden en toen begon het langzaam weg te vliegen, ongeveer met de snelheid van een helikopter. Ik moest lachen in mijzelf, want ik bedacht dat ze dit misschien wel deden om mij te laten geloven dat het een helikopter was. Ik luisterde met gespitste oren om te horen wat voor soort geluid het maakte, maar er was nauwelijks iets te horen.

Eerst vloog het naar het zuidwesten. Toen een paar kilometer verder veranderde het van koers naar een richting waar Mount Shasta ongeveer ligt, schat ik. Ik kon het object nog een tijdlang volgen en toen verdween het uit zicht.

Ik bleef nog een beetje in de buurt rondrijden aan de rand van de stad, de plek waar het object was geland. Ik merkte toen nog een paar dingen op die ik vreemd vond, maar die misschien niets met mijn waarneming te maken hadden.

Zoals een man die voor een groot raam zonder gordijnen zat in het huis dat het dichtst bij de landingsplek stond. Hij leek totaal niet te merken dat ik probeerde met een grote combinatie een honderdtachtig graden draai te maken op zijn gazon. Het leek alsof hij in een soort trance was of iets dergelijks.

Ik vervolgde mijn trip. Toen ik een stukje verder was verloor de auto bijna alle vermogen en was niet vooruit te branden. Ik ging zo langzaam dat ik bijna stilstond. Ik had nog nooit eerder in dat gebied een probleem gehad met een signaal voor mijn mobiele telefoon, maar nu was dit wel het geval. Ik kon niet bellen en ook geen sms versturen.

Tijdens het vervolg van de rit naar Reno voelde ik dat ik geobserveerd werd en dat ik niet alleen was. Ik heb dat gevoel nog steeds, tot op de dag van vandaag. Als ik nu ’s morgens vroeg in het donker buiten loop voel ik me niet op mijn gemak. Ik begrijp dat niet want toen ik die ontmoeting had voelde ik helemaal geen angst.

Sinds die ontmoeting werkt mijn nieuwe camera ook niet meer. Ik had er die dag helaas geen batterijen in en die heb ik nu al een paar keer vervangen, maar hij doet helemaal niets meer. Ik denk dat ze die op de één of andere manier kapotgemaakt hebben.

Tot zover het verhaal van die vreemde ontmoeting in de buurt van Mount Shasta.

Iemand die ook veel ervaringen heeft met UFO’s rondom Mount Shasta is de auteur Brian Wallenstein. Hij heeft er een dik boek over geschreven van ruim 600 pagina’s met de titel “Mount Shasta Sightings”.

Hieronder volgt een vorig jaar opgenomen interview met hem over zijn boek en zijn eigen UFO waarnemingen.

{ https://niburu.co/ }

There is a list of satellite map images with missing or unclear data. Some locations on free, publicly viewable satellite map services have such issues due to having been intentionally digitally obscured or blurred for various reasons.

Now take a look at the imagery of Saunders Island, a crescent-shaped island 8.8 km (5.5 mi) long, lying between Candlemas Island and Montagu Island near Antarctica and you see that the images having been intentionally digitally obscured by Google Earth.

We may wonder why they have digitally obscured a part of the island or it must be that they have to hide something!

Something like a never-seen-before lake of bubbling lava under the island?

The shocking discovery was made by the British Antarctic Survey using powerful satellite imagery of the Southern Hemisphere.

The Antarctic survey confirmed not only the presence of molten lava in the crater of Mount Michael, an active volcano on Saunders Island but this lava lake is the eighth of its kind to be found on Earth.

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

UFO hovering above Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

This UFO video was just submitted through our Facebook page. It was recorded over Winnipeg, Canada on 13th February 2020.

Witness report: 

My daughter and I recorded a UFO last Thursday night in the sky to the west of our home. It was a sphere of light in the sky. Two other light spheres appeared as well shortly after we began recording. The lights would fade in and out. White lights seem to briefly shoot out from one side of the middle light. The lights stayed in the same location until a military aircraft began flying toward it. The lights started to fade more to the west after 9 minutes or so when the plane was flying toward it. We stopped recording when it wasn’t visible. If I edited it to shorten the clip, could I send somewhere for someone to look at it? I apologize in advance for my daughters disgusting language.

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

ᵀᴴᴱ WESTALL UFO ᴀɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇ STRANGENESS ᴛʜᴀᴛ ғᴏʟʟᴏᴡᴇᴅ

{ https://theorbis.home.blog/ }

Iron Age Temple Uncovered in Jerusalem Challenges Biblical Claim

The famous Temple of Solomon might not have been the first or only temple in the Holy Land.

Dating to around 900 BC, an Iron Age temple located near Jerusalem negates the long-held idea the ancient Kingdom of Judah (southern Israel) only had one temple, the First Temple, better known as Solomon's Temple, which was operational between 10th century BC until it was destroyed in 586 BC.

The Iron Age site of Tel Motza, about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) outside Jerusalem, has been known of since the early 1990s and archaeologists found the remains of a settlement dated to the Neolithic period (about 6000 BC). In 2012 a settlement from the First Temple period was discovered containing a cultic structure and 36 wheat granaries, indicating that Motza was part of an ancient economic center, and it is the presence of this one ancient religious complex that challenges the history of Judah presented in the Bible.

The Tel Motza Iron Age temple excavation site in Jerusalem.

(Natritmeyer / CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Judah Was Not As Well Established As The Bible States

A new study of the temple by co-researcher Shua Kisilevitz, a doctoral student of archaeology at Tel Aviv University in Israel and an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), and review co-author Oded Lipschits, the director of the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, was published in the January/February issue of the  Biblical Archaeology Review  magazine. In the article the researchers say the temple had been built about 900 BC and that they think it operated until the early 6th century BC.

And where this discovery is controversial is that the existence of this temple means that people living close to Jerusalem had their own place of worship, a cultic temple, which in itself suggests the rule of the Jerusalem high priests was “not so strong”, and that the kingdom was “not so well established” as the Bible leads us to believe, Kisilevitz and Lipschits, told Live Science .

Oldest Known Horse Depictions In Judah

A report in the Daily Mail detailing the study says the ancient temple could have held about 150 congregants who worshiped the god Yahweh, but they also used idols to communicate with the divine in the same period as the First Temple. This contradicts the Jewish Bible that details the religious reforms of  King Hezekiah  and King Josiah, who consolidated worship at Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, and allegedly stopped ‘all’ cultic practices out of its walls.

Kisilevitz told Live Science that the temple was a rectangular building with an open courtyard at the front that would have been a focal point for cultic worship, and inside they found a stone built sacrificial altar near pits for dead animal bodies. Two human-like and two horse-like clay figurines were discovered smashed and buried in the courtyard, which was thought to have been associated with a rainfall, fertility and harvest ritual of some kind. The researchers added that the horse-like figurines may be the “oldest known depictions of  horses from the Iron Age of Judah.”

Figurine of a horse found in Tel Motza Iron Age temple in excavation site.

(Clara Amit / Israel Antiquities Authority )

• As Wise as Solomon: The Powerful King Who Magically Ruled Israel
• The Lost and Coveted Treasures of King Solomon
• 9,000 Year-old ‘Mega Site’ Found Near Jerusalem Changes History

Smashed Idols, Broken History

The teams of archaeologists at Tel Motza unearthed dozens of grain storage silos (granaries) and associated administrative and religious buildings. This informs us that Tel Motza sold grain to the nearby Jerusalem. Over time, the settlement is believed to have become an agricultural and economic “powerhouse,” the researchers wrote in the magazine piece. They also speculate that perhaps the temple was permitted to exist by the high priests at Solomon’s Temple, because it was part of the granary and didn’t threaten centralized control of the kingdom.

During the time this temple was functional, new political groups and alliances emerged in the Levant, and it is believed that in the face of these changes people maintained traditional religious practices. The researchers said this was evident in the temple’s artifacts and architecture, which they say are reminiscent of religious traditions from the ancient Near East that had been practiced since the third millennium BC.

Figurine of a ram found in Tel Motza Iron Age temple excavation site.

(Yael Yolovitch / Israel Antiquities Authority )

The discovery and analysis of this ancient Iron Age temple not only enlightens historians on the state formation of Judah during this period. It also determines that the state was nowhere near as centralized as it would later become and that in its formative days it depended not solely on the administrative elite at Solomon’s Temple, but on trading relationships with nearby settlements like Tel Motza, and maybe others yet to be discovered.

• Top image: Main: The Tel Motza Iron Age temple excavation site in Jerusalem.    Source: Skyview / Israel Antiquities Authority .     Inset: Ancient figurines of people found at Tel Motza.        Source: Clara Amit / Israel Antiquities Authority

By Ashley Cowie

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

Hadden de neanderthalers een begrafenisritueel?

{ https://www.eoswetenschap.eu/ }

Findings From NASA's Juno Update Jupiter Water Mystery

{ http://www.nasa.gov/ }

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent

 @hannahdev

{ https://www.theguardian.com/international }

Saturn's weird, Earth-like moon just failed a key test for alien life

By Rafi Letzter 

Blame quantum mechanics.

An image from NASA's Cassini probe, taken Sept. 23, 2006, shows a pair of hydrocarbon lakes on Titan.

(Image: © NASA/JPL)

Saturn's most Earth-like moon looks a bit less likely to host life, thanks to quantum mechanics, the weird rules that govern subatomic particles.

Titan, the second largest moon in our solar system after Jupiter's Ganymede, is unique in two ways that have convinced some researchers that this moon might host extraterrestrial life: It's the only moon in our solar system with a dense atmosphere, and it's the only body in space, besides Earth, known to definitely have pools of liquid on its surface. In Titan's case, those pools are frigid lakes of hydrocarbons, closer to the gasoline in a car than the oceans on Earth. But some researchers have suggested that complex structures could arise in those pools: bubbles with special properties that mimic ingredients found to be necessary for life on our planet.

On Earth, lipid molecules (fatty acids) can spontaneously arrange themselves into bubble-shaped membranes that form the barriers around the cells of all known life-forms. Some researchers think this was the first necessary ingredient for life as it formed on Earth.

• Related: 9 strange scientific excuses for why humans haven't found aliens yet 

On Titan, researchers have speculated in the past, an equivalent set of bubbles might have emerged, these consisting of nitrogen-based molecules called azotosomes.

But for those structures to arise naturally, the physics has to work just right in the conditions actually present on Titan: temperatures of about minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 185 degrees Celsius), without liquid water or atmospheric oxygen.

Previous studies, using molecular dynamics simulations — a technique often used to examine the chemistry of life — suggested that such bubble structures would arise and become common on a world like Titan. But a new paper, published Jan. 24 in the journal Science Advances, suggests that those earlier simulations were wrong.

Using more complex simulations involving quantum mechanics, the researchers in the new paper studied the structures in terms of their "thermodynamic viability."

Here's what that means: Put a ball at the top of a hill, and it's likely to end up at the bottom, a position of lower energy. Similarly, chemicals tend to arrange themseIves in the simplest, lowest-energy pattern. The researchers wanted to know whether the azotosomes would be the simplest, most efficient arrangement for those nitrogen-bearing molecules.

Titan represents a "strict test case for the limits of life," the researchers wrote in their paper. And in this role, the moon fails. Azotosomes, the simulation showed, just aren't thermodynamically viable on Titan.

This work, the researchers said in a statement, should help NASA figure out what experiments to include on its Dragonfly mission to Titan, planned for the 2030s. It's still theoretically possible that life emerged on Titan, the researchers said in the paper, but such life would likely not involve anything we'd recognize as a cell membrane.

• 8 ways aliens could contact us
• 10 interesting places in the solar system we'd like to visit
• 15 unforgettable images of stars

Originally published on Live Science.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

Avoiding space debris might require new legal framework, US lawmakers say

By Elizabeth Howell

To stop dangerous space debris, the U.S. government must work together with private companies and international partners.

An artist's concept of the orbital debris field around Earth, based on real data from the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office.

(Image: © NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

The ever-growing number of satellites and orbital debris in space prompted calls for change at a House hearing, although how this will be legislated is still under consideration.

At issue is the rise of privately owned satellite constellations by companies such as SpaceX and OneWeb. Satellites today are smaller and more affordable than the big machines of past decades, thanks to advancements in technology. But with fleets of small satellites comes other risks, such as more chances for them to slam into each other. And high-profile near misses are starting to become more common. 

"This is one of the most important and rapidly evolving issues facing our ability to operate in space," said Kendra Horn, D-Okla., chair of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, in her opening statement at the hearing in Washington, on Feb. 11.

• Related: 7 wild ways to destroy orbital debris

Two large, defunct and uncontrollable satellites nearly collided in orbit two weeks ago, passing about 60 feet (18 meters) from each other — narrowly avoiding a collision that could have sent thousands of pieces of "space junk" into low Earth orbit. And in late 2019, the European Space Agency had to redirect one of its satellites to reduce the risk of a collision; the other satellite operator, SpaceX, did not respond to requests to move its own machine out of the way. 

This doesn't even mention the numerous confirmed examples of space collisions and space junk over the decades that in some cases, are still causing problems today. For example, the International Space Station has changed its orbit in the past to dodge dangerous space debris. Space assets such as weather satellites, telecommunications links and the GPS navigation system for the United States are among the vital links of space infrastructure that could be knocked out if collisions continue.

The U.S. Department of Defense has a catalog of more than 20,000 known space objects, Horn said, although this number has a couple of limitations. The catalog only represents unclassified satellites or objects, and it also indicates the number of trackable objects. There are some things in space that are just too small to be tracked with current technology. 

"Space is going to get more crowded," Horn said, as thousands of new objects join what's already in space. The SpaceX Starlink constellation could have more than 12,000 satellites alone in a few years, and (besides the collision concern) it already is raising concerns from astronomers for its bright objects blocking night-sky observations. 

The House subcommittee commissioned a few experts to speak on how lawmakers can address this problem, under a provision in the 2020 NASA budget to carry out research and development activities concerning space debris mitigation, and to consider a strategy for space situational awareness research and technology. 

The solutions proposed were diverse, but for the most part, the experts said it will likely involve using several government entities that could include NASA, the Department of Commerce and other possibilities. There may be some private industry involvement as well.

Public-private partnerships

One possibility is finding more sources for satellite data outside of the Department of Defense. "We need better data," said subcommittee ranking member Brian Babin (R-Texas), adding that the Department of Defense cannot release all data for national security concerns — and it does not see everything. 

Babin suggested that the Department of Commerce could form a partnership with the private sector. It already has experience with regulating standards such as export controls, he said. It also already gives a "light touch" to emerging industries, he pointed out — such as its careful relationship in the 1990s with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that assigns internet addresses, among many other functions.

Brian Weeden, the Secure World Foundation's director of program planning, testified as a witness for the subcommittee. He said alerts are already coming from private industry nonetheless. It was LeoLabs, a private American company, that first sent out the alert about the possible 2020 collision in a tweet three days before the event, he said — based on ground-based tracking radars. But he warned the current infrastructure is "dangerously insufficient to face the growing number of space challenges."

But Commerce is not the only federal entity that could step up to help solve the space junk crisis.

International collaboration

Much of space law rests on precedent, taking into account how things are done in international waters or on the continent of Antarctica (where multiple countries have jurisdiction). For that reason, scholar Ruth Stilwell called for considering the "high seas" as one area where space policymakers could turn for legislation. (Stilwell is an adjunct professor at Norwich University and a senior non-resident scholar at the Space Policy Institute of George Washington University.)

Stilwell called for an "international agreement on standards and behaviors," with a transition to new space traffic management taking into account the needs of various space players. Whatever the framework is, however, it would need government oversight of some sort. "You can only be a good actor with rules to follow," Stilwell added later in the hearing. "You can't expect somebody to be a good actor if rules do not exist."

There is also concern that by handing space traffic control to big entities like Commerce and a few private companies, other voices (such as smaller companies) could be lost in the space world. "We need to ensure the expertise developed in small communities is not lost in the transition phase," Danielle Wood, the director of the space-enabled research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said at the hearing.

While NASA does have expertise in the space domain, the agency doesn't have all the expertise that other ones have — which is why Joanne Gabrynowicz, professor emeritus of space law at the University of Mississippi Law Center, called for an interagency solution. "There is no one agency who has it all," Gabrynowicz said at the hearing, referring to other government agency possibilities for managing space traffic.

NASA also has numerous other things to think about, Weeden said in a separate piece of testimony — including its mandate to land astronauts on the moon by 2024 and then move on to Mars. "NASA could do it, but my sense is they will be overwhelmed by all the other things," Weeden said.

If people don't act quickly, there is the risk that space debris could lock out the possibility of future missions for a while, if a collision creates pieces of debris that slam into other satellites and break them up, too. (This is known as the Kessler Syndrome.) 

Over time the collisions would stabilize, noted Daniel Oltrogge, who is founder and administrator of the Space Safety Coalition, but the effects would still be felt. "By the time it does [stabilize], you have a huge number of small particles out there, and some fragments … that are quite large," said Oltrogge, who is also chair of the space traffic management space governance task force for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

More subcommittee hearings will be coming up to discuss what to do next.

• Space junk menace: New guidelines urged to help fight orbital debris threat
• Astronomers says Starlink and other constellations could threaten science
• Satellite crashes, asteroid impacts and space weather pose big risks, US lawmakers say

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/  }

Are They Alive... Antarctica Melting Ice Is Revealing Something No One Thought Possible!

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

SPACEX WANTS TO SEND REGULAR CITIZENS INTO SPACE — HERE'S HOW

SpaceX biedt vier “tickets naar de ruimte” aan - HLN.be

Bron: Belga

Bouwer van de Falcon-draagraket SpaceX heeft een overeenkomst gesloten met Space Adventures, met zetel nabij Washington. Die firma werkte samen met het Russische ruimtevaartbureau Roscosmos om acht ruimtetoeristen met een Russische Sojoez naar het Internationaal Ruimtestation ISS te brengen en terug te halen.

Lees ook

Voor de rijkste miljardairs is ruimtereizen niet zomaar een hobby meer

Geen verblijf in ruimte

SpaceX, het bedrijf van Tesla-kopstuk Elon Musk, biedt nu de kans om mee te vliegen met zijn door een Falcon-9 gelanceerde Crew Dragon, of de bemande versie van zijn onbemande cargo die voor rekening van het ruimtevaartbureau NASA instaat voor vervoer naar en van het ISS. Die Crew Dragon moet binnen enkele maanden - echt bemand - voor het eerst vliegen, maar wanneer precies is nog niet bekend. 

De raketbouwer beklemtoont ruimtetoeristen geen verblijf in het ISS aan te bieden. SpaceX geeft geen details over de datum, de duur en het programma van de trip. Voorzitter Eric Andersen van Space Adventures zei dat de vlucht twee keer zo hoog kan gaan als voorgaande missies van een amateur-astronaut of bezoeker van het ruimtestation. Dit wentelt op ongeveer 400 km hoogte rond onze planeet.

Concurrentie

Ook werkzaam in de sector van het ruimtetoerisme zijn Virgin Galactic en Blue Origin. Zij werken aan trips tot 80 à 100 km hoogte of de grens van de ruimte, voor enkele minuten, voor 250.000 dollar of meer. SpaceX zal ongetwijfeld duurder zijn. 

Met een Falcon-9 heeft SpaceX maandag nog eens 60 satellieten tegelijk voor zijn Starlink-constellatie voor wereldwijd breedbandinternet gelanceerd. Het netwerk omvat zodoende al 300 kunstmanen.

Voor de eerste keer sinds 2016 kon de teruggekeerde eerste rakettrap echter niet landen op een droneschip in de Atlantische Oceaan. Die trap werd ook al gebruikt bij drie eerdere lanceringen. Het lijkt onwaarschijnlijk dat het in zee geplofte ding nog eens gebruikt zal kunnen worden.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

Concerns over secret search for giants' bones near Huntly

{ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/ }

Giant skeleton searchers call off dig

Susan Strongman, Reporter, In Depth

A secretive group who spent four years tunnelling into the side of a country road in search of a mythical race of pre-Polynesian giants' skeletons have called off their dig.

But one of the diggers, who has revealed his identity via Facebook, has warned a "reiki protection is on the cave dig".

The diggers have excavated a tunnel bout 14 metres into the hillside.

Photo: Supplied

Last week, RNZ revealed iwi, academics and the landowner were concerned by the anonymous group's dig in the Waikaretu Valley, west of Huntly.

READ MORE: Concerns over secret search for giants' bones near Huntly

The group say this bone belongs to a giant pre-Polynesian human and could be more than 2500 years old. Experts say it's likely from a moa.

Photo / Supplied

The group, who updated their progress on a blog, were searching for evidence of pre-Polynesian inhabitants of New Zealand.

They believed they had found a bone in the tunnel that belonged to a giant human up to 2500 years old.

But after viewing photos and a video of the bone, multiple experts told RNZ it likely belonged to a moa.

The dig was done without the consent of the landowner, or consultation with iwi who have tīpuna and taonga buried in the north west Waikato area's limestone caves.

Archaeologist Dr Siân Halcrow expressed concern that the group's fossicking behaviour could damage the archaeological record.

In a blog post on Saturday, the group announced they would abandon the dig, writing that the world will "now never know for sure if this cave was filled by hand specifically to hide some fourteen 8'+ pre-Polynesian skeletons."

In the post, the group said they would focus on three other locations in their search for proof that a race of eight foot humans beat Polynesians to become the first humans in Aotearoa, which they told RNZ would be "the most talked about worldwide story of the millennium."

Today, Rodney Davidson, a reiki practitioner from Northland, confirmed he was involved in the dig.

He posted a warning on Facebook: "Be aware that a Reiki protection is on the cave dig and has been since the start too. It has made it,s [sic] presence felt on at least two occasions to great benefit in fact. Abuse it in anyway and there will be a ' result ' ! I have no control over this so all your choice!"

There is no evidence of human habitation of Aotearoa New Zealand prior to the arrival of Polynesians.

The pervasive myth that an earlier population of Moriori was displaced by Māori has been repeatedly rejected by academics.

The 1916 and 1946 editions of the School Journal taught generations of school children many myths about Moriori. They include that they were wiped-out by Māori during an 1835 invasion, and that they were conquered due to their inferiority.

A true account of the history of the iwi is about to be entrenched in law.

• READ MORE: Moriori Treaty Settlement to be signed: 'It's been a long wait'

Other alternative histories suggest that prior to the arrival of Polynesians, the country was settled by Egyptians, Celts, Greeks, Chinese, Melanesians, or Phoenicians.

Evidence from the archaeological record, linguistics and DNA analysis shows Polynesians first arrived in New Zealand in the 14th century.

Halcrow said "conspiracy theories" about the settlement of New Zealand by non-Polynesians were "grounded in racist ideologies."

She raised concerns about the number of people following the group's blog, saying, "It does really highlight what some New Zealanders think, in terms of pre-Māori conspiracy theories, with really racist undertones. It's not grounded in fact, so people should be aware."

Eru Whare of Ngāti Taahinga, chairman of Pukerewa Marae which is near where the group was digging, said, "I wouldn't put it down to racism. I think it would be a lack of education and understanding of cultural values."

"It's very hard for our people to try and decipher why people would do such things. And whether they are looking for, you know, big giants or moas. I mean I can understand... But for guys just going in there without any consultation. Well, that's something else. That's a pretty disturbing approach."

University of Waikato teaching fellow Dr M Dentith, who studies conspiracy theory, fake news, and secrecy, said theories about pre-Polynesian inhabitants of New Zealand were often used to make some variation of the claim, "'Well, if white people were here first, then the Treaty is null and void', or 'We did to Māori only what they did to our distant ancestors'".

• Listen to Waikato University teaching fellow Dr M Dentith talking to Jesse Mulligan duration8′ :49″ 
  from Afternoons with Jesse Mulligan

Dentith said much of this could be put down to a lack of education around New Zealand's history and prehistory.

{ https://www.rnz.co.nz/ }

“(The world will) now never know for sure if this cave was filled by hand specifically to hide some fourteen 8’+ pre-Polynesian skeletons.”

There’s a mini war of sorts underway in New Zealand over … giants! A reporter for Radio New Zealand (RNZ) has brought to light a hunt that has been underway for some time for evidence of giants that the searchers believe lived on the island prior to the Polynesians who arrived between 1250 and 1300 and developed the Māori culture. The group calls itself Tangata Whenua (Māori for “people of the land”) and, according to its website, has been secretly digging (often at night) a cave or tunnel since 2016 in the Waikato region in northern New Zealand for evidence of the 8-foot tall giants that they believe have been found before in 16 locations. The website states that the group knows of four of these sites and, earlier this month, they found what they claim is part of a femur from what would have been a being 7’10” to 8’4″ tall and lived 2500 years ago. (You can read the account and see a photo here.)

“But after viewing photos and a video of the bone, multiple experts told RNZ it likely belonged to a moa.”

Moa

RNZ reporter Susan Strongman has been reporting on the secret dig that has annoyed the landowner, who says they never asked permission, and archeologists and indigenous people, who say the hunters are not archeologists and risk harming historical artifacts and human remains. Strongman raised the heat on the group by revealing the name of one member — Rodney Davidson, a reiki practitioner from Northland. In a response on the group website and on his Facebook page, he defended the hunt, criticized Strongman and admitted that the group has stopped looking in that area, so no one will ever know for sure in the cave has giant skeletons in it. He said they will continue their clandestine searches in the other caves whose locations are apparently still secret.

“Be aware that a Reiki protection is on the cave dig and has been since the start too. It has made it,s [sic] presence felt on at least two occasions to great benefit in fact. Abuse it in anyway and there will be a ‘ result ‘ ! I have no control over this so all your choice!”

Along with the warning that a reiki aura or shield is protecting the cave, Davidson also gave out her twitter and email addresses for his supporters to send their responses – supporters whose numbers he claims have risen since she broke the story.

Meanwhile, experts like Otago University associate professor of bioarchaeology Dr Siân Halcrow agree that the bone is probably from a moa (a large extinct flightless bird resembling the emu), there is no evidence of any humans or human-like species of any size on New Zealand prior to the Māori (thus, no evidence that the Māori killed them off – a popular but unproven theory), and any searches for pre-Polynesian giants are disconcerting.

“It does really highlight what some New Zealanders think, in terms of pre-Māori conspiracy theories, with really racist undertones. It’s not grounded in fact, so people should be aware.”

Māori

Archaeologist Sian Keith told RNZ that archeologists seek evidence and are passionate and thorough, so talk of coverups and secrecy in his field are upsetting. That may be true among his own colleagues, but there are plenty of stories from Egypt, Central America and other archeology sites that would disagree.

As with any war of words, deep-seated beliefs, secrecy, conspiracy theories and conflicting information, this one is far from over.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

UFO encounters happen all over the world, to people from all walks of life. It is an all-encompassing phenomenon that includes a wide range of different reports that run the range from the slightly odd to the downright insane. Some of the most exciting and intriguing of these are those encounters that have occurred between aircraft pilots and something seemingly not of this world, and one of the best known and most mysterious cases of this is the time Iranian fighter jets engaged something very weird and seemingly aggressive in their skies.

It all began with a series of strange phone calls. On September 19, 1976, at approximately 11:30 PM, the Imperial Iranian Air Force command post at Tehran, Iran, began receiving panicked calls from concerned citizens in the Shemiran city district, who claimed to be witnessing unusual bright lights moving about in the sky. The Iranian Air Force at first assumed this to be conventional aircraft or helicopters, but it was soon found that there was nothing scheduled to be in the sky at that time that could be creating the phenomena, and so assistant deputy commander of operations General Yousefi personally contacted the control tower at Mehrabad International Airport and then looked out over the landscape to see with his own eyes a very bright object like a star travelling across the sky, only far too large and bright to be a regular aircraft or star.

In the meantime, more calls were coming in from frightened citizens, and the commander felt it would be prudent to investigate the disturbance further. To this effect he authorized an F-4 Phantom II jet to be scrambled at Shahrokhi Air Force Base in Hamadan and sent to go take a look and possibly intercept. As the jet approached it began to experience various technical malfunction and glitches, with the instrument panel falling to work properly and communications ripped through with heavy static, which all got bad enough that the pilot was forced to abort and head back towards base. Oddly, the plane supposedly began to function normally as soon as he left the area, suggesting that perhaps the unearthly object had been responsible. Undeterred, the Iranian Air Force sent up another F-4, which was able to get a radar signature for the mystery object, which they estimated was similar to that of a passenger jet, although the blinding nature of the light it emitted prevented an accurate judgement of size. Whatever it was then reportedly shot away from the approaching fighter with a sudden, breathtaking burst of speed and acceleration, and the chase was on.

F-4 Phantom

The fighter was able to pace the fleeing UFO but not gain on it, yet the crew, composed of a Lieutenant Parviz Jafari and Lieutenant Jalal Damirian, was able to make some observations. Other than the immense, nearly blinding brightness of the object, it was also noticed that it had an array of rectangular lights upon it that alternated between red, blue, green, and orange in some inscrutable rapid pattern. As they stared in awe and tried to catch up to it, the mysterious unidentified aircraft reportedly at several points ejected into the air a total of four smaller objects, one of which headed right for its pursuers, causing the alarmed pilot to try to lock onto it with a missile, but he would later report that the targeting system suddenly went haywire and all communications with base were cut off. This aggressive smaller object showed no signs of slowing down, inexorably approaching at very high speed, and thinking that this was perhaps a missile of the unidentified object’s own, the fighter took emergency evasive maneuvers. According to the crew, they took a deep dive, and the smaller object followed their movement to chase them some distance before turning around to join its larger brethren. The large UFO then shot off at mind-boggling speed and the jet’s instruments went back online. On their way back to base they apparently would see another smaller object, which apparently descended to the desert below. The pilot Jafari would later say of these objects in a press conference:

Four other objects with different shapes separated from the main one, at different times during this close encounter. Whenever they were close to me, my weapons were jammed and my radio communications were garbled. One of the objects headed toward me. I thought it was a missile. I tried to launch a heat seeking missile to it, but my missile panel went out. Another followed me when I was descending on the way back. One of the separated objects landed in an open area radiating a high bright light, in which the sands on the ground were visible. We could hear emergency squash all the way, which was reported by other airliners flying at the time and continued for another couple of days.

It would indeed later turn out that a passenger airliner had also had their equipment disrupted, and additionally the large object had also apparently been visually observed by air traffic control on the ground. Rather eerily, air traffic control claimed that as the F-4 made its approach to land they observed another object or craft, this one cylindrical and with a light on each end and a flashing light in its center, appear and follow the fighter back towards base. This second object would then apparently pass dangerously close over the fighter and do a fly by over the base, causing the control tower to lose all power as it did, only for everything to return to normal when it was gone. It would then reportedly be seen again some time later by a pilot over the Mediterranean, as well as by the crew and passengers of a passenger airliner over Lisbon, Portugal, and also over Morocco. An Iranian air traffic control officer at the time would later say of the incident:

When they heard our report and the report of the pilots, they concluded that no country is capable of such technology, and all of them believed it was a strange object from outer space.

Another odd little detail is that when the area where the “probe” was claimed to have been dropped was investigated, locals claimed that they had heard a loud noise and seen a bright light on the evening in question, although no physical evidence was apparently found. The whole strange incident would be investigated by not only the Iranian authorities, but also the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group in Tehran, the U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and there have been many attempts to try and explain it all over the years. There have been many conventional explanations offered, such as that what was seen was a rocket, meteor, or the re-entry of a decaying satellite, or that this was a misidentified astronomical body such as Venus or Jupiter, but none of these really seem to fit all of the odd features of the case. These objects were witnessed by numerous experienced, qualified personnel such as pilots, military officers, and air traffic control workers, which makes it unlikely they would make such an observational mistake. There is also the detail that something was jamming equipment aboard the jets, which is hard to explain away and has left authorities and researchers of the case puzzled. It has been suggested that this could have been the result of pilot error and faulty, under-maintained equipment, but there is also the report that an air control tower was temporarily disabled as well.

Was this all explainable with mundane explanations? Is it all a perfect brew of witness error and malfunctioning equipment? Or was this something more bizarre? The Tehran UFO incident has become a very exciting case for several reasons. The object was seen by multiple witnesses, ranging from residents to military personnel and pilots, many of whom are highly reliable observers and all of whom describe the same thing within the same time frame. There is also the strange anomaly that at least three separate aircraft experienced technical malfunctions and equipment jamming similar to electromagnetic effects during the event. Finally, it was very well investigated, with no official explanation ever offered. Whatever is going on here has remained very much discussed in UFO circles, and it remains a true unexplained case for the files, perhaps doomed to remain locked in a limbo of debate and speculation for a very long time.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

The entire saga of the US military’s modern investigations into UFOs has been clouded in confusion, obfuscation, and a whole alphabet soup of acronyms—AATIP, AAWSAP, UAP, etc.—which has enabled the Pentagon to avoid actually answering the real question: is there something weird going on or not? Since the story of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program broke in 2017, the Pentagon’s story has gone from acknowledging that AATIP investigated “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAPs, not UFOs, which is rather important to them), to saying AATIP had nothing to do with UAPs. Add to this the strange list of AATIP funded projects and the former head of AATIP starting a side-project with Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge and you’ve got the dumbest possible byzantine labyrinth that could maybe lead to “soft disclosure.”

This week, however, Popular Mechanics reported that they had obtained leaked documents dating to 2009 which show that not only did AATIP investigate UFOs, but they also investigated them as possibly otherworldy or interdimensional phenomena and continued to do so beyond 2012, the year AATIP was “officially” shuttered. Furthermore, AATIP took an interest in the paranormal phenomena at Utah’s famed Skinwalker Ranch with an interest in harnassing whatever’s going on there for defense purposes. Paranormal weaponry, that’s just what we need, right?

It even looks like a UFO.

The leaked documents come from Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS). It is a 494-page “Ten Month Report” compiled by BAASS for the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Applications Program (AAWSAP), the contracting division of the broader AATIP program. Bob Bigelow, the billionaire founder of Bigelow Aerospace, is a well-known figure in the UFO world. Bigelow’s private research group the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) was stationed at Skinwalker Ranch for years after the billionaire purchased the property. Bigelow Aerospace’s involvement with AATIP has also been well-publicized.

In 2008, BAASS was awarded a $10 million contract by AAWSAP for a guaranteed year with a 5-year option. According to Popular Mechanics,  the “Ten Month Report” was one of many such reports given by BAASS to AAWSAP through the duration of the contract. Throughout the document, it is clear that what is being investigated is not an unknown foreign weapons system. From the Popular Mechanics piece:

From cover to cover, the BAASS report references the government’s new buzzword for UFOs: UAP. However, nowhere could Popular Mechanics find a single reference to foreign (terrestrial) advanced aerospace weapon systems, or projected technological innovations based on current industry trends.

Contrary to the Pentagon’s recent sidestepping, it seems clear that what was being investigated was something not just unidentified but completely unknown. Here’s an incomplete list of topics covered in BAASS’s “Ten Month Report” as summarized by Popular Mechanics:

●Overview of the BAASS Physics Division’s efforts to conduct research on advanced aerospace vehicles, including the development of standardization for measurement of physical effects and signatures associated with UAP.

● Overview of BAASS research for measuring and gleaning the effects on biological organisms from UAP.

● Mention of Skinwalker Ranch in Utah as a “possible laboratory for studying other intelligences and possible interdimensional phenomena.”

● Strategic plans to organize a series of intellectual debate forums targeted to broad audiences pertaining to the “potential disclosure of an extraterrestrial presence.”

● Mention of BAASS program dubbed “Project Northern Tier,” which involved securing documents related to instances where dozens of UFOs flew over restricted airspaces of facilities housing nuclear weapons.

● Project databases of UAP-related materials compiled through various partnerships, and the intent to expand these databases by coordinating with foreign governments.

● Summaries of multiple UAP events both inside the U.S. and in foreign countries.

● Photographs of UAPs provided by various sources, including foreign governments.

Cover of the BAASS “Ten Month Report”

These reports are technically the property of BAASS and, due to the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, are conveniently excluded from FOIA requests.  Attorney Josh Budray told Popular Mechanics:

“Unfortunately, the government attempting to evade FOIA by contracting out its responsibilities is nothing new. Both federal and state FOIA statutes strive to eliminate such obvious gamesmanship—avoiding transparency and disclosure obligations by contracting out functions—but whether they are successful in doing so is an entirely different story.”

There’s honestly too much in the Popular Mechanics report to summarize here, and it is recommended that you take a read for yourself. Seriously, it’s huge. Other leaked documents obtained include a 54-page report on the physiological effects of exposure to UFOs, as well as proof that AATIP operated beyond its official closure in 2012.

While much of what is in the leaked documents have been in the realm of solid assumptions since the AATIP story first broke, they have still been assumptions. The Pentagon has admitted that footage such as that from the USS Nimitz does show “unidentified aerial phenomena,” it has always been delicately handled from a position that “unidentified” might mean “we just don’t know who built it.” While these leaked documents reveal nothing about the nature of these phenomena (because of course not), they do show that whatever AATIP and BAASS were, and likely are, studying is completely weird and has been treated accordingly by the Pentagon.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

There have been a number of unexplained Google Earth sightings in Antarctica recently and now zooming in on a mountainous region, we found what appears to be several disc-shaped UFOs on a mountain ridge of the Victory Mountains.

Whether the UFOs have crash landed, part of a secret military project or may be of extraterrestrial origin, is not clear, but there is clearly a lot of activity around these disc-shaped objects.

First location:

2 UFOs and operational base 

UFOs: 40 meters in diameter 

Coordinates: 73° 4'46.72"S 73° 4'46.72"S 

Second location: 

3 UFOs and operational base 

UFOs: 10 meters in diameter 

Coordinates: 73° 4'50.32"S 167°41'36.31"E

How many hours of scouring Google Earth must it take to find these things?

The mountain range where the object was found lies on Antarctica‘s northern coast near Australia.

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

Huge bright object recorded over Lake Mary, Florida 17-Feb-2020

This stationary unidentified flying object was seen and filmed in the sky above Lake Mary in Florida on 17th February 2020.

Witness report: 

Observed Orange Star like object. Driving into work on Lake Mary Blvd. stopped at traffic light on Lake Mary Blvd and Lake Emma and witnessed a star like orange object, so I decided to record it, not realizing that there was a object above it with all kinds of lights, a long cigar shape. (Attached recording) Got to work at 3300 Exchange Place, Lake Mary and decided to get my camera and started recording to see if I could find the object and I got it on camera. Then I saw another object to bottom right, plus the orange one, and cigar one which was high. Then all of a sudden an object (green) appears above the cigar object, and beams down at something in the ground and then disappears! I continued to record until I had to go into work.

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

Massive UFO Fleet Appears Over Pennsylvania, Expert Claims

Anew video shows an alleged fleet of UFOs flying over a community in Pennsylvania. As seen in the clip, the strange objects were moving slowly in the same direction.

The video was taken by an eyewitness as he was driving with his family in King of Prussia. It was shared on YouTube by Scott Waring of ET Data Base.

In the video, clusters of bright orbs can be seen in the sky. Although they did not appear to follow a specific formation, all of them were moving in the same direction. Some of them were moving slowly while the others remained stationary.

“Personally observed with my family on the way home from the King of Prussia Mall, heading eastbound multiple bright lights in the sky remaining stationary,” the eyewitness stated. “Have video taken in car while observing. This is unexplainable unless there is some type of unknown military aircraft I am unaware of.”

Interestingly, the bright orbs appeared in different parts of the sky. Some of the objects were grouped in large clusters. Based on the brightness of the objects and since there were no stars in the sky when the video was taken, Waring noted that other people most likely saw the strange objects too.

Hopefully, videos taken by other eyewitnesses of their sightings could shed light on the nature of the strange objects.

“The UFOs were moving slowly, glowing and following the same path,” Waring wrote in a blog post. “I do not hear the objects over the sound of the cars on the freeway. This must have been recorded by others. Thousands of people must have seen this so I am expecting a few more videos to come in.”

Although it is not yet clear what the objects were, it is possible that the bright orbs were only satellites. Back when SpaceX launched the first batch of Starlink satellites in May last year, the event sparked numerous UFO sightings due to the formation of the satellites. As seen in the photos, the satellites orbited Earth together and appeared like a “train of stars” in the sky.

A photograph of a screen shows infra-red video of taken from a Mexican Air Force patrol aircraft of 7 bright objects flying over the eastern coastal state of Campeche on March 25, 2004.

 Photo: REUTERS

{ https://www.ibtimes.com/ }

Why Are So Many UFOs Seen Near U.S. Military Bases?

They are military aircraft.

Some of those close encounters probably involved secret military prototype front-line pilots didn’t know exist. Others, however, remain unexplained — and could be revolutionary for human civilization.

“Just because something’s unexplained doesn’t mean that it’s extraterrestrial, of course, but I never say never,”  Nick Pope, who ran the British military’s own UFO investigative unit in the early 1990s, told me via email. “Extraterrestrial visitation might be unlikely, but if a single case turned out to be true, it would be a game-changer.”

“The basic instinct of intelligence personnel looking at the most convincing UFO sightings is to assume that they’re secret prototype aircraft or drones, developed either by another nation, or by another part of the government—but in a situation where the information is so compartmentalized nobody else can get access,” Pope said.

“Another theory is that some of these sightings are attributable to some sort of atmospheric plasma phenomenon that science doesn’t yet fully understand,” Pope added, using the scientific term for electrified air.

“Many UFO sightings in the southwest United States during the 1980s were actually secret advanced military aircraft such as the Lockheed F-117 and Northrop Grumman B-2,” Elizondo said.

There has been no shortage of rumored or confirmed, high-performance military prototypes in recent years that could account for UFO sightings. The U.S. Air Force secretly developed the RQ-170 stealth spy drone in the early 2000s, finally admitting to its existence only after a photographer spotted one at an airfield in Afghanistan in 2007. It’s unclear whether sightings of the RQ-170 explain any recent UFO reports.

More recently, the Air Force has been working on a bigger and ever stealthier spy drone called the RQ-180, along with the new radar-evading B-21 bomber. In 2014, a mysterious, wedge-shaped aircraft—possibly an early technology demonstrator for the B-21 program—was photographed flying over Kansas.

The military and the defense industry have also been hard at work on so-called “hypersonic” aircraft and space-planes capable of flying at speed exceeding Mach 5. Some of those efforts are public. Others, such as Lockheed Martin’s self-funded SR-72 hypersonic spy plane, remain cloaked in secrecy.

The abundance of secret prototypes plying American skies gives plenty of cover to government investigators and skeptical outsiders whose impulse is to dismiss possible evidence of alien life. “That said, there are those in government—including, clearly, some of the intelligence officials who worked in the AATIP—who are prepared to think the unthinkable, and say that some of these things might be extraterrestrial,” Pope said.

The 2004 video seems unexplainable now. But remember, many similarly mysterious UFO sightings in the past turned out to be military prototypes. Maybe aliens really are buzzing Planet Earth. But if history is any guide, it’s more likely the Pentagon’s own advanced aircraft that are making surprise appearances in front of baffled pilots.

• This first appeared in WarIsBoring here. 
• Image: Flickr.

{ https://nationalinterest.org/ }

REVEALED: The Pentagon's secret UFO program that focused on shadowy Utah ranch labeled a 'possible laboratory for studying other intelligences'

• Bombshell report in Popular Mechanics describes Pentagon's UFO program
• Details origins of cryptic Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program 
• Previously unknown research contracted by DIA in 2008-09 is revealed  
• One 494-page report details high frequency of encounters near ICBM silos
• Describes one 1975 encounter where missile targeting coordinates were altered
• Another report analyzed the medical effects of close encounters with UFOs 
•  It also details the shadowy Skinwalker Ranch in Utah - which was proposed as a 'possible laboratory for studying possible interdimensional phenomena'

By KEITH GRIFFITH FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

Remarkable new details about secretive research into UFOs produced for the Pentagon has been revealed in a bombshell new report.

In a lengthy and detailed report published on Friday, Popular Mechanics delved into the Defense Department's cryptic Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

Using black-budget money under the auspices of the Defense Intelligence Agency, in 2008 AATIP contracted private space technology company Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) to provide the government with technical reports and research into UFOs, according to the magazine.

BAASS also controlled 'Skinwalker Ranch' in Utah  - which the company proposed as a 'possible laboratory for studying other intelligences and possible interdimensional phenomena.'

A 494-page report that BAASS delivered to the Pentagon in July 2009 goes into heavy detail about reported UFO encounters, it was revealed on Friday

In 2008, the Pentagon awarded a $10 million contract to BAASS under a contracting program known as the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program

The investigative report offers an unprecedented look inside the AATIP, the existence of which was first publicly revealed with the publication of the USS Nimitz encounter video in 2017. 

The AATIP program was officially de-funded by 2012, though many familiar with the matter believe it may have continued on under different auspices.

Mysteries at Skinwalker Ranch may have helped inspire the DIA research program

In 2008, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) awarded a $10 million contract to BAASS under a contracting program known as the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP).

BAASS, today known as Bigelow Aerospace, was founded in 1999 by Robert T. Bigelow, the owner of hotel chain Budget Suites of America.

A lifelong enthusiast of space travel and the paranormal, Bigelow had in 1996 poured some of the fortune he made in business into BAASS and the purchase of the Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, after various strange and paranormal events were reported there. 

Bigelow proposed to use the ranch to study paranormal phenomenon, and a visit to the ranch by a DIA scientist in 2007 may have inspired the creation of the AATIP, according to Popular Mechanics.

Robert Bigelow, founder and president of Bigelow Aerospace, speaks during a tour of Bigelow Aerospace in North Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. September 12, 2019

Former AAWSAP contractor and astrophysicist Eric Davis shared what colleagues had told him of the DIA scientist's experience in an interview with researcher Joe Murgia.

'In the living room of the former NIDS double wide observation trailer/staff quarters. A 3D object appeared in mid-air in front of him and changed shape like a changing topological figure. It went from pretzel-shaped to Möbius strip shaped. It was 3D and multi-colored. Then it disappeared,' he said. 

According to former Senator Harry Reid, whatever happened at Skinwalker was enough to convince the DIA to seriously investigate paranormal and UFO phenomena. 

'Something should be done about this. Somebody should study it.' I was convinced he was right,' Reid told New York Magazine.

The gate to Skinwalker Ranch is seen prior to its 2016 sale. A visit to the ranch by a DIA scientist in 2007 may have inspired the creation of the AATIP

In 2016, Bigelow sold Skinwalker Ranch for $4.5 million to a shell corporation, and concrete barriers and heavy security were erected around the perimeter

A 2009 BAASS report commissioned by the Pentagon mentions Skinwalker Ranch in Utah as a 'possible laboratory for studying other intelligences and possible interdimensional phenomena.' 

In 2016, Bigelow sold Skinwalker Ranch for $4.5 million to 'Adamantium Holdings', a shell corporation whose true owners have never been traced. 

After this sale, all roads leading to the ranch were blocked, the perimeter was secured with cameras and barbed wire, and signs went up warning strangers not to approach.

Anyone who does approach the ranch now reports being immediately confronted by guards and ordered to leave.  

Project Northern Tier: BAASS report details high frequency of UFO contacts near nuclear missile silos  

Under the DIA contract, BAASS was tasked with providing the Pentagon with technical reports, surveys and studies related to 'future aerospace weapon systems.' 

The language in the DIA's $10 million contract with BAASS - and its objectives - seem purposely vague, obscuring the fact that the AAWSAP contract was focused on what the Pentagon now calls Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP).

But a 494-page report that BAASS delivered to the Pentagon in July 2009, and revealed by Popular Mechanics, is explicitly focused on UAP.

The 'Ten Month Report,' as it's called, is filled with strategic plans, project summaries, data tables, charts, descriptions of biological field effects, physical characteristics, methods of detection, theoretical capabilities, witness interviews, photographs, and case synopses, all related to UAP.

Robert Bigelow, (left) founder and president of Bigelow Aerospace, and NASA astronaut Mike Gernhardt, are seen on September 12, 2019 

BAASS, today known as Bigelow Aerospace, was founded in 1999 by Robert T. Bigelow, the owner of hotel chain Budget Suites of America

The report mentions a BAASS program called Project Northern Tier, which involved securing documents related to instances where dozens of UFOs flew over restricted airspaces of facilities housing nuclear weapons.

One chart published in the report details the alarming frequency of UAP encounters near four current and former key ICBM facilities: Malmstrom AFB in Montana, Minot AFB in North Dakota, former Wurtsmith AFB in Michigan and former Loring AFB in Maine.

The time period of the study seems to focus on a five-month window from July through November of 1975, when the BAASS report claims Malmstrom reported an alarming 61 unexplained encounters.

The BAASS report, directly quoting the book Clear Intent, describes one astonishing encounter on November 7, 1975 at the K-7 ICBM missile silo attached to Malmstrom.

A map shows the location of two still-active ICBM facilities mentioned in the BAASS report

One chart published in the report details the alarming frequency of UAP encounters near four current and former key ICBM facilities

Responding to an intrusion alarm, a Sabotage Alert Team raced in a vehicle to the silo, where they encountered a 'brightly glowing, orange, football field-sized disc' hovering in the air.

'It began to rise, and at about 1,000 feet, NORAD picked up the UFO on radar,' the report states. Two F-106 fighter jets were scrambled to intercept the object, but were never able to get a visual. 'At about 200,000 feet, it disappeared from NORAD's radar.'

Specialists were brought in to do a systems check on the missile, and discovered that the computer in the warhead had 'mysteriously changed the target numbers.'

UFO enthusiasts have long noted the apparent connection between sightings and nuclear activity. The famous 2004 USS Nimitz carrier strike group encounter with the 'Tic Tac' object is also connected in that regard, as the air craft carrier is nuclear-powered. 

The BAASS report (above), directly quoting the book Clear Intent, describes one encounter on November 7, 1975 at the K-7 ICBM missile silo attached to Malmstrom

One astonishing encounter is described in the BAASS report from November 7, 1975 at the K-7 ICBM missile silo (above in satellite image) attached to Malmstrom AFB

A Minuteman III missile is seen in its silo. In 1975 there is a report that the onboard targeting computer of such a missile inexplicably changed coordinates after a UFO encounter

Medical study examines possible physiological effects of UFO encounters

Popular Mechanics also published in full a previously unreleased technical paper listed as one of AATIP's products, .

The paper titled 'Clinical Medical Acute & Subacute Field Effects on Human Dermal & Neurological Tissues' examines injuries that have been reported after contact with UFO/UAPs.

'This focused on forensically assessing accounts of injuries that could have resulted from claimed encounters with UAP,' the study's author, Christopher 'Kit' Green, told Popular Mechanics.  

'I didn't work for BAASS, other than as a contractor for my paper, and I wasn't a part of AAWSAP. However, it is my understanding this program was a UFO study that outwardly was not supposed to look like it had anything to do with UFOs,' he said. 

Green also told the magazine that while his work focused on encounters with unknown or unidentified aerial objects, all of the injuries he assessed could be accounted for by known terrestrial means, and did not provide any evidence for extraterrestrial or non-human technologies.  

Read more:

• Are UFOs Real? - Government's UFO Program - Government Secrets
• What Did The DIA Scientist See At Skinwalker That Caused Him To Push For AAWSAP? » Joe Murgia
• Harry Reid on What the Government Knows About UFOs

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

The U.S. Military Has a Secret Research Program on UFOs

Here is what we know about it. 

If that wasn’t strange enough, the article included declassified footage from a U.S. Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter’s AN/ASQ-228 sensor display as it trailed a still-unidentified flying object over the Pacific near San Diego on Nov. 14, 2004.

In the footage, the Super Hornet pilot, while traveling at 252 knots at nearly 20,000 feet, switched between his display’s infrared and visual modes as the sensor tried to lock onto the blurry, oblong or pill-shaped object. The flying object appeared white in IR mode, and black in TV mode — indicating that whatever it was, the sensor had picked up on the object’s emission, temperature or reflection.

The video comes from the same incident when Cmdr. David Fravor, a veteran Navy pilot assigned to the USS Nimitz carrier fighter squadron VFA-41 Black Aces, was on a training mission off San Diego. “It was a real object, it exists and I saw it,” Fravor told the Washington Post. Telling the paper that he believes it was “not from the Earth.”

During an exercise, commanders ordered Fravor to intercept an object that was appearing at 80,000 feet — above the range of Ticonderoga-class cruiser USS Princeton’s SPY-1 air-search radar — before dropping suddenly to 20,000 feet. “Officials told they had been tracking a couple dozen of these objects for a few weeks,” the paper reported.

The story that followed has circulated in the military aviation world and fighter community for several years, including this write-up by former Navy F-14A Tomcat pilot Paco Chierici at Fighter Sweep. With orders to intercept the object, Fravor in his jet — callsign FASTEAGLE 01 — headed toward with aid from an E-2 Hawkeye early warning and control plane.

In his debrief comments, Dave, his WSO and the two other crews stated the object had initially been hovering like a Harrier. They described it as uniformly white, about 46 feet long (roughly fighter-sized), having a discernible midline horizontal axis (like a fuselage) but having no visible windows, nacelles, wings or propulsion systems.

There was no apparent exhaust or rotor wash, either. The pill-shaped object then “oriented one of its skinny ends towards him,” and rose in a “right 2-circle flow” — fighter speak for when each aircraft have their noses pointed at each other’s tails. The object then accelerated away at “multi-Mach” speed.

The video of the AN/ASQ-228 sensor display occurred later in the day with a different set of fighters. The object at this point appeared stationary before taking off.

Or perhaps it was an elaborate hoax, or a software or sensor error. Maybe an atmospheric disturbance? Or let’s say it was an alien spacecraft powered by technology impossible for our tiny primate brains to understand. I hope it’s the last one, but I’m not counting on it. Your guess is as good as mine.

Eyewitnesses, even fighter pilots, are prone to human error. Pilots also know how aircraft operate, and the belief that there is something unusual in the skies is more common in that community than you might assume. Fravor certainly believes what he saw, and many fighter pilots believe him.

The Pentagon UFO-hunting mission, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, is still partially classified. In any case, even if the explanation is as mundane as a weapons test, the eyewitness accounts and FLIR footage make this an interesting mystery worth further study. Whether Fravor saw an object of extraterrestrial origin is beside the point.

It’s also worth reading the comments section at Fighter Sweep:

I was on board the USS Princeton (2001-2005) when this all went down. We actually went to GQ (General Quarters) for about 4 hours as all if this was going down. I’ve been telling everyone about this even, but have gotten the usual “yeah right” look when I tell them about it. I saw the video after it happened, but didn’t think that it would somehow make it’s way to the public, considering all of the “security” that surrounded the issue.

Crazy how the world turns, isn’t it?!

Thank you for giving this event life! I no longer look like a tin foil hat wearing idiot!

• This article first appeared several years ago.
• Image: Flickr.

{ https://nationalinterest.org/ }

Red Triangle shaped bright lights Sighting in Bogata, Texas

A mysterious triangular UFO seems to have returned to the skies of Texas after a motorist filmed three red lights flashing above his car.

The bizarre footage shows the strange object seemingly moving towards the cameraperson in the night sky in Bogata.

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

Discovery at 'flower burial' site could unravel mystery of Neanderthal death rites

by University of Cambridge

How dark is the cosmic web?

By Paul Sutter 

A dark web ties the universe together. Now, we can see it.

A visualization of the filaments in the cosmic web. Simulation produced by the EAGLE project.

(Image: © EAGLE Project)

The universe is permeated by a vast, invisible web, its tendrils weaving through space. But despite organizing the matter we see in space, this dark web is invisible. That's because it is made up of dark matter, which exerts a gravitational pull but emits no light. 

That is, the web was invisible until now. For the first time, researchers have illuminated some of the darkest corners of the universe. 

• Related: The 11 biggest unanswered questions about dark matter

Weaving the web

A long time ago, the universe was hotter, smaller and denser than it is now. It was also, on average, much more boring. There wasn't much variation in density from place to place. Sure, space was much more cramped overall, but in the young universe, no matter where you went, things were pretty much the same.

But there were tiny, random differences in density. Those nuggets had slightly more gravitational pull than their surrounding neighborhood, and so matter tended to flow into them. Growing bigger in this way, they developed an even stronger gravitational influence, pulling more matter in, causing them to be bigger, and so on and so on for billions of years. Simultaneously, as the nuggets grew, the spaces between them emptied out.

Over the course of cosmic time, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.

Eventually, the dense patches grew to become the first stars, galaxies and clusters, while the spaces between them became the great cosmic voids.

Now, 13.8 billion years into this massive construction project, the job isn't quite finished. Matter is still streaming out of the voids, joining groups of galaxies that are flowing into dense, rich clusters. What we have today is a vast, complex network of filaments of matter: the cosmic web.

A light in the dark

The vast majority of matter in our universe is dark; it does not interact with light or with any of the "normal" matter that we see as stars and gas clouds and other interesting things. As a result, much of the cosmic web is completely invisible to us. Fortunately, where the dark matter pools, it also drags along some regular matter to join in the fun.

In the densest pockets of our universe, where the gravitational whispers of dark matter have influenced enough regular matter to coalesce, we see light: The regular matter has converted itself into stars.

Like a lighthouse on a distant, black seashore, the stars and galaxies tell us where the hidden dark matter lurks, giving us a ghostly outline of the cosmic web's true structure.

With this biased view, we can easily see the clusters. They pop out like giant cities seen from a red-eye flight. We know for sure there's a tremendous amount of dark matter in those structures, since you need a lot of gravitational oomph to pool together that many galaxies.

And on the opposite end of the spectrum, we can easily spot the voids; they are the places where all the matter isn't. Because there are no galaxies to illuminate these spaces, we know that they are, by and large, truly empty.

But the grandeur of the cosmic web lies in the delicate lines of the filaments themselves. Stretching for millions of light-years, these thin tendrils of galaxies act like great cosmic freeways crossing black voids, connecting bright urban clusters.

Through a dim lens

Those filaments in the cosmic web are the hardest part of the web to study. They have some galaxies but not a lot. And they have all sorts of lengths and orientations; in comparison, the clusters and voids are geometric child's play. So, even though we've known of the existence of filaments, through computer simulations, for decades, we have had a hard time actually, you know, seeing them.

Recently, though, a team of astronomers made a major advance in mapping our cosmic web, publishing their results Jan. 29 to the arXiv database. Here's how they went to business:

First, they took a catalog of so-called luminous red galaxies (LRGs) from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) survey. LRGs are massive beasts of galaxies, and they tend to sit in the centers of dense blobs of dark matter. And if the LRGs sit in the densest regions, then lines connecting them should be made of the more delicate filaments.

But staring at the space between two LRGs isn't going to be productive; there isn't a lot of stuff there. So, the team took thousands of pairs of LRGs, realigned them and stacked them on top of each other to make a composite image.

Using this stacked image, the scientists counted all the galaxies that they could see, adding up their total light contribution. This allowed researchers to measure how much normal matter made up the filaments between the LRGs. Next, the researchers looked at the galaxies behind the filaments, and specifically, at their shapes.

As light from those background galaxies pierced the intervening filaments, the gravity from the dark matter in those filaments gently nudged the light, ever so slightly shifting the images of those galaxies. By measuring the amount of shifting (called "shear" by the scientists), the team was able to estimate the amount of dark matter in the filaments.

That measure lined up with theoretical predictions (another point for the existence of dark matter). The scientists also confirmed that the filaments weren't entirely dark. For every 351 suns' worth of mass in the filaments, there was 1 suns' worth of light output. 

It's a crude map of the filaments, but it's the first, and it definitely shows that while our cosmic web is mostly dark, it's not completely black. 

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of Your Place in the Universe.

• The biggest unanswered questions in physics
• What's that? Your physics questions answered
• Cosmic record holders: The 12 biggest objects in the universe
• Originally published on Live Science.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

Hackers could shut down satellites — or turn them into weapons

By William Akoto  

Two CubeSats, part of a constellation built and operated by Planet Labs Inc. to take images of Earth, were launched from the International Space Station on May 17, 2016.

(Image: © NASA)

Last month, SpaceX became the operator of the world's largest active satellite constellation. As of the end of January, the company had 242 satellites orbiting the planet with plans to launch 42,000 over the next decade. This is part of its ambitious project to provide internet access across the globe. The race to put satellites in space is on, with Amazon, U.K.-based OneWeb and other companies chomping at the bit to place thousands of satellites in orbit in the coming months.

These new satellites have the potential to revolutionize many aspects of everyday life — from bringing internet access to remote corners of the globe to monitoring the environment and improving global navigation systems. Amid all the fanfare, a critical danger has flown under the radar: the lack of cybersecurity standards and regulations for commercial satellites, in the U.S. and internationally. As a scholar who studies cyber conflict, I'm keenly aware that this, coupled with satellites' complex supply chains and layers of stakeholders, leaves them highly vulnerable to cyberattacks.

If hackers were to take control of these satellites, the consequences could be dire. On the mundane end of scale, hackers could simply shut satellites down, denying access to their services. Hackers could also jam or spoof the signals from satellites, creating havoc for critical infrastructure. This includes electric grids, water networks and transportation systems.

• Related: Why SpaceX's Starlink satellites caught astronomers off guard

Some of these new satellites have thrusters that allow them to speed up, slow down and change direction in space. If hackers took control of these steerable satellites, the consequences could be catastrophic. Hackers could alter the satellites' orbits and crash them into other satellites or even the International Space Station.

Makers of these satellites, particularly small CubeSats, use off-the-shelf technology to keep costs low. The wide availability of these components means hackers can analyze them for vulnerabilities. In addition, many of the components draw on open-source technology. The danger here is that hackers could insert back doors and other vulnerabilities into satellites' software.

The highly technical nature of these satellites also means multiple manufacturers are involved in building the various components. The process of getting these satellites into space is also complicated, involving multiple companies. Even once they are in space, the organizations that own the satellites often outsource their day-to-day management to other companies. With each additional vendor, the vulnerabilities increase as hackers have multiple opportunities to infiltrate the system.

Hacking some of these CubeSats may be as simple as waiting for one of them to pass overhead and then sending malicious commands using specialized ground antennas. Hacking more sophisticated satellites might not be that hard either.

Satellites are typically controlled from ground stations. These stations run computers with software vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers. If hackers were to infiltrate these computers, they could send malicious commands to the satellites.

A history of hacks

This scenario played out in 1998 when hackers took control of the U.S.-German ROSAT X-Ray satellite. They did it by hacking into computers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The hackers then instructed the satellite to aim its solar panels directly at the sun. This effectively fried its batteries and rendered the satellite useless. The defunct satellite eventually crashed back to Earth in 2011. Hackers could also hold satellites for ransom, as happened in 1999 when hackers took control of the U.K.'s SkyNet satellites.

Over the years, the threat of cyberattacks on satellites has gotten more dire. In 2008, hackers, possibly from China, reportedly took full control of two NASA satellites, one for about two minutes and the other for about nine minutes. In 2018, another group of Chinese state-backed hackers reportedly launched a sophisticated hacking campaign aimed at satellite operators and defense contractors. Iranian hacking groups have also attempted similar attacks.

Although the U.S. Department of Defense and National Security Agency have made some efforts to address space cybersecurity, the pace has been slow. There are currently no cybersecurity standards for satellites and no governing body to regulate and ensure their cybersecurity. Even if common standards could be developed, there are no mechanisms in place to enforce them. This means responsibility for satellite cybersecurity falls to the individual companies that build and operate them.

Market forces work against space cybersecurity

As they compete to be the dominant satellite operator, SpaceX and rival companies are under increasing pressure to cut costs. There is also pressure to speed up development and production. This makes it tempting for the companies to cut corners in areas like cybersecurity that are secondary to actually getting these satellites in space.

Even for companies that make a high priority of cybersecurity, the costs associated with guaranteeing the security of each component could be prohibitive. This problem is even more acute for low-cost space missions, where the cost of ensuring cybersecurity could exceed the cost of the satellite itself.

To compound matters, the complex supply chain of these satellites and the multiple parties involved in their management means it's often not clear who bears responsibility and liability for cyber breaches. This lack of clarity has bred complacency and hindered efforts to secure these important systems.

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory had to get creative to squeeze an antenna into a CubeSat called RainCube, scheduled to fly in 2017.  (Image credit: Tyvak/Jonathan Sauder/NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Regulation is required

Some analysts have begun to advocate for strong government involvement in the development and regulation of cybersecurity standards for satellites and other space assets. Congress could work to adopt a comprehensive regulatory framework for the commercial space sector. For instance, they could pass legislation that requires satellites manufacturers to develop a common cybersecurity architecture.

They could also mandate the reporting of all cyber breaches involving satellites. There also needs to be clarity on which space-based assets are deemed critical in order to prioritize cybersecurity efforts. Clear legal guidance on who bears responsibility for cyberattacks on satellites will also go a long way to ensuring that the responsible parties take the necessary measures to secure these systems.

Given the traditionally slow pace of congressional action, a multi-stakeholder approach involving public-private cooperation may be warranted to ensure cybersecurity standards. Whatever steps government and industry take, it is imperative to act now. It would be a profound mistake to wait for hackers to gain control of a commercial satellite and use it to threaten life, limb and property — here on Earth or in space — before addressing this issue.

[You're smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation's authors and editors. You can get our highlights each weekend.]

• How much space junk hits Earth?
• In Photos: A Look at China's Space Station That's Crashing to Earth
• Earth from Above: 101 Stunning Images from Orbit
• This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

Breakthrough Listen Scans Milky Way Galaxy for Beacons of Civilization

Artist’s concept of a nearby civilization signaling Earth after observing our planet crossing in front of the sun. Astronomers have now scanned 20 nearby stars in the Earth transit zone in search of such signals. 

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

Lien Ships And Structures On Planet Mercury, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: Feb 16, 2020
Location of discovery: Planet Mercury
Source:

• https://www.google.com/maps/space/mercury/@-70.4987174,43.9366372,483319m/data=!3m1!1e3

I was having some fun with the Google Mercury map and found so many structure that I had to make a video about them. I only show about ten in this short video, but one day AI will run ramped through the internet and find thousands of structures in the same planet photo. AI is much better at finding and identifying such tiny details, and people might accept discoveries from AI more easily than a human like myself. 

Can you imagine the technology within one of these ships? It would advance tech on earth thousands of years in just a few days. The country that has one of these ships...will be the most powerful country on earth. 
Scott C. Wari

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

UFO Seen Shooting Across Sky Over Fremont, California, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Source: MUFON 
Location of sighting: Fremont, California, USA

Guys there is a close up before and at the end of this video I made to help you see it better. I hope it helps. This is an outstanding video of a circular disk craft shooting across the sky trying to make itself look like a meteor. Its not a meteor, its going too slow and at an angle that would be impossible for a meteor. 100% proof that aliens fly over cities in California. 
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

Eyewitness states:

• Taking my dog for a walk when I saw this about 6pm. going north over Fremont, Ca. took video with iphone. this is an mp4 video.

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

BruceSeesall shows a UFO hurtling towards the moon. The footage was captured last year. We get in close in 5K strong magnification.

Other UFO sightings as shown in the video: Directional changes seen in infrared camera...UFO changing directions in the skies of Montreal Canada and UFO's plunging in and out of clouds on the moon seen in high quality 5K.

  

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

UFO near a plane: New York – Dominican Republic

This footage was just released online but it was recorded on 19th July 2016 on a flight from Bronx, NY to Dominican Republic.

What do you think this is?

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

 KLIMAATVERANDERING: ZOU DE ZON DE BOOSDOENER KUNNEN ZIJN?

Caroline Kraaijvanger

De aarde warmt op. En volgens sommigen is dat het resultaat van de zonne-activiteit. Is dat denkbaar?

In de jaren zeventig ontdekt paleo-ecoloog Bas van Geel in een veenkolom uit Engbertsdijksveen een klimaatomslag. Veen dat ten tijde van het Subboreaal onder relatief droge omstandigheden was gegroeid, maakte ten tijde van het Subatlanticum (ca. 800 voor Christus) plaats voor veen dat onder zeer natte omstandigheden was ontstaan. De oorzaak bleef onbekend. Tot het eind van de twintigste eeuw. Dan ontdekt Van Geel dat de klimaatomslag samenvalt met een plotselinge afname in de activiteit van de zon. Een ontdekking die zijn professionele leven verandert. “Ik ontpopte mezelf tot een klimaatscepticus.”

Zonne-activiteit
Van Geel is geen klimaatscepticus in de traditionele zin van het woord. Zo ontkent hij zeker niet dat de aarde de laatste eeuw is opgewarmd. Wel betwijfelt hij of de rol die CO2 hierin speelt, werkelijk zo omvangrijk is als momenteel wordt aangenomen. Een deel van de opwarming die nu aan CO2 wordt toegeschreven, is volgens hem namelijk niet te herleiden naar onze uitstoot van dit bekende broeikasgas, maar naar de activiteit van de zon. “Ik denk dat we de rol van de zon onderschatten.”

Activiteit op de zon.

Afbeelding: NASA / GSFC / Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Onze actieve moederster
Wie wel eens plaatjes van het oppervlak van de zon heeft gezien, weet dat het er aldaar vurig aan toe kan gaan. Onze moederster kan zonnevlammen genereren en coronale massa-ejecties uitspugen. Kortom: onze zon is actief. Maar de mate van activiteit fluctueert. Daarin is – grofweg – een elf jaar durende cyclus te onderscheiden die gekenmerkt wordt door een zonneminimum (een periode met weinig zonneactiviteit) en een zonnemaximum (een periode met veel zonneactiviteit). “De verschillen tussen de energie die een actieve zon afgeeft en de energie die een inactieve zon afgeeft, zijn niet zo groot,” erkent Van Geel. Sterker nog: ze zijn te klein om de klimaatomslagen – zoals bijvoorbeeld die ten tijde van het Subatlanticum – te kunnen verklaren. “Er moeten dan ook versterkingsmechanismen zijn,” denkt Van Geel. Mechanismen die ervoor zorgen dat het geringe verschil tussen een actieve en inactieve zon toch een enorme impact heeft op ons klimaat. Maar wat voor mechanismen zijn dat dan? Er zijn twee hypothesen, aldus Van Geel. De eerste draait om kosmische straling. “Kosmische straling speelt een rol bij wolkenvorming: watermoleculen condenseren door kosmische straling. Als de zon heel actief is, is er weinig kosmische straling in het zonnestelsel.” En zouden dus minder wolken ontstaan. En omdat wolken zonlicht reflecteren (en het aardoppervlak koelen) zou een actieve zon – met enige vertraging – resulteren in een opwarming van dat aardoppervlak. “En dan is er nog een hypothese waar ik persoonlijk wat meer in geloof. Deze hypothese stelt dat de verschillen tussen de energie van een actieve en de energie van een inactieve zon misschien klein zijn, maar dat de veranderingen in de afgegeven UV-straling wel groot zijn.” Tijdens een zonneminimum neemt de UV-straling afkomstig van de zon sterk af en wordt minder ozon gevormd. En dat merken we op aarde, doordat ozon energie absorbeert en in die hoedanigheid dus gezien kan worden als een broeikasgas. Tijdens een zonneminimum wordt er minder van gegenereerd en koelt de aarde dus af.

Een kritische blik op de versterkingsmechanismen
“Al achttien jaar proberen we een manier te vinden waarop de vrij kleine waargenomen solaire variaties van de afgelopen dertig jaar versterkt kunnen worden,” vertelt professor Werner Schmutz, directeur van het Physikalisch-Metorologisches Observatorium in Davos, aan Scientias.nl. “Fluctuaties in de hoeveelheid UV-straling die van invloed zijn op ozon in de stratosfeer lijken daarbij het meest veelbelovend.” Maar de hamvraag is natuurlijk: oefent een actieve zon via ozon daadwerkelijk invloed uit op ons klimaat? Schmutz en collega’s zochten dat in 2013 uit en moesten in het resulterende paper concluderen dat het vermeende versterkingsmechanisme eigenlijk geen naam mocht hebben. Oefent de zonne-activiteit dan misschien een effect uit op ons klimaat via kosmische straling? De hypothese klonk professor Terence Sloan, verbonden aan de University of Lancaster, plausibel in de oren. En dus besloot hij dat in 2008 eens uit te zoeken. Het leidde tot een serie papers, waarvan het laatste deel in 2013 gepubliceerd werd. “We ontdekten dat het effect te klein was om te detecteren,” zo vertelt Sloan aan Scientias.nl. “En dus sprake was van een verwaarloosbaar effect op de opwarming van de aarde.” De benodigde, hypothetische versterkingsmechanismen lijken in recente studies dus geen stand te houden.

“DE ZON KAN ZEER ZEKER UITGESLOTEN WORDEN ALS DE OORZAAK VAN DE OPWARMING DIE DE AARDE IN DE LAATSTE VIJFTIG JAAR HEEFT DOORGEMAAKT”

Stralingssterkte
Speelt de zonne-activiteit dan helemaal geen rol in het klimaat? Zover willen de meeste onderzoekers ook weer niet gaan. Schmutz grijpt opnieuw terug op zijn studie uit 2013 die het versterkingsmechanisme omtrent UV-straling en ozon praktisch van tafel veegde, maar wel enige invloed van de zon op het klimaat bespeurde. “Als de zon inderdaad, zoals wij vermoeden, van invloed is, dan lijkt dat aan het einde van al onze studies simpelweg toe te schrijven te zijn aan variaties in de totale stralingssterkte van de zon (dus variaties in de hoeveelheid energie die de zon afgeeft).” Die fluctuaties in de intensiteit van het zonlicht dat de aarde bereikt, zijn klein. En het Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stelt dan ook dat recente zonne-activiteit geen noemenswaardige impact heeft gehad op het klimaat. Schmutz is het daarmee eens. “De zon kan zeer zeker uitgesloten worden als de oorzaak van de opwarming die de aarde in de laatste vijftig jaar heeft doorgemaakt, omdat de stralingssterkte stabiel was. En als we wat verder inzoomen, zien we zelfs dat de stralingssterkte sinds de jaren veertig ietsje is afgenomen en in de huidige elf jaar durende cyclus zelfs heel duidelijk is afgenomen.” Vandaar dat klimaatmodellen de huidige opwarming ook niet kunnen reproduceren als ze onze uitstoot van broeikasgassen buiten beschouwing laten en zich alleen laten leiden door natuurlijke fluctuaties, zoals veranderingen in de zonne-activiteit.

Afbeelding: AdinaVoicu / Pixabay.

Het verleden en de toekomst
Maar hoe zit het dan met die opmerkelijke perioden in het verleden, zoals het Maunder Minimum (1645-1715)? Een tijdvak waarin de zonne-activiteit uitzonderlijk laag was, net als de temperatuur op aarde? “Er was een minimale zonne-activiteit in de zeventiende eeuw en die viel samen met een historisch koude periode waarin zelfs de rivier The Theems bevroor,” vertelt Sloan. “Maar niemand kan je vertellen waarom een afname in zonnevlekken een koude periode op aarde veroorzaakt.” “We hebben eigenlijk alleen in het verleden maar goede correlaties gezien tussen zonne-activiteit en een dalende temperatuur,” voegt Schmutz toe. “Aangezien we de stralingssterkte van de zon pas sinds 1978 vanuit de ruimte meten, beslaan onze observaties nog maar een korte tijd. En in die tijd is de zon niet veel veranderd, in ieder geval duidelijk niet genoeg om van invloed te kunnen zijn op het klimaat. En dat betekent dat er op dit moment twee mogelijkheden zijn. De eerste: de zon heeft in ongeveer dertig jaar het volledige scala aan mogelijke variaties laten zien. In dat geval moet de zon uitgesloten worden als een drijvende kracht achter historische klimaatveranderingen.” Een andere optie is dat we in deze dertig jaar – een tijdvak van niks, als je spreekt over een ster die al 4,5 miljard jaar meegaat – eigenlijk nog niets gezien hebben en de zon op grotere tijdschalen tot veel grotere variaties in staat is. “Dan is de zon de belangrijkste verdachte op het gebied van historische klimaatveranderingen.” In andere woorden: op lange termijn zou de zonne-activiteit dus wel een effect kunnen hebben op het klimaat. Maar in welke mate, is onduidelijk. Schmutz en collega’s verkenden dat heikele vraagstuk recent in dit onderzoeksproject. Op basis van modellen – die speculatief van aard zijn en ervan uitgaan dat ons een periode van sterk verminderde zonne-activiteit te wachten staat “Niemand weet zeker of de zon de komende 50 tot 100 jaar in een Grand Minimum belandt, maar we verwachten het” – voorspellen ze dat de zon er de komende eeuw voor kan zorgen dat de temperatuur op aarde 0,5 graden lager uitvalt dan het geval zou zijn als de zonne-activiteit niet sterk zou verminderen. “Als hun model klopt, kan die 0,5 graad afkoeling de effecten van broeikasgassen verminderen,” merkt Sloan op. Maar wederom kan de zon niet het verschil maken. Want de door menselijk handelen aangedreven opwarming van de aarde gaat aanzienlijk sneller dan de voorspelde en zeer speculatieve afkoeling die de zon zou kunnen veroorzaken. Als we niks doen, zitten we aan het eind van de rit dus – ongeacht of de zon nu voor een beetje verkoeling zorgt of niet – met een planeet die enigszins over de kook is.

Van Geel wacht ondertussen rustig de komende jaren af. “De zonneactiviteit loopt nu terug en de vraag is: wat doet het klimaat? Ik denk echt dat we richting afkoeling gaan.” En als dat niet zo is? “Dan heb ik ongelijk en ben ik dom geweest. Maar als ik twijfelde, zou ik niet naar buiten treden.” Sloan en Schmutz zien het op basis van hun onderzoek allemaal heel anders. Het feit dat de aarde opwarmt, kunnen we volgens hen niet afschuiven op de zon. Als de zon al een rol speelt, dan is deze nihil in vergelijking met de rol die onze eigen activiteit speelt. Tegelijkertijd sluiten de onderzoekers nog niet uit dat de zon op lange termijn wel impact kan hebben op het aardse klimaat. Maar hoe dan precies en in welke mate: dat blijft voorlopig in nevelen gehuld. Het lijkt voor het klimaatdebat allemaal niet zo heel relevant, zo benadrukt Schmutz. “Het is in mijn optiek onmogelijk dat huidige, natuurlijke effecten de invloed van ons mensen domineren.”

• Bronmateriaal:

  Interviews met Bas van Geel, Werner Schmutz en Terence Sloan
  Afbeelding bovenaan dit artikel: PublicDomainPictures / Pixabay

{ https://www.scientias.nl/ }

NASA geeft toe dat de klimaatverandering natuurlijk is en veroorzaakt wordt door de zon

Al meer dan 60 jaar weet de National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) dat veranderingen in de weersomstandigheden op de planeet volkomen natuurlijk en normaal zijn. Maar het ruimteagentschap heeft, om welke reden dan ook, besloten om de zogenaamde door de mens veroorzaakte opwarmingszwendel te laten voortbestaan en zich te laten verspreiden, ten koste van de menselijke vrijheid.

Activiteit op de zon.

Afbeelding: NASA / GSFC / Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Het was in 1958, om precies te zijn, toen NASA voor het eerst opmerkte dat veranderingen in de zonnebaan van de aarde en veranderingen in de helling van de aarde verantwoordelijk waren voor wat klimaatwetenschappers vandaag de dag “opwarming” (of “afkoeling”, afhankelijk van hun agenda) noemen. Met andere woorden, op geen enkele manier verwarmt of koelt de mens de planeet door verbrandingsmotor-voertuigen te rijden of rundvlees te eten.

In 2000 publiceerde NASA op zijn website van het Earth Observatory informatie over de klimaattheorie van Milankovich, waaruit blijkt dat de planeet in werkelijkheid door externe factoren veranderd die absoluut niets met menselijke activiteiten te maken hebben. Maar ook deze informatie is na 19 jaar nog steeds niet in de mainstream media terechtgekomen en daarom beweren “klimaatbeschermers” nu dat we eigenlijk nog maar 18 maanden of 12 jaar over hebben voordat de planeet sterft aan een overschot aan kooldioxide (CO2).

Maar de waarheid is veel meer in overeenstemming met wat de Servische astrofysicus Miloetin Milankovitsj, naar wie de klimaattheorie van Milankovitsj is genoemd, heeft gesuggereerd over hoe de seizoensgebonden en latitudinale variaties in zonnestraling, die de aarde op verschillende manieren en in verschillende tijden raken, de grootste invloed hebben op de veranderende klimaatpatronen van de aarde.

De volgende twee afbeeldingen (door Robert Simmon, NASA GSFC) helpen dit illustreren, de eerste toont de Aarde in een baan dicht bij nul (Excentriciteit: van excentrisch, afwijkend van het centrum) en de tweede toont de Aarde in een baan van 0,07. Deze orbitale verandering wordt weergegeven door de excentrische, ovale vorm in het tweede beeld, die opzettelijk is overdreven om de massale verandering in de afstand tussen de aarde en de zon te laten zien, afhankelijk van of het in het perihelium of het aphelium is.

“Zelfs de maximale excentriciteit van de baan van de aarde – 0,07 – zou niet representatief zijn bij de resolutie van een website”, merkt de Hal Turner Radio Show op.

“Desalniettemin, bij de huidige excentriciteit van 0,017 in het perihelium, is de aarde vijf miljoen kilometer dichter bij de zon dan in het aphelium.”

De grootste factor die het klimaat op aarde beïnvloedt is de zon

Wat betreft de helling van de aarde of de verandering in de axiale helling, laten de twee onderstaande afbeeldingen (Robert Simmon, NASA GSFC) zien hoeveel de aarde kan verschuiven, zowel op haar as als rond haar rotatieoriëntatie. Bij hogere neigingen worden de seizoenen van de aarde veel extremer, terwijl ze bij lagere neigingen veel milder worden. Op dezelfde manier kan de draaias van de aarde een sterke invloed hebben op de seizoensgebonden extremen tussen de twee hemisferen, afhankelijk van welke hemisfeer in het perihelium is uitgelijnd met de Zon.

Er moet worden vermeld dat “klimaat” in het Nederlands “gesteldheid” betekent. Het woord is gekozen omdat de hele dagzijde van de aarde gelijkelijk door de zon wordt bestraald, maar de opwarming hangt uitsluitend af van de invalshoek, de helling van de stralen ten opzichte van het aardoppervlak. Op de warme evenaar is de hoek ongeveer 90%; op de koude polen is hij veel vlakker.

NASA verbergt pagina die zegt dat de zon de primaire klimaatstimulans is, en wolken en deeltjes belangrijker zijn dan broeikasgassen

Fenixx

 3reacties

Milankowitsch was in staat om uit deze verschillende variabelen een uitgebreid wiskundig model te ontwikkelen dat de oppervlaktetemperaturen op de aarde ver terug in de tijd kan berekenen, en de conclusie is eenvoudig: het klimaat op aarde is altijd al aan het veranderen geweest en is in een staat van constante verandering, zonder onze tussenkomst als mens.

Toen Milankovitsj zijn model voor het eerst presenteerde, werd het bijna een halve eeuw lang genegeerd. Vervolgens, in 1976, bevestigde een studie in het tijdschrift Science dat de theorie van Milankovich inderdaad juist was en dat deze overeenkwam met verschillende perioden van klimaatverandering die zich in de loop van de geschiedenis hebben voorgedaan.

In 1982, zes jaar na de publicatie van deze studie, accepteerde de National Research Council van de Amerikaanse National Academy of Sciences de theorie van Milankovich als reëel en verklaarde deze waar:

“… orbitale variaties blijven het meest grondig bestudeerde mechanisme van klimaatverandering op tijdschalen van tienduizenden jaren en zijn veruit het duidelijkste geval van een direct effect van veranderende zonnestraling op de lagere atmosfeer van de aarde.”

Als we het geheel in één simpele zin zouden moeten samenvatten, zou het zo zijn: De grootste factor die het weer- en klimaatpatroon op aarde beïnvloedt is de zon, of beter gezegd de periode van de zon. Afhankelijk van de positie van de aarde ten opzichte van de centrale ster op een bepaald moment, zullen de klimaatomstandigheden dramatisch variëren en zelfs drastische anomalieën veroorzaken die alles wat mensen dachten te weten over hoe de aarde werkt op de proef stellen.

Maar in plaats van dit feit te accepteren, dringen de huidige klimaat “wetenschappers”, samen met de linkse, en steeds meer rechtse politici, en natuurlijk de massamedia, erop aan dat niet-herbruikbare boodschappentassen in de supermarkt en geen elektrische voertuigen de planeet snel zullen vernietigen, en dat we absoluut een globale klimaatbelasting als oplossing moeten invoeren.

“Het klimaatdebat gaat niet over wetenschap. Het is een poging om de bevolking politiek en economisch te controleren door de elite”, schrijft een commentator op de Hal Turner Radio Show.

“En het is een andere manier om de bevolking te verdelen tegen zichzelf, waarbij sommigen geloven in de door de mens veroorzaakte opwarming van de aarde en anderen niet geloven, dat wil zeggen verdeel en heers.”

Een nieuwe studie toont aan dat de klimaatverandering niet afhankelijk is van de menselijke CO2-uitstoot

Fenixx

 4reacties 

The above graph compares global surface temperature changes (red line) and the Sun's energy received by the Earth (yellow line) in watts (units of energy) per square meter since 1880. The lighter/thinner lines show the yearly levels while the heavier/thicker lines show the 11-year average trends. Eleven-year averages are used to reduce the year-to-year natural noise in the data, making the underlying trends more obvious.

The amount of solar energy received by the Earth has followed the Sun’s natural 11-year cycle of small ups and downs with no net increase since the 1950s. Over the same period, global temperature has risen markedly. It is therefore extremely unlikely that the Sun has caused the observed global temperature warming trend over the past half-century.

https://www.nasa.gov/

{ https://fenixx.news/ }

New observations from a spacecraft orbiting Mercury have revealed that the tiny, pockmarked planet harbors a highly unusual interior — and the craft’s glimpse of Mercury’s surface topography suggests the planet has had a very dynamic history.

The observations were taken by a probe called MESSENGER (short for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging), the first ever to enter orbit around Mercury. MESSENGER reached Mercury’s orbit in March 2011, and has since circled the planet twice a day, collecting nearly 100,000 images and more than four million measurements of Mercury’s surface.

A team of scientists from institutions including MIT, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have analyzed the data and precisely mapped the planet’s topography and gravitational fields. From the gravity estimates, the team found that Mercury likely has a highly unusual interior structure — an exceptionally large iron core overlain by a solid layer of iron sulfide and a thin outer shell of silicate mantle and crust. From topographic measurements, the team mapped out a large number of craters on the planet’s surface, making a surprising finding: Many of these have tilted over time, suggesting that processes within the planet have deformed the terrain after the craters formed.

The researchers detail their findings in two papers published this week in the journal Science.

“Prior to MESSENGER’s comprehensive observations, many scientists believed that Mercury was much like the moon — that it cooled off very early in solar system history, and has been a dead planet throughout most of its evolution,” says co-author Maria Zuber, the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics at MIT. “Now we’re finding compelling evidence for unusual dynamics within the planet, indicating that Mercury was apparently active for a long time.”

Mercurial mission

Getting into orbit about Mercury was no easy feat, mostly because of its proximity to the sun. Any spacecraft heading toward the planet speeds up, drawn in by the sun’s powerful gravitational field. To counteract the sun’s pull and slow MESSENGER down, the MESSENGER team programmed the probe to fly by Venus twice, and Mercury three times, before slowing down enough to be captured in Mercury’s orbit with the help of a main engine burn.

Video: Watch a color movie of Mercury’s surface captured by MESSENGER
After entering Mercury’s orbit, the spacecraft began measuring the planet’s surface elevations via laser altimetry. Through radio tracking, the probe estimated the planet’s gravity field. Throughout the one-year mission, the MESSENGER spacecraft battled tides from the sun, which tugged the probe out of its optimal orbit, as well as what Zuber calls “sunlight pressure” — photons or packets of light from the sun that exerted pressure on the spacecraft. The team periodically adjusted the probe’s orbit and made precise corrections to its measurements to account for the sun’s effects, mapping out the gravity field as well as the elevation of the surface of Mercury’s northern hemisphere.

Inside and out

The team’s measurements revealed surprising findings both in the planet’s interior and on its surface. From the probe’s gravity estimates, the group inferred that Mercury likely has a huge iron core comprising approximately 85 percent of the planet’s radius. (Earth’s core, by comparison, is about half the planet’s radius in size.) This means that Mercury’s mantle and crust occupy only the outer 15 percent or so of the planet’s radius — about as thin as the peel on an orange, Zuber says.

The researchers also reasoned, given Mercury’s gravity field, that just above the outer molten layer of the planet’s core may be a solid layer of iron and sulfur — a type of layered structure not known to exist on any other planet.

“If the iron and sulfur model is correct, it would have implications for how the dynamo inside Mercury produces the planet's magnetic field,” says Gerald Schubert, professor of earth and space sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles, who did not participate in the research. “The dynamo generation process might work differently in Mercury compared with Earth.”

Co-author Dave Smith, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, says the scientific process that led to the team’s results was a journey in itself.

“We had an idea of the internal structure of Mercury, [but] the initial observations did not fit the theory so we doubted the observations,” Smith says. “We did more work and concluded the observations were correct, and then reworked the theory for the interior of Mercury that fit the observations. This is how science is supposed to work, and it’s a nice result.”

Through laser measurements of the planet’s surface, researchers mapped out multiple geologic features in Mercury’s northern hemisphere, finding the range of elevations to be smaller than that of Mars or the moon. They also observed something unexpected in Mercury’s Caloris basin, the largest impact feature on Mercury: Portions of the floor of the crater actually stand higher than its rim, suggesting that forces within the interior pushed the crater up after the initial impact that created it.

Zuber and her team also identified an area of lowlands approximately centered on Mercury’s north pole that could conceivably have migrated there over the course of the planet’s evolution. Zuber explains that a process called polar wander can cause geological features to shift around on a planet’s surface due to the redistribution of mass on or within a planet by geodynamical processes.

One such process of transporting mass in a planet’s interior is convection within the mantle. Viscous material within the mantle circulates and can push fragments of crust up and out, shifting terrain around the globe. Given Mercury’s extremely thin mantle, as revealed by MESSENGER, Zuber says it’s challenging to understand how convection operated to raise broad expanses of terrain to the elevations observed.

“It’s interesting to think what might be causing the observed deformation,” Zuber says. “It appears there are some very unusual dynamics going on inside Mercury.”

{ http://news.mit.edu/ }

A team of researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands have developed a neural network called “Hazardous Object Identifier” that they say can predict if an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth.

Their new AI singled out 11 asteroids that were not previously classified by NASA as hazardous, and which were larger than 100 meters in diameter — big enough to explode with the force of hundreds of nuclear weapons if they impacted Earth, potentially leveling entire cities. They also focused on space rocks that could come within 4.7 million miles of Earth, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics earlier this month.

None are an imminent threat, however: not only are their chances of ever hitting Earth astronomically slim, but they are making their flyby between the years 2131 and 2923 — hundreds of years from now.

Using a supercomputer, the researchers fast-forwarded through a simulation of 10,000 years of orbital movements of the Solar System’s planets. The team then reversed the simulation, simulating future Earth-impacting asteroids by flinging them away from Earth and tracking their exact locations and orbits.

“If you rewind the clock, you will see the well-known asteroids land again on earth,” said co-author and astronomer Simon Portegies Zwart from Leiden University in a statement. “This way you can make a library of the orbits of asteroids that landed on earth.”

This simulation served as the training ground for their neural network, which then looked for patterns in the data common among the simulated asteroids that might eventually hit Earth.

To nail down whether their AI was actually good at spotting Earth-impacting asteroids in reality, the team tested it on known data of 2,000 asteroids listed by NASA. The neural network was 90.99 percent accurate in determining which ones were hazardous and which ones weren’t.

The team is now working on making its neural network even more accurate.

“We now know that our method works, but we would certainly like to delve deeper in the research with a better neural network and with more input,” Zwart said. “The tricky part is that small disruptions in the orbit calculations can lead to major changes in the conclusions.”

{ https://futurism.com/ }

Mysterious skull washes up on UK beach with ‘no eye sockets’

Grisly remains prompt hunt for answers

Harry Cockburn

Discover the Mystery of a 9-Ton Slab of Glass Found in the Cave of Beit Shearim, Israel

David again assembled all the picked men of Yisrael, thirty thousand strong (Samuel 2 6:1)

Bet Shearim (courtesy: Youtube)

Explore the ancient acropolis of Bet Shearim where Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi, head of the Sanhedrin was buried.

{https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/ - https://www.cmog.org/ }

People in West Africa still carry 'beneficial' genes from a mystery ancient human ancestor that protects them against tumours

• Experts at the University of California Los Angeles are behind the finding
• They devised a statistical method able to highlight abnormal genetic code
• This was applied to the DNA of 50 modern Yoruba people in West Africa
• Roughly eight per cent of their DNA comes from a yet unknown 'ghost' species
• Hominin species Homo heidelbergensis is believed to be the likely candidate

By TIM COLLINS FOR MAILONLINE

Evidence of an unknown species of human ancestor has been found hiding in the DNA of West African people.

Experts made the finding by analysing the human genome, looking for strings of genetic information that were out of place.

This revealed an inheritance of markers from an unidentified human-like species, some of which may be of benefit to their descendants - including one which suppresses the development of tumours. 

Researchers believe an ancient species of hominin, known as Homo heidelbergensis, may be the most likely candidate for the 'ghost' species.

Scroll down for video 

Mysterious evidence of an unknown species of human ancestor has been found hiding in the DNA of West African people. Homo heidelbergensis (artist's model) was an early human ancestor that experts believe may be the most likely candidate 

The finding was made by Arun Durvasula and Sriram Sankararaman, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

They devised a statistical method able to highlight abnormal genetic code without needing the genome of the species it was inherited from.

This bypasses the need for DNA extracted from extinct African hominins as a basis of comparison.

The hotter and wetter climate on the African continent tends to destroy any preserved DNA, unlike samples of human-like species the Neanderthals and Densiovans uncovered in Europe and Asia.   

The statistical technique was applied to the DNA of 50 modern Yoruba who had their genetic information sequenced as part of the 1,000 Genomes Project.

This established that roughly eight per cent of their DNA comes from a yet unknown 'ghost' species.

Ancestor species like the Neanderthals and Denisovans have been ruled out of the equation, as we already have their DNA and there is no evidence to suggest they lived in Africa. The journey of Neanderthals and the evolution of Homo sapiens was intertwined for thousands of years

While Homo sapiens may be the only hominin species alive today, tens of thousands of years ago the planet was home to a variety of human and protohuman species. 

As the result of interspecies breeding, some of these species' DNA has been passed down to modern humans.

Traces of Neanderthal DNA are still found in people of non-African descent and Denisovan DNA lives on in people of Asian heritage.

Researchers also learned in 2016 that the DNA of an unknown population of archaic hominins continues to exist in Pacific Island peoples.

The Neanderthals and Denisovans have been ruled out of the equation, as we already have their DNA and there is no evidence to suggest they lived in Africa. 

Modern-day pygmies, who may have interbred with the Yoruba people have also been eliminated from the process, as their DNA has been sequenced and it is not a match. 

A small-brained hominin that could be found roaming around the South African plains 250,000 years ago, Homo naledi, is a possible but unlikely contender. 

Researchers believe they were too different from us genetically to be able to mate and reproduce successfully   

'I would be amazed if there was anything of them in us,' said Mark Thomas of University College London, who was not involved in the study, speaking to New Scientist about the finding.

Experts made the fining thanks to a statistical method which is able to highlight abnormal genetic code without needing the genome of the species it was inherited from. This established that 8% of Yoruba DNA comes from a yet unknown 'ghost' species

Homo heidelbergensis was a more advanced hominin living in Africa around 200,000 years ago and a more probable candidate.

It could also be that the mystery DNA came from an isolated group of Homo sapiens or population of hominins that are as yet unknown to researchers. 

Whatever the answer turns out to be, the study is a reminder that our species did not emerge from a single founding population, Professor Thomas told New Scientist 

The full findings of the study are available in a paper published in the online print repository bioRxiv. 

WHEN DID HUMAN ANCESTORS FIRST EMERGE?

The timeline of human evolution can be traced back millions of years. Experts estimate that the family tree goes as such:

55 million years ago - First primitive primates evolve

15 million years ago - Hominidae (great apes) evolve from the ancestors of the gibbon

7 million years ago - First gorillas evolve. Later, chimp and human lineages diverge

A recreation of a Neanderthal man is pictured 

5.5 million years ago - Ardipithecus, early 'proto-human' shares traits with chimps and gorillas

4 million years ago - Ape like early humans, the Australopithecines appeared. They had brains no larger than a chimpanzee's but other more human like features 

3.9-2.9 million years ago - Australoipithecus afarensis lived in Africa.  

2.7 million years ago - Paranthropus, lived in woods and had massive jaws for chewing  

2.6 million years ago - Hand axes become the first major technological innovation 

2.3 million years ago - Homo habilis first thought to have appeared in Africa

1.85 million years ago - First 'modern' hand emerges 

1.8 million years ago - Homo ergaster begins to appear in fossil record 

800,000 years ago - Early humans control fire and create hearths. Brain size increases rapidly

400,000 years ago - Neanderthals first begin to appear and spread across Europe and Asia

300,000 to 200,000 years ago - Homo sapiens - modern humans - appear in Africa

50,000 to 40,000 years ago - Modern humans reach Europe 

Read more:

• DNA from another mystery human ancestor lingers in some people | New Scientist
• Recovering signals of ghost archaic admixture in the genomes of present-day Africans | bioRxiv

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

But we're also starting to find glimpses of something strange in our neighbourhoods - traces of ancient, unknown hominins that we've never seen before.

"Each of us carry within ourselves the genetic traces of these past mixing events," said biologist João Teixeira of the University of Adelaide.

"These archaic groups were widespread and genetically diverse, and they survive in each of us. Their story is an integral part of how we came to be."

After closely analysing the existing literature, Teixeira and his colleague biologist Alan Cooper have identified two such 'ghost' ancestors in modern DNA. The first, identified in Eurasian DNA with the help of artificial intelligence, was widely reported earlier this year.

The second, however, was reported last year, a detail that flew under the radar in a larger paper: a mysterious, and inconclusive, genetic signature exclusively found in the population of Flores, Indonesia. It appears to be as divergent from modern human DNA as Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA is.

By carefully analysing these genetic signatures, the biologists have been able to trace when and where these interbreeding events may have occurred.

"For example, all present-day populations show about 2 percent of Neanderthal ancestry," Teixeira said, "which means that Neanderthal mixing with the ancestors of modern humans occurred soon after they left Africa, probably around 50,000 to 55,000 years ago somewhere in the Middle East."

As the modern humans moved farther east, across into islands of Southeast Asia, they seem to have run into more groups.

"At least three other archaic human groups appear to have occupied the area, and the ancestors of modern humans mixed with them before the archaic humans became extinct," Teixeira said.

One of those groups was the Denisovans. The other two remain a mystery.

The first unknown extinct hominin - named EH1 - was roughly genetically equidistant from Denisovans and Neanderthals. The ancestor of all Asian and Australo-Papuan populations bred with EH1, resulting in 2.6 to 3.4 percent shared EH1 ancestry.

(João Teixeira)

It's less strong now, but that genetic signal can still be detected in the DNA of Aboriginal Australians, East Asians and Andaman Islanders. This led the researchers to tentatively conclude that EH1 likely occupied a region in northern India, where a group of modern humans - the migration branch that went on to Asia, Australia and the Papuan islands - encountered them (1 on the map above).

Modern humans also seemed to have interbred with Denisovans in a number of locations, such as East Asia, the Sunda Shelf, and the Philippines (2, 3, and 4 on the map).

Evidence for EH2 - the extinct hominin that interbred with modern humans on Flores - is a little less clear. It only appears in short-statured people that live near Liang Bua Cave - where Homo floriensis was discovered. So it's highly localised, and has somehow remained contained for the roughly 50,000 years since the two groups met (5 on the map).

Further research is obviously required into this phenomenon. But it certainly seems to point to a very tangled human history.

"We knew the story out of Africa wasn't a simple one, but it seems to be far more complex than we have contemplated," Teixeira said.

"The Island Southeast Asia region was clearly occupied by several archaic human groups, probably living in relative isolation from each other for hundreds of thousands of years before the ancestors of modern humans arrived."

Sadly, it also looks like the arrival of modern humans was pretty closely followed by the extinction of the archaic hominins in each area. Talk about being ghosted.

The research has been published in PNAS.

{ https://www.sciencealert.com/ }

On April 25 of 1977, a patrol of 6 soldiers in the desert badlands wilderness of a remote area of Pampa Lluscuma, near Putre, Chile, were settled down in their camp at approximately 4:15 AM when something caught their attention in the star-flecked expanse of sky above. The men watched in awe as two very bright lights descended from the heavens, with one of them silently approaching close to the camp to show that it was a brightly lit violet oval of light with two pinpoints of red light at either end, and another of the objects sinking down behind some foothills in the near distance, its violet glow still visible frosting the hills. The remaining light apparently then dropped down to a low altitude and seemed to just roam about over the desert, casting everything in that spooky glow. The men at first cowered under emergency blankets, but it soon became clear that there was no impending danger, and that these lights were simply hovering over the landscape. And thus would begin one of the strangest UFO encounter reports to ever come out of the country of Chile.

At the time this whole light show was odd enough that they felt it was worth investigating, and the leader of the patrol, a Cpl. Armando Valdez volunteered to venture out towards where the unknown light had sunk behind the hills to check things out. Valdez checked that his weapon was loaded and ready, and trudged out across the parched, scrub infested moonscape towards the unknown as his men warily gazed out towards that eerie glow in the distance. Valdez would not be gone for long, stumbling back into the camp a mere 15 minutes later, but something was obviously very wrong with him. He looked haggard, worn out, wild-eyed, and most oddly of all seemed to have accrued several days of beard growth in just that short span of time, when he had been clean shaven just minutes before. The patrol leader seemed to have some trouble walking, and when he sat down he merely stared off into the distance in a trance-like state and cryptically mumbled “You don’t know who we are or where we come from but we will be back soon” before passing out. When the men searched him, they found that the watch Valdez had been wearing inexplicably showed that a full 5 days had gone by, even though he had only been gone a few minutes.

Valdez and his men

Valdez would awaken from his stupor at 7 AM, and oddly his watch seemed to be frozen in time, still stuck at exactly the same point it had been when he had returned to camp. He was more lucid this time, but try as he might he could remember nothing of what had happened to him after he had left that camp, much less why his watch and beard growth seemed to indicate that he had been gone for 5 days rather than 15 minutes. He would later say of his bizarre ordeal:

The surprising thing was the way it approached us. As soldiers we are trained to deal with any situation. But this phenomenon didn’t seem to have any logical explanation. I would like to regain my memory of those fifteen minutes. I would even like to submit to hypnosis to draw out information about what happened.

The case became a media sensation in Chile, but there was some effort made to stem the notoriety of it all, with Chilean President and Commander in Chief Augusto Pinochet eventually putting a ban on any further interviews with the witnesses, and it then sort of slipped into obscurity until some researchers began digging into the story again. Notably journalist and researcher Patricio Abuselme went about reopening investigations into this strange UFO encounter, interviewing witnesses and Valdez himself for his 2010 book La noche de los centinelas (The Night of the Sentries), which he spent nearly 8 years compiling after extensive digging around. Abuselme says of the project:

This is the case that made Chilean ufology known worldwide. However, no one bothered to conduct a serious, in-depth investigation of the case. I took up the challenge in 2002, and it took me eight years to compile the protagonists’ accounts and reassemble this “impossible story.”

When I started this investigation, I did so in the secret hope of explaining the whole case in conventional terms. And I thought I was well on the way until the main protagonist of the story debunked the cases most controversial aspects – the growth of his beard and the wristwatch’s date change – by providing conventional explanations. The problem is that when I tried to corroborate it with the other witnesses, they provided a version that was mutually congruent, but at odds with the one offered by Valdés. For this reason, the book poses a controversy. If someone is looking for a story of mystics in direct contact with Martians, he or she won’t find it here. What they will find is information, information and more information. The outcome of a detailed journalistic investigation that enables the reconstruction of an intriguing real case that captured headlines over 30 years ago.

Interestingly, it has come to light in recent years that the story has indeed changed somewhat, with Valdez coming forward on an interview with Terra.cl. to claim during his research for his own book on the matter titled The Shadow of the Truth, that in retrospect he knew that he was never really abducted by aliens at all, although the strangeness with the watch and the beard was all true. Wait, what? Valdez, by this time retired from the military, would give some shocking comments on the affair that had kept people on their toes looking for answers for decades. However, he far from writes it all off as a fiction, rather being very cryptic about what actually happened. He would say in this interview about his hypnotic regression and the insights he gained:

I’ve been fully involved in developing my book and furthermore, looking into my experience, since I wish to be as factual as possible in my story. Truly, I wasn’t abducted. This is the reason for sensitive nature of what I’m putting forth in the book. Some important background details are being released. Look, it’s really complicated to explain all of a sudden. That’s the reason behind my trip to Putre, my scientific studies and the book I’m writing, because it’s all very complicated. I would say that I knew immediately how things had happened. What I’m explaining in my book [is making known] the reasons for which certain items went off on another track. Indeed. I didn’t think at first that I’d been abducted, although the matter of the growth of beard is true, as well as the subject of my wristwatch. But for this reason I have taken to writing the book to explain the reasons behind all of these things.

My story and explanations have been accepted to a certain extent, and I have told them certain things and in a certain manner. There are many who hold points of view different from my own and I don’t have to deny that there are contradictions. But as I said, the story is mine and they have not influenced me at all regarding my book. In fact, there are those who may agree or not agree with my book tomorrow, and will not stop what I’m doing. There are mixed items. The term UFO today is contaminated by another type of thing, and I prefer to speak in terms of FANI (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). I think that in my experience there is a bit of everything–a good measure of paranormal phenomena, strange effects, lights, many things acting in unison and this is what I am showing in my book, although it’s been hard for me to convey on paper what I felt, what I experienced and what really happened.

It doesn’t make much sense to be honest, and making it even more confusing was an interview Valdez did with researcher Carlos Vergara, which was translated by Mexican UFO researcher Scott Corrales. It is a bit of a confrontational interview, with Valdez being typically cryptic and constantly plugging his book, and here is an excerpt:

– Were you abducted?

– In the context, I would say no…. In other words, had I been abducted, I would have been sucked up and taken by a spacecraft somewhere else. But I will make the truth known in my book.”

– Excuse me, Corporal Valdes. Cut the book talk and tell me something more solid.

– No, no, no. That’s not what its about. I’m not trying to promote myslef. All right, what do you want to know. Ask me and I’ll tell you.”

– Where the hell were you those fifteen minutes?

– I can tell you that I was always present and looking at my men. I even heard everything they said.

– So what’ll it be then? Were you abducted or not?

– I can’t tell you yes or no. I have a truth, but it’s a long story, son. The whole phenomenon must have transpired here on Earth. The truth is harder to explain than a lie. If I said that I went to another galaxy, it would be easier. This is harder to believe.

– I don’t believe you…

– You see? I only want to be at peace with myself. You want the truth? I was never abducted! But another phenomenon occurred.

– What phenomenon?

– Something very close to home, having to do with Earth. And it happened to me with a purpose I have just come to realize. I speak of future things in my book. They call it eschatology…

What in the world is he talking about? It seems in a sense that Valdez is just as confused about what happened as anyone else, and for all of this we are no closer to any real answers as to what he encountered out in that desert wilderness, if anything. was he abducted or not? What does he think really happened? What is the meaning of his beard growth, the weirdness with the watch, and the fact that five others all witnesses the UFOs that kicked off the whole thing? It is hard to say, but it is certainly known that Chile has been rather a hotbed of UFO sightings over the years, so it seems that there could be something genuinely strange going on here. As to what that might be is anyone’s guess, and the Valdez Chilean UFO Encounter remains just as enigmatic as it always has been.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }