Exploring ocean worlds in the search for life

Marc Boucher

In our search for life in the universe our solar systems provides us with tantalizing options including several ocean worlds.

This past week NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab Von Karman Lecture Series hosted Dr. Morgan Cable who spoke on the topic of The Search for Life: Exploring Ocean Worlds.

Here’s the lecture description: “The search for life is “civilization level science.” What happens if or when we find it? Using the upcoming block of “Ocean Access” missions, Dr. Morgan Cable shows us why ocean worlds are important and what the discovery of life could mean to us as a civilization.”

Enjoy.

{ https://spaceq.ca/ }

Life on Mars? Organic molecules discovered on the red planet by NASA Curiosity rover are 'consistent with alien life'

• Thiophene molecules contain carbon and sulphur which are essential for life
• These molecules have been identified on the surface of Mars by Curiosity rover 
• Astronomers believe their likely source of their origin is via biological processes
• Analysis from the Rosalind Franklin rover will shed light on molecules' origin  

By JOE PINKSTONE FOR MAILONLINE

Organic molecules present in truffles, coal and oil on Earth have been identified on the surface of Mars and may hint at the presence of alien life on the red planet.  

These chemicals, called thiophenes, are important molecules as they contain both carbon and sulphur — two ingredients essential for life. 

NASA's curiosity rover has identified signs of them on the surface of Mars and astronomers think the most likely source of origin is from biological processes.

Further analysis by the Rosalind Franklin rover that will launch later this year will help add credence to the tentative theory, researchers hope.   

Scroll down for video  

NASA's curiosity rover has identified signs of thiophenes on the surface of the red planet and astronomers believe the most likely source is from biological processes. These chemicals contain both both carbon and sulphur — two ingredients essential for life

Washington State University astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch looked into how thiophenes came to exist on Mars. 

Their findings, published in the journal Astrobiology, indicate the chemicals were likely produced by biological processes and not chemical reactions. 

This is a major step in the hunt for Martian life but is not concrete proof, the scientists say. 

'We identified several biological pathways for thiophenes that seem more likely than chemical ones, but we still need proof,' Dirk Schulze-Makuch said. 

'If you find thiophenes on Earth, then you would think they are biological, but on Mars, of course, the bar to prove that has to be quite a bit higher.'   

NASA's Curiosity rover (pictured) has identified signs of them on the surface of the red planet and astronomers believe the most likely source is from biological processes

Thee most likely source of these chemicals is thought to be biological processes of primitive lifeforms but it is also possible they were formed after a meteor impact. 

A space rock crash landing can cause searing temperatures and thiophenes can be created if a host of certain chemicals are heated to around 120°C (248°F).  

If thiophenes were made as a result of biological processes it is likely it was via bacteria three billion years ago. 

Back then, Mars was warmer and wetter and a more hospitable land where the key chemical reaction to form thiophenes can take place - a reaction called sulfate reduction process that creates thiophenes.

Data from Curiosity has been exhausted and astronomers hope the imminent launch of the Rosalind Franklin rover can shed more light on the chemicals and their origin. 

It will be carrying a Mars Organic Molecule Analyser, or MOMA, which can collect large samples and analyse them without having to destroy them.  

Analysing isotopes - chemical strains that can reveal its history - could help learn more about this potential indicator of life on Mars. 

Dr Schulze-Makuch said: 'Organisms are "lazy". They would rather use the light isotope variations of the element because it costs them less energy. 

Yet even if the next rover returns this isotopic evidence, it may still not be enough to prove definitively that there is, or once was, life on Mars.

'As Carl Sagan said ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence",' Dr Schulze-Makuch said. 

'I think the proof will really require that we actually send people there, and an astronaut looks through a microscope and sees a moving microbe.'   

WHAT EVIDENCE DO SCIENTISTS HAVE FOR LIFE ON MARS?

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

Some ‘superpuff’ exoplanets may actually be ringed worlds like Saturn

Rings could make the mysterious planets look bigger than they really are

Wide rings could block light from a star as a planet crosses in front of it, making the planet look bigger than it really is, scientists say. This artist’s illustration shows what such a planet might look like up-close.

ROBIN DIENEL, COURTESY OF THE CARNEGIE INST. FOR SCIENCE

By Lisa Grossman

Some puzzling planets called superpuffs could be Saturns in disguise.

These exoplanets appear very large given their masses, suggesting that they have densities like cotton candy. Astronomers have struggled to explain how these planets could have turned out so fluffy (SN: 11/30/15).

“People had been thinking of complicated ways to explain these mysterious planets,” such as dust storms leaving a planet, says theoretical astrophysicist Anthony Piro of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif.

Now, Piro and exoplanet scientist Shreyas Vissapragada of Caltech propose a simpler explanation. Instead of being outsized for their weight class, some superpuffs could sport wide rings that make the planets appear bigger than they really are, the researchers suggest February 28 in the Astronomical Journal.

“This seemed like such a natural, kind of cute explanation,” Piro says. “We know of things like Saturn in our own solar system. Why can’t something like that exist in other solar systems as well?”

The duo considered 10 known superpuffs observed with the Kepler space telescope, and ran computer simulations to see if the planets’ girths could be due to rings.

The team found that because all of the superpuffs sit fairly close to their stars, their rings would need to be made of rock, unlike Saturn’s icy rings (SN: 8/23/17), to avoid melting away. And, as a result, the proposed rocky rings can’t extend too far from a planet, or the rocks’ gravity would pull them together into moons.

That means that the three superpuffs orbiting the star Kepler 51 can’t be explained by rings — the planets appear big enough that any rocky rings they might have would turn into moons, the team found. But the other seven worlds might have rings and are worth checking, Piro says.

Following up on these planets might need to wait for NASA’s sharp-eyed James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2021 (SN: 4/19/16).

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

What's an Earth-Like Planet Anyway?

NASA'S CURIOSITY JUST TOOK THE HIGHEST RESOLUTION PANORAMA OF MARS TO DATE

While America overdosed on turkey, NASA's Curiosity rover spent this past Thanksgiving holiday all alone, millions of miles away on Mars.

But unlike the rest of us, the rover was far from idle. Instead, the Martian explorer worked on its photography skills.

Between November 24 and December 1, 2019, Curiosity took more than 1,000 images of the Red Planet, piecing together the highest resolution panorama of Mars to date. The stunning image reveals the dry, dusty surface of Mars in its full glory.

"While many on our team were at home enjoying turkey, Curiosity produced this feast for the eyes," Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which leads the Curiosity rover mission, said in a statement.

NASA released the final image on Wednesday.

The panorama captures a wide view of Glen Torridon, an area of Mars that Curiosity is currently exploring near a mountain called Mount Sharp.

Curiosity used the telephoto lens on its Mast Camera to snap the high-resolution image. Altogether, it is made up of 1.8 billion pixels, revealing the Martian landscape in unprecedented detail.

The rover also used a medium-angle lens to produce a lower resolution version of just 650 million pixels, which also features the robot’s arm and front deck.

The image marks the first time Curiosity has dedicated its operations to producing a 360-degree panorama of its surroundings, according to NASA.

It took Curiosity nearly seven hours to capture both shots. The holiday period meant the rover could spare the extra time, though — with its operating team away on holiday, it didn’t have many tasks on its to-do list.

While this view is unprecedented, Curiosity is known for its photography skills. In 2013, it snapped a lower-resolution panorama of the Martian surface while it was on the Rocknest site. The image is not as detailed as the new panorama, and features the rover’s shiny metallic body in the foreground. Clearly, the robot has stepped up its game over the intervening years.

The rover is also fond of taking selfies, snapping pictures of itself as it explores the Red Planet.

Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012 with the mission of searching for hints of microbial life that may have existed on the Red Planet during its early history.

The car-sized robot roams the Gale Crater on Mars, where it has discovered a lake that may have contained water billions of years ago, and an environment that may have supported life.

Curiosity will soon be joined by NASA’s Mars 2020 rover, which is scheduled to launch this summer. Like its robot peer, the Mars 2020 rover is designed to search for signs of current or past signs of life on the Red Planet.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

UFO 'Bigger Than Earth' Flying Past the Sun Spotted by NASA Observation Mission aka "Ezekiel's Wheel" Type

The “humongous object” appears to be bigger than Mercury, Venus, and the Earth. “You can tell this thing doesn’t look like our space station, no way. It doesn’t look like any satellite that I have seen. To be honest, when I first saw the footage I thought: Ezekiel’s Wheel! It’s very similar – the circle with a cross in it”, the host said.

The host refers to a saying in the Book of Ezekiel, where the prophet spoke about a flying chariot, which he described as a “wheel in the middle of a wheel”.

NASA has not yet issued a response to the issue. via Sputnik.news

Other videos, selected by peter2011

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A selfie of the Curiosity Rover at Greenheugh Pediment on Mars, uploaded by Neville Thompson on his Gigapan page, shows a couple of strange objects.

The alleged objects appear very different compared to the large rocks surrounding them, suggesting that these objects may be parts of old machinery used for mining activities.

NASA’s Curiosity Rover has photographed many interesting images of the surface of Mars since it touched down on the red planet in 2012 and these images is yet another proof that ancient civilizations lived on the red planet in the distant past?

Gigapan link:

• http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/219755

Other videos, selected by peter2011

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The Unexplained UFO Lights over G.E. Peebles Test Facility in Ohio’s Area 51 (1996)

The Peebles operation, with more than 250 employees and located on nearly 7,000 acres, is both an engine test and final assembly facility. Each year, Peebles runs final acceptance testing on about 1,250 engines manufactured by GE and its joint venture partners. From Peebles, these engines are shipped to aircraft manufacturers for installation on customer aircraft. Does Hangar 18, Legendary Alien Warehouse, Exist? Crashed UFOs, alien autopsies and government cover-ups — untangling the legend surrounding Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. As home to Project Blue Book, ground zero for government investigation of UFOs from 1951 to 1969, Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) outside Dayton, Ohio, ranks up there alongside Area 51 as a subject of enduring speculation.

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

Why Habitable Exoplanets Are Bad News for Humanity's Future

• This article was originally published on The Conversation.
  

Last week, scientists announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, a planet 492 light years away in the Cygnus constellation. Kepler-186f is special because it marks the first planet almost exactly the same size as Earth orbiting in the “habitable zone” – the distance from a star in which we might expect liquid water, and perhaps life.

What did not make the news, however, is that this discovery also slightly increases how much credence we give to the possibility of near-term human extinction. This because of a concept known as the Great Filter.

The Great Filter is an argument that attempts to resolve the Fermi Paradox: why have we not found aliens, despite the existence of hundreds of billions of solar systems in our galactic neighborhood in which life might evolve? As the namesake physicist Enrico Fermi noted, it seems rather extraordinary that not a single extraterrestrial signal or engineering project has been detected (UFO conspiracy theorists notwithstanding).

This apparent absence of thriving extraterrestrial civilizations suggests that at least one of the steps from humble planet to interstellar civilization is exceedingly unlikely. The absence could be caused because either intelligent life is extremely rare or intelligent life has a tendency to go extinct. This bottleneck for the emergence of alien civilizations from any one of the many billions of planets is referred to as the Great Filter.

Are We Alone?
What exactly is causing this bottleneck has been the subject of debate for more than 50 years. Explanations could include a paucity of Earth-like planets or self-replicating molecules. Other possibilities could be an improbable jump from simple prokaryotic life (cells without specialized parts) to more complex eukaryotic life – after all, this transition took well over a billion years on Earth.

Proponents of this “Rare Earth” hypothesis also argue that the evolution of complex life requires an exceedingly large number of perfect conditions. In addition to Earth being in the habitable zone of the sun, our star must be far enough away from the galactic centre to avoid destructive radiation, our gas giants must be massive enough to sweep asteroids from Earth’s trajectory, and our unusually large moon stabilizes the axial tilt that gives us different seasons.

These are just a few prerequisites for complex life. The emergence of symbolic language, tools and intelligence could require other such “perfect conditions” as well.

Or Is the Filter Ahead of Us?
While emergence of intelligent life could be rare, the silence could also be the result of intelligent life emerging frequently but subsequently failing to survive for long. Might every sufficiently advanced civilization stumble across a suicidal technology or unsustainable trajectory? We know that a Great Filter prevents the emergence of prosperous interstellar civilizations, but we don’t know whether or not it lies in humanity’s past or awaits us in the future.

For 200,000 years humanity has survived supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts, and naturally occurring pandemics. But our track record of survival is limited to just a few decades in the presence of nuclear weaponry. And we have no track record at all of surviving many of the radically novel technologies that are likely to arrive this century.

Esteemed scientists such as Astronomer Royal Martin Rees at the Cambridge Center for the Study of Existential Risk point to advances in biotechnology as being potentially catastrophic. Others such as Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark and Stuart Russell, also with the Cambridge Center, have expressed serious concern about the exotic but understudied possibility of machine superintelligence.

Let’s Hope Kepler-186f is Barren
When the Fermi Paradox was initially proposed, it was thought that planets themselves were rare. Since then, however, the tools of astronomy have revealed the existence of hundreds of exoplanets. That just seems to be the tip of the iceberg.

But each new discovery of an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone, such as Kepler-186f, makes it less plausible that there are simply no planets aside from Earth that might support life. The Great Filter is thus more likely to be lurking in the path between habitable planet and flourishing civilization.

If Kepler-186f is teeming with intelligent life, then that would be really bad news for humanity. For that fact would push back the Great Filter’s position further into the technological stages of a civilization’s development. We might then expect that catastrophe awaits both our extraterrestrial companions and ourselves.

In the case of Kepler-186f, we still have many reasons to think intelligent life might not emerge. The atmosphere might be too thin to prevent freezing, or the planet might be tidally locked, causing a relatively static environment. Discovery of these hostile conditions should be cause for celebration. As philosopher Nick Bostrom once said:

The silence of the night sky is golden … in the search for extraterrestrial life, no news is good news. It promises a potentially great future for humanity.

• Image courtesy NASA

NASA's Curiosity rover took this selfie in 2019.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill

Although our understanding of the Martian molecules is limited and incomplete, the information we do have could be consistent with life on the Red Planet billions of years ago.

The molecules were actually extracted by the Curiosity rover from a mudstone section of the Gale Crater called the Murray Formation; a study on the finding was published in 2018. The initial experiments revealed a number of molecules, including a group of aromatic compounds called thiophenes.

Here on Earth, these compounds are usually found in some pretty interesting places. They show up in crude oil - made of compressed and superheated dead organisms such as zooplankton and algae; and coal - made of compressed and superheated dead plants.

The compound is thought to form abiotically - that is, through a physical process, not a biological one - when sulphur reacts with organic hydrocarbons at temperatures greater than 120 degrees Celsius (248°F), a reaction called thermochemical sulphate reduction (TSR).

However, while this reaction is abiotic, the hydrocarbons and sulphur can both be of biological origin. So, researchers set out to investigate how thiophenes could have formed on Mars.

"We identified several biological pathways for thiophenes that seem more likely than chemical ones, but we still need proof," said astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University.

"If you find thiophenes on Earth, then you would think they are biological, but on Mars, of course, the bar to prove that has to be quite a bit higher."

There are a number of ways thiophenes could have emerged on Mars without necessitating the presence of life. For instance, thiophenes have been detected in meteorites; so extramartian rocks could have carried the molecules in.

Geological processes can also produce the heat necessary for TSR, especially back when Mars was volcanically active; and volcanic activity, of course, also produces sulphur.

But there's something interesting about the Martian thiophenes. The processes described above require the sulphur to be nucleophilic, that is, the sulphur atoms donate electrons to form a bond with their reaction partner. Yet most of the sulphur on Mars exists as non-nucleophilic sulphates.

These can be reduced to nucleophilic sulphides via TSR. But there's another possibility, too - biological sulphate reduction (BSR). Some bacteria - and white truffles, too, actually, although you probably won't find those on Mars - can synthesise thiophenes.

So it's possible that when Mars was a warmer, wetter place than it is today, around 3 billion years ago, that bacterial colonies existed, and produced the thiophenes. This could occur even in below-zero temperatures. Then, when Mars dried up, the thiophenes were left there for Curiosity to dig out of the mudstone all these years later.

Sadly, the sample was a bit damaged. Curiosity uses an analysis technique called pyrolysis that heats the samples to over 500 degrees Celsius. So there's a limit to the knowledge we can glean from what survived.

But the Rosalind Franklin rover, scheduled for launch in July, will have on board an instrument that is much less destructive. So any thiophenes it digs out of the ground may be more intact when analysis is applied.

In addition, the carbon and sulphur isotopes could be revealing, too. That's because living organisms prefer lighter isotopes; if the thiophenes contain lighter isotopes, that could weight the evidence towards biological processes too.

Sadly, we probably won't know for sure based on just what our robotic friends can dig out of the ground.

"As Carl Sagan said 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence'," Schulze‑Makuch said.

"I think the proof will really require that we actually send people there, and an astronaut looks through a microscope and sees a moving microbe."

• The research has been published in Astrobiology.

{ https://www.sciencealert.com/ }

What’s the Difference Between Dark Matter and Dark Energy?

Our universe is dominated by mysterious and invisible forms of matter and energy that have yet to be fully (or adequately) understood.

Two galaxy clusters collided to create the “Bullet Cluster,” shown here. Normal matter is shown in pink and the rest of the matter is illustrated in blue, revealing that dark matter dominates this enormous cluster.

(Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CfA/M.Markevitch et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI; Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.; Lensing Map: NASA/STScI; ESO WFI; Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.)

Dark matter cannot be photographed, but researchers can detect it and map it by measuring gravitational lensing. Its distribution is shown here in the blue overlay of the inner region of Abell 1689, a cluster of galaxies 2.2 billion light-years away.

 (Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/Yale/CNRS)

Dark Matter

In the 1930s, Swiss-born astronomer Fritz Zwicky studied images of the roughly 1,000 galaxies that make up the Coma Cluster — and he spotted something funny about their behavior. The galaxies moved so fast that they should simply fly apart. He speculated that some kind of “dark matter” held them together. 

Decades later, astronomers Vera Rubin and Kent Ford found a similar phenomenon when they studied the rotation rates of individual galaxies. The stars at a galaxy’s outer edge should circle slower than stars near the center. That’s the way planets in our solar system orbit. Instead, they noticed that the stars on a galaxy’s outskirts orbit just as fast — or faster — than the stars closer in. Rubin and Ford had found more evidence that some invisible form of matter is apparently holding the universe together.

“Even stars at the periphery are orbiting at high velocities,” Rubin once explained in an interview with Discover. “There has to be a lot of mass to make the stars orbit so rapidly, but we can’t see it. We call this invisible mass dark matter.”

The left galaxy rotates how astronomers would have expected if dark matter didn’t exist. The galaxy on the right reflects what their telescopes actually reveal. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Astronomers now have many other lines of evidence that suggest dark matter is real. In fact, the existence of dark matter is so widely accepted that it’s part of the so-called standard model of cosmology, which forms the foundation of how scientists understand the universe’s birth and evolution. Without it, we can’t explain how we got here.

But that lofty status puts pressure on cosmologists to find definitive proof that dark matter exists and that their model of the universe is correct. For decades, physicists all over the world have employed increasingly high-tech instruments to try and detect dark matter. So far, they’ve found no signs of it.

A wide view of the local universe, spanning hundreds of millions of light-years, reveals the clumped and weblike structure of the cosmos, with strands of galaxies and immense voids. The Milky Way is just one of many points that make up the Virgo Supercluster. Rather than just empty, passive spaces, voids may hold clues to understanding dark matter, dark energy and galactic evolution.

(Credit: Andrew Z. Colvin)

---

• Read More: As the Hunt Drags Out, Physicists Start Searching for the Lightest Dark Matter

---

Dark Energy

Astronomers have known that our universe is expanding for about a century now. Telescopic observations have shown that most galaxies are moving away from each other, which implies the galaxies were closer together in the distant past. As a result, the evidence piled up for the Big Bang. However, astronomers assumed that the combined gravitational pull of all the cosmos’ stars and galaxies should be slowing down the universe’s expansion. Perhaps it would even someday collapse back in on itself in a Big Crunch.

That notion was thrown out in the late 1990s, however, when two teams of astronomers spotted something that didn’t make any sense. Researchers studying supernovas in the the most distant galaxies discovered that distant galaxies were moving away from us faster than nearby galaxies. The universe wasn’t just expanding — the expansion was speeding up.

“My own reaction is somewhere between amazement and horror,“ astronomer Brian Schmidt, who led one of the two teams, told The New York Times in 1998. “Amazement, because I just did not expect this result, and horror in knowing that it will likely be disbelieved by a majority of astronomers — who, like myself, are extremely skeptical of the unexpected.“

(Credit: Roen Kelly/Discover)

But rather than refute it, subsequent observations have only made the evidence for dark energy more robust. In fact, some prominent critics of dark matter still accept the existence of dark energy.

Now, that doesn’t mean researchers know what dark energy is. Far from it. But they can describe its role in the universe, thanks to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Einstein didn’t know about dark energy, but his equations suggested new space can come into existence. And he also included a fudge factor in relativity called the cosmological constant, which he added — and later regretted — to keep the universe from collapsing inward. This idea allows space itself to have energy. However, scientists have still never actually seen this force on Earth.

Some theoretical physicists think there’s an entire dark realm of particles and forces out there, just waiting to be discovered. Whatever dark energy and dark matter are made of, they seem to be playing tug-of-war with our universe — both holding it together and pulling it apart.

Linda Moulton Howe: A Hidden Alien Language Within Binary Codes Could Reveal the ET Agenda

Linda Moulton Howe: A Hidden Alien Language within Binary Codes Could Reveal The ET Agenda

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

Advanced Ancient Civilizations That Had Abilities We Are Still Struggling To Understand

Advanced Ancient Civilizations That Had Abilities We Are Still Struggling To Understand

VIDEOS, selected by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

An awesome unidentified flying object moves unbelievably fast through the sky in Southern Arizona. The footage, captured on March 6, 2020 raises many questions about what it could have been.

It is suggested that the object is a bug of some kind flying real close to the camera but not everybody is convinced and argue that it is more likely an antigravity craft whether man-made or alien.

Another point of discussion is the vortex like cloud in the background and some people wonder if it came into our dimensional plane of existence through the vortex.

  

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

Navy Has One More Video and More Documents On The Nimitz UFO Encounter

As you may recall, the Navy released three videos of bizarre UFO encounters, involving characteristics that defy much of our understanding of physics. One was from the Nimitz aircraft carrier incident, and the others were from a much later encounter with the carrier Roosevelt. The videos were short in length and somewhat grainy. Many journalists have attempted if there’s more of those videos that are at least longer, clearer versions of the ones already made public. However, all such requests were answered in the negative.

Interestingly, researcher Christian Lambright submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in October 2019 to look for some particular details along these lines. Recently, he finally received a response. While the military did not provide him with any new videos or documents, they did concede that they have other papers and another video that would apply to his recent request. Unfortunately, they could not release the documents and video footage because they were classified top secret and secret respectively. The Navy claims that their release could cause grave damage to national security.

The new development is in contrast to what Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough had announced. Despite testimony from several of the sailors from the Nimitz battle group who witnessed these events claiming that they remembered seeing longer videos, Ms Gough informed us on several instances that those three videos were the only ones they had and no clearer or more extended versions existed.

Now, we have the Pentagon, through Ms Gough, saying there are no more videos and we have ONI saying there’s at least one more. Somebody is lying again, as both of these things can’t be simultaneously true.

Who should we believe? Let us know in the comment section.

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

Is life possible around black holes?

Meet 'Perseverance': NASA's Mars 2020 rover has a new name

NASA’S NEW MARS ROVER OFFICIALLY HAS A NAME

NASA/VICTOR TANGERMANN

{ https://futurism.com/the-byte }

In a move that surely must have frustrated the hundreds, if not thousands, of people pouring over databases full of old Martian satellite images and rover photographs for signs of life, NASA posted an unusual shot on its “Astronomy Picture of the Day” blog of a really strange-looking hole on the side of a Red Planet volcano with a caption that readily admits it could contain life forms. (Image above. Credit: NASA.) All we need is someone or some rover to creep up to the edge and peek in. Any volunteers? Anyone? Bueller?

“Holes such as this are of particular interest because their interior caves are relatively protected from the harsh surface of Mars, making them relatively good candidates to contain Martian life. These pits are therefore prime targets for possible future spacecraft, robots, and even human interplanetary explorers.”

On March 1, 2020, NASA’s pic of the day was a hole photographed in 2011 by the HiRISE instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Located on a slope of the Pavonis Mons volcano, the opening measures 35 meters (115 feet) across and the hole, based on the angle of its shadow, measures at least 20 meters (65.5 feet) deep. If Pavonis Mons sounds familiar, the volcano is the subject of the Flaming Lips instrumental song “Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia)” on the album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, which later was made into a Broadway musical by The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin. Is NASA hinting that there might be pink robots in this hole? Or perhaps it’s a space elevator to Deimos, the smaller moon of Mars, as depicted in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Or is NASA hiding something else … in plain sight?

Pavonis Mons is a giant shield volcano made from stacks of overlapping lava flows that measures 8.7 miles high — taller than Mt. Everest. A digital model shows a pile of debris inside the hole, indicating it was once as deep as 295 feet. That makes the hole deeper than most caves on Earth. If early humans lived in caves, why not Early Martians? Or current Martian life forms?

“These results have important implications for habitability and human exploration of the moon but also for the search for extra-terrestrial life on Mars. Lava tubes are environments shielded from cosmic radiation and protected from micrometeorites, potentially providing safe habitats for future human missions. They are also, potentially, large enough for quite significant human settlements.”

Riccardo Pozzobon from the University of Padova, Italy, agrees. In a study conducted in 2017, he and other scientists compared volcanic lava tubes on Earth in Hawaii, Iceland, and the Galapagos Islands to those seen on the Moon and Mars. On the Moon, some are 1 km (0.6 miles) across and hundreds of kilometers in length. Both these and the smaller ones on Mars are big enough for future human settlements and possibly past or current extraterrestrial life.

Another view of pavonis mons

(NASA)

We may soon find out. The Mars 2020 rover is scheduled to launch on July 17 and land on February 18, 2021, with the mission to search for signs of life. Unlike other rovers, this one will carry a helicopter – perfect for flying over and perhaps even flying into the hole on Pavonis Mons.

Maybe The Flaming Lips should head back to the studio and begin working on some lyrics to “Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia)” about approaching it by helicopter or on wheels.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Volgende robotjeep die naar Mars gestuurd wordt, heeft een naam: ‘Perseverance’ - HLN.be

Bron: Belga, Techcrunch

De Perseverance moet op zoek gaan naar sporen van vroeger microbiologisch leven, en zal ook het klimaat en geologie van de rode planeet onderzoeken. 

Lees ook

Tarwe kweken op Mars? Waregems bedrijf onderzoekt mee of het kan

Tekenen van leven

De nieuwe verkenner is de opvolger van de Curiosity uit 2012, die nog altijd rondtoert op Mars. Het nieuwe voertuig heeft zeven nieuwe instrumenten aan boord, laten de ingenieurs van het Jet Propulsion Laboratory van NASA weten. De nieuwe instrumenten zullen het terrein van Mars bestuderen en in bodemstalen op zoek gaan naar tekenen van leven.

“Wat we zullen leren uit de stalen die tijdens deze nieuwe missie zullen genomen worden, heeft het potentieel om een antwoord te geven op de vraag of we alleen zijn in het universum”, stelde Ken Farley, die als wetenschapper betrokken is bij het project, eerder.

Voor de nieuwe verkenner ontwikkelde NASA ook een nieuwe landingstechnologie waarmee het voertuig plekken op Mars zal kunnen bezoeken die te riskant waren voor Curiosity.

De naam werd aangereikt door een scholier uit Virigina die een landelijke wedstrijd heeft gewonnen om de Marsverkenner te dopen. Totnogtoe ging die met de droge naam ‘Mars 2020’ door het leven. Bedoeling is in juli te vertrekken, om in februari neer te strijken op Mars.

Er waren 28.000 deelnames aan de wedstrijd. De winnende scholier krijgt nu een uitnodiging om op Cape Canaveral in Florida de lancering bij te wonen. 

Eerder vonden scholieren voor Amerikaanse Marsjeeps al namen uit zoals Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity en Curiosity. Die laatste nam onlangs nog de scherpste panoramafoto van Mars ooit.

VIDEO's, peter2011

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

Billy Meier Prophecies! Real or Fake UFO's? The Controversial Story

We enter 2020 with an explosive, intense, dynamic and fascinating interview-conversation with UFO Researcher, Author, Lecturer, Documentary Filmmaker and the English-speaking representative for the controversial reclusive Swiss UFO photographer and Alien contactee – BILLY MEIER! Michael Horn is interviewed by AOT TV´s Lucas Alexander in this compelling and controversial edition of Age Of Truth TV. IS BILLY MEIER A FRAUD OR IS HE REAL? Who is Billy Meier really, and if his extraordinary story and photographic evidence is real, how come HE WAS CHOSEN to predict prophecies of world events and disasters to come, told by his alien contacts from the Pleiadian Star System? Why was Billy Meier “allowed” to take all these numerous photographs of UFO crafts? Is he in fact linked to the deep-state military – or the New World Order power-elite?

Michael Horn is calling the Billy Meier case, the ONLY authentic UFO case with real evidence! He has spent 40 year researching the Billy Meier case, and become very controversial in the field of UFOlogy and amongst researchers into Alien, E.T. existence on planet Earth and all over the universe. Michael Horn claims that Billy Meier, through his E.T. contacts have given warnings about man-made Climate Change as early as 1951, and many times thereafter, and he claims that Climate Change is very much man-made. This is leading the conversation into an interesting area, discussing The Club of Rome, New World Order plans and U.N. Agenda 21 and much more. In 2004, after 25 years of research into Meier’s information, Michael Horn became the voluntary Authorized American Media Representative for the Billy Meier Contacts. Michael gives national and international multi-media presentations, university lectures, interviews, etc., and makes frequent media appearances representing the Meier contacts

…. SELECTED TOPICS DISCUSSED: – IS BILLY MEIER REAL OR A FRAUD? – Did Billy Meier take all the numerous photographs of REAL UFO´s from elsewhere in the universe, Alien crafts, or could they be man-made advanced military technology? – Is Billy Meier a TRUE Alien contactee, and a chosen prophet, or is he part of a military cover-up, promoting a secret New World Order agenda plan?

- Is Climate Change really man-made, or is there an agenda behind the massive media propaganda about Global Warming, through f.ex. Greta Thunberg. – U.N. Agenda 21 – New World Order – The DARK ORDER (aka. Illuminati) – The Club Of Rome – Prophecies from Billy Meier about world catastrophes. – UFO researchers/ UFO community vs. Billy Meier and Michael Horn. – 5G roll-out and the danger of electromagnetic radiation and frequencies. – REINCARNATION! Is it a soul-trap? ……all this and much much more when AGE OF TRUTH TV presenter and investigative reporter, Lucas Alexander is interviewing Michael Horn in this hard-talk explosive 2 hour 22 min. show. Filmed on December 5, 2019 at the Age Of Truth TV studios in Copenhagen, Denmark, and via ZOOM to Flagstaff Arizona, USA.

Other videos, selected by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

On February 20, 20202 we reported about the strange space vehicles that seemed to appear out of flashes of light.

Now, more of these strange lights have been captured on the ISS live feed the last days.. Could it be that these flashes are jumpgates or wormholes from which UFOs emerge? And as said before, what could be reason for their arrival?

The enlarged images show unidentified flying objects coming out of these flashes. Even in some images you can see a sort of portal.

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

“I Have Seen the Bodies.” Cases from the Crash Retrieval Vault. Richard Dolan Intelligent Disclosure

Richard and Tracey return to the astonishing and all-too-forgotten cases of the late Leonard Stringfield, the pioneer of UFO/UAP crash retrieval research. For this program, they discuss three more cases uncovered by Stringfield during the late 1970s, when this phenomenon was only just beginning to be discussed among UFO researchers. The cases are fairly detailed, fascinating, and compelling.

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

{ https://futurism.com/ }

First known extraterrestrial protein possibly spotted in meteorite

By Mike Wall 

But the find is preliminary.

A meteor streaks across the sky. In a new study, researchers report finding a novel protein in the meteorite Acfer 086, which landed in Algeria in 1990.

(Image: © NASA)

A research team claimed to have found the first known extraterrestrial protein, spotting it in a space rock that fell to Earth 30 years ago.

The scientists, led by Malcolm McGeoch of the Plex Corp. in Fall River, Massachusetts, analyzed the meteorite Acfer 086, which landed in Algeria in 1990. High-precision mass spectrometry revealed the presence of a novel protein, McGeoch and his team wrote in a new paper that's available on the online preprint site arXiv.org.

The protein, which the researchers proposed calling "hemolithin," consists of chains of the amino acids glycine and hydroxyglycine, as well as iron, oxygen and lithium atoms, the researchers reported. And the hemolithin is significantly enriched in deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen that features a neutron in its atomic nucleus along with a proton. (The nucleus of a "normal" hydrogen atom has a proton but no neutron.)

• Related: 6 most likely places for alien life in the solar system

Such deuterium enrichment does not appear in amino acids that form here on Earth, and so it "indicates protosolar disc or molecular cloud origin," McGeoch and his colleagues wrote in the paper, which has been submitted to a journal and is currently undergoing peer review. (You can read the preprint for free here.)

"This is the first report of a protein from any extraterrestrial source," the scientists added.

To be clear, the researchers aren't claiming that the hemolithin is evidence of alien life. But the discovery, if it holds up, would still be of great interest to astrobiologists. That's because it would show that very complex chemistry of the sort employed by life as we know it on Earth occurs of its own accord in deep space. (Proteins are the workhorses of cells, performing a wide variety of tasks for organisms.)

The implication would be that it doesn't take a miracle for bona fide biochemical systems to get up and running — and that, therefore, life might be widespread throughout the cosmos. 

This notion is hardly outré anymore, because researchers are racking up more and more evidence of complex chemistry occurring beyond Earth. Big organic molecules swirl in the thick atmosphere of Saturn's huge moon Titan, for example, and amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — have been found in meteorites and on comets.

But such talk of implications is preliminary; the new paper is still under peer review, after all. And not everyone is onboard with the results.

"I am not impressed by this report," said Jeffrey Bada, distinguished professor of marine chemistry emeritus at the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

"The main problem is the occurrence of hydroxyglycine, which, to my knowledge, has never before been reported in meteorites or in prebiotic experiments. Nor is it found in any proteins," Bada, whose research interests include the geochemistry of amino acids, organic cosmogeochemistry and the search for alien life, told Space.com via email. "Thus, this amino acid is a strange one to find in a meteorite, and I am highly suspicious of the results."

Space.com reached out to the corresponding author of the new study, Julie McGeoch of Harvard University's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. She said she'd be happy to discuss the paper — but only after it has passed peer review.

So, stay tuned; we may be hearing more about possible extraterrestrial proteins in the not-too-distant future.

• 7 theories on the origin of life
• Alien life could use endless array of building blocks
• Meteor showers and shooting stars: Formation, facts and discovery

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life.

Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Inner Earth

It's got solid and liquid parts, it's almost as hot as the sun, and it may be teeming with life

Gary Hincks/Science Photo Library

Sometimes, when you’re focusing on a very strange story – eerie, even – the best thing you can do is to sit back and let the witness tell the tale, and without interruption. And, that’s exactly what I’m going to do today. The account below comes from a well-respected UFO researcher and writer, Denise Stoner, who very generously shared this with me for publication. Denise is – with Kathleen Marden – the co-author of The Alien Abduction Files. With that said, onto the story in Denise’s own words: “At least three times here in Florida at a particular combination health/grocery/restaurant called Whole Foods I have been observed by a strange character. This is a good place to blend as many folks who shop here are ‘odd characters’ to begin with or ‘hippie like,’ gone back to nature types. So, the person who has observed me is wearing a gauzy outfit, thin hair, woven straw Panama type hat and sun glasses fits right in. His skin, hair, and clothing are all almost the same beige color.

“The difference is he has a drink in front of him, a notebook, stares at me the whole time as we eat at a table on the sidewalk. He never has food of his own nor does he touch the drink. It seems he knows when we are almost finished eating, he gets up, walks slowly past our table, rounds the corner that is clearly visible but must pass a pillar on the corner of the shopping plaza by our table. Once he goes behind that pillar, he never comes out the other side. There is literally nowhere for him to go but out the other side, then down the sidewalk or out to the parking lot – but no, he is gone. I cannot get up to follow thinking I am going to bump in to him on the other side of the pillar. He lets me know in no uncertain terms that he is watching me or letting me know he is there.

“Yes, I have pondered many times what prevents me from picking up my cell phone and taking a picture of this individual. I have no answer for that. It absolutely crosses my mind the whole time the episode is taking place. Afterwards I feel foolish, know I will be made fun of in the telling of the story, and promise myself I will have the camera ready the next time.  It never happens. Are we somehow prevented from having photographic evidence needed as proof? I do have several speaking engagements a year and have decided to add one of these odd stories each time as I feel people need to know this type of thing exists. Let them decide for themselves what they think. This is going on and that is a fact – the fact appears to be that we have some type of ‘human’ with unusual abilities living among the earthly beings and our only choice for now is to be observant, to watch and wait. What other options do we have?”

“The situation to you as it has remained clear as crystal in my mind.  As for my Mom, she knows something happened but it has gotten foggy and she doesn’t know why, yet she recalls something happened that made her feel very uncomfortable. My Mom and I had gone to the mall on Christmas Eve for a couple of last minute stocking stuffer type gifts.  We actually knew what we wanted so parked outside J.C. Penney’s on the side where those goods were. We went in and immediately noticed that in late afternoon, there were only a few shoppers. We picked out our gifts and got in line at the cashier in back of two other people. We could easily see the exit door and the sun in the parking lot, we were facing that way. The glass doors opened and two very tall, thin women entered. They had long almost waist length blond hair parted in the middle on top and it was thin in texture. Their skin was also pale and I did not notice any make up but each had huge piercing blue eyes. Their gait was odd like they were too tall (approximately 6’1) to walk smoothly. I was already an investigator for MUFON so was aware of oddities in people and had done background searches for the Federal Government, so was trained to be observant.

“They were pushing one of those umbrella style strollers with no fancy attachments – just the hammock type bed, wheels, and handles. I noticed they had no purses or accessories such as a diaper bag to carry diapers or bottles, etc. The women moved slowly it seemed and drew my attention to the stroller. There was a baby blanket in the bottom portion and on top the head of a baby no bigger than a small grapefruit, pasty colored skin, no noticeable nose, a line for a mouth and huge dark eyes taking up most of the rest of this head. I wondered if the baby was deformed but knew this was not the case somehow. The baby appeared alert and was staring up at me. My Mom bumped me with her arm to get my attention and said ‘what is wrong with that baby?’ I felt I needed to tell the person in front of me because we had been talking with her about being slow in finishing up our shopping. When I tapped her on the shoulder I then was shocked to see not only her but the lady in front of her and the cashier were kind of frozen in place. Everything seemed to be moving in extremely slow motion around us.

“The blond women seemed to pass the thought to me that I needed to take another good look at the baby and study it. Then as if a film was put back in to normal speed they walked past me and the cash register began to work, people – the only three in the area were moving again as if nothing happened. I told my Mom to hold our places and I ran after the women.  Just next to us was the infants’ clothing department. The women had turned in to that aisle. I followed and when I turned in to the aisle – they disappeared. Just gone like they had never been there. I ran back the short distance to my Mom and told her they were gone. We checked out and my Mom kept saying, ‘what was going on with that baby?’ I told her no one goes shopping with a baby that tiny without taking needed supplies, bottles, diapers, clothes, etc.

“I remember asking her if she thought we had seen something alien such as a hybrid and she just shook her head as if there was no answer. We stepped out the door and that’s when the experience with the men took place. When we exited the mall my Mom had already stepped off the curb to locate my car, I was stopped by three men who were leaning on the brick wall by the door. Wearing black suits, black hats, white shirts, sun glasses. Short in stature. The only difference from your reports was the fact that one had a briefcase – black also. I don’t recall their mouths moving but it could be I was just nervous.

“One of them said, ‘you will not discuss what happened inside that store, do not talk about it to anyone; do you understand?’ I did not answer, stepped off the curb as I felt I was in danger and called after my Mom. Just after I stepped off the curb I turned back to discover these men were gone and there was nowhere for them to go other than in to the parking lot or further down the sidewalk as there was a brick wall where they had been and continued down the length of the building to the only door we had come out. We had been shown something in the store we both feel wasn’t normal and were talking about it as we left to see if we were imagining things when I met these men.  Does this sound typical of these types? I am too old to be abducted and used for breeding and have had a hysterectomy so that could not have been the purpose – to show me a child of mine and I felt nothing like that was going on.”

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

It sometimes seems that the UFO phenomena is drawn to military activity. For whatever reasons something seems to draw these forces in, and there are countless reports of UFO activity around military installations or events. It has actually become quite the point of discussion among UFO aficionados, and one very prominent example of this is the time a wave of strange UFO phenomena washed over one of the largest military exercises the world has ever seen.

In the fall of 1952, one of the largest peacetime military exercises in history was underway in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic in the vicinity of Denmark and Norway. Called “Operation Mainbrace,” or also “Exercise Mainbrace,” the massive naval operation was carried out by the Allied Command Atlantic, which is one of the commands of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and was meant to simulate a response to an attack or invasion by the Soviet Union on Europe. The operation was truly epic in scope, involving the navies of nine countries, the USA, UK, Canada, France, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, the Netherlands and Belgium, and composed of over 200 ships, 1,000 aircraft, and 80,000 personnel. It was the most powerful fleet seen in the North Sea since World War. It was a truly impressive series of military war games, and it would also turn out to be an absolute magnet for UFOs, and indeed one of the most amazing military UFO incidents ever.

It all kicked off on September 13, 1952, when crew aboard the Danish destroyer Willemoes saw a glowing blue triangular unidentified object shoot through the night sky at an estimated speed of 900 mph. This would be far from the only strange sight witnessed in the skies above the operation, and reports from other navy personnel would come in over the coming days. On September 19, a British Meteor jet involved with the operation coming in to land at the airfield at Topcliffe, Yorkshire, England, was observed by crew on the ground to be followed by an anomalous silvery circular object that swayed “like a pendulum” and reportedly stopped when the jet circled around to engage it. The UFO then made a sudden acceleration into the distance, only to do a sharp turn and continue on in a different direction. One of the witnesses, a Lieutenant John W. Kilburn, would say of the incredible incident:

I was standing with four personnel of No. 269 Squadron watching a Meteor fighter gradually descending. The Meteor was at approx. 5000 feet and approaching from the east. Flight Officer Paris suddenly noticed a white object in the sky at a height between ten and twenty thousand feet some five miles astern of the Meteor.  The object was silver in color and circular in shape. It appeared to be travelling at a much slower speed than the Meteor, but on a similar course. It maintained the slow forward speed for a few seconds before commencing to descend, swinging in a pendular motion during descent. Like a falling sycamore leaf. After a few seconds, the object stopped its pendulous motion and its descent and began to rotate about its own axis. Suddenly it accelerated at an incredible speed towards the west turning onto a south-easterly heading before disappearing. All this occurred in a matter of fifteen to twenty seconds. The movements were not identifiable with anything I have seen in the air and the rate of acceleration was unbelievable.

On the following day another high profile sighting was made, this time by the crew of the U.S. aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Franklin D. Roosevelt. The ship was thrown into a state of confusion and alarm when a large silvery sphere was observed, seeming to follow the fleet. On board that day was a journalist by the name of Wallace Litwin, who managed to snap a series of four color photographs of the object. At the time he thought it must surely be a weather balloon, but he was soon informed that it was moving way to fast to be a balloon and also that none of the ships had launched any. The photos were examined by Navy Intelligence officers, who deemed the object to not be a balloon, although there was no other explanation offered. All witnesses also confirmed that it was not a balloon, and it was seen as very disconcerting, as this was well monitored airspace that had just been violated. Litwin would say:

In other words, the skies above this NATO fleet were very carefully observed and nothing flew around overhead unobserved. But I knew that I had taken a picture of what looked like a ping-pong ball 10 feet over my head.

On that very same day the oddness would continue when three Danish Air Force officers at Karup Air Field, Denmark, saw a shiny metal disc-like object move rapidly out towards the fleet at sea. On September 21 another silver sphere seeming to be speeding away from the fleet’s position was tracked by a formation of RAF jets. The jets moved to intercept the mysterious object, but found that it was easily able to evade them with a physics defying display of maneuvers and speed, after which is shot off into the distance. It would apparently appear once again to follow the planes, but then disappear for good when one of the pilots circled around towards it.

In many of these cases there turned out to be radar confirmation, and considering the experience of these witnesses there seemed to be little reason to think that these could be mere weather balloons or some atmospheric phenomena or Venus. There were numerous other reports from personnel aboard ships and aircraft with the fleet, from witnesses of all nationalities, and even none other than Dwight D. Eisenhower supposedly saw one as he was aboard one of the vessels. One witness reported on this incident thusly:

We were North and East of England with the NATO fleet in the North Atlantic. It was about 1:30 a.m. Through the stormy rain and lightning, this big blue-white light appeared right off starboard bow. It came down to 100 feet off the water and just hung there as we cruised by it. The UFO was easy to see when the lightning flashed. It then rose straight and left. Four of us saw it. Here’s the kicker! General Ike, who’d flown over by chopper with the Admiral had just come out on the signal bridge wearing P.J.s and a robe looking for coffee.   We were sitting and making small talk when the bright light came on. We all watched it ten minutes, then just stood there staring at each other. After a while, General Eisenhower said, he better go ‘check this out’ and left. He also told us to ‘forget about it for now’. Next day and ever after, nothing was ever said about it. I don’t know what it was or why it was hushed, but I saw it.

Interestingly, even after Operation Mainbrace ended on September 25 UFO sightings reports would come pouring in from the region, almost as if they had been agitated by the activities the fleet had been carrying out, before suddenly disappearing as mysteriously as they had arrived. What brought these phenomena here? Are these forces drawn to our military activities for some reason, or is this just misidentifications, weather balloons, and Venus? Considering the caliber of witnesses on offer here, perhaps it is best to keep an open mind, and the Operation Mainbrace UFO encounters remain a well-documented fixture of UFO lore.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Among the many witnesses of UFO phenomena, some of them really stand out, and some of the most remarkable of these are when the men or women of law enforcement report their encounters with these otherworldly forces. These are people out doing their job to serve and protect, yet sometimes it seems that they come across things that nothing in their experience or training has prepared them for. Here we will look at a few of some of the most terrifying UFO encounters that police officers have reported, in which the outcome was truly bizarre and frightening.

For our first case we go back to the 1960s. On September 3, 1965 a Deputy Sheriff Bob Goode was out on patrol along Highway 35, just outside of Damon, Texas, joined by another officer, Chief McCoy. At around 11PM they allegedly noticed a purple light off in the distance. As they stared at it wondering just what they were looking at, another smaller light reportedly detached from the main body, after which both seemed to hover. The curious officers began taking a series of dark backroads that would take them closer to the strange phenomena, which they estimated was around 5 or 6 miles away. They got about as close as the roads would take them and stopped the patrol car to marvel once again at those eerie hovering lights, and as they did they were startled when the two objects came rushing right towards them with breathtaking speed, covering several miles within seconds. The objects then seemed to position themselves directly overhead, bathing the entire landscape in bright purple light, like day time on some alien world, and they could feel heat emanating from them. McCoy would say the larger object was “as big as a football field,” and later say of the frightening experience:

The bulk of the object was plainly visible at this time and appeared to be triangular shaped with a bright purple light on the left end and the smaller, less bright, blue light on the right end. The bulk of the object appeared to be dark gray in color with no other distinguishing features. It appeared to be about 200 feet wide and 40-50 feet thick in the middle, tapering off toward both ends. There was no noise or any trail. The bright purple light illuminated the ground directly underneath it and the area in front of it, including the highway and the interior of our patrol car. The tall grass under the object did not appear to be disturbed. There was a bright moon out and it cast a shadow of the object on the ground immediately below it in the grass.

Image by Steve Baxter

The two men tore out of there, and after a few moments of hovering the lights shot off back to their original position. The two officers stopped once more to observe them, but the chances of a repeat of what had happened scared them into leaving. They would later be interviewed by a Major Laurence Leach, Jr., of Ellington Air Force Base, who deemed them to be very sincere and of sound judgement, stating, “There is no doubt in my mind that they definitely saw some unusual object or phenomenon.”

A couple of years later, in 1967 we have the account of patrolman Herb Schirmer, who was a police officer in Ashland, Nebraska. On the evening of December 3 of that year he was on his usual patrol and things were pretty routine until he noticed two red lights over Highway 63, which he at first took to be the lights of a big rig truck at first. Still, something felt off about it, and so he drove off towards the lights to investigate, soon realizing that this was no truck. According to Schirmer, the red lights were in fact emanating from what looked to be the portholes of a metallic, semi-spherical object hovering just over the highway in front of him. As he got closer he could see that it had a sort of walkway around it and some kind of landing gear dangling from the bottom. The object would then float upwards and speed off into the distance, and this is where things would get bizarre.

Although nothing else seemed to have happened at the time, a look at the clock showed that it was nearly 3 AM, which was odd because he had only just started approaching the object around 10 minutes before. As he drove back to the station that bewildering sense of lost time intruded upon his thoughts, and he also began to feel physically ill. Something was itchy on his neck, and he reached around to feel a large welt there that he could not explain. Schirmer would report the whole crazy encounter, and this caught the attention of a UFO research organization called the Condon Commission, who believed that he had possibly been abducted.

Image by Steve Baxter

A hypnosis session was organized, during which Schirmer described being rendered paralyzed and unable to remove his sidearm shortly after stopping his vehicle. He was then apparently beamed aboard the craft and telepathically communicated with by humanoid beings in uniforms bearing winged serpent insignias, who claimed to draw power from electrical lines and to be from the planet Venus. Schirmer would go on to quit the force several months later due to post traumatic stress from his experience and recurring physical problems. In the meantime, he was apparently the object of ridicule within the community and his wife eventually left him because he could not stop talking about the UFO he had seen.

From the 1970s we have the frightening encounter relayed by an officer Manuel Amparano, of Kerman, California. It was a little after 3:30 AM on May 13, 1978 when Amparano was on a routine patrol and noticed a “a circular-type thing, similar to a round fireball or a setting sun, about 100 to 150 feet off the ground.” Thinking that this was maybe a fire, he got closer to investigate and what he took to be a tree on fire suddenly lifted off of the ground. The amazed officer quickly trained his searchlight on the object, and was met with a bright blue flash, after which whatever it was sped off. That flash soon turned out to have been perhaps some sort of weapon, as officer Amparano claims he was left with burns on his face and chest, of which he would say:

It was like a sunburn when you fall asleep at the pool. There were white blisters on the parts of my body facing that light. I also had trouble with sunlight. It was like right after you have your eyes checked and they are sensitive to light. That lasted about a week.

Image by Steve Baxter

When doctors examined him, they came to the conclusion that these particular burns seemed to have been caused by microwaves, although no one could figure out how it had happened. An investigation of the area of the purported encounter would turn up a circle of dead vegetation, where it is claimed nothing would grow for years after, although now it is apparently an almond orchard. What happened here? Who knows?

The following year we have a somewhat similar type of encounter, reported by a Deputy Sheriff Val Johnson, of Marshall County, Minnesota. On August 27, 1979, Johnson was on patrol near the North Dakota border when he saw a strange light apparently off in the wilderness. As he took a side road to get closer, the light apparently began to approach his car at an amazing rate of speed. It seemed to almost be on a collision course, and Johnson lost consciousness after being blinded by a bright flash to the sound of breaking glass. When he came to he was still sitting in his stalled car, happy to be alive but alarmed that he could not see anything. Oddly, his car had travelled some distance from where the object had engaged him, and he would say of his bizarre experience:

I noticed a very bright, brilliant light, 8 to 12 inches in diameter, 3 to 4 feet off the ground. The edges were very defined. I thought perhaps at first that it could be an aircraft in trouble, as it appeared to be a landing light from an aircraft. I proceeded south on #220. I proceeded about a mile and three tenths or a mile and four tenths when the light intercepted my vehicle causing damage to a headlight, putting a dent in the hood, breaking the windshield and bending antennas on top of the vehicle.

At this point, at the interception of the light, I was rendered either unconscious, neutralized or unknowing for a period of approximately 39 minutes. From the point of intersection, my Police vehicle proceeded south in a straight line 854 feet, at which point the brakes were engaged by forces unknown to myself, as I do not remember doing this, and I left about approximately 99 feet of black marks on the highway before coming to rest sideways in the road with the grille of my hood facing in an easterly direction. At 2:19 a.m., I radioed a 10-88 (Officer Needs Assistance) to my dispatcher in Warren.

Image by Steve Baxter

The officer called on his radio for help, and he was rushed to the hospital with what looked like burns on his face and irritation of the eyes. Meanwhile, the patrol car he had been in was found to have a smashed in right side headlight, a crack in the windshield on the driver’s side, an unusual circular dent on the hood, also on the driver’s side, and a roof antenna that was bent over at a 60-degree angle. The windshield was particularly weird, as it seemed to have sustained “inward and outward forces acting almost simultaneously.” All of the damage was on the driver’s side of the vehicle. The interior clock was also found to be 14 minutes slow, and oddly Johnson’s wristwatch had the same anomaly. Experts who examined the vehicle would be unable to explain the peculiar damage it had incurred, and it did not seem to be any normal collision, with the official explanation being “mechanical forces of unknown origin.” Luckily his eyes would heal and he would regain his eyesight.

These have just been a few of the more remarkable and harrowing encounters that officers of the law have faced, although there are more where this came from. It is interesting to note that these are seasoned professionals out on patrol not looking for the mysterious and certainly more or less considered to be more reliable witnesses than most. We are left to wonder just what would cause them to risk their reputations and standing to come forward to report these things, and if they were simply tall tales why they would do such a thing. Considering the police pedigree of these cases, it certainly lends them a bit of added weight, and truly plunges them into the bizarre.

• A special thanks to Steve Baxter for all of the amazing artwork he provided for this article.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

As far as we know, we’re the only life in this solar system. While there are other places in the solar system where we think life could exist, nothing has been proven or even been close to proven. At this point we can’t say for sure it’s even possible for extraterrestrial life to exist outside our little bubble. That might soon change, however. Researchers claim that they have recently discovered the first-known extraterrestrial protein in a meteorite that fell to Earth  30 years ago.

Over the last few years, other building blocks of life have been discovered in meteorites from our Solar System. Cyanide, ribose, and amino acids have all been discovered in space rocks here on Earth. This latest find would be the first-ever whole extraterrestrial protein.

The paper detailing the discovery was uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, and it has yet to be peer-reviewed, so bear that in mind. The discovery sill has to be replicated by other scientists to prove that it is, in fact, an extraterrestrial protein. If it does check out, it would be a clue that there very well could be extraterrestrial life (of some sort) here in this solar system. While it wouldn’t be direct evidence of extraterrestrial life, proteins are necessary building blocks of life and it would show that they can form outside of Earth.

The meteorite that contains the alleged extraterrestrial protein fell in Algeria in 1990

The meteorite, named Acfer 086, landed in Algeria in 1990. Since then, it has been kept in a museum. It had been analyzed previously, but the authors of the paper decided to attack it again with “state-of-the-art” mass spectrometry. According to ScienceAlert, astronomer and chemist Chenoa Tremblay of CSIRO Astronomy & Space Science in Australia, who was not involved in the research says:

“In general, they’re taking a meteor that has been preserved by a museum and has been analysed previously. And they are modifying the techniques that they’re using in order to be able to detect amino acid inside of this meteor, but in a higher signal ratio.”

According to the paper, the researchers found the amino acid glycine, which had already been discovered in the meteorite, at a higher signal ratio than previously found. They also found that the glycine was bound to other elements including iron and lithium. After modeling the structure they realized that they had an entirely new alien protein, which they named hemolithin.

The protein has a chemical composition found in long-period comets.

While hemolithin is similar in structure to proteins found on Earth, its ratio of deuterium to hydrogen isn’t found on Earth. It is found, however, in long-period comets. The researchers argue that this protein likely formed in the proto-solar disc, some 4.6 billion years ago.

They do acknowledge that they may be completely wrong, although they don’t think it’s likely. Another explanation is that this isn’t a protein at all, but some other type of polymer, but the researchers say this is an outside possibility.

It’s a bit too early to get over-excited about this. After all, it still has to pass peer-review. But there’s a good chance that this is actually an extraterrestrial protein. That would mean that the chances of extraterrestrial life in our Solar System just became a bit more plausible.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

A snapshot of a distant exoplanet gives astronomers an idea of what it looks like. A snapshot of a distant exoplanet as it passes in front of its sun and light shines around it gives astronomers an idea of what the planet and its atmosphere are made of. If we assume there’s intelligent life on some of these planets, we can also assume that they’re looking back at us and trying to figure out the same thing. If we could only look back from deep space at Earth as it passes in front of the Sun, we could see the signatures of life that would tell us if an exoplanet is our cosmic twin – identical or fraternal. Last year, astronomers figured out a way to do without the need for a spaceship looking back. Instead, they looked into a giant mirror during a lunar eclipse. Wait … what?

“Observations of the Earthshine off the Moon allow for the unique opportunity to measure the large-scale Earth atmosphere. Another opportunity is realized during a total lunar eclipse which, if seen from the Moon, is like a transit of the Earth in front of the Sun. We thus aim at transmission spectroscopy of an Earth transit by tracing the solar spectrum during the total lunar eclipse of January 21, 2019.”

As described in a paper published this week in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and summarized in a press release, lead author Klaus Strassmeier from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam firgured out that a total lunar eclipse on January 21, 2019 – when the Earth passed directly between the Moon and the Sun — was a total ‘solar’ eclipse to anyone looking at the Sun (with protective glasses, of course) from the lunar surface. Since we know (or at least can confidently assume) that no one did that, Strassmeier and astronomers using the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona took advantage of the dimmed yet reflective surface of the Moon and looked into a mirror image that showed Earth’s atmosphere as sunlight passed through it around the edges – a filtered light with the appropriate name “Earthshine.”

Large Binocular Telescope

(Credit: NASA)

“The Earth’s atmosphere contains many by-products of biological activity, such as oxygen and ozone in association with water vapor, methane and carbon dioxide. These biogenic molecules present attractive narrow molecular bands at optical and near infrared wavelengths for detection in atmospheres of other planets.”

Our Earthshine also showed traces of sodium, calcium and potassium — all elements generated by or needed by human life on the planet. A similar planetshine would thus indicate that an exoplanet has or is capable of hosting similar life forms or even humans, once we figure out how to travel that far.

Besides the Large Binocular Telescope, the astronomers needed the Potsdam Echelle Polarimetric and Spectroscopic Instrument (PEPSI) to separate tiny spectral-line absorptions of the Earth’s atmosphere from the normal solar spectrum. That combination allowed them to find two elements that don’t belong in Earth’s atmosphere — manganese and barium. Instead of from Earth, the astronomers believe these two chemicals came from the Sun.

Lunar eclipse

“To understand this phenomenon further, the researchers plan to study the Sun’s atmosphere more closely to trace those two conspicuous chemical elements. Doing so will reveal how they traveled from the center of the Sun to its limb, leaving an imprint on Earth’s upper atmosphere, the researchers say.”

In an interview with Inverse, the astronomers admitted they have much more to learn before they’ll feel confident identifying an exoplanet as a potential Earth clone. That should not take anything away from the fantastic accomplishment of using the Moon as a mirror to check ourselves out.

As the Fonz would say:

““Heeeey!”

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

When astronomers decided that Pluto was no longer a planet, many who memorized the names of nine planets in in school and spent hours building models of them for science projects were upset that all of this high-quality education was for naught. This was never a concern with the Moon, which didn’t have a name to memorize nor any competition in orbit around the Earth … until recently. Astronomers have discovered the second known mini-moon circling the planet, and there’s probably more. Will there be time to add it before the next science fair? Will it still be around by then?

Kacper Wierzchos
@WierzchosKacper
Feb 25
BIG NEWS (thread 1/3). Earth has a new temporarily captured object/Possible mini-moon called 2020 CD3. On the night of Feb. 15, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Teddy Pruyne and I found a 20th magnitude object. Here are the discovery images.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1232460436634656769 

On February 15, 2020, astronomers Kacper Wierzchos and Teddy Pruyne at the Catalina Sky Survey operating out of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson spotted what they believed to be a mini-moon orbiting Earth. They quickly made over 30 more observations in two days to confirm the discovery of a space rock measuring a mere 6 to 12 feet (1.9 to 3.5 meters) in diameter – so small that it may not have been discovered had it not been reflecting sunlight like its really big brother. They quickly commissioned a photographer and captured the first image of the mini-moon – now called 2020 CD3 or C26FED2 – and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Minor Planet Center announced it to the world.

“Orbit integrations indicate that this object is temporarily bound to the Earth. No link to a known artificial object has been found. Further observations and dynamical studies are strongly encouraged.”

Wait … what? “Temporarily bound”? Maybe you should scrap the ‘Earth and its Moons’ project completely and go with an old reliable volcano. It turns out that 2020 CD3 and the only other mini-moon — 2006 RH120 – don’t stay in Earth orbit forever. In fact, they don’t even stay for a few years. 2006 RH120 was only in Earth orbit from September 2006 to June 2007, and 2020 CD3, while it’s been around since around 2017, will probably leave by April 2020. That’s no joke – merely a sign of what the two mini-moons really are — tiny near-Earth asteroids that get captured by Earth’s gravity for a short time before slipping back out into space or being consumed by the atmosphere.

Or are they something else?

“Although we still have no idea entirely what the object is, experts believe it is either a rare space rock or a manmade object that has become locked by our planet’s gravity.”

Curiosmos reports that the highly-reflective surface of 2020 CD3 has some questioning whether it’s truly a space rock or if it might be a missing satellite, rocket part or other piece of space junk. It may be difficult to identify 2020 CD3 before April because it’s moving away from Earth.

“It came just in time to witness humanity fight the coronavirus. Coincidence…I think not.”

If it’s not an NEO and not one of ours, Scott Waring of ET Data Base suggests it’s one of theirs – with ‘them’ being aliens monitoring the spread of the coronavirus on Earth. Farfetched? Not much more farther to fetch than the theory that the virus came to Earth on a recent meteor which traveled over Wuhan before crashing in China. Yes, most people would not reject ‘coincidence’ as fast as Waring does and the dots are pretty far apart. What would help is a better photo of 2020 CD3 or the discovery of more mini-moons – something astronomer Amy Mainzer sees happening as soon as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is operational in 2022 and recording images of the entire sky every few days to produce a time-lapse movie of the universe.

“We can only see what we have the technology to see. And necessarily, that’s not everything all of the time.”

Type that up, put it on your ‘Earth and its Moons’ science project and maybe the judges will give you a break … this time

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Marsrover Curiosity neemt zijn scherpste panoramafoto ooit - HLN.be

Bron: NASA

Berg

De foto’s werden genomen met de ‘Mastcam’ van de bekende rover, die zijn telefotolens gebruikte om het spectaculaire vergezicht vast te leggen. Een groothoeklens voegde een panorama van onder meer het dak van de Marsjeep en de robotarm toe, goed voor bijna 650 miljoen pixels. 

Beide panorama’s samen tonen ‘Glen Torridon’, een gebied aan de kant van Mount Sharp, de berg die Curiosity volop aan het bestuderen is.

Lees ook

Marsrover Curiosity deelt nieuwe selfie van zijn bijzonder experiment

Vakantie

Leuk detail: De beelden werden gemaakt tussen 24 november en 1 december vorig jaar, toen het bevoegde missieteam van het Amerikaanse ruimtevaartagentschap enkele dagen verlof had rond Thanksgiving.
Met weinig taakjes voorhanden tijdens het wachten op de terugkeer van het team en nieuwe commando’s, had de Marsrover de zeldzame kans om af en toe even rustig achteruit te zakken en zijn omgeving vanuit exact hetzelfde punt te kieken.

_{(Lees verder onder de foto)}

Focus

Uiteindelijk was Curiosity meer dan 6,5 uur - verspreid over 4 dagen - zoet met de speciale fotoshoot. Om een consistente verlichting te krijgen, werd telkens bewust enkel tussen de middag en 14 uur lokale Marstijd geklikt. Achter de goeie focus van het totaalplaatje zat een complex programma.

“Terwijl velen van ons team thuis kalkoen zaten te eten, maakte Curiosity dit feestmaal voor de ogen”, zegt projectwetenschapper Ashwin Vasavada.

Wil je Mars graag van nog wat dichterbij bekijken? Met deze speciale tool kan je verder inzoomen.

Lees ook: Sterrenkundige: “De mensheid kan niet naar Mars verhuizen” (+)

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS 

Met een speciale tool kan je inzoomen op het panorama.

 NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS 

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

Russia's Roswell, Alien Autopsy, Unexplained Abduction Cases Globally, Philip Mantle

Once Upon a Missing Time, About the Author

Philip Mantle is an international UFO researcher, lecturer and broadcaster. His books have been published in six different languages around the world. He is the former Director of Investigations for the British UFO Research Association and former MUFON representative for England.

Philip has written articles and features for numerous publications around the world and has been both editor and assistant editor of high street UFO publications.

Other videos by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

Nikola Tesla: 13,000 Year Old Black Knight Satellite UFO That NASA Knows About

13,000 Year Old Black Knight Satellite UFO That NASA Knows About

Something highly secret is being monitored by NASA, an ancient satellite orbiting earth that’s not ours! First detected by Nikola Tesla and then by astronomers around the world, this strange polar orbiting craft may still be producing signals…

Presented by David Wilks at Awakening UFO & Conspicuous Life Expo, Manchester, UK.

Other videos by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

Giant UFO Moves Through Or Solar System, NASA Footage, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Feb 19-20, 2020 stereo A camera
Location of sighting: Earths sun
Source: NASA

Here is a really interesting video of a circular craft with a diamond shaped center. It was moving through a NASA SOHO video and got caught. The UFO is there for only 4 seconds, but if slowed down, we can see its detail well. This is 100% proof that aliens are in our solar system right now. This ship is massive, moon size or bigger and moving incredibly fast. I'm sure NASA would never mention it because if they did, they would have to tell the public the truth about aliens existing. They don't want to cause any panic. So they wont. 
Scott C. Waring 

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

Black UFO Seen In The Daytime Over Mexico, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Feb 16, 2020
Location of sighting: Queretaro, Mexico

This dark black UFO is moving over a central Mexico during the daylight which gives us great detail. The object is coming down behind some trees and appears to be interested in the surround area foliage. Past UFOs have been seen to do similar things...flying over the surface of water, bushes and trees. Perhaps its running biological tests on the plants. Awesome daytime raw footage. 
Scott C. Waring 

Eyewitness states: 

We do not know what it was. It was recorded in Querétaro, Mexico. A friend said that he looked like a flying vochito.

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

According to Anderson Neves, the Earth is flat and does not rotate, the sun and the moon are close to the world, within a large dome that surrounds our flattened planet.

A malignant pseudo-science has corrupted the education system around the world,It calls the idea of a round Earth "humankind's greatest lie, dictated by the global elite."

"Just look at the horizon. Climb a mountain and take pictures. You can see the Earth isn't curved," says Neves, clutching a level to illustrate his point.

The Flat-Earthers are brimming with counter-factual questions: If the Earth is rotating at 1,700 kilometers (1,000 miles) per hour at the equator, why doesn't the movement make everything fly off? If it's a sphere, why can't we see the curve from an airplane, reports Phys.org.

A recent survey out of Brazil suggests that around seven percent which is about 11 million residents in the country have become believers in the controversial concept.
  

Other videos by peter2011

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

An unidentified flying object appears close to the International Space Station on March 4, 2020. Then, The UFO changes shape, moves away from the ISS before it disappears into space.

Many UFOs and other strange space vehicles have been observed on the ISS live feed lately, they come and they go and nobody knows where they come from.

  

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

The Unexplained UFO Cover Up Cases and The End of Project Blue Book

On December 17, 1969 the Secretary of the Air Force announced the termination of Project Blue Book, the Air Force program for the investigation of UFOs. The decision to discontinue UFO investigations was based on an evaluation of a report prepared by the University of Colorado entitled, “Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects;” a review of the University of Colorado’s report by the National Academy of Sciences; past UFO studies; and Air Force experience investigating UFO reports during the past two decades.

Other videos by peter2011

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

10 of the wildest things that pilots have witnessed up in the air

Ever wonder what kinds of unusual objects pilots see from the air?

With a truly unique vantage point, they've reported a range of strange sightings, including UFOs, geoglyphs, and drones. But they've also had unobstructed views to some of nature's most incredible sights.

Here are 10 wild things that pilots have seen while flying.

• SEE ALSO: What it's like to be a family member of a pilot
• FOLLOW US: Insider is on Facebook

{ https://www.insider.com/ }

UFO Sightings in North America Increased by More Than 75 Percent in the Last Year

BY ELLEN GUTOSKEY

This is not a photo of Area 51.

KTSIMAGE/ISTOCK VIA GETTY IMAGES

In 2018, a modest 3395 people in the U.S. and Canada submitted their accounts of UFO sightings to the National UFO Reporting Center. In 2019, that number jumped to 5971.

Apparently, aliens are especially fond of flying their aircrafts over California, Florida, and Washington; according to ABC News, they were the three most popular states for UFO sightings in 2019, with 485, 385, and 222 reports, respectively. Nevada, home of the infamous Area 51, totaled only about 70 for the year.

Peter Davenport, director of the Washington-based organization, told ABC News that he didn’t have any insight as to why the number had jumped nearly 76 percent in just one year.

"One of the mysteries of ufology is there is a fluctuation in the number of reports over the years," he said. "Some years it’s been low, but it’s gotten higher recently."

American Astronomical Society spokesman Rick Fienberg, on the other hand, offered a few ideas to ABC News: Not only were Jupiter and Venus extra-visible last year, but SpaceX sent a total of 180 new satellites into space. Since the National UFO Reporting Center simply catalogs reports—it doesn’t investigate them—it’s likely that many are actually planets, satellites, or other easily explainable phenomena. As Fienberg pointed out, the u in UFO stands for unidentified, not unidentifiable.

"If you’re not keeping up with the news and not familiar with the skyline, you might mistakenly see an unidentified flying object. It may be unidentified to you, but known to others," Fienberg said.

We’re not ruling out the possibility that extraterrestrial beings are getting more careless about concealing themselves and their vehicles as time goes on—they’ve supposedly been slipping up as far back as 1400 BCE. Find out about 12 notorious UFO sightings from history here.

[h/t ABC News]

{ https://www.mentalfloss.com/ }

Retired FBI Agent Reveals His UFO Experiences, One Involving Missing Time

He was later invited to discuss them at a meeting attended by  other government employees and higher-ranking military personnel

By Robert Hastings - The UFO Chronicles

In November 2019, Dr. Bob Jacobs and I published our book, Confession: Our Hidden Alien Encounters Revealed, in which we divulged our secret status as “experiencers”. Prior to this voluntary outing of ourselves, I was known for my investigations of nuclear weapons-related UFO cases—including incursions at ICBM sites during which the missiles were knocked offline—and Bob was publicly associated with one of the key events, the 1964 Big Sur Incident, when a UFO was inadvertently captured on motion picture film during the test launch of a dummy nuclear warhead. Almost unbelievably, the domed, disc-shaped craft was seen to circle the warhead and shoot it down with four beams of light! The film was quickly classified Top Secret and confiscated by two CIA officers.

Following our book’s publication Bob and I have each been contacted by other experiencers who wished to relate their own encounters to us. In early February 2020, I was approached by one such person, a retired FBI agent—whom I have vetted—who agreed to let me publish his account as long as he remained anonymous. He told me:

A “war baby,” I was born in 1942 while my Dad was flying missions against the Japanese in the South Pacific. Upon his return home and during my formative years, he steered me towards the U.S. Air Force—if not as a career, then at least the experience. And so upon completion of high school I enrolled in and eventually graduated from a military institution, was commissioned, and reported for active duty overseas with an Air Force flying unit in 1965.

Still single and while quartered in the base Bachelor Officers Quarters (BOQ) in 1966, I experienced the following: My suite consisted of a living room and a bedroom, connected by a bathroom. The living room and bedroom each had a door opening out into a long second floor hallway of the barracks/dormitory; my suite was approximately in the middle.

While asleep one night, tucked-in beneath my blanket, I awoke to what appeared to be a person standing beside the bed and to my immediate right. Because the room was darkened the image was indistinct. There was no sound and, since my arms were pinned beneath the blanket, I had no option but to stay still. The person/image moved away and out the nearby door. I immediately jumped out of the bed, moved to that door and opened it. There was no one in the hallway, which startled me because the second floor corridor was 50-75 feet long in either direction from my bedroom door.

Fast-forward to 1974. Upon completing four years active duty with the Air Force and returning to the United States following a combat tour in Southeast Asia, I had joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), completed new-agent training, and was assigned investigative duties at a large East Coast field office. Now married, but without children, and living in a single family residence just outside Mount Holly, New Jersey (McGuire AFB/Fort Dix were nearby), I experienced the following:

My wife, myself, and another couple had enjoyed a Saturday night dinner at our house and were in the finished basement recreation room area when someone called to our attention a strange light over the tree-line beyond the back yard, visible through the rear sliding glass door. Our friends—I’ll call them “Dave” and “Michelle”—were educated, responsible and professional. He was a former college quarterback and at that time a staff assistant to a highly respected college football coach. She was a schoolteacher, friend and colleague of my wife.

The “light” appeared highly strange and unrecognizable to me as any conventional aircraft and was moving in an erratic, unpredictable manner that alarmed us. Michelle immediately became highly agitated and demanded (to me) “get your gun!” I immediately ran upstairs to the master bedroom, retrieved my issue .357 sidearm, and ran back downstairs to where the other three had been standing at the doorway. However, strangely, I have no recollection as to what happened from that point forward until the following morning when, our friends apparently having returned to their home, my wife and I proceeded with our normal activities. Several weeks later, while dining out with the same couple, I mentioned the strange event, but none of the others could recall anything beyond seeing the light. I was the only one who could recall me leaving the group and returning to the basement armed.

Later, also in 1974, I had reconnected with an Air Force friend, formerly a maintenance officer in my old squadron. A chance meeting on a commuter train brought Jim and his wife Diane to our home, again on a Saturday night, where we had dinner followed by relaxation and conversation in the downstairs recreation room. I subsequently lost touch with Jim until, years later and after my transfer to FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., I got a call from him as he was in the capitol area for a business conference. We agreed to meet for lunch and a tour of the nearby Air and Space Museum. Afterward and while walking back across The Mall, I remarked to him that, while extensive and interesting, there was no reference to or displays of [NASA] spacecraft or the UFO phenomenon. He responded, and I’ll never forget, “Like that UFO we saw out in back of your house in New Jersey that night.” I then had and still have absolutely no recollection of the specific event to which he was referring, beyond the fact that he and Diane had actually visited us in Mt Holly.

(RH: The earlier incident involving the agent retrieving his gun clearly qualifies as a missing time event. However, as regards the second incident mentioned above, the agent only says that he could not, at a much later date, recall anything about it. One might argue that this memory lapse was mundane in nature due to the passage of time. That said, in my view it’s likely that it too involved missing time.)

Moving forward into the late 1980s, I was scheduled to travel to Connecticut on Bureau business, and was able to reconnect with our other friends, Dave and Michelle, who had by then relocated from New Jersey to the Hartford area. Upon my arrival and greeting them for dinner at a local restaurant, Michelle reminded me of “the UFO we saw that night” in Mt Holly. Once again, none of us could remember anything else about that event.

I asked the retired agent, “Did you or your wife ever find odd, unidentifiable marks or scars on your bodies at any point in time?” He responded, “No, nothing like that.”

Continuing, he then said something that I found absolutely remarkable:

Around the decade’s turn (1989-91), I was made aware of a meeting of ‘experiencers’, involving persons in government and/or the military who had experienced events involving unexplained lights/strange aircraft, missing time and memory failure. I proceeded to the meeting, held at a facility in Northern Virginia near but not at the Pentagon, which was attended by numerous others, most of whom appeared to be government officials and higher-ranking military officers. I was asked to tell my story—actually, stories—and was thereafter assured that I was “not alone” and that others present at the meeting had had similar if not identical past experiences. I was subsequently provided a list of publications to read to perhaps better understand the phenomena and, as I recall, at the top of that list was Communion by Whitley Strieber.

I then asked, “Who told you about the meeting?” He responded:

I cannot recall how I was advised about the meeting in Northern Virginia but information about it, as well as its location, was probably provided by an FBI associate as I had little or no contact with other government agency personnel during my 15-plus years at FBI Headquarters.

The strange experiences I had were something best left unsaid due to fear of ridicule and of job security concerns, not to mention curtailment of professional advancement. However, by the time of the meeting, I was nearing mandatory retirement age—at that time age 55 for all FBI Special Agents—and had “capped out” salary-wise so I had little to no concern regarding future administrative advancement. I had obviously told a colleague about my encounters and he in turn apparently told someone else who decided that I should attend the meeting.

I then asked, “Were you the only member of the audience to speak about your strange experiences?” He replied:

I do not recall any other specific stories, just that I did relate mine in detail to the group and was told afterward by one or more persons that they had experienced similar events. The purpose of the meeting was obviously to share similar experiences and information, perhaps in part to allay our fears, and by directing our attention to recent publications detailing the phenomena.

This account is stunning! Having interviewed 167 former/retired U.S. Air Force personnel over the years, I’ve never heard anything like it. Those veterans made clear that their commanders—and sometimes Air Force Office of Special Investigations agents—had sternly warned them not to share their nuclear weapons-related UFO encounters with others, even their spouses. Severe penalties were mentioned should a security breach occur.

However, in this case, we have a retired FBI Special Agent stating that he was asked by a colleague, presumably a superior, to address a gathering of government officials and higher-ranking members of the military regarding his strange, suggestive experiences. This implies that, as of the 1989-91 time-frame, some number of high-level persons in the U.S. intelligence community and the military were aware of reports involving the UFO abduction phenomenon—that were obviously considered credible—and had authorized certain presumably self-confessed experiencers within their own organizations to attend a meeting during which the subject would be openly discussed. If this were not enough, information about it—found in various books and articles—would be disseminated to the attendees. As far as I am aware, such an account is unprecedented! Was this gathering a one-off event or did this happen more than once over the years?

Any individual who has had a similar experience who wishes to speak with me about it may contact me at ufohastings@aol.com. Please note that I will ask such persons to provide records substantiating their former U.S. government employment or military service.

 

{ https://www.theufochronicles.com/ }