Just before someone dies, there is a phenomenon known as terminal lucidity, in that moments just before death, patients will have a moment of full mental clarity. 

It is often at this time they may talking about deceased loved ones in the room that have come to take them or reach up and smile to an invisible person as they take their last breaths.

  

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

UFO Abductee Travis Walton Extended Interview

Author of the “Fire in the Sky” UFO related book Travis Walton who the Hollywood movie of the same name was based on does an extended 2019 interview recorded in the area where part of his experience took place outside of Snowflake Arizona. In this video Walton covers his childhood, experience working in the woods and other jobs he’s done, details on the other workers and friends of his that were involved in his situation, what he recalls from the abduction experience himself in great detail, what he dealt with upon being returned to earth, the Police investigation into what was thought to be his murder, the detailed psychological and medical testing done on himself and his co-workers, theories on why he was abducted, thoughts on his critics, thoughts on the Hollywood movie that was done about him and what was incorrectly portrayed in the movie, thoughts on other people who say they’ve had similar experiences, details on his personal life, why he thinks the aliens might be visiting earth for and a lot more!

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

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

NASA Spacecraft Provides Insight into Asteroid Bennu’s Future Orbit

Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona

“NASA’s Planetary Defense mission is to find and monitor asteroids and comets that can come near Earth and may pose a hazard to our planet,” said Kelly Fast, program manager for the Near-Earth Object Observations Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We carry out this endeavor through continuing astronomical surveys that collect data to discover previously unknown objects and refine our orbital models for them. The OSIRIS-REx mission has provided an extraordinary opportunity to refine and test these models, helping us better predict where Bennu will be when it makes its close approach to Earth more than a century from now.”

In 2135, asteroid Bennu will make a close approach with Earth. Although the near-Earth object will not pose a danger to our planet at that time, scientists must understand Bennu’s exact trajectory during that encounter in order to predict how Earth’s gravity will alter the asteroid’s path around the Sun – and affect the hazard of Earth impact.

{ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ }

Baan van één van de gevaarlijkste ruimtestenen in ons zonnestelsel nu nauwkeuriger in beeld gebracht

Met dank aan ruimtesonde OSIRIS-REx weten we nu dat de kans dat ruimtesteen Bennu tussen nu en het jaar 2300 op aarde inslaat, slechts 0,057 procent is.

Dat heeft NASA zojuist bekend gemaakt. De Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie leunt voor de nieuwe kansberekening sterk op data van de Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (kortweg OSIRIS-REx): een sonde die bijna twee jaar om ruimtesteen Bennu cirkelde.

De onderzoekers zijn in hun nopjes met de data van OSIRIS-REx en de bevindingen die daaruit voortvloeien. “De data van deze missie hielpen ons om de inslagkans in de komende eeuwen beter te voorspellen en heeft onze algemene kennis over mogelijk gevaarlijke planetoïden vergroot – een ongelofelijk mooi resultaat,” vindt onderzoeker Dante Lauretta.

Bronmateriaal:

• "NASA Spacecraft Provides Insight into Asteroid Bennu’s Future Orbit" - NASA
• Afbeelding bovenaan dit artikel: NASA / Goddard / University of Arizona

{ https://www.scientias.nl/ }

ESA'S EXOMARS ROVER: LAUNCH DATE, BOREHOLES, AND THE HUNT FOR LIFE

IF YOU WANT TO FIND LIFE ON MARS, CARRY A BIG DRILL. That’s the idea the European Space Agency and partner Russian Roscosmos have brought to the upcoming ExoMars mission and its planned Rosalind Franklin Mars rover.

“The deepest anyone has dug on Mars is six centimeters,” ExoMars project scientist Jorge Vago tells Inverse.

That’s a big deal, he says, since there are several factors — cosmic radiation, unmitigated ultraviolet light, and powerfully oxidizing perchlorates — that have likely destroyed any organic biosignatures in the top meter or so of Martian soil over the past billions of years.

“The recipe we have with ExoMars is we’re going to drill below all that crap,” to a depth of two meters, Vago says. “Our hypothesis is that if you go to the right place and drill deep enough, you may be able to get access to well preserved organic material from 4 billion years ago, when conditions on the surface of Mars were more like what we had on infant Earth.”

The rover, set for launch in 2022, will bring to a head a decades-in-development program that has suffered a series of setbacks. If all goes well, the Rosalin Franklin rover may be scientists' best shot at getting a definitive answer about whether there was ever life on Mars and what its fate can tell us about our own planet.

WHAT IS THE ROSALIND FRANKLIN ROVER?

The Rosalind Franklin rover is an astrobiology lab on six wheels. It’s the mobile component of the joint ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars mission that also includes the Kazachok lander vehicle. Kazachok will land and release the rover on Mars’s Oxia Planum, an area believed to have once contained liquid water and may have been hospitable to early life.

“If we are lucky, it might have been the coastal area of a very large northern hemisphere ocean,” Vagos says. The Oxia Planum will also be the oldest site targeted by spacecraft so far, he adds, and is believed to be between 4 and 4.1 billion years old.

The rover will drill deep into the soil, bring samples into its internal array of instruments, and conduct experiments looking for biosignatures of potential life on Mars.

The rover itself is named in honor of the British scientist Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray images of DNA were instrumental in the discovery of the double-helical structure of the DNA molecule by Frances Crick and James Watson. “She would have shared the Nobel Prize with them if she had not died of cancer,” Vargo says.

The Kazachok lander and Rosalind Franklin rover represent a second phase for the overall ExoMars mission, which began in 2016 with the launch of the Trace Gas Orbiter and ill-fated Schiaparelli EDM lander.

The Trace Gas orbiter is expected to continue studying the Martian atmosphere with a special focus on methane through at least 2023, but the Schiaparelli lander crashed during its descent to the Martian surface due to a computer malfunction. A problem with the lander’s inertial measurement unit, or IMU, which tracks the lander’s position on its descent, led the lander’s computer to believe it had landed while still a few kilometers in the air, according to Vago.

The Schiaparelli lander’s demise provided valuable data for ESA; however, the spacecraft’s final telemetry data led to improvements in the upcoming Kazochok and Rosalind Franklin rover mission.

“The 2022 mission implements a new, much more robust entry, descent, and landing (EDL) sequence, with redundant IMUs whose values are constantly being compared relative to what they should be by the capsule's computer,” Vago says. “In case one of them would go coo-coo, it would be taken offline.”

WHAT IS THE ROSALIND FRANKLIN ROVER LAUNCH DATE?

The 12-day launch window for ExoMars opens on September 20, 2022, and closes on October 1. If all goes well, the Kazachok lander and Rosalind Franklin rover will launch on a Proton rocket from the Baikonur launch complex in Kazakhstan sometime in that window. “Regardless of when we launch, the landing is always on the 10th of June, 2023,” Vago adds.

The mission was most recently scheduled to launch in 2020, but “we were hit with a double whammy,” he says. “On the one hand, we were late with the software and some of the avionics boxes, so we couldn’t test them the way we wanted to. And then we were hit by Covid-19.”

WHAT IS THE MISSION OF THE ROSALIND FRANKLIN ROVER?

“The main goal is to search for signs of life,” Vagos says, though there are many constituent steps the Rosalind Franklin rover will take in service of that goal. It will begin, he says, by studying geochemistry and potential biological signatures in the area around the landing site. “After you land, you look around and try to understand where you are and what it is that you see,” Vagos says. “It’s part and parcel of the exploration to try and understand the geology.”

The rover will then explore and drill in other locations, aiming to access any potentially preserved signs of life further beneath the Martian surface than any mission has reached before. It will be a deliberative process guided by the rover's many instruments to help with drill site selection.

“It is true we can go down to two meters, but it takes us almost five days to drill that deep,” Vago says. “It is a big commitment from the point of view of mission time to decide, ‘OK, I am going to drill here.’”

HOW BIG IS THE ROSALIND FRANKLIN ROVER, AND WHAT CAN IT DO?

The Rosalind Franklin rover is a middleweight, coming in at around 310 kilograms (683 pounds). Lighter than NASA’s 1,000 kilogram (2,204 pound) Curiosity rover, but heftier than the Russian Mars rovers at 186 kilograms (410 pounds).

The ground test model of the Rosalind Frankling ExoMars rover navigating rocky terrain in a laboratory test.  ESA

Designed with difficult terrain in mind, the Rosalind Franklin rover has flexible wheels, which can also lock and serve as “feet” swung from articulated “knees” for traversing deep sand or steep dunes. “We can command a different type of gate in which we use the wheels as insect feet,” Vagos says.

Locomotion aside, the rover carries an arsenal of instruments designed to aid in its primary mission of searching for Martian life. A set of stereoscopic cameras on the rover mast aid in navigation, while a high-resolution 300-millimeter (~1 foot) camera is paired with an infrared spectrometer to help scientists decide where to explore. “Everything looks kind of butterscotch or orange-y,” Vagos says. “Having the infrared spectrometer gives you better information about the mineralogy.”

Once a potential drilling site is selected and the rover moves there, it can use the Russian-built Adron-RM neutron spectrometer to gauge how much water is in the soil beneath the rover. Too much moisture could interfere with measurements, Vagos says, “instead of crushing the samples to make powdered material, you would be sort of kneading dough to make bread.”

The rover also includes a French-made ground-penetrating radar to ensure the rover doesn’t attempt to drill through a slab of basalt a meter below the surface. The drill itself contains a microscope and an infrared spectrometer, according to Vagos.

Once a sample is acquired, it will be brought into the rover, where many tools can be applied to study the soil, including ovens and lasers designed to separate potential organic material from any perchlorates contained within the sample.

HOW WILL THE ROSALIND FRANKLIN ROVER LOOK FOR LIFE?

The rover will use the ESA’s ExoMars Biosignature score, which applies weight to several different signs of life. These include morphological signs of life similar to stromatolites on earth, layers of sediment that are structured by bacteria colonies.

“After what, 25, 30 years of missions landing on Mars, nobody has seen any of these that would feel comfortable with saying, for sure we have detected a morphological biosignature,” Vago says. “But in principle, that is something you can and would want to look for.”

The most important biosignatures the rover will look for are chemical biosignatures, such as the presence of organic molecules of a certain “handedness,” Vagos says.

Organic molecules are either left or right-handed — that is, they have the same structure, but they are reflections of each other. If you make an organic chemical in a lab or a geological process, you get equal amounts of both.

“But if it is life that makes an organic molecule, it makes one type,” Vagos says, so finding only “left-handed” organics on Mars would be a strong sign of life.

But even that wouldn’t be strong enough to prove life existed on Mars. Vagos says evidence of organic molecules of a certain handedness would add 30 points to the Biosignatures Score, the most of any independent sign, but not enough on its own.

“What we claim is that if you get up to 100 points, then for sure you have demonstrated life was active,” he says. “The reason we say that is to be able to add 100 points, you have to have at least four or five independent biosignatures verified, and the chance that would happen just using geology is very, very low.”

HOW MANY ROVERS WILL BE ON MARS?

If the Rosalind Franklin rover successfully lands on Mars in 2022, it will become the eighth successful rover to land and operate on Mars, and will likely be the fourth rover active on Mars at that time.

NASA’s Curiosity rover, which landed in 2012, is still operational as of August 2021, while NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed in February 2021, should still be cruising the red planet in 2022.

The Chinese Zhurong rover landed in May 2021.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

A “Nazi coin of the year 2039” found in Mexico goes viral on the Internet

Many ooparts have been found in ancient ruins, however is it possible to find one that comes from a future other than ours? That is the case with a Nazi coin minted in 2039.

Diego Avilés is responsible for having found a strange coin in one of his works . At first glance it looks like a Nazi coin, with its swastika and slogan “alle in einer nation”, which in Spanish translates as ” all in one nation .” Only this one is a bit peculiar.

Its minting date clearly says 2039 . Taking into account this date, and the motto that can be read on the reverse of the Nazi coin, is it possible that he traveled from a future where Nazi Germany won the war and dominated the world?

Nazi currency of the future?

In the municipality of La Concordia, in Chiapas, Mexico, there is, in fact, a town known as “New Germany,” but to date, no one pays with Nazi coins.

So how is it possible that a coin with a swastika and clear Nazi attributes is found in Mexico? A fraud? An alternative future?

Many people have claimed that the currency has been tampered with ; it would be the most logical thing to do. Modify the 1 and 9 at the beginning by a 2 and 0, so that, instead of 1939, it says 2039.

However, changing two numbers is something very different and much less complicated than adding a complete phrase to it .

The people of New Germany were born thanks to the German immigrants who arrived in Chiapas in the 1920s. However, at no time did any of them trade in Nazi coins in Mexico.

To date the origin is not known, so it will be analyzed by the University of Mexico.

Not even the commercialization of oil between both nations introduced the Nazi currency of the time in the North American nation. Their presence just doesn’t make sense.

An oopart today?

Quite simply, the coin found by Avilés does not fit into anything historical. Not even in the legal tender frameworks during the war , even though it has similarities.

Is this an oopart in our era? Let us remember that this is what objects are called ” outside their time line ” or that do not belong to the epoch attributed to them.

There are many of these discoveries, most belonging to ancient times, such as the Antikythera mechanism , a kind of ancient analog computer found in 1900.

However, an oopart from a future beyond the present had never been found . Reason that has generated a multitude of theories.

At the moment, the University of Mexico is analyzing the Nazi currency to determine its origin.

• Is it possible that this coin came from an alternate future where the Nazis ruled the world? Or is it a simple fraud? However, the mystery is still present and until there are official versions, we will not be able to know where it comes from.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousthing.com/ }

NASA / FUTURISM

{ https://futurism.com/the-byte }

Less than two weeks after the blockbuster revelation that a Canadian company responsible for providing air traffic control monitoring to commercial pilots has been hiding UFO reports and just a few months after an independent investigation found numerous Canadian UFO sightings by pilots not known to the general public comes yet another unusual sighting near Canada’s Atlantic coast and this one has reports from both commercial AND military pilots. Are aliens spending more time in the Great White North now that border restrictions have lessened and close encounters with American military pilots may be getting too close for comfort?

2021-08-11
The Gander area control centre (ACC) reported that, at 0155Z, a Government Of Canada, Department of National Defence flight (CFC4003) from Trenton, ON (CYTR) to Cologne/Bonn, Germany (EDDK) and a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Airbus A330-300 (KLM618) from Boston/Logan, MA (KBOS) to Amsterdam/Schiphol, Netherlands (EHAM) reported seeing a bright green flying object. It flew into a cloud, then disappeared. No impact to operations.

The incident referred to in this report was posted on August 11th by CADORS (the Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Report System), the organization providing to the public digital access to its database of airline incidents and UFO reports from airlines, but actually occurred on July 30th, giving the military, airlines and government plenty of time to investigate it before posting. Why the delay? The CANDOR report gives probable causes as “Weather balloon, meteor, rocket, CIRVIS/UFO” – CIRVIS is the Canadian-United States Communications Instructions Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings required to be filed by U.S. ands Canadian military pilots after “all unidentifiable, suspicious, or hostile air or seaborne traffic” incidents. VICE.com, which has been doing an outstanding job revealing the UFO goings-on in Canada recently, requested additional information from an unnamed Canadian military spokesperson and got this response:

“In this particular incident, there is nothing to indicate that what the crew saw posed any kind of safety risk to the aircraft. We believe that they saw something—they would not have filed a report otherwise.”

This sounds like the verbiage in the Pentagon’s recent UFO report – they saw something and they don’t know what it was but it was no safety risk. Isn’t that contradictory? A spokesperson from Nav Canada, the private company that operates Canada’s air traffic control system, told VICE it had nothing to add. However, Steffan Watkins (@steffanwatkins), an “open source research consultant focused on debunking #misinfo|#disinfo about planes, ships, & #OpenSkies,” had some interesting observations which he posted on Twitter:

“RCAF CC-177 177705 #CFC4003 (49.059, -60.787) @ 28k ft, had just made a change in course and had climbed 1000ft when they reported seeing the UFO.”

“PH-AKD #KL618 #KLM618 (48.023, -59.422) 39,000ft made no change in course.”

He wondered if the RCAF pilot changed course to avoid something or to get a better look, or was this just a normal swerve-like course correction. What’s normal about a swerve? Does the police officer EVER take that as your alibi and not write a ticket? (Asking for a friend.) And before you point out that the Perseids meteor shower could be the cause of the green object seen, this was still early in 2021 cycle (it doesn’t peak until Aug 11-13). Would a military pilot ‘swerve’ to see a meteor – especially when he or she was on their way to help out in Afghanistan?

“We believe that they saw something.” That’s the best we can say at this point, but the circumstantial evidence warrants more investigation. Will that ever happen? Kudos to VICE for their coverage of these mysterious Canadian encounters between Military and commercial flights and UFOs.

The truth is out there, eh?

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Of all of the types of evidence that have been put forward over the years for UFOs, certainly the most sought after is physical proof, something we can see and touch. It is a type of evidence that has remained frustratingly elusive over the decades, and considering the thousands of UFO sightings on record and the numerous reports of actual UFO crashes, one might think it was only a matter of time before such evidence came to light, but this has not proven to be the case. Any such alleged evidence is always whisked away by the military or covered up, leaving us with only stories. Yet, on occasion, we get a story of a piece of UFO or something of the sort, and one of these is the tale of a man who claimed to have retrieved a mysterious artifact dropped from an alien craft over the desert.

One evening in 1985, a man named Bob White was driving with a friend on their way from Denver to Las Vegas. At the time, White was asleep and his friend at the wheel, watching the hypnotic lane lines flicker by as they meandered through the remote wasteland between Grand Junction, Colorado and the Utah border. Here was a place in which there was not another soul for miles around, a moonscape of rocky desert that expanded out past the illumination of the headlights in a vast expanse of nothingness, and it would have been a rather dull drive until a weird series of events began to play out that made the evening a bit more exciting.

Bob White

At around 2:30 a.m., White was jolted awake by his friend. Wiping the sleepiness from his eyes and watching the nighttime desert streak by outside, he at first couldn’t figure out why his friend had woken him. It wasn’t his turn to be at the wheel and nothing at first seemed out of place, the car smoothly rolling along, but his friend was in a state of agitation. When White asked what was going on, his companion frantically pointed off towards the horizon, and it was then that he could see a strange light off in the distance, which did not look like an airplane. The light steadily grew in size and brightness until it was blinding, turning the desert night into day, and White would say of what happened:

The light was about the size of a full harvest moon. As we got closer, it grew larger. When we were a few hundred yards from it, I turned off the ignition and we coasted up close to it. It was huge, the size of a very big barn. I got out of the car for a better look. For some unknown reason, Jan turned on the headlights, and this light went up in the sky as fast as my eyes could follow it. What I saw, was not of this Earth. Then I saw another small light, bright orange with a tinge of yellow, white, and blue falling from it.

After this, the larger object rose into the air rapidly, joined with an even larger object, a sort of “mother ship,” and the whole of it shot off into the night, leaving the two frightened men there alone in the dark desert once again to try and process what they had just seen. Overcome with curiosity, White started hiking off through the scrub through the wilderness towards where he estimated the smaller object had fallen, making his way up an incline to find a groove in the ground, which he estimates as having been around 18 inches deep and 9 inches wide. Within this groove was a glowing object, about 7-1/2 inches long and shaped like a teardrop, still too hot to get anywhere near and apparently made of some kind of metal. White waited until it had cooled down enough to touch, and then brought it back to the car, stashing it into the trunk.

White, who claims to have never believed in UFOs before this incident, was baffled as to what the object could possibly be, but did not know who to turn to for help or what to do with it. He kept it locked in a safe deposit box to keep it safe, and in the meantime travelled about trying to raise interest in his discovery, travelling to conferences and trying to get the object tested. He even opened his Museum of the Unexplained, which would hold the object high as its main attraction. In 1996, a small sample of the object was finally tested by the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, which didn’t come to any firm conclusions, but did have this to say:

The metallurgical analysis was pretty mundane. We didn’t find any evidence that it was extraterrestrial. Now you can make the argument that we didn’t spend $1 million and look at every conceivable option. We didn’t cover every base.

A second laboratory came to a similar conclusion, deflating hoped that this was an alien device or piece of spaceship. Undeterred and convinced of the object’s otherworldly nature, White decided to keep trying, sending in samples to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico Tech, and at the Geosciences Research Division of the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, for more thorough analyses. One of White’s partners, a Dr. Robert Gibbons, a former scientist with NASA, would say of the results of these further tests:

We recently came across scientific data that linked Bob’s object with the planet Mars. Isotope abundance ratio tests were performed on Bob’s object in May, 1999 in La Jolla, CA and the numbers are virtually the same as obtained from Martian meteorite samples. The ratio of isotopes of Strontium for the QUE 94201 meteorite found in Antarctica in 1994 was 0.701. The ratio of isotopes of Strontium for Bob’s object was 0.712. The ratio of isotopes of Strontium for the Shergotty meteorite found India in 1865 was 0.723. Bob’s object is right in the middle of two proven Martian meteorites!

Bob White and his mysterious artifact

So, what does this all mean? Well, the most rational explanation is that this is exactly what the object is: a meteorite. This could also explain the strange sighting the two men had had to some degree, although it doesn’t explain the presence of the massive UFO they had seen or the “mothership” it attached to before speeding off into the night. Other ideas are that they saw debris from a satellite falling, or some naturally occurring celestial phenomenon, and that the weird object he found was completely unrelated. Then there is the possibility that this is all just a hoax. All of these possibilities White strongly denied. He never tried to get rich off of his findings, and whatever he did find out there in the desert, he certainly seemed to have at least truly believe it was real, once saying of his crusade to get the object recognized:

This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’m 73 years old. I don’t have much longer. What I’d like to see before I’m gone is the national media get their heads out of the sand. I’d like to see the national media and everybody else realize that what I have is real. I don’t know what I have to do to prove this is the truth. You can’t make this stuff up.

He would continue to adamantly stick to his story and defend his strange discovery all the way up to his death in 2009, but the object would stay locked away in his museum, where it remains to this day. What exactly did he find out there in the desert on that fateful night? Is this a piece of meteorite, space debris, just a weird-looking rock, a hoax, or something else? As of yet, there is no proof that the object is anything more mysterious than a rock or meteorite, but it is still a pretty odd story all the same, and managed to get a lot of attention in its time as a piece of possible physical evidence from a UFO.

RELATED INFORMATION, selected and posted by peter2011

What others have to say about the Bob White object

 

Source: 4https://www.coasttocoastam.com/photo/view/bob_white_s_artifact/46121

September 2003

Dr Robert Gibbons, former NASA scientist and Executive Director of the Museum of the Unexplained said:

'We recently came across scientific data that linked Bob's object with the planet Mars. Isotopic abundance ratio tests were performed on Bob's object in May 1999, in La Jolla, CA  and the numbers are virtually the same as obtained from Martian meteorite samples. The ratio of isotopes of strontium for the QUE94201 meteorite found in Antarctica in 1994 was 0.701. The ratio of the isotopes of strontium for Bob's object is 0.712. The ratio of the isotopes of strontium for the Shergotty meteorite found in India in 1860 is 0.723. Bob's object is right in the middle of two proven Martian meteorites.

Dr Gibbons called for more tests on Bob's object.
2004

 

The Seattle Times newspaper dated 22 June 2004 carried an article by Steve Rock about White and the object. It provides an account by White himself. It was in 1985 about 2-3am one morning and he was travelling in a passenger. The driver woke him from sleep and pointed out a light in the sky. White went back to sleep. A while later the driver again woke White and there was a huge object only 100 yards away in front of the vehicle. These lights ascended into the sky where they joined a pair of neon tube like objects which all travelled East and were lost to view.

An orange object was seen falling from them, which White found red hot on the ground. After it cooled it was placed in the vehicle.

It was 7.5 inches long, teardrop shape and had a metallic exterior , and weighed less than 2 pounds.

It made its way to the Nevada based National Institute for Discovery Science. In 1996 a sample was sent to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Col Kelleher of NIDS reportedly stated 'The metallurgical analysis was pretty mundane.' A Californian scientist who tested it is stated to have said 'It didn't have any extra-terrestrial signature.'

  The full analysis report may be read here. One website I located had the following table:

Source: http://www.greatdreams.com/ufos/ufo_metal.htm

APRIL 2017

In reply to a comment from an individual, named Lee, who said they saw stalagmites of this type form in a steel workshop, Larry Cekander, co-founder of 'The Museum of the Unexplained' with Bob White, stated:

'...trying to compare iron or steel machine shop grinding to the artifact recovered in 1985 is like comparing apples and oranges and trying to make grape juice. The metal object pictured in the interview is aluminum not steel or other ferrous metal. No matter how hard you try you will never get aluminum to melt on a grinding wheel. You will never get any sparks from it. As soon as you start to grind on it, it will turn to powder or dust.

The Vickers hardness scale of the artifact is 61 to 63, the pictures you are using to compare the Bob White object are not close at all to the shape or consistency of the object. One other small point. The artifact has been to 15 labs and universities in the past 21 years including Los Alamos; Ne Mexico State Mine and Minerals; delta state and much more.

If the artifact had been in a machine shop on a grinder of some sort there would be residue in the artifact from the wheels used to form it. There are 33 elements identified and not one of them are binding agents from a grinding wheel or disc.

If you have any other questions please ask me. The labs and universities we have used DO KNOW the difference between a formation of metals under a grinding wheel and the artifact.

We know it was formed outside of our atmosphere, no question about it. Now maybe the machine used on it in outer space had a machine shop but then again we know it was in a molten state when ejected into a vacuum under extreme pressure with extremely cold conditions. There are identifiers showing an extra-terrestrial origin to the object also. It was never near a machine shop lee..'

Chronology

1985. Sighting; and artifact found.

1996 A sample was sent to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Col Kelleher of NIDS reportedly stated 'The metallurgical analysis was pretty mundane.'  The full analysis report may be read here. The final paragraph of the analysis report reads:

'There are no anomalies in the results of this analysis. The detected phases are accounted for, and the micro structure lends itself to standard metallurgical interpretation. The physical properties that were measured (density, hardness and electrical resistivity) all fall within the expected range.' 

1999 Isotopic abundance ratio tests were performed on Bob's object in May 1999, in La Jolla, CA (Geosciences Research Division of the Scripps Institute.) I have not been able to locate a full copy of their analysis. However, it was reported, by Dr Robert Gibbons, that 'The ratio of the isotopes of strontium for Bob's object is 0.712.'

Since 1999 Larry Cekander states that 'The artifact has been to 15 labs and universities in the past 21 years including Los Alamos; Ne Mexico State Mine and Minerals; delta state and much more.' However, I have been unable to locate detailed analyses from other than the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.  If any reader knows of these detailed analyses, I would like to hear of them.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 13 - 8 - 2021

UFO Sighted Over Miami, Florida ( August 12, 2021 )

STATEMENT : UFO. Just filmed what looks like a UFO. Colour lights in MIiami Sky, Florida, 9:26 PM EST.

Closer every day

• credit : Alex Sanchez 

UFO Sighted Over Lake Lac Saint-Martin, Manitoba, Canada ( August 11, 2021 )

STATEMENT : Was coming home from fairford Manitoba Canada when I got to little Saskatchewan First Nation I noticed a ball of light on the lake in the middle of know where maybe a UFO just crashed there I made a few videos of the light it was very dark on that road
maybe a UFO just crashed near stellas beach lake st Martin Manitoba

They are everywhere

• credit : Ian Sinclair

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - MUFON CASES - - 13 - 8 - 2021

MUFON CASE : 117250 Trenton, New Jersey ( August 12, 2021 )

Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : 3 Massive orange ufo orbs
Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117250

It was too hot to sleep I went outside & saw 3 massive orbs just hovering in the sky I could not resist to record what was taking place. Recorded using a tripod from my balcony I wanted to show all different angels of these orbs.

Date Submitted : 2021-08-12
Date of Event : 2021-08-12
MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : 3orbs.mp4 : no audio

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

Some of the more remarkable UFO encounters on record have involved pilots of various types, both civilian and military. These reports tend to resonate because they come from well-trained professionals with impeccable observation skills, so when they say they have seen something truly strange, people tend to listen. Such reports are actually quite numerous, stretching back through the decades, and here we will look at a selection of particularly notable pilot UFO encounters from the 1950s.

Starting off, 1952 seems to have been a rather busy year for strange pilot UFO encounters. First, we have the case of Commander Edward P. Stafford, of the US Navy, who says that in August of that year he was in charge of a detachment of three Naval patrol planes flying out of an air base at Thule, in northwest Greenland, which was integral to the chain of arctic radar stations called the DEW (distant early warning) line. At the time they were doing what is called “ice reconnaissance,” which entailed flying around the Kennedy Channel looking for large icebergs or pack ice so that this data could be relayed to the supply ships that arrived during the summer. They also had the secondary mission of helping Arctic scientists doing cosmic ray research, by helping them to retrieve the data packages from their high-altitude research balloons when the balloons came back down to earth. They would relay the location of the fallen packages, after which helicopters would go in to retrieve them. Stafford describes these as easy missions, but on this day things would get strange. Stafford would say:

These were easy flights, always in good weather and always at an altitude safely above the tall, cloud-shrouded bergs and coastal rocks we often had to dodge on ice patrol. Each of us had two or three of those “milk runs” while deployed to Thule, and we rather enjoyed the change of tactics and routine, as well as the virtuous feeling that we were helping to advance the cause of science. This is why I was surprised to find one of the other plane commanders as tense and pale on return from a balloon chase as though it had been a hairy combat mission or a close encounter with a berg or a mountaintop. Lt. John Callahan was a salty, steady professional pilot, so I knew when I saw him walking in from his plane that something serious had happened on that flight. “What the hell’s the matter John?” I asked him. “You look as if you’d just survived a midair!” “Ed, you’re not going to believe it. I’m not even sure I do… and I SAW it. And so did O’Flaherty and Merchant. At least most of it. And I don’t think they believe it either.”

The obviously heavily distressed and scared Callahan was then brought into the ready room and began to explain just what “it” had been. He claimed that he had been on a balloon run, flying at 10,000 feet in the clear with the balloon in sight high above and the radio compass needle locked on to the balloon’s transmitter, with he and his co-pilot Bill O’Flaherty occasionally taking turns checking the balloon through their binoculars. It was as they were doing this that they had noticed something very unusual, indeed. On one of these binocular checks, Callahan noticed three bright silver discs attached to the instrument pod of the balloon, and he pointed them out to O’Flaherty, who also saw them. They hadn’t been there minutes before, so both men were baffled as to what these objects could possibly be. Stafford would describe of what had happened to them next, saying:

Callahan took the glasses back and looked again. They were still there exactly as the copilot had described, three shining, saucer-shaped metallic objects clustered on the hanging trail of the balloon just above the black dot of the science package. On the intercom Callahan called the plane captain to the cock- pit and handed him the binoculars. “Take a look Merchant. What do you think?” The captain’s reaction was the same as the copilot’s. “What the hell are they? Where did they come from?” Callahan took the glasses back and studied the strange objects for several minutes while O’Flaherty maneuvered the Privateer to keep the target in sight. Suddenly Callahan sucked in his breath and held it. What he was seeing could not be happening. The three objects had detached themselves from the tail of the balloon and formed up into a compact vee. As Callahan watched incredulously, they executed what looked at that distance like a vertical bank to the left and accelerated to a blinding speed that took them out of sight, climbing in about three seconds. Callahan handed the glasses back to O’Flaherty. “They’re gone,” he said slowly, “CLIMBING from 90,000 feet. Never saw anything turn so tight or move so fast.” Back in the ready room after the instrument pod had landed and its position had been reported, this was the aspect of the phenomenon that most affected Callahan. “Jesus, Ed,” he told me, “from the angle of the sky those things passed through in the three seconds they were in sight, at that distance, they must have been going tens of thousands of miles an hour. They must have pulled a hundred Gs in that turn. And what the hell climbs out, ACCELERATING from 90,000 feet?”

The witness then apparently wrote a full report of the incident, but after that it was apparently just sort of buried and forgotten by the higher ups. There was never any explanation given, and the report was never brought up again. The only record of this happening is Stafford’s testimony, which originally appeared in Naval History Magazine, and that’s it. It is a strange case to be sure, but it wasn’t the only incident to happen in 1952. Just the month before, in July of 1952, there was another high-profile case involving a passenger airliner in the United States. On the evening of July 14, 1952, a Pan American World Airways DC-4 with a crew of three and 10 passengers, was on a routine flight from New York to Miami and things were going smoothly until just after sunset, when things would get very strange, indeed. At the time, the plane was on autopilot over Chesapeake Bay approaching Norfolk, Virginia, at an altitude of 8,000 feet, when all three crew members, consisting of Captain F. V. Koepke, First Officer William B. Nash and Second Officer William H. Fortenberry, saw a bright “red-orange brilliance” low near the ground in the distance. None of them could figure out what it could be, it had just suddenly appeared from nowhere, and as they studied the phenomenon it got even weirder still, when they could discern that it was in fact a series of bright objects. First Officer Nash would say of what they saw:

Almost immediately we perceived that it consisted of six bright objects streaking toward us at tremendous speed, and obviously well below us. They had the fiery aspect of hot coals, but of much greater glow, perhaps twenty times more brilliant than any of the scattered ground lights over which they passed or the city lights to the right. Their shape was clearly outlined and evidently circular; the edges were well defined, not phosphorescent or fuzzy in the least and the red-orange color was uniform over the upper surface of each craft. Within the few seconds that it took the six objects to come half the distance from where we had first seen them, we could observe that they were holding a narrow echelon formation, a stepped-up line tilted slightly to our right with the leader at the lowest point, and each following craft slightly higher. At about the halfway point, the leader appeared to attempt a sudden slowing. We received this impression because the second and third wavered slightly and seemed almost to overrun the leader, so that for a brief moment during the remainder of their approach the positions of these three varied. It looked very much as if an element of “human” or “intelligence” error had been introduced, in so far as the following two did not react soon enough when the leader began to slow down and so almost overran him.

The mysterious objects then shot forward at great speed, like “a stream of tracer bullets” approaching to pass under the plane, and the crew all excitedly took up positions that allowed them to look outside to watch them as they did. Nash would say of what they saw beneath them:

All together, they flipped on edge, the sides to the left going up and the glowing surface facing right. Though the bottom surfaces did not become clearly visible, we had the impression that they were unlighted. The exposed edges, also unlighted, appeared to be about 15 feet thick, and the top surface, at least, seemed flat. In shape and proportion, they were much like coins. While all were in the edgewise position, the last five slid over and past the leader so that the echelon was now tail-foremost, so to speak, the top or last craft now being nearest to our position.

The objects then all sped off in formation to the west while making erratic maneuvers like “a ball ricocheting off a wall.” Two more objects they hadn’t noticed then sped under them to join the others, and went out over the darkened bay at low altitude, before lifting off to disappear into the sky. Nash would say of their ascent:

As they climbed, they oscillated up and down behind one another in a irregular fashion, as though they were extremely sensitive to control. In doing this, they went vertically past one another, bobbing up and down, just as the front three went horizontally past one another, as the initial six approached us. This appeared to be an intelligence error, ‘lousing up the formation’—they disappeared by blinking out in a mixed-up fashion, in no particular order. We stared after them, dumbfounded and probably open-mouthed. We looked around at the sky, half expecting something else to appear, though nothing did. There were flying saucers, and we had seen them. What we had witnessed was so stunning and incredible that we could readily believe that if either of us had seen it alone, he would have hesitated to report it. But here we were, face to face. We couldn’t both be mistaken about such a striking spectacle.

It would later turn out that none of the passengers had witnessed the strange spectacle, but when they radioed in their report, they would find that eight unidentified objects in the of vicinity Langley Field has also been seen by another pilot in the area, as well as several witnesses on the ground. In fact, there had apparently been seven additional reports from persons who had witnessed similar incidents within 30 minutes of the encounter in the same area. Air Force investigators would later try to explain it away as five jets that had been purportedly operating in the area at the time, but the crew were experienced pilots who knew they had not seen jets. At the time, Project Blue Book would look at the case and concur that it was likely not jets that had been seen, eventually filing it away as “unknown.” Interestingly, the case would be dusted off in 1962 by the Director of the Harvard College Observatory, astrophysicist Donald H. Menzel, who would conclude that it had all been due to simply a reflection in the cockpit windows, from either an internal or external light source, which had then been misidentified as UFOs. Menzel would doubt the credibility of the pilots, claiming that they gotten overexcited, had exaggerated what they had seen, and made a simple mistake of perception, falling for an optical illusion. This would be challenged by Nash, who lashed out at Menzel in a letter, saying:

Dr. Menzel, regardless of your figures the western horizon was not quite bright, and regarding your “reflection theory,” in the first place the objects were between us and the West. In the second place, they would have had to be damned persistent, consistent and impossible reflections to have manifested in three cockpit windows in exactly the same way. We first observed them through the front window. As they approached and I moved across the cockpit, I kept my eyes on the objects and saw them through the curved window of the windshield, and we both finished our observations looking through the right side window. That is why there is no evidence that the pilots considered that what they saw was a reflection; and you state that we were too excited by what we saw to make the most elementary scientific tests. Again, Doctor, pilots do not excite easily or they would not be airline pilots—please—a little respect for us?

Menzel would concede that perhaps it had not been reflections, instead changing his explanation to some sort of optical illusion caused by a temperature inversion, or even a spotlight that had been refracted off of a cloud layer, both of which he would hold up as “a highly probable explanation that is consistent with all observations and does not depend on the presence of an extraterrestrial spacecraft.” However, Nash would adamantly deny that this could have accounted for what they had seen, and indeed neither a spotlight nor a temperature inversion seems to have been able to explain every aspect of what was seen by multiple qualified witnesses. To this day the case remains unsolved.

Another report from 1952 comes to us from the Gulf of Mexico, where on December 6, 1952 a crew aboard a USAF B-29 bomber would have a hairy encounter of their own. The bomber was moving out across the gulf towards Texas when they picked up something bizarre on their radar scopes, which appeared to be several unidentified objects moving at incredible speed. The objects rapidly approached the bomber, after which they became visible as they streaked past, much to the astonishment of the crew. These mysterious objects then did a series of acrobatic aerial maneuvers around the bomber for several minutes, before merging with another massive object that appeared, after which this giant UFO sped off at speeds estimated to be in excess of 9,000 miles per hour. One of the crew that day, a 1st Lt Norman Karas, would explain of the incident:

On 6 December 1952, while flying over the Gulf of Mexico towards Galveston, Texas, the flight engineer finished transferring fuel and I then turned on my radar set. I noticed an unidentified target approaching our aircraft at terrific rate of speed. I timed it as best as I could with my stopwatch over a known distance and the instructor flight engineer computed the speed at 5,240 mph. I alerted the entire crew to look for the object visually and some flashes of light were noticed. The closest the objects came were approximately 20 miles. I saw about 20 objects in all, sometimes as much as two and three on the scope at one time. I re-calibrated the set and there was no change. The object was small and possibly round. I also noticed a large return come up to within 40 miles of our tail from behind, and then disappeared. To the best of my knowledge, I believe that this object was real and moved at an extremely high speed and was not a set malfunction or optical illusion. Contact was broken off at 05:35 after a group of the blips merged into a ½ inch curved arc about 30 miles from our aircraft at 320 degrees and proceeded across the scope and off it at a computed speed of over 9,000 mph.

B-29 bomber

What was going on here? Who knows? The following year, we have a 1953 case that allegedly happened near Ellsworth AFB, just east of Rapid City, South Dakota. On August 11 of that year, the Air Defense Command radar station at Ellsworth AFB got a strange call from the local Ground Observer Corps filter center just after dark. It turns out that a spotter about 10 miles from the base had reported a very bright light moving low on the horizon, and ground control also picked it up, reporting the object as being at an altitude of 16,000 feet and stating that it “was well defined, solid, and bright.” A F-84 pilot who had been on maneuvers in the area was diverted to investigate. The pilot made visual confirmation of the object and began to approach, but when he was about 3 miles away it began to pull away and ascend even as the fighter tried to keep up, getting brighter as it did. Captain Edward J. Ruppelt former Director of Project Blue Book, would say of what happened next:

There was always a limit as to how near the jet could get, however. The controller told me that it was just as if the UFO had some kind of an automatic warning radar linked to its power supply. When something got too close to it, it would automatically pick up speed and pull away. The separation distance always remained about 3 miles. The chase continued on north out of sight of the lights of Rapid City and the base – into some very black night. When the UFO and the F-84 got about 120 miles to the north, the pilot checked his fuel; he had to come back. And when I talked to him, be said he was damn glad that he was running out of fuel because being out over some mighty desolate country alone with a UFO can cause some worry.

Both the UFO and the F-84 had gone off the scope, but in a few minutes the jet was back on, heading for home. Then 10 or 15 miles behind it was the UFO target also coming back. While the UFO and the F-84 were returning to the base – the F-84 was planning to land – the controller received a call from the jet interceptor squadron on the base. The alert pilots at the squadron had heard the conversations on their radio and didn’t believe it. “Who’s nuts up there?” was the comment that passed over the wire from the pilots to the radar people. There was an F-84 on the line ready to scramble, the man on the phone said, and one of the pilots, a World War II and Korean veteran, wanted to go up and see a flying saucer. The controller said, “OK, go.”

After the second plane was in the sky the mysterious light proved to be very evasive and elusive, foiling all attempts to get near it, climbing, diving, and generally maneuvering in a way that was well beyond the capabilities of the fighter. Ruppelt would explain of this cat and mouse chase:

In a minute or two the F-84 was airborne and the controller was working him toward the light. The pilot saw it right away and closed in. Again, the light began to climb out, this time more toward the northeast. The pilot also began to climb, and before long the light, which at first had been about 30 degrees above his horizontal line of sight, was now below him. He nosed the ’84 down to pick up speed, but it was the same old story – as soon as he’d get within 3 miles of the UFO, it would put on a burst of speed and stay out ahead.

Even though the pilot could see the light and hear the ground controller telling him that he was above it, and alternately gaining on it or dropping back, he still couldn’t believe it – there must be a simple explanation He turned off all of his lights – it wasn’t a reflection from any of the airplane’s lights because there it was. A reflection from a ground light, maybe. He rolled the airplane – the position of the light didn’t change. A star – he picked out three bright stars near the light and watched carefully. The UFO moved in relation to the three stars. Well, he thought to himself, if it’s a real object out there, my radar should pick it up too; so he flipped on his radar-ranging gunsight. In a few seconds the red light on his sight blinked on – something real and solid was in front of him. Then he was scared. When I talked to him, he readily admitted that he’d been scared. He’d met MD 109’s, FW 190’s and ME 262’s over Germany and he’d met MIG-15’s over Korea but the large, bright, bluish-white light had him scared – he asked the controller if he could break off the intercept. This time the light didn’t come back.

Ruppelt claims that every aspect of the case was subsequently looked into, but no rational explanation was every found, leaving it to be filed as “unknown.” A similar aerial chase occurred in August of 1956, this time in the region of Bentwaters AFB, in the UK. On the evening of August 13, several radar operators at two military bases in the east of England, one of these being Bentwaters, picked up multiple anomalous objects that moved very rapidly and performed inexplicable maneuvers. These objects were showing some very strange behavior, and seemed to converge on one very large object described as “several times larger than a B-36 aircraft,” which then continued to fly out over the countryside at a speed of around over 12,000 mph. Other objects were picked up as well, all of them moving at speeds of between 4,000 and 6,000 mph. These objects were also visually confirmed by a C-47 twin-engine military transport plane over Bentwaters, which reported that “a bright light streaked under my aircraft travelling east to west at terrific speed.” It was all enough to scramble a deHavilland Venom jet interceptor, which streaked off to investigate, and a later report filed by a Captain Edward L. Holt would say of what happened next:

Pilot advised he had a bright white light in sight and would investigate. At 13 miles [20 km.] west he reported loss of target and white light. Lakenheath radar vectored him to a target 10 miles [16 km.] east of Lakenheath and pilot advised that target was on his radar and was ‘locking on.’ Pilot then reported he had lost target on his radar. Lakenheath GCA reports that as the Venom passed the target on radar, the target began a tail chase of the friendly fighter. Radar requested pilot acknowledge this chase. Pilot acknowledged and stated he would try to circle and get behind the target. Pilot advised he was unable to ‘shake’ the target off his tail and requested assistance. One additional Venom was scrambled from RAF station. Original pilot stated: ‘Clearest target I have ever seen on radar.

The jets would lose the object and it has gone on to become a very puzzling case. It would be thoroughly investigated by The Condon Report, which was a Air Force-funded study at the University of Colorado under Dr. Edward U. Condon, the case remains unexplainable, and would conclude:

The probability that anomalous propagation of radar signals may have been involved in this case seems to be small. One or two details are suggestive of AP, particularly the reported disappearance of the first track as the UFO appeared to overfly the Bentwaters GCA radar. Against this must be weighed the Lakenheath controller’s statement that there was “little or no traffic or targets on scope,” which is not at all suggestive of AP conditions, and the behavior of the target near Lakenheath – apparently continuous and easily tracked. The “tailing” of the RAF fighter, taken alone, seems to indicate a possible ghost image, but this does not jibe with the report that the UFO stopped following the fighter, as the latter was returning to its base, and went off in a different direction. The radar operators were apparently careful to calculate the speed of the UFO from distances and elapsed times, and the speeds were reported as consistent from run to run, between stationary episodes. This behavior would be somewhat consistent with reflections from moving atmospheric layers – but not in so many different directions.

Visual mirage at Bentwaters seems to be out of the question because of the combined ground and airborne observations; the C47 pilot apparently saw the UFO below him. The visual objects do not seem to have been meteors; statements by the observers that meteors were numerous imply that they were able to differentiate the UFO from the meteors. In summary, this is the most puzzling and unusual case in the radar-visual files. The apparently rational, intelligent behavior of the UFO suggests a mechanical device of unknown origin as the most probable explanation of this sighting. However, in view of the inevitable fallibility of witnesses, more conventional explanations of this report cannot be entirely ruled out.

What was going on here? It is hard to say. In our last case here, we have one more case from 1956, concerning a Navy R7V-2 transport, a 4-engine Constellation, that was flying west across the Atlantic Ocean at the time on its way from Newfoundland to the Naval Air Station at Patuxent, Maryland. The aircraft was under the leadership of the very experienced Commander George Benton, who had made more than 200 flights across the Atlantic, and flying under incredibly clear, ideal conditions at the time. Along for the ride were nine Naval personnel returning home from foreign duty, and along with Benton’s regular and relief crews there were nearly 30 airmen-pilots, navigators and flight engineers aboard, many of whom were asleep when things began to get strange.

It started when Commander Benton noticed “a cluster of lights, like a village” on the sea ahead, which should have been completely dark. He verified this with his co-pilot, Lieutenant Peter W. Mooney, who also also saw the lights and said they looked “like a small town.” There was not supposed to be land there, so at first they thought that they had somehow gone off course, but a check of their navigation instruments showed that this wasn’t the case. They then thought that perhaps they were seeing a fleet of ships, but they didn’t look like ships, and a radio enquiry showed that there were no known such shipping operations scheduled in the area. As the aircraft approached, several colored rings appeared to spread out from the lights, and it appeared to get larger. They could now see that it was one massive object, 350 and 400 feet in diameter, apparently metallic, and it was hovering over the water below.

As they all tried to make sense of what they were seeing, the object began to rise towards their plane. It was much larger than the aircraft, and moving at such a clip towards them that they took evasive action to avoid a collision. As they braced for impact, the enormous disk tilted and veered off, only to circle back around and pace them. It was then that they could get a clear look at it, and in a report on the incident made by Major Donald E. Keyhoe, of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) he says of this:

Its sheer bulk was amazing; its diameter was three to four times the Constellation’s wing span. At least thirty feet thick at the center, it was like a gigantic dish inverted on top of another. Seen at this distance, the glow along the rim was blurred and uneven. Whether it was an electrical effect, a series of jet exhausts or lights from opening in the rim, Benton could not tell. But the glow was bright enough to show the disc’s curving surface, giving a hint of dully reflecting metal. Though Benton saw no signs of life, he had a feeling they were being observed. Fighting an impulse to dive away, he held to a straight course. Gradually, the strange machine pulled ahead. Tilting its massive shape upward, it quickly accelerated and was lost against the stars.

The men would subsequently be interrogated and debriefed, with the Air Force apparently keenly interested in what they had seen but refusing to answer any questions by the crew as to what was going on. It was then sort of just brushed under the carpet. Then, a week later, there would be a new and rather strange development, of which Keyhoe would say:

Five days later, Commander Benton had a phone call from a scientist in a high government agency. “I’m informed you had a close-up UFO sighting. I’d like to see you.” Benton checked, found the man was cleared by the Navy. Next day, the scientist appeared, showed his credential, listened intently to Benton’s report. Then he unlocked a dispatch case and took out some photographs. “Was it like any of these?” At the third picture, Benton stopped him. “That’s it!” He looked sharply at the scientist. “Somebody must know the answers, if you’ve got photographs of the things.” The other man took the pictures. “I’m sorry, Commander.” He closed his dispatch case and left. At the time when I learned of this case, I had served for two years as Director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena.

These are just but a few of the pilot reports from the era, and they paint a rather amazing picture. These are reports that come from very trained witnesses, with the phenomena viewed by multiple people and often with radar corroboration and reports from the ground. What are we to make of such reports? Just what is going on here and can it so readily be written off? Why were so many of these reports buried by their superiors in order to fade away into the background? This is also just one era, a few reports in one decade, but such accounts expand well beyond this, right up into the present day. It is all a very sobering look at a phenomenon we barely understand, and which seems to be relegated by those in control to the shadows. Whatever truth there is to any of this, and what it all means, looks likely to remain hidden from us for some time to come.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Scientists in the Chinese province of Heilongjiang have located a crater from what they believe was the largest asteroid impact to have hit our planet in the last 100,000 years. The speed as well as the way it impacted the planet would have been catastrophic to anyone living near the impact zone – it could very well have been the most powerful asteroid impact witnessed by modern humans.

Described as being “impossibly deep”, the crater was found in Yilan County close to Harbin and was believed to have been made by an asteroid that hit Earth approximately 49,000 years ago. The crater is 1.85 kilometers wide (1.1 miles) and 579 meters deep (1,900 feet deep). Professor Chen Ming from the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, stated, “Yilan is the most deeply formed crater we have ever seen.”

According to their calculations, experts believe that the asteroid would have been about 100 meters in width (328 feet). While it was much smaller than the 10-to-15-kilometer-wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, this impact would have caused a lot of destruction as it was traveling at a much faster speed and it came down vertically.

The blast from the impact would have been between 500 and 2,000 times stronger than the atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. Everything within a 10 kilometer radius (6.2 miles) of the impact zone would have been devastated. Furthermore, the shock waves and heat caused by the impact would have been strong enough to melt granite and turn it into glass.

Drill samples taken of rocks and tear-shaped shards of glass from the crater revealed that there was an asteroid impact many years ago, and the charcoal found there provided the researchers with a date of the event.

Those living in the area would have been strongly affected by the blast as well as numerous animals (such as elephants) since the crater is next to a fertile plain caused by the Songhua River that humans and animals would have enjoyed. (An aerial view of the crater site can be seen here.)

The Yilan crater in Heilongjiang province.

Photo:Heilongjiang

A picture of Professor Chen Ming at the Yilan crater drilling site.

Photo: Handout

The study was published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science where it can be read in full.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

I recently wrote a few articles on how, during the Cold War, the Russians tried to manipulate U.S. intelligence agencies by using the UFO phenomenon. But, what about the U.K.? Has it been manipulated in strange, similar ways by the Russians? The answer is: Yes. There’s no doubt about it. Welcome to the Serpo mystery. If you don’t know about Serpo, well, it goes like this: in May 1987 a woman named Alice Bradley Sheldon – an employee of the CIA who wrote sci-fi under the alias of James Tiptree – took her life. Her husband’s life, too. Sheldon is believed to have created a faked UFO document – to freak out the Russians – in the 1960s called the Serpo document. It tells a story that mirrors certain portions of the 1977 movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Specifically, the final stages of the movie in which Richard Dreyfuss’ character of Roy Neary is taken away by aliens. To understand how and why the Brits – alongside their American counterparts – secretly decided to make use of the UFO phenomenon in the late 1960s, and for reasons relative to counterintelligence, disinformation programs, and Russian destabilization, we have to begin with a sensational saga that surfaced in November 2005. That was when a source using the term “Anonymous” came out of the shadows and told an incredible story. Some said it was too incredible to be true. It just might have been exactly that.

Spielberg’s ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977).

It’s a story surrounding what became known within Ufology as “The Serpo Documents.” As for “Anonymous, he or she was said to have been a government insider with a wealth of information on some of the biggest UFO-themed secrets of all time. Here’s what “Anonymous” shared with the UFO research community on the Serpo controversy: “I am a retired employee of the U.S. Government. I won’t go into any great details about my past, but I was involved in a special program. As for Roswell, it occurred, but not like the story books tell. There were two crash sites: one southwest of Corona, New Mexico and the second site at Pelona Peak, south of Datil, New Mexico. The crash involved two extraterrestrial aircraft. The Corona site was found a day later by an archaeological team. This team reported the crash site to the Lincoln County Sheriff’s department. A deputy arrived the next day and summoned a state police officer. One live entity was found hiding behind a rock. The entity was given water but declined food. The entity was later transferred to Los Alamos. The information eventually went to Roswell Army Air Field. The site was examined and all evidence was removed. The bodies were taken to Los Alamos National Laboratory because they had a freezing system that allowed the bodies to remain frozen for research. The craft was taken to Roswell and then onto Wright Field, Ohio.”

The source continued: “The second site was not discovered until August 1949 by two ranchers. They reported their findings several days later to the sheriff of Catron County, New Mexico. Because of the remote location, it took the sheriff several days to make his way to the crash site. Once at the site, the sheriff took photographs and then drove back to Datil. Sandia Army Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico was then notified. A recovery team from Sandia took custody of all evidence, including six bodies. The bodies were taken to Sandia Base, but later transferred to Los Alamos. The live entity established communications with us and provided us with a location of his home planet. The entity remained alive until 1952, when he died. But before his death, he provided us with a full explanation of the items found inside the two crafts. One item was a communication device. The entity was allowed to make contact with his planet.” From thereon, the story expanded significantly: supposedly a number of American astronauts were sent to the planet of the aliens, no less.”

The highly talkative English informant, who worked at the U.K. Ministry of Defense, said the following of the statement from “Anonymous”: “Interesting reading. However, these are NOT real events that are being described here, although the document they come from IS REAL. I saw this information in 1969 or ’70 in Whitehall [London]. Originally it was a CIA document authored by a lady named Alice Bradley Sheldon. Its main purpose, if you will pardon the phrase, was to ‘scare the crap out of the Soviets’ in response to them scaring the crap out of us. In the ’60s, during the warmer part of the Cold War, the KGB successfully led the U.S. Government to believe that a number of nuclear devices had been concealed in disused mines and caves close to four (4) large American cities. These bombs could be detonated by sleeper agents at any time Moscow wished. It was not completely disproved that this was fake until 1980.”

There’s this, too, from the source: “The ‘Project SERPO’ report was part of the CIA’s riposte to this and an attempt to trump the Soviets. Its aim was to make them believe that we had acquired lethal extraterrestrial energy devices and that we had a cozy friendship with these all-powerful EBENs [EBEN is allegedly a classified term used by American Intelligence to describe aliens. It is said to derive from the term ‘Extraterrestrial Biological Entity’] who would be very unhappy if Moscow attempted to harm the United States in any way. To a degree I believe this effort was effective to begin with. However, it came unstuck when the CIA tried to overreach the information by ADDING PHOTOGRAPHS and also trying to spook allies such as ourselves who were better equipped to analyze the information and bugged to the hilt by the KGB. Why this information is being released again now I do not know. Possibly in the past the DIA could have BEEN FOOLED BY THE CIA into believing that ‘Project SERPO’was a real event and the ANONYMOUS source may genuinely want to release this information. Alternatively the DIA may have got it direct from the KGB most likely with a few choice modifications added by them.”

To me, all of this sounds entirely plausible. After all, what’s more likely, that decades ago aliens from their world came to our planet (and vice-versa) or that the whole thing was nothing but a made-up yarn to mess with the minds of Russian Intelligence? People in Ufology who thrive on the Serpo story may not like to hear my views on all of this, but the fact is that, in this story, the simplest scenario is probably the correct one. And, maybe one day, we’ll know more about how and why the U.K. Ministry of Defense were caught up in all of this.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by pieter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Observatories Assemble: NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Joins Japan’s Hisaki Satellite and W. M. Keck Observatory to Solve “Energy Crisis” on Jupiter

Sitting more than five times the distance from the Sun as Earth, Jupiter is not expected to be particularly warm. Based on the amount of sunlight received, the average temperature in the planet’s upper atmosphere should be about minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit or a chilly minus 73 Celsius. Instead, the measured value soars to around 800 degrees Fahrenheit or 426 Celsius. The source of this extra heat has remained elusive for 50 years, causing scientists to refer to the discrepancy as an “energy crisis” for the planet.

Recently an international team assembled observations from a trio of observatories -- NASA’s Juno spacecraft, the Hisaki satellite from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaiʻi. -- to discover the likely source of Jupiter’s thermal boost.

“We found that Jupiter’s intense aurora, the most powerful in the solar system, is responsible for heating the entire planet’s upper atmosphere to surprisingly high temperatures,” said James O’Donoghue of the JAXA Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Sagamihara, Japan. O’Donoghue began the research while at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and is lead author of a paper about this research appearing in Nature August 4.

Jupiter is first shown in visible light for context before an artistic impression of the Jovian upper atmosphere's infrared glow is overlain. The brightness of this upper atmosphere layer corresponds to temperatures, from hot to cold, in this order: white, yellow, bright red and lastly, dark red. The aurorae are the hottest regions and the animation shows how heat may be carried by winds away from the aurora and cause planet-wide heating. At the end, real data is added with a temperature scale, indicating the observed global temperatures measured in the study.
Credits: J. O'Donoghue (JAXA)/Hubble/NASA/ESA/A. Simon/J. Schmidt

Auroras occur when electrically charged particles are caught in a planet’s magnetic field. These spiral along invisible lines of force in the magnetic field towards the planet’s magnetic poles, striking atoms and molecules in the atmosphere to release light and energy. On Earth, this leads to the colorful light show that forms the aurora Borealis and Australis, also known as the northern and southern lights. At Jupiter, material erupting from its volcanic moon, Io, leads to the most powerful aurora in the Solar System and enormous heating in upper atmosphere over the polar regions of the planet.

Jupiter is shown in visible light for context underneath an artistic impression of the Jovian upper atmosphere's infrared glow. The brightness of this upper atmosphere layer corresponds to temperatures, from hot to cold, in this order: white, yellow, bright red and lastly, dark red. The aurorae are the hottest regions and the image shows how heat may be carried by winds away from the aurora and cause planet-wide heating.
Credits: J. O'Donoghue (JAXA)/Hubble/NASA/ESA/A. Simon/J. Schmidt

The idea that the aurora could be the source of Jupiter’s mysterious energy had been proposed previously but observations have been unable to confirm or deny this until now.

Global models of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere suggested that winds heated by the aurora and headed to the equator would be overwhelmed and redirected by westward winds driven by the planet’s rapid rotation. This would prevent the auroral energy from escaping the polar regions and heating the whole atmosphere. However, this new observational result suggests that such trapping is not occurring, and that the westward winds may be relatively weaker than expected compared with equatorward winds.

High-resolution temperature maps from Keck II, combined with magnetic field data from Hisaki and Juno, allowed the team to catch the aurora in the act of sending what appears to be a pulse of heat toward Jupiter’s equator.

The team observed Jupiter with the Keck II telescope for five hours on two separate nights in April 2016 and January 2017. Using the Near-Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSPEC) on Keck II, heat from electrically charged hydrogen molecules (H3+ ions) in Jupiter’s atmosphere was traced from the planet’s poles down to the equator.

Previous maps of the upper atmospheric temperature were formed using images consisting of only several pixels. That’s not enough resolution to see how the temperature might be changing across the planet, providing few clues as to the origin of the extra heat. To improve the situation, the team utilized the power of Keck II to take many more temperature measurements across the face of the planet and only included measurements with uncertainty in the recorded value of less than five percent. This took years of careful work and yielded temperature maps with over ten thousand individual data points, the highest resolution to date.

Instead of high temperatures only in the polar regions near the aurora, which would be expected if the heat was trapped there, these detailed maps showed that the heat in the upper atmosphere was more widely distributed, with a gradual decrease in temperature closer to the equator.

“We also revealed a strange localized region of heating well away from the aurora - a long bar of heating unlike anything we've seen before,” said Tom Stallard, a co-author of the paper at the University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom. “Though we can't be sure what this feature is, I am convinced it’s a rolling wave of heat flowing equatorward from the aurora.”

Additionally, observations from JAXA’s Hisaki satellite showed that conditions at the time of the Keck II temperature observations could generate a strong aurora on Jupiter. From orbit around Earth, Hisaki has observed the aurora-generating magnetic field around Jupiter since the mission’s launch in 2013. This long-term monitoring has revealed that Jupiter’s magnetic field is strongly influenced by the solar wind; a stream of high-energy particles that emanates from the Sun. The solar wind carries its own magnetic field and when this meets Jupiter’s planetary field, the latter is compressed. At the time of the Keck II observations, Hisaki showed that pressure from the solar wind was particularly high at Jupiter and the field compression is likely to have created an enhanced aurora.Finally, observations from Juno in orbit around Jupiter provided the precise location of the aurora on the planet. “Juno’s magnetic field data provided us with a ‘ground truth’ as to where the aurora was: this information isn't readily available from heat maps, as heat leaks away in many directions,” said O’Donoghue. “Picture this like a beach: if the hot atmosphere is water, the magnetic field mapped by Juno is shoreline, and the aurora is ocean, we found that water left the ocean and flooded the land, and Juno revealed where that shoreline was to help us understand the degree of flooding.”

Jupiter is shown in visible light for context with an artistic impression of the Jovian upper atmosphere's infrared glow overlain, along with magnetic field lines (blue lines). The aurorae are the hottest regions and the image shows how heat may be carried by winds away from the aurora and cause planet-wide heating.
Credits: J. O'Donoghue (JAXA)/Hubble/NASA/ESA/A. Simon/J. Schmidt

"It was pure luck that we captured this potential heat-shedding event,” adds O’Donoghue. “If we’d observed Jupiter on a different night, when the solar wind pressure had not recently been high, we would have missed it!”

More about the observatories and partners:

The research was funded by NASA through the Solar System Observations Program and the Solar System Workings Program as well as JAXA’s International Top Young Fellowship program. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas. NASA Goddard built and runs Juno’s magnetometer instrument. The W. M. Keck Observatory is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA. The Observatory was made possible by the financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community; the authors are fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.

{ https://www.nasa.gov/ }

After baffling scientists for 50 long years, the mystery of what’s causing Jupiter’s heat may finally be solved. The mysterious “energy crisis” on our Solar System’s largest planet is believed to be caused by auroras.

Since Jupiter is so far from our sun, experts were baffled as to why it is so hot. In fact, it is 5.2 astronomical units away from the sun, meaning that it is 5.2 times the distance that Earth is from the sun. Based on its location, the temperature in the Gas Giant’s upper atmosphere should be around -100 degrees Fahrenheit (-73 degrees Celsius); however, it is a whopping 800 degrees Fahrenheit (427 degrees Celsius). To put this into better perspective, the average surface temperature on Venus is 847 degrees Fahrenheit (453 degrees Celsius) – slightly hotter than Jupiter.

Image taken in 2016 by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

As for what is causing Jupiter to remain so hot, astronomers believe that the powerful magnetic field causes strong auroras which ultimately heats up the planet. When a magnetic field is strong, it sends electrically charged particles towards the poles that cause them to hit molecules and atoms in the atmosphere that create beautiful lights. And Jupiter has a very strong magnetic field (much more powerful than Earth’s). The volcanic eruptions on Jupiter’s moon Io sends a lot of particles into the planet’s atmosphere. Furthermore, the size of the Gas Giant and its powerful winds are contributing factors in how the heat moves throughout the planet.

The astronomers came to this conclusion by analyzing data collected by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Hisaki satellite, and the Keck II telescope. They watched how an aurora sent a pulse of heat towards the planet’s equator as James O’Donoghue, who is a planetary space scientist at JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, noted in a statement provided by the Keck Observatory, “It was pure luck that we captured this potential heat-shedding event,” adding, “If we’d observed Jupiter on a different night, when the solar wind pressure had not recently been high, we would have missed it.”

By using a near-infrared spectrograph, Keck performed two observations (April of 2016 and January of 2017) that showed how electrically charged hydrogen molecules traveled from the poles to the equator. Keck II then measured the temperatures. (An artist’s impression of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere infrared glow can be seen here.)

They even found something else that surprised them, “We also revealed a strange, localized region of heating well away from the aurora — a long bar of heating unlike anything we’ve seen before,” explained Tom Stallard from the University of Leicester, “Though we can’t be sure what this feature is, I am convinced it’s a rolling wave of heat flowing equatorward from the aurora.”

The study was published in Nature where it can be read in full.

Jupiter is shown in visible light for context underneath an artistic impression of the Jovian upper atmosphere's infrared glow. The brightness of this upper atmosphere layer corresponds to temperatures, from hot to cold, in this order: white, yellow, bright red and lastly, dark red. The aurorae are the hottest regions and the image shows how heat may be carried by winds away from the aurora and cause planet-wide heating.
Credits: J. O'Donoghue (JAXA)/Hubble/NASA/ESA/A. Simon/J. Schmidt

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

An image of suspected UFOs taken over Ireland.

The truth is out there!

A cow believed to have been mutilated by extraterrestrials

A pair of UFO enthusiasts are looking to make contact with a woman who told her story on national radio earlier this year about a mysterious sighting that appeared over Cavan Town more than three decades ago.

Carl Nally and Dermot Butler have co-authored a number of hugely popular books on phenomena such as ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’. They include Conspiracy of Silence, States of Denial, Circle of Deceit - with two more compendium type novels in the offing.

The caller, who spoke on Joe Duffy’s ‘Liveline’ on RTE Radio One said she had seen a “large object” over Cavan Town in August 1987 and the pair are interested in speaking with any other witnesses to the alleged sighting.

“It was Dermot who heard it and we found we hadn’t got information about that on our files, so we’re very interested in finding anything more about the sighting. We can then compare it with other sightings of the same type of craft, or others seen in the area,” explains Mr Nally.

According to data compiled by online resource ‘Psychic World’ earlier this year, Ireland tops the list for the most UFO sightings in Europe with 105, followed by France and Spain. It’s stated that each visit over the Emerald Isle lasts on average 13 minutes, with the majority of the sightings described as being inexplicable bright lights.

The US-based National UFO Reporting Center, meanwhile, records in detail personal accounts, dates and locations, the most recent occurring in Doolin, Co Clare, on May 30 last; and the closest to Cavan being in Mullingar on April 5 where the night before circles were observed in the sky over the Westmeath town for around eight minutes.

Neighbouring Co Meath has several more dating back over a number of years. Among the most interesting was a sighting in the early hours of August 6, 2019, when a person reported seeking a “blue” light “scanning skies with 3D lazers”, which lasted for around 10 mins.

In 2012 a person posted reporting an orange-coloured light cluster in formation, which when shared on social media, was similarly sighted in Navan, Kells and Oldcastle.

Elsewhere that same year in a separate resource there are records of three separate sightings of a UFO over Shantemon Mountain near Castletara.

Before that, on September 30, 1996, a slow-moving object was observed for around half an hour, moving east to west over Carrickmacross before retracing its path again in a way that dispelled suggestions it could be a plane.

Then again in Kells, on August 15, 1977, strange lights and shapes were spotted high above for several hours. At one point, an observer reported seeing a large triangular craft, with a multi-coloured light trail, fly past at high speed.

The region of course has a rich heritage in exploring, and indeed welcoming, paranormal activity, where the late Desmond Leslie of Castle Leslie, Glaslough, was celebrated in such circles for his studies as a ‘ufologist’.

UFO landing strip

A former British pilot amongst other titles earned, he was one of the first proponents of flying saucers and UFOs, co-writing with George Adamaski the bestselling ‘Flying Saucers have Landed’, a book later translated into more than 50 languages. He is also famously said to have approached Monaghan County Council about the prospect of building a UFO landing strip within the grounds of the historic Leslie estate.

“[Mr Leslie] was a wonderful man, a great mind on the subject, and we wrote to him and had arranged to meet prior to his death. Certainly he was a strong believer, and was said to have experienced strange lights and extraterrestrial behaviour in the area,” says Mr Nally, who first became interested in UFOlogy at the age of 16 years when he witnessed circular objects travel at altitude and, without stopping, veer at right angles before heading west.

“There were about 20 of them, and I was fascinated by this because any manoeuvre like that would kill a terrestrial pilot. There is no way they could stop and move at those angles and that speed,” he surmised.

Public interest in UFOs has again been piqued following the recent publication of the Pentagon’s preliminary assessment after reviewing 144 unidentified observations made by military aviators between 2004 and 2021.

Of the reports examined, the task force could only determine an explanation for one - a deflated balloon. The rest remain unexplained.

While Mr Nally says there appears to be “no rhyme or reason” as to where UFO sightings might occur, he actively encourages people who do encounter such experiences to consider as much detail as possible before passing it on to people like him who have spent a life time investigating such matters.

“Navan, Cavan, Kells, we’ve had people report seeing something hovering over fields before shooting off at speed, or lights leaping from one field to another and then the UFO will fly off.

“What’s important for us is to be able to put two sightings together, and match that with as many witness accounts as possible.”

Incidents of animal mutilations is another subject Carl and Dermot are very keen to explore further.

“Bodies across the world deny it but we know it’s happening, animals being found with organs cauterised. Examinations carried out in the UK show in some incidents sexual organs cored out with lazer equipment, and most of the animals are drained completely of blood. No one can explain that. To say it’s scavengers, grey crows, is complete rubbish. The truth will come out sometime.”

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://www.anglocelt.ie/ }

The USO phenomenon in 1975

Amazing how much was known about the USO (unidentified submerged object) phenomenon in 1975.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

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

Major Milestone for NASA’s Revolutionary Roman Space Telescope

The Space Telescope Science Institute Will Host Roman’s Science Operations Center and Data Archive

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has just successfully completed the critical design review of the mission’s ground systems, which are spread over multiple institutions including the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; and Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California. STScI will host the Science Operations Center while Goddard will provide the Mission Operations Center and Caltech/IPAC will house the Science Support Center. The passing of the critical design review means the plan for science operations has met all of the design, schedule, and budget requirements. The mission will now proceed to the next phase: building and testing the newly designed systems that will enable planning and scheduling of Roman observations and managing the resulting data, which will amount to over 20 petabytes (20,000,000 GB) within the first five years of operations.

When it launches in the mid-2020s, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will revolutionize astronomy by building on the science discoveries and technological leaps of the Hubble, Spitzer, and Webb space telescopes. The mission’s wide field of view and superb resolution will enable scientists to conduct sweeping cosmic surveys, yielding a wealth of information about celestial realms from our solar system to the edge of the observable universe.

On July 23rd, the Roman Space Telescope successfully completed the critical design review of the mission’s ground systems, which are spread over multiple institutions including the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; and Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California. STScI will host the Science Operations Center (SOC) while Goddard will provide the Mission Operations Center and Caltech/IPAC will house the Science Support Center. The passing of the critical design review means the plan for science operations provides all the necessary data processing and archiving capabilities. The mission will now proceed to the next phase: building and testing the newly designed systems that will enable planning and scheduling of Roman observations and managing the resulting data, anticipated to be over 20 petabytes (20,000,000 GB) within the first five years of operations.

“At STScI, we are really excited about the opportunities for discovery that Roman will bring. All areas of astrophysics will benefit,” said STScI deputy director Nancy Levenson. “We are developing novel tools and new ways of working so the global research community can make best use of the advanced capabilities of this survey-oriented, ‘big data’ space mission.”

“A lot of work is required to reach this stage in any space mission, and our team faced the added challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic. The successful completion of the critical design review is a testament to all of their efforts,” said Cristina Oliveira, SOC deputy head at STScI.

In its role as Science Operations Center, STScI will plan, schedule, and carry out observations, process and archive mission datasets, and engage and inform the astronomical community and the public. STScI will collaborate closely with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which manages the mission and will host the Mission Operations Center (MOC). The MOC is responsible for overall spacecraft operations and overseeing the data transmitted between the spacecraft and the ground. The collaboration also includes Caltech/IPAC, home of the Roman Science Support Center (SSC), which works with the other ground system elements to achieve the scientific and operational goals of Roman.  

The Science Support Center at Caltech/IPAC is tasked with issuing calls for Roman proposals to the general science community and managing the proposal process. It will also lead the Coronagraph Instrument observation planning and data products, and provide a data analysis environment for the instrument and community team. In addition, it is responsible for community outreach for both exoplanet science and science enabled by spectroscopic observations. The SSC is also developing and operating science data pipelines to process data from the Wide Field Instrument spectroscopic modes and for exoplanet microlensing science.

Goddard is developing the Wide Field Instrument to perform the major science surveys, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is developing the Coronagraph Instrument to perform exoplanet direct imaging observations.

Expanding Our View

Roman will be able to capture an area over 100 times larger than Hubble in a single snapshot. This will give it the unique ability to do wide-field surveys at space-based resolution, which will be the observatory’s primary operating mode.

“Unlike Hubble and Webb, Roman is a survey mission first and foremost,” explained acting SOC mission scientist John MacKenty of STScI. “Our role is to help gather input from the astronomical community, make those surveys ready for the community to do science, and give the community the tools they need to do their research.”

Roman’s surveys will generate mountains of data, creating new challenges for scientists seeking to analyze those data. As a result, STScI is spearheading the use of cloud-based computing for Roman data processing.

“Instead of sending the data to the astronomer, we’re bringing the astronomer to the data,” said SOC mission systems engineer Chris Hanley of STScI.

All of the data collected by the Roman Space Telescope will be accessible via the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at STScI. Those data will be publicly available within days of the observations – a first for a NASA astrophysics flagship mission. Since scientists everywhere will have rapid access to the data, they will be able to quickly discover and follow up on short-lived phenomena, such as supernova explosions.

The Science of the Roman Space Telescope

Roman will enable new science in all areas of astrophysics. It can search for dwarf planets, comets, and asteroids in our solar system. It will image stars throughout our own galaxy to measure its structure and investigate its formation history. It will also survey the birthplaces of stars, giant nurseries of gas and dust which Roman’s large field of view will be able to fully image at high resolution for the first time.

By staring deeply at wide swaths of apparently blank sections of sky, Roman will image an unprecedented number of galaxies with high resolution. Roman will map the distribution of dark matter within large clusters of galaxies and discover thousands of galaxies at very high redshifts, which will provide the tools to study how galaxies change over cosmic time.

Roman’s surveys will deliver new insights into the history and structure of the universe, including the mysterious “dark energy” that is making space itself expand faster and faster. This powerful new observatory will also build on the broad foundation of work begun with Hubble and other observatories like Kepler/K2 and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) on planets outside our solar system. It will discover thousands of exoplanets using its wide-field camera. Its Coronagraph Instrument will conduct a technology demonstration and, depending on its performance, may provide studies of the atmospheres of giant gaseous planets orbiting other stars.

The Space Telescope Science Institute is expanding the frontiers of space astronomy by hosting the science operations center of the Hubble Space Telescope, the science and mission operations centers for the James Webb Space Telescope, and the science operations center for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. STScI also houses the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) which is a NASA-funded project to support and provide to the astronomical community a variety of astronomical data archives, and is the data repository for the Hubble, Webb, Roman, Kepler, K2, TESS missions, and more. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Melbourne, Florida; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.

{ https://scitechdaily.com/ }

Are You Ready for Benevolent Artificial Intelligence

Picture yourself driving on a narrow road in the near future when suddenly another car emerges from a bend ahead. It is a self-driving car with no passengers inside. Will you push forth and assert your right of way, or give way to let it pass? At present, most of us behave kindly in such situations involving other humans. Will we show that same kindness towards autonomous vehicles?

Using methods from behavioural game theory, an international team of researchers at LMU Munich and the University of London have conducted large-scale online studies to see whether people would behave as cooperatively with artificial intelligence (AI) systems as they do with fellow humans.

Cooperation holds a society together. It often requires us to compromise with others and to accept the risk that they let us down. Traffic is a good example. We lose a bit of time when we let other people pass in front of us and are outraged when others fail to reciprocate our kindness. Will we do the same with machines?

The study which is published in the journal iScience found that, upon first encounter, people have the same level of trust toward AI as for human: most expect to meet someone who is ready to cooperate.The difference comes afterwards. People are much less ready to reciprocate with AI, and instead exploit its benevolence to their own benefit. Going back to the traffic example, a human driver would give way to another human but not to a self-driving car.The study identifies this unwillingness to compromise with machines as a new challenge to the future of human-AI interactions.

Credit: Pixabay

“We put people in the shoes of someone who interacts with an artificial agent for the first time, as it could happen on the road,” explains Jurgis Karpus, Ph.D., a behavioural game theorist and a philosopher at LMU Munich and the first author of the study. “We modelled different types of social encounters and found a consistent pattern. People expected artificial agents to be as cooperative as fellow humans. However, they did not return their benevolence as much and exploited the AI more than humans.”

With perspectives from game theory, cognitive science, and philosophy, the researchers found that ‘algorithm exploitation’ is a robust phenomenon. They replicated their findings across nine experiments with nearly 2,000 human participants. Each experiment examines different kinds of social interactions and allows the human to decide whether to compromise and cooperate or act selfishly. Expectations of the other players were also measured. In a well-known game, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, people must trust that the other characters will not let them down. They embraced risk with humans and AI alike, but betrayed the trust of the AI much more often, to gain more money.

“Cooperation is sustained by a mutual bet: I trust you will be kind to me, and you trust I will be kind to you. The biggest worry in our field is that people will not trust machines. But we show that they do!” notes Dr. Bahador Bahrami, a social neuroscientist at the LMU, and one of the senior researchers in the study. “They are fine with letting the machine down, though, and that is the big difference. People even do not report much guilt when they do,” he adds.

Biased and unethical AI has made many headline — from the 2020 exams fiasco in the United Kingdom to justice systems — but this new research brings up a novel caution. The industry and legislators strive to ensure that artificial intelligence is benevolent. But benevolence may backfire. If people think that AI is programmed to be benevolent towards them, they will be less tempted to cooperate. Some of the accidents involving self-driving cars may already show real-life examples: drivers recognize an autonomous vehicle on the road, and expect it to give way. The self-driving vehicle meanwhile expects for normal compromises between drivers to hold.“

Algorithm exploitation has further consequences down the line. “If humans are reluctant to let a polite self-driving car join from a side road, should the self-driving car be less polite and more aggressive in order to be useful?” asks Jurgis Karpus.

“Benevolent and trustworthy AI is a buzzword that everyone is excited about. But fixing the AI is not the whole story. If we realize that the robot in front of us will be cooperative no matter what, we will use it to our selfish interest,” says Professor Ophelia Deroy, a philosopher and senior author on the study, who also works with Norway’s Peace Research Institute Oslo on the ethical implications of integrating autonomous robot soldiers along with human soldiers.

“Compromises are the oil that make society work. For each of us, it looks only like a small act of self-interest. For society as a whole, it could have much bigger repercussions. If no one lets autonomous cars join the traffic, they will create their own traffic jams on the side, and not make transport easier”.

Contacts and sources:

• Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Publication:

• Algorithm exploitation: humans are keen to exploit benevolent AI.
  Jurgis Karpus, Adrian Krüger, Julia Tovar Verba, Bahador Bahrami, Ophelia Deroy. iScience, 2021; 102679 DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2021.102679

Source: 

• https://www.ineffableisland.com/2021/06/are-you-ready-for-benevolent-artificial.html

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

12 Mysterious Events That Left Scientists Scratching Their Heads

People are accustomed to routine events. However, something strange occurring anywhere in the world evokes interest across the globe. You might be familiar with certain mysteries. So, let us introduce you to a few mysterious events that are bound to pique your interest. From the true story of a young boy going into coma and waking up to speak a language completely foreign to him to actual rivers on fire, we got it all. Some would be terrified to know that a star in the galaxy disappeared suddenly for which astronomers could not find any reason. These jaw dropping events will make you feel like a very small and helpless part of a divine plan.

Here are the twelve most mind boggling, mysterious events that astonished everyone who found out about them.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

August 10 612 BC: Nineveh, the Largest City in the World, Fell

On this day, 2,632 years ago, the ancient metropolis of Nineveh fell. “ ABC 3 ” is a historiographical text from ancient Babylonia which records August 10th 612 BC as the date of this dramatic occurrence. At that time, Nineveh was the largest city in the world and the capital of Assyria. This all came to an abrupt end when Nabopolassar, the Chaldean king of Babylonia and a central figure in the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, siezed Nineveh. This marked what historians know as one of the most shocking events in ancient history: The “First” Fall of Nineveh. The “second” Fall of Nineveh occurred in 2015 with more destruction by ISIS.

The Discovery of Nineveh: A Unparalleled Archaeological Find

Ancient Mesopotamia was a cradle of civilization in the northern part of western Asia’s Fertile Crescent, corresponding to modern Iraq, Kuwait, eastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and areas along the Turkish–Syrian and Iran–Iraq borders. In 1839, Paul-Émile Botta of France excavated a series of mounds in the Iraqi desert that led to the incredible discovery of Nineveh, the vast ancient Assyrian city of Upper Mesopotamia located on the outskirts of modern-day Mosul in northern Iraq.

This discovery in mid-19th-century Europe was truly amazing, because it meant that at least one of the ancient cities and cultures mentioned in the Bible actually existed. This gave the Holy Bible a breath of newfound esteem at a time when scientists were demanding the empirical testing of supernatural claims, replacing time worn myths with logic and reason. The discovery of ancient Nineveh changed everything.

Ancient Nineveh: A Royal City Envied Far And Wide 

The Assyrian Empire started to become unstable after the death of King Aššurbanipal in 631 BC when the Babylonians ended their independence. Around 627 AD the Babylonian general Nabopolassar defeated the Assyrians in a battle near Babylon and became king, marking the beginning of the Babylonian Empire which lasted until Nineveh was captured by the Persian Cyrus the Great in October 539 AD.

Assyrian military campaign in southern Mesopotamia, 640-620 BC, from an alabaster bas-relief located in the South-West Palace at Nineveh.

(Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin / CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Although he had liberated Babylonia, Nabopolassar also wanted destroy its capital cities including the religious center at Aššur, the first Assyrian city, and the administrative center at Nineveh. To prevent this, which would have caused a major shift of power in the Near East, the Egyptians offered military support to Assyria. The Fall of Nineveh Chronicle says that on 25 July 616 AD Nabopolassar defeated an Assyrian force on the banks of the Euphrates to the south of Harran. However, soon after he retreated when an Egyptian army closed on his forces. By at the end of the following year, the Medes, a tribal federation living in modern Iran, seized the moment, amidst all the unrest, and had took control of Nineveh.

This image, taken in April 2017 during a UNESCO mission to Nineveh, which was heavily destroyed and excavated by ISIS in the "second" Fall of Nineveh in 2015.

(UNESCO / CC BY-SA 3.0 )

Nabopolassar tactfully signed a treaty with the Medes king Umakištar (Cyaxares). The Babylonian crown prince Nabû-kudurru-usur (Nebuchadnezzar) is said to have married Amytis, who many historians hold to have been the daughter of Cyaxares' son Astyages. The joint Medes-Babylonian army invaded Nineveh in May 612 AD the city finally fell in July. According to an article on Livius after the suicide of King Sin-šar-iškun, “the looting of Nineveh continued until 10 August, when the Medes finally went home,” and that the fall of Nineveh “shocked the ancient world.” From distant Greece, the poet Phocylides of Miletus reported of the destruction of this ancient city.

ISIS soldiers in the Museum of Mosul destroying ancient Nineveh artifacts with sledgehammers in 2015.

(Aljazeera / Screenshot)

2015: The “Second” Fall of Nineveh By ISIS Destruction

While Nineveh fell for the first time over 2500 years ago, destruction of the ancient city continued in 2015 when a priceless Assyrian winged bull was demolished at the Nineveh site. An article in The Guardian discussing the destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) described the destruction as a “war crime.” At the same time, the terrorist organization attempted to attract a sympathetic audience to gain new recruits in their homeland, while provoking reactions in the West.

• Tragedy as militants bomb 2,700-year-old Nineveh Wall in Iraq
• 3000-Year-Old Assyrian Reliefs Unearthed in ISIS Stomping Ground
• Three ancient cities to rival London, Paris and New York

A 2015 Aljazeera video shows the destruction of several 7th century artifacts from Nineveh on February 26 2015, when ISIS publicly destroyed the Mosul Museum. Many other artifacts were stolen and put up for sale in foreign markets. However in 2019, the BBC announced that since Iraqi troops recaptured Mosul in 2017, part of the Mosul Museum has been restored and reopened to exhibit contemporary art, while the rest of the museum remains closed “to protect what is left,” said the museum director. If the first Fall of Nineveh was incredible, the second fall of Nineveh was both tragic and disturbing.

• Top image: Assyrian soldiers carry beheaded heads of their prisoners as depicted on a wall in the South-West Palace at Nineveh, during the “First” Fall of Neneveh.         
• Source: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin / CC BY-SA 4.0

By Ashley Cowie

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

Suspected UFO Sighting by Civilian, Military Aircraft Reported on Canadian Government Website

by Andrei Dergalin

{ https://sputniknews.com/ }

Nieuwe berekening van NASA: asteroïde Bennu in 2182 het gevaarlijkst

De aardappelvorminge ruimterots Bennu vormt op 24 september 2182 een mogelijke bedreiging voor de aarde. Het kan zijn dat de asteroïde dan op onze planeet botst. De waarschijnlijkheid is ongeveer 1 op 2700 (0,037 procent). In het algemeen geldt voor de periode tot 2300 een mogelijkheid van 1 op 1750 (0,057 procent).

  Bron:ANP, de Volkskrant

Hoewel de kans dat Bennu de aarde raakt erg klein is, blijft het een van de twee gevaarlijkste bekende asteroïden in ons zonnestelsel, samen met een andere, genaamd 1950 DA, aldus de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA. NASA-onderzoekers gebruikten bij hun berekeningen gegevens van de ruimtesonde OSIRIS-REx.

Lees ook

• 

  PREMIUM

  Nasa-sonde Osiris-Rex verliest deeltjes van planetoïde in de ruimte

De kans op een botsing doet zich pas ná 2135 voor, wanneer de planetoïde zeer dicht langs de aarde raast. De zwaartekracht van de aarde past Bennu’s baan dan zodanig aan dat een botsing bij een volgende passage mogelijk wordt.

De kans dat de ruimterots tussen 2135 en 2300 inslaat bleek na de nieuwe analyse zo’n 1 op 1.750. In september 2182 is dus de kans op botsing het grootst.

Aardappelvormige rots

De Amerikaanse ruimtesonde OSIRIS-REx heeft de afgelopen jaren onderzoek gedaan bij Bennu. Dat is een aardappelvormige rots van ongeveer een halve kilometer doorsnee. Hij draait in een baan rond de zon, momenteel op 306 miljoen kilometer afstand van de aarde. De asteroïde kan wetenschappers iets vertellen over het ontstaan van ons zonnestelsel en over het ontstaan van leven op aarde.

De metingen van OSIRIS-REx helpen de bewegingen van de mogelijk gevaarlijke asteroïde de komende eeuwen beter te begrijpen, aldus NASA. Het vermindert de onzekerheden over de toekomstige baan aanzienlijk. Ook verbetert het het vermogen van wetenschappers om de waarschijnlijkheid van een inslag te bepalen en banen van andere asteroïden te voorspellen.

NASA deelt "belangrijke ontdekking" bij asteroïde Bennu

Een van de doelen van NASA is het vinden en in de gaten houden van asteroïden en kometen die in de buurt van de aarde kunnen komen en gevaarlijk kunnen zijn voor onze planeet. “De OSIRIS-REx-missie bood een buitengewone kans om deze modellen te verfijnen en te testen, waardoor we beter kunnen voorspellen waar Bennu zal zijn wanneer hij over ruim een eeuw dicht bij de aarde komt”, aldus de de organisatie.

De missie van de OSIRIS-REx kost 1 miljard euro. In 2016 werd de sonde gelanceerd en in 2018 kwam hij in een baan rond Bennu. Vanuit alle hoeken werd de rots gemeten en gefotografeerd. Die gegevens werden naar de aarde gestuurd om te bestuderen.

Een ander onderdeel van het onderzoek volgt nog. In oktober vorig jaar daalde de OSIRIS-REx af naar het oppervlak van Bennu om daar ongeveer 60 gram steentjes en stof op te zuigen. Die zijn verzameld in een bakje aan boord van de sonde. Een paar maanden geleden begon de OSIRIS-REx aan de miljoenen kilometers lange terugreis naar de aarde. Het is de bedoeling dat hij in september 2023 op aarde landt, waarna wetenschappers het opgehaalde gruis onder de microscoop kunnen leggen.

De Amerikaanse ruimtesonde OSIRIS-REx heeft de afgelopen jaren onderzoek gedaan bij Bennu en vorig jaar zelfs gruis verzameld.  © AP

© AP

De Amerikaanse ruimtesonde OSIRIS-REx heeft de afgelopen jaren onderzoek gedaan bij Bennu (artistieke impressie).  © AP

GERELATEERDE VIDEO'S, uitgekozen en gepost door peter2011

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

The UFO Phenomenon | Full Documentary

It is now beyond doubt that strange, anomalous objects filling our skies and caught on camera are the real deal. Even the Pentagon admits it’s true. These seemingly intelligently controlled craft are operating above the clouds, in our oceans and in our orbit – travelling at hypersonic speeds far beyond any known human technology and completing manoeuvres unknown to science. The subject of conspiracy and derision for years, UFOs are now the hottest topic in Washington and the world. Five-time Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist Ross Coulthart – who has been investigating the phenomena for the past two years – led the 7NEWS Spotlight team across the US, amassing never-before-seen compelling evidence and speaking to the key players behind an event that will change the course of history.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

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

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - MUFON CASES - - 12 - 8 - 2021

MUFON CASE : 117235 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ( August 11, 2021 )

Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : strange object closeup
Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117235

Witnessed by 4 audio removed b/c of yelling & cussing words It is not a balloon or drone

Date Submitted : 2021-08-11
Date of Event : 2021-08-11
MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : blackobject.mp4

VIDEO 2 : MUFON CASE : 117231 Palos Heights, Illinois
Glowing UFO Spotted in Illinois
Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117231

I was outside and I was sitting there on a chair in the middle of our yard, I look up to my right and see a normal plane flying at regular distance from the ground heading to midway airport like they usually do. I then look out far east and in the atmosphere I see this cylindrical glowing object, it did NOT look like a normal plan and was flying on a steady path at a normal not fast or slow speed, but was FAR OUT in the atmosphere. This video was cropped so I don't disclose personal information about where I live. However, this video is completely untampered with and I have the time and date stamp mark on the original video I recorded to prove it. This was recorded from an I-phone 11 Pro, the footage I am going to show you is a slowed down recording I made frame by frame from the original video I took.

Date Submitted : 2021-08-11
Date of Event : 2021-08-08
MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : evidence.mp4

VIDEO 3 : MUFON CASE : 117236 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
creature security cam footage
Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117236

A ufo was sighted around the neighbourhood last night.

Date Submitted : 2021-08-11
Date of Event : 2021-08-11
MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : Aug112021.mp4

RELATED VIDEO

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - MUFON CASES - - 11- 8 - 2021

MUFON CASE : 117221 Brooklyn, New York ( August 10, 2021 )

Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Giant blue ufo ejecting ufos : Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117221 : Recorded from cellphone which turned off for no reason

Date Submitted : 2021-08-10
Date of Event : 2021-08-09

• note : file has been looped 

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 12 - 08 - 2021

UFO Sighted Releasing Probes Over Mooca, São Paulo, Brazil ( August 8, 2021 )

Extraordinary sighting of another UFOs releasing probes in the Mooca neighborhood, São Paulo, Brazil on August 8, 2021

Here I present the originals and an approximate analysis.

Closer and more evident every day

• credit : Diego Santos

UFO Ejects Craft Over Japan ( August 10, 2021 )

Video of a Bright Unidentified Object or UFO Ejecting a smaller object or UFO from itself. Filmed In Japan on August 10, 2021.

Here i present the original : Closer every day

• credit : Yuki Serpo
• note : no audio

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 11 - 08 - 2021

Flashing UFO Sighted Over Colombia ( August 9, 2021 )

Intense extream flashing UFO was sighted over the skies of Colombia on August 9, 2021 : UFO has intense extream flashing light

what is this mysterious bright flashing light above Colombia.

They are everywhere

• credit : U.S.F

Transparent UFO Sighted Over Mt. Fuji Shizuoka Japan ( August 10, 2021 )

Transparent Cloaked UFO was sighted over Mt. Fuji Shizuoka Airport, Japan : 富士山静岡空港 on August 10, 2021 : What is this mysterious transparent spherical UFO / UAP/ ORB doing over Mt. Fuji Shizuoka Airport : Here i present the original

Closer every day and more evident

• credit : アルマ・ウリベ

What Is Above Us?(UFO SIGHTINGS)

Several unexplained sightings. Come and join in on the discussions?
All Lunar and Planetarium videos made by Terry's Theories.
Source of first video MUFON case # 117112
Source of second video MUFON case # 117024

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

N.S. expert says American UFO report could be about something else entirely

Recent examples could be governments experimenting with hypersonics, says Paul Kimball

Carsten Knox · CBC News 

In this 2015 video declassified by the U.S. Department of Defence, U.S. navy pilots track an unidentified flying object off the coast of Jacksonville, Fla. 0:35

"The U.S. navy has come out and said, 'Yes, these are real videos. Our guys took them and we're not exactly sure what they represent,'" said Kimball. "And that's kind of it. You know, I hate to be the skunk at the garden party, but at the moment that's as far as it goes. Then there's the UFO media machine, as I like to call it, that latches on to that and drums up interest in the subject and says, 'Well, OK, space aliens.' And it's a very long leap to get from these videos to space aliens.

"We have some anomalies. We can't necessarily explain them. No evidence to say that they're space aliens, but no evidence to say that they're not, you know, so leaving the door open."

As far as what else the U.S. government might be up to with the release of this current report, Kimball tells a story his close friend, Karl T. Pflock, told him.

The late Pflock was deputy assistant secretary of defence in the Ronald Reagan administration, a strategic planner, a CIA officer, UFO researcher, and author of Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe. 

"Karl actually believed that space aliens had visited Earth," said Kimball. "So we weren't talking about somebody who said there were never any space aliens. But, he said, 'Look, most of these cases can be explained by testing advanced weapon systems. The government is working on technology that is 10 or 15 years in advance of what they'll admit to.' 

"You're sort of seeing in many of these cases, like the Belgian triangle flap that occurred in the 1980s, that was probably delta-wing aircraft being tested by the United States military. Well, you would mistake that potentially for a UFO."

Kimball suggests governments have been experimenting with hypersonics, the kind of technology that, theoretically, could be what these navy pilots may be seeing but not actually know anything about. If it represents tech being developed by the United States, these videos are a way to let America's enemies know what's coming soon without being overt about it. But if it's the tech of another superpower, that would be a problem. 

"That would be very concerning from a national security point of view, which is, I think, why members of Congress are really interested in it," said Kimball. 

For the record, Canada's Department of National Defence doesn't have a dog in this fight. Spokesperson Jessica Lamirande sent a statement to CBC News on the subject of the American report. 

"The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) do not typically investigate sightings of unknown or unexplained phenomena outside the context of investigating credible threats, potential threats, or potential distress in the case of search and rescue," the statement said.

"Although we collaborate closely with the U.S. for aerospace control, we are not aware of any Canadian nexus or participation in the U.S. Department of Defence's UFO studies at this time, nor does the CAF have a unit dedicated to investigating UFOs." 

Kimball remains an agnostic about extraterrestrial visitors to Earth, but he also thinks the subject is worth serious consideration. 

"I'm very open to the idea of the paranormal or the supernatural or things beyond our understanding, however you want to frame it," he said.

"The odds are there are extraterrestrials in our galaxy. So could they be coming here? Yeah. Have I seen anything yet that absolutely convinces me that they have been coming here? No. But I've seen enough to make me think this isn't a subject that you should laugh at." 

{ https://www.cbc.ca/ }

On August 8, 2021 a drone owner in the city of Vera Cruz, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil captured a high speed object at the moment the object passes close to the drone in straight path.

The drone owner wonders whether the object was a small airplane, another drone, a bird or eventually something else. 

After analyzing the object with other similar objects moving through the sky at very high speed, it looks like it is a so-called UFO "fastwalker".

 “Fastwalker” is a term used by NORAD and branches of armed forces to describe unidentified aerial phenomena moving and/or changing directions at high speed far beyond what current aerospace technology is capable of.

  

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

UFO deploying two small objects over São Paulo, Brazil 8-Aug-2021

This video was filmed in the Mooca District in São Paulo, Brazil on August 8th 2021. It shows a bright UFO deploying two small objects.

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

UFO report ‘vindication’ for man who tracked 1994 sightings on radar

It was the night of March 8, 1994. Working at the National Weather Service, Bushong’s radar was lighting up with stuff he’d never seen before.

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

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 10 - 08 - 2021

UFO Sighted Over Middleburgh, New York ( August 8, 2021 )

Impressive UFO was sighted over the skies of Middleburgh, Schoharie County, New York on August 8, 2021

STATEMENT : UFOs in our airspace.

They are everywhere

• credit : A Esemplare 

New Crop Circle, Kitt's Lane, Nr West Meon, Hampshire.( August 8, 2021 )

This Stunning crop circle was discovered on August 8, 2021 North West of Meon in Hampshire, England . Crop circle show a unique six pointed star design aligning with what seekers call the 'Lion's Gate 8/8.'

• credit : Stonehenge Dronescapes

RELATED VIDEO

What's Happening? Glitch in the Matrix ? ( August 8, 2021 )

What's happening? Glitch in the matrix ? August 8, 2021 : What if we are living in a simulation, and the world as we know it.
This is the simulation theory -- the idea that our entire universe could be running inside of some sort of extra-dimensional computer ..

STATEMENT : What's happening?!?! Glitch in the matrix.....?

Is this a glitch in the matrix an account for a missing period of time or a lapse in the space-time continium.

• credit : .W Wijk

UFO Sighted Over Spain ( August 8, 2021 )

UFO Mothership or Portal Entrance ? This was sighted over Spain on August 8, 2021

STATEMENT : Strange cloud appears in Spain, what is it?

ORIGINAL : Aparece una nube extraña en España, ¿qué es esto? Closer every day

• credit : H Motti

RELATED VIDEOS

Huge UFO Sighted Over Mexico City ( August 8, 2021 )

A Huge UFO was sighted over a Mexican Federal Highway in Mexico City 

STATEMENT : They send me this video in private message of a UFO sighting in Mexico City
ORIGINAL : Me mandan, este video por privado, de un avistamiento O.V.N.I en Ciudad de Mexico

• credit : U.S.F

UFO Filmed Deploying Two Objects & Fast-walker UFO Filmed By Drone Over Brazil. August 8, 2021

Guys, thanks for all the kind words and support. It meant alot to me....

Clip one was filmed on the 8th of August 2021 from the Mooca District of São Paulo, Brazil. In the clip we can see this brightly lit object fly over the sky of Mooca, the quick thinking witness pulled over his car and managed to filmed the UFO moments before it deployed two smaller objects. The Main craft seem to be Plasma in origin, as it doesn't seem solid.
Thanks to Diego Santos for allowing me the use of his footage and to view the original: https://youtu.be/K5A1b2ar-nk

Second clip was also filmed on the 8th of August 2021 from Vera Cruz in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The Fast-walker was filmed by the camera on-board this drone. The object passes close to drone in straight path but what could this object be???
Thanks to Fabricio Bullerjahn for allowing me the use of his footage and to view the original: https://youtu.be/_v20x74tBOs

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

Anunnaki Revealed: Who Were These Beings of Ancient Astronaut Theory? – Part I

The modern era has witnessed an incredible surge in the popularity of all forms of media concerning the mythology of the ancient Mesopotamians. Fueling this ever-growing trend are the writings of a number of researchers who propose connections between several Sumerian myth cycles and the theory that the human race was engineered or created by a group of extraterrestrial beings. Known as Ancient Astronaut Theory , this field is largely reliant upon the translations of cuneiform tablets supposedly made by Zecharia Sitchin, whose series of Earth Chronicles books form the foundation upon which the modern church of the alien gods has been built.

Central to Sitchin’s narrative is a group of mythic beings known as the Anunnaki, whom he claimed crossed their own DNA with that of Homo erectus in order to create mankind—for the purpose of using humans as slaves to mine gold and other minerals. Today these Anunnaki are often portrayed as the equivalent of the Old Testament creator God.

Anunnaki created mankind?

( Public Domain )

But what does the cuneiform corpus actually say about the Anunnaki and other mythic beings? How does the version of these beings and their activities presented in Ancient Astronaut media compare with how they were truly represented in the ancient world?

• Ancient Mesopotamia and the Rise of Civilization
• Ancient Angels: Heavenly Messengers or Myths? The Origins of Cherubim – Part I
• The Disc of Life in Ancient Texts

Princely Blood

To begin with, Anunnaki translates to “princely blood” or “seed of Anu”, not “those who came down” or “those who came from heaven to earth”, as many modern sources have claimed. The Anunnaki are “the Sumerian deities of the old primordial time;” a pantheon of gods who were the children of the sky god Anu and his sister, Ki. Significantly, some scholars have come to realize that the Anunnaki should more appropriately be considered demi-gods or semi-divine beings. Apparently, Anu’s sister Ki was not originally considered a deity and was only ascribed the status of a goddess much later in the history of the myth cycle.

Akkadian cylinder seal dating to circa 2300 BC depicting the deities Inanna, Utu, and Enki, three members of the Anunnaki.

( Public Domain )

As explained by William Klauser:

“Some authorities question whether Ki was regarded as a deity since there is no evidence of a cult and the name appears only in a limited number of Sumerian creation texts. Samuel Noah Kramer identifies Ki with the Sumerian mother goddess Ninhursag and claims that they were originally the same figure. She later developed into the Babylonian and Akkadian goddess Antu, consort of the god Anu (from Sumerian An).”

Essentially, this would mean that the Anunnaki were born of a union between a sky god and a mortal female, who was later deified in mythic traditions.

Four copper-alloy statuettes dating to c. 2130 BC, depicting four ancient Mesopotamian gods, wearing characteristic horned crowns.

(Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin/ CC BY-SA 3.0 )

From Dust to Dust

Furthermore, “Ki” is the Sumerian sign for “earth”, and Anu’s consort is sometimes considered the personification of the earth itself. This is similar to Biblical tradition, where mortals were created out of the dust of the earth (Genesis 2:7). The concept of a group of half-divine beings born of mortal women is very similar to the Biblical and extra-Biblical tradition of the Nephilim.

One of the most heavily referenced ancient texts which describes the Nephilim is the Extra-Biblical Book of 1 Enoch attributed to the patriarch Enoch, son of Jared and father of Methuselah. 1 Enoch is considered an apocryphal text today, and is rejected by most mainstream theological establishments, but this was not always the case. Many of the early Church Fathers, such as Athenagoras, Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, and Tertullian accepted the book as scripture, and fragments of 10 copies of 1 Enoch in Aramaic have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. 1 Enoch is also quoted in the Biblical Book of Jude , and it has been estimated that there are as many as several hundred more references throughout the New Testament itself.

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

Anunnaki Revealed: Finding the Nephilim in Myth, Giants Among Men– Part II

• READ PART I

Central to Ancient Astronaut Theory and author Zecharia Sitchin’s narrative, is a group of mythic beings known as the Anunnaki, whom he claimed crossed their own DNA with that of Homo erectus in order to create mankind—for the purpose of using humans as slaves to mine gold and other minerals. Today these Anunnaki are often portrayed as the equivalent of the Old Testament creator God.

But what does the cuneiform corpus actually say about the Anunnaki and other mythic beings? How does the version of these beings and their activities presented in Ancient Astronaut media compare with how they were truly represented in the ancient world?

Babylonian representation of the national god Marduk, who was envisioned as a prominent member of the Anunnaki

( Public Domain )

[Don’t Miss Part 1 Here]

Mount Hermon is located at the southern end of the Anti-Lebanon mountain range, straddling the borders of Syria and Lebanon. Hermon’s highest peak reaches 9,232 feet (2814 meters). Gilgamesh was renowned in the ancient world for obtaining knowledge from the pre-flood (or “antediluvian”) world, as stated by the Ugarit Epic of Gilgamesh (lines 5-9):

“He explored everywhere the seats of power, he knew the totality of wisdom about all things. He who traveled the distant road to Utter-napisti, who crossed the ocean, the wide sea, as far as the sunrise: he brought back tidings from the antediluvian age.”

These passages bring us full circle with Lipinski’s interpretation of the Old Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh epic, where the ancient king journeyed to Mount Hermon—abode of the Anunnaki.

• The Mythical Dilmun and The Island of the Dead
• Ancient Angels: Heavenly Messengers or Myths? The Origins of Cherubim – Part I
• The Ascension of Gilgamesh: Did the Epic Hero Actually Exist?

Gilgamesh, the Giant

The concept of ancient knowledge from the pre-flood world is actually inherent in many Eastern traditions. For example, there is a similar story in the apocryphal Book of Jubilees about Kainam, a son of the Biblical Arphaxad:

“And the son grew, and his father taught him writing, and he went to seek for himself a place where he might seize for himself a city. And he found a writing which former generations had carved on the rock, and he read what was thereon, and he transcribed it and sinned owing to it; for it contained the teaching of the Watchers in accordance with which they used to observe the omens of the sun and moon and stars in all the signs of heaven. And he wrote it down and said nothing regarding it; for he was afraid to speak to Noah about it lest he should be angry with him on account of it.” (Jubilees 8:1-5)

Interestingly, there are several ancient sources, which suggest that Gilgamesh himself was a half-god or semi-divine being of gigantic stature. According to the Sumerian Kings List, Gilgamesh was the 5th king of Uruk, who reigned sometime between 2800 and 2600 BC. While there are traditions considering the father of Gilgamesh to be king Lugalbanda, the Sumerian Kings List states that his true father was a “lillu-spirit, a high priest of Kulaba”, and he is described in the epic as “two-thirds god”.

Gilgamesh Statue

(Gwil5083/ CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Gilgamesh is believed to have attained victory over the kings of Kish, centralizing Uruk’s power, and tradition has him expanding the city of Uruk, including its temple precinct and walls. In several fragments of a twelfth-century-BC copy of the Gilgamesh Epic discovered at ancient Ugarit, Gilgamesh is described as “Surpassing all (other) kings (!), renowned for bodily stature” (line 16) and again as “Gilgames, renowned for bodily stature, hero born in Uruk, butting wild bull!” (lines 18-19). Lines 34-36 of the Ugarit Gilgamesh offer specific details on Gilgamesh’s size: “Eleven cubits was his height, four cubits the width of his chest. A triple cubit was his foot and a reed-length his legs”. According to these measurements, Gilgamesh would have stood between 16 and 18 feet tall (4.8 to 5.4 meters tall). In connection to Gilgamesh being a giant, the fragmentary Book of Giants from the Dead Sea Scrolls names several Nephilim giants as Ohya, Mahway, Hahya, and Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh, the king-hero from the city of Uruk, battling the 'bull of heavens'

(0045269/ CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Giants Reigning on Mount Hermon

Returning to the subject of Mount Hermon, Gilgamesh is not the only ancient giant directly associated with this prominent locale. Several Old Testament books ( The Book of Numbers , Deuteronomy, and The Book of Joshua ) record the battle of Moses and the Israelites against Og, an Amorite king of Bashan. In Deuteronomy 3:11 (KJV), Og is described as “of the remnant of giants”, and his bed (or sarcophagus) is measured as nine cubits long and four cubits wide, meaning that Og himself may have been 12 or 13 feet in height (approx. four meters tall).

In Joshua 4:5 (KJV), it is revealed that Og “reigned in mount Hermon, and in Seclah, and in all Bashan”, a region which would include the slopes of Mount Hermon and the Golan Heights.

Entities of the Underworld

Still another factor connecting the Anunnaki with the story of the Watchers and their offspring is their status as underworld beings. In Mesopotamian cycles, the Anunnaki are frequently depicted as “fates” or judges of the dead who occupy the subterranean realm or function as “spirits of the earth”. In tablets discovered at Nippur from around 2000 BC, the Anunnaki are “the seven judges”, underworld entities that accompany Ereshkigal, queen of the subterranean realm. When Ishtar descends and is brought before the assembly, they fasten their “eyes of death” upon her, causing her to perish.

An early nineteenth-century drawing of a statuette of Hecate, with whom Ereshkigal was syncretized.

( Public Domain )

Cast Down into Hell

The mountain abode of the Canaanite god, El is also frequently associated with secret or hidden natural springs and underground rivers. Lipinski associates these connotations with the sources of the Jordan River, one of which is the spring of Banias, originating at the foot of Mount Hermon. He furthermore elaborates that the mountain was considered in ancient times to cover “one of the outlets of the Deep or Ocean from which came the waters of the Flood…an eruption of the subterranean ocean on which the earth was believed to rest.”

In 1 Enoch, God commands the archangel Michael to “Go, bind Semjaza and his associates who have united themselves with women…bind them fast for seventy generations in valleys of the earth…”(1 Enoch 10:11-12), while Raphael is commanded, “Bind Azazel hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness: make an opening in the desert, which is in Dudael, and cast him therein.”(1 Enoch 10:4)

Ancient Hittite relief carving from Yazılıkaya, a sanctuary at Hattusa, depicting twelve gods of the underworld, whom the Hittites identified as the Mesopotamian Anunnaki.

(Klaus-Peter Simon/ CC BY 3.0 )

There are also references to the fate of the Watchers in New Testament books, including Second Peter , which states, “…God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness…” (2nd Peter, 2:4, KJV). The word translated as “hell” in this verse is actually the Greek Tartarus, referencing the deepest underworld of Greek mythology—the prison of the Titans.

Not only were the Titans giants, but like the Anunnaki, they were the offspring of an earth goddess (Gaia) and a sky deity (Uranus). Some scholars consider it likely that the Greek mythos was largely based on the older Eastern Mythologies. The same concept is repeated again in the Book of Jude, verse 6, which mentions, “the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness”.

One of the giant Titans, Atlas, who was punished to bear the heavens on his shoulders for all time.

( Public Domain )

The True Identity of the Anunnaki

It is widely known that the archetypal myth cycles of the Mesopotamian and Near Eastern traditions share a common origin, and that the subjects of these cycles also appear in the Biblical, extra-Biblical, and even Quranic texts. The purpose of this article is to identify the specific mythic concept behind the Anunnaki in the ancient world.

• Are The Nephilim Really The Offspring Of Sons of God And The Daughters Of Man?
• The Nurturing Goddess Ninsun: Worshipped by Ancient Mesopotamians and the Mother of Gilgamesh
• Legends of Mount Shasta: “The Abode of the Devil” Part I – The Legend of J.C. Brown

Contrary to much of the popular literature and other media of today, the evidence recorded by the academic research of scholars and a comparative study of the actual cuneiform and other ancient texts indicates that the true identity of the Anunnaki is to be found in the Eastern tradition of a group of half-gods, spawned by cross-breeding between divine beings and mortal females at Mount Hermon in the Anti-Lebanon mountain range. These beings are often associated with knowledge from the world before a great deluge and were later assigned roles in the underworld. This would suggest that rather than making the Anunnaki the equivalent of the “Elohim” who created man in the Book of Genesis; they should more properly be compared to the Nephilim and the fallen angels described in Genesis Chapter 6, 1 Enoch, and other extra-biblical texts.

Jason Jarrell and Sarah Farmer  are investigative historians and avocational archaeologists. They study many subjects including depth psychology, Biblical mysteries, political science, and comparative mythology.  They’re also authors of Ages of the Giants: A Cultural History of the Tall Ones in Prehistoric America (2017). Learn more at their website:  ParadigmCollision.com

• Top Image: Ordered universe and cuneiform (Public Domain) and statue of Gilgamesh. ( CC BY 2.0 );Deriv.

By Jason Jarrell and Sarah Farmer

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

ANCIENT ALIENS: THE MILLENNIA-LONG HISTORY OF OBSESSING ABOUT EXTRATERRESTRIALS

The idea that other worlds might be home to alien beings has been part of our thought for as long as we have been looking skyward.

TO FEEL SMALL, all we have to do is look up.

The Sun, the Moon, the stars, the planets, and the Milky Way are evidence enough that Earth is not all that is.

And for as long as humans have had words, we have been sharing stories about the presumed builders and occupiers of those vaulted heavens: the gods, spirits, angels, and demons who were, in a sense, the first extraterrestrials.

According to a Cherokee story, for example, the Milky Way is a great web spun across the sky by Grandmother Spider, who used it to reach the other side of the world and bring back the sun.

In one grisly Aztec myth, the war god Huitzilopochtli sprang from his mother Coatlicue’s womb fully grown and fully armored. He beheaded his sister, Coyolxauhqui, who had been plotting to kill Coatlicue, and cast her head into the sky, creating the Moon.

Materialist interpretations of the cosmos eventually began to take the place of mythological ones. But the idea that there might be other beings in the sky has stayed with us, and it found its first proto-scientific roots in Greece in the sixth century BCE.

Anaximander, a philosopher who lived in Miletus in modern-day Turkey, contributed one key idea. He was the first to propose that Earth is a body floating in an infinite void, held up by nothing. For someone who lived 2,200 years before Isaac Newton, this was a stunning insight. The philosopher Karl Popper called it “one of the boldest, most revolutionary, and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thought.”

Anaximander also thought Earth was a cylinder with the continents arrayed on one flat end, so he wasn’t right about everything. But he did invent the idea of space, a place with no absolute up or down.

And just as important, Anaximander’s system was the first to leave open the possibility that there are other worlds like ours. (Though, to be clear, he may not have believed that these worlds existed elsewhere in space. He may have thought they preceded or would succeed Earth in time or perhaps coexisted in some parallel universe.)

Anaximander’s successors were more definite about the idea that came to be known as “the plurality of worlds” and more willing to explore its implications.

In the fifth century BCE, the Thracian philosopher Leucippus and his pupil Democritus invented atomism: the belief that the visible universe consists of tiny, indivisible, indestructible atoms, churning in the void without purpose or cause.

In this picture, worlds aren’t divinely created; they simply form when enough atoms collide and stick together. Democritus thought that there was an infinite supply of atoms, so he reasoned that there must be an infinite number of worlds. His pupil Metrodorus of Chios put it this way: “It seems absurd, that in a large field only one stalk should grow, and that in an infinite space only one world exists.”

And then there’s Epicurus. He lived about a century after Democritus and is most notorious for his philosophy that pleasure — best obtained through modest, self-sufficient living — is the greatest good.

But Epicurus read Democritus and thoroughly absorbed his empiricist, atomist worldview, including the idea that there must be many worlds. “There is an unlimited number of cosmoi [worlds], and some are similar to this one and some are dissimilar,” Epicurus wrote in a letter to the historian Herodotus.

Epicurus’s ideas are important not just because they were prescient but because they became a long-lasting irritant for future philosophers and theologians. Unfortunately, most of his writings are lost. What we know about his thought comes mainly from De rerum natura, or On the Nature of Things, a book-length poem by his Roman disciple Lucretius.

You can think of this book, written around 50 BCE, as the first volume of popular science. Here’s what Lucretius said about the Epicurean view of other worlds:

If store of seeds there is

So great that not whole life-times of the living

Can count the tale …

And if their force and nature abide the same,

Able to throw the seeds of things together

Into their places, even as here are thrown

The seeds together in this world of ours,

’Tmust be confessed in other realms there are

Still other worlds, still other breeds of men,

And other generations of the wild.

The passage is a milestone in discussions of extraterrestrials. It goes beyond the basic idea that infinity must contain many worlds to offer what is probably the first straightforward assertion in Western literature that aliens must exist. The first and sadly the last for a very long time.

The truth is that the mechanistic, nonsupernatural picture of the world offered by Anaximander, Democritus, and Epicurus was radical for its day. It failed to gain a large following in ancient Greece.

In Athens in 450 BCE, the philosopher Anaxagoras posited that the sun is a fiery rock and that the Moon is an Earthlike body that glows in the sun’s reflected light. He was promptly arrested on charges of impiety and sentenced to death. After his friend and former pupil Pericles came to his defense, he was released but banished.

Both Plato (428–348 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) lambasted Democritus’s idea of a plurality of worlds on theological grounds. Plato, a monotheist, argued that there is only one creator and that therefore there can be only one world, “if the created copy is to accord with the original.”

Aristotle similarly thought that a plurality of worlds would require a plurality of Prime Movers to keep them in motion — a plainly heretical idea. The idea of infinite worlds also conflicted with his view of physics, in which the five basic elements — earth, air, fire, water, and divine aether — tend to move up or down toward their “natural places” at the center or the edges of the universe.

Because things made of earth always sink to the center, Aristotle believed, Earth must be the only world, and there can be no solid bodies in the heavens.

Though Aristotle was a pagan, his anthropocentric picture of the universe was a gift to early Christian theologians. The Book of Genesis, which says God purposefully created the heavens and the earth, left no room for other worlds or other sentient beings (unless you count angels and demons).

The New Testament then introduced the idea that God was incarnated as Christ to rescue the faithful from sin and damnation — a flattering story implying that humans are uniquely worthy of Christ’s sacrifice. As the scientist and Christian apologist William Whewell would later put it, the Incarnation made Earth into “the Stage of the Great Drama of God’s Mercy and Man’s Salvation.”

By contrast, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius offered a picture of a purely mechanical universe where everything arises from the purposeless collisions of atoms and where humans might be just one of an infinite number of intelligent races. “Small wonder the early Christians tossed the Epicurean package, extraterrestrials and all, into the abyss of doctrinal errors,” writes the Catholic ethicist Benjamin Wiker.

As Christianity swept across the decaying Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries CE, the Church Fathers ridiculed and suppressed the Epicureans and their ideas and allowed their writings to burn or crumble. Atomism, the pursuit of pleasure, the plurality-of-worlds idea — all of it slipped into darkness, where, as Wiker observes, “it stayed for nearly a thousand years.”

Mikolaj Kopernik Fototeca Storica Nazionale./Hulton Archive/Getty Images

KEPLER, COPERNICUS, GIORDANO BRUNO, AND MANY WORLDS

Somehow, though, Lucretius’s poem On the Nature of Things managed to cross the abyss into the 15^th century.

The Swerve, a delightful book about “how the world became modern” by the Harvard literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, tells the story of the Florentine book collector Poggio Bracciolini, who recovered a copy of the poem in the library of a monastery in southern Germany in 1417.

Within 60 years, hundreds of manuscripts and print editions were in circulation, reigniting interest in Epicureanism. Greenblatt argues that the poem’s atheistic and materialist ideas helped usher in Renaissance humanism — an inquisitive philosophy that, despite its name, began to question humanity’s privileged station in the cosmos.

Whether the credit is due to Bracciolini or not, the Renaissance saw steadily growing interest in the idea of the plurality of worlds and its corollary, the possibility that other worlds might be populated by other beings. Mikołaj Kopernik, better known as Nicolaus Copernicus, provided one key stepping stone.

The Polish mathematician and astronomer were born in 1473 — coincidentally, the same year the first print edition of On the Nature of Things appeared. (Note the date here: Copernicus lived at the same time as Christopher Columbus, who was 22 years his senior; Leonardo da Vinci, who was 21 years older; Niccolò Machiavelli, four years older; and Martin Luther, 10 years younger.)

Copernicus is central to the story of extraterrestrials not because he believed in them — the question didn’t seem to interest him — but because he was the first person to propose, based on observation and calculation, that Earth was not the center of the visible universe.

Around 1510, Copernicus began writing the commentaries and manuscripts that would become De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres). Finally published in 1543, the year Copernicus died, the book upended the old Aristotelian system.

It argued that Earth rotates around its pole, that the Moon orbits Earth, and that Mercury, Venus, the Earth-Moon system, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn all travel around the Sun at their own rates.

Finally, it asserted that the firmament — the outermost celestial sphere, containing the stars — must be incomprehensibly far away, at least compared to the distances between the sun and the planets.

Copernicus’s heliocentric model accounted for important oddities that the old Aristotelian system couldn’t adequately explain, such as the occasional “retrograde” or backward motion of the other planets against the background stars.

But, of course, heliocentrism wasn’t immediately accepted, not least because it amounted to a huge demotion for Earth. It left us with only a single heavenly attendant, the Moon, and it forced Copernicus’s readers to reckon with the idea that we live on a planet that is just like any other.

This premise — that there’s nothing particularly special about Earth and that we aren’t in a privileged, central position to observe the universe — would come to be known as the Copernican principle, and it’s at the core of the modern-day case for doing research related to the search for extraterrestrial life (SETI).

Copernicus knew his theory would provoke religious objections, which may be why he declined to publish it during his lifetime. His follower Giordano Bruno was not so cautious. Bruno was a Sicilian subject who entered the Dominican order in Naples and then became a religious vagabond. He read Lucretius and Copernicus, took their ideas deeply to heart, and made some startling leaps of his own.

In three sets of dialogues published between 1584 and 1591 — La cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper), De l’infinito universo et modi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds), and De immenso (Of vastness) — Bruno argued that at least some of the stars are suns with their own planets and that some of these planets must have their own residents.

On this and many other subjects, Bruno’s daring views conflicted with long-standing doctrines of the Catholic Church: For starters, that the universe was created for humanity alone and that there can be no people on other worlds without another Christ to redeem them.

Bruno was arrested in Venice in 1592 on charges of blasphemy and heresy and sent to Rome, where his trial lasted seven years. On February 17, 1600, he was hanged naked upside down and burned at the stake.

Bruno’s persecution was widely followed by people living outside Rome, but it couldn’t prevent the emergence of a new understanding of the heavens. In 1609, Johannes Kepler, the German mathematician and astronomer, published Astronomia nova (New Astronomy), which extended Copernicanism in crucial ways.

Understandably, Kepler was elated to receive a copy of Galileo Galilei’s Siderius nuncius (Starry Messenger) soon after it was published the following year. The book announced Galileo’s discovery of mountains on the Moon and four satellites orbiting Jupiter: we call them Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

These Jovian moons formed what was, in essence, a miniature solar system obeying the same rules as the planets. This discovery provided spectacular evidence for Copernicanism and in Kepler’s mind confirmed his own theories about planetary motion.

Jupiter and its large moons. NASA/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

But here’s the interesting part for our purposes: Even though Kepler (a Protestant) knew of Bruno’s travails and the Catholic Church’s attitude toward the plurality-of-worlds idea, he sent Galileo (a Catholic) a congratulatory letter that included speculation about extraterrestrials. Any planet important enough to have moons, Kepler supposed, must also have people.

“These four little moons exist for Jupiter, not for us,” he wrote. “Each planet in turn, together with its occupants, is served by its own satellites. From this line of reasoning, we deduce with the highest degree of probability that Jupiter is inhabited.”

Galileo cannily declined to endorse that idea. “The view of those who would put inhabitants on Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, and the Moon, meaning by ‘inhabitants’ animals like ours, and men in particular” was “false and damnable,” he wrote in his pamphlet Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie Solari (Letters on Sunspots) in 1613.

But while Galileo may have sidestepped Bruno’s error in this case, he eventually ran afoul of the church for different reasons. His volume Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems), a rousing defense of Copernicus, angered Pope Urban VIII and his inquisitors. In 1633, the church sentenced Galileo to a house arrest that lasted until his death in 1642.

OF THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS

From Democritus to Galileo, thinkers treated the idea that other worlds might be home to alien beings — the word alien comes from the Latin term alius, “other” — with great seriousness. After all, believing in aliens could get you banished or burned at the stake.

But in 1686 a Frenchman named Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle became the first writer to exploit the subject’s humorous possibilities. His book Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) was another early example of science popularization.

Fontenelle made a rigorous case for Copernicanism, but to keep things entertaining he also used whimsical proto-science-fiction notions about the cultures of the other planets. The people of Venus, Fontenelle mused, are “sunburnt, full of verve and fire, always amorous, loving verses, loving music, inventing celebrations, dances, and tournaments every day.”

The inhabitants of Saturn, by contrast, are “quite phlegmatic. … These are people who don’t know what it is to laugh, who always take a day to answer the slightest question asked them.”

These ideas didn’t contradict the doctrine of Christ’s unique incarnation on Earth, Fontenelle reassured his readers because people on other planets would not be descended from Adam and wouldn’t need saving. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the church from putting Conversations on its Index of Forbidden Books.

Christian Huygens, the Dutch astronomer who explained the rings of Saturn and discovered its moon Titan, took a more serious tack in Cosmotheoros, published posthumously in 1698 and translated into English as Celestial Worlds Discover’d; or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants, and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets.

He noted that Venus and Jupiter have atmospheres, one requirement for life. He expanded on Bruno’s assertion that other stars must have their own planetary systems and reasoned that where there are planets, there must be people.

By Huygens’s time, the plurality-of-worlds concept was beginning to seem ordinary. Eighteenth-century thinkers such as Edmond Halley, Gottfried Leibniz, Alexander Pope, Immanuel Kant, William Herschel, Pierre Laplace, and Thomas Paine accepted it as part of a scientific-realist worldview.

This view was, however, still incompatible with strict Christianity. That’s what motivated a leading 19th-century scientist and one-time believer in other inhabited worlds, William Whewell, to abandon pluralism and publish one of the strongest catalogs of scientific arguments against the idea.

A brilliant polymath, Whewell was a professor of mineralogy at the University of Cambridge, then a professor of moral philosophy, and finally the head of Trinity College, where Sir Isaac Newton had studied and taught.

In the 1830s, Whewell published essays that left room for the idea of extraterrestrials. But he later grew increasingly disturbed by the question of whether God had provided “a like scheme of salvation” for every other world.

If both pluralism and the Incarnation could not be true, Whewell decided he would stick with the Incarnation. So he assembled a scientific and philosophical broadside against the idea of other worlds, which he published in 1853 under the title Of the Plurality of Worlds: An Essay.

Whewell pointed out that humans, according to the geological record then being unearthed, had been present on this planet for only an “atom of time.” If Earth had been, in effect, uninhabited through most of its history, then it wouldn’t be surprising if other distant planets were also empty.

In any case, he pointed out, no planets around other stars had yet been observed, and many nebulae, star clusters, and multiple-star systems would be unsuitable places for them. Here in the local neighborhood, Whewell noted, the Moon has no atmosphere or water; Jupiter features crushing gravity and may lack a solid surface; Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are probably too far from the sun and therefore too cold to support life; and Mercury and Venus are probably too close to the sun and therefore too hot.

He wasn’t sure about Mars, but he theorized that only Earth is in what he called “the Temperate Zone of the Solar System.”

In short, though Whewell’s ultimate goal was to defend Christian theology, he was the first to marshal empirical evidence to point out the real weaknesses in the plurality-of-worlds idea.

This challenge was, in a sense, long overdue. Copernicus was correct to revoke Earth’s privileges as the pivot point of the universe, but that insight by itself says nothing about what else might exist in the universe.

We know today that Democritus and Epicurus were on the right track when they theorized about atoms and other worlds, but they didn’t have any hard data, and neither did Bruno, Kepler, Huygens, or Fontenelle. Whewell concluded: “The belief that other planets, as well as our own, are the seats of habitation of living things, has been entertained, in general, not in consequence of physical reasons, but in spite of physical reasons.”

Coming from the master of Trinity, this attack caused a ruckus in the scientific world. Defenders of pluralism were forced to go back to their laboratories and telescopes (which is evidence, if you’re in an optimistic mood, that materialists and religious believers aren’t engaged in a winner-take-all war, but rather in a healthy competition of ideas). Even today, the essential aim of astrobiologists and exoplanet hunters is to provide what Whewell called the missing “physical reasons.”

Percial Lowell’s Mars canals. ullstein bild Dtl./ullstein bild/Getty Images

PERCIVAL LOWELL AND THE CANALS OF MARS

One of the researchers who poured new energy into the pursuit of extraterrestrials in the late 19th century was Percival Lowell. An amateur astronomer, Lowell used his wealth and his connections as a member of an old Boston Brahmin family to establish his own observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1894.

The year before that, the distinguished Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had published La vita sul pianeta Marte (Life on Mars), laying out his observations of “seas,” “continents,” and waterways on Mars. After reading Schiaparelli’s book and another on Mars by the French astronomer Camille Flammarion, Lowell became convinced that the alleged waterways were artificial canals, and he built the observatory in order to observe, document, and publicize them.

One piece of lore, endlessly repeated in books, magazine articles, and web posts about Mars, says that Lowell’s imagination was fired by one of history’s most comic mistranslations. Schiaparelli, so the story goes, described the lines he saw on the surface of Mars using the word canali, “channels.”

English translators, however, rendered it as “canals.” A channel isn’t necessarily artificial; a canal is. The misleading word choice was what supposedly sent Lowell on his wild quest.

This is one of those stories journalists call “too good to fact-check.” In reality, Schiaparelli had begun talking about canali as early as 1878, the year after a close Mars–Earth approach. He was well aware that his work had inspired others to speculate that the canali were artificial, and perhaps used for irrigation. He did nothing to tamp down this speculation.

“Their singular appearance and the fact that they are designed with absolute geometrical precision as if they were drawn with a ruler or a compass, has led some to see in these features the work of intelligent beings, inhabitants of the planet,” Schiaparelli wrote in La vita sul pianeti Marte. “I will be careful not to combat this assumption, which includes nothing impossible.”

Regardless of who inspired his canal obsession, Lowell set out to confirm Schiaparelli’s discovery, making nearly nightly observations of Mars starting in mid-1894. He duly discovered 184 canals, putting Schiaparelli’s 79 to shame.

Lowell published these findings in a popular volume, Mars (1895), followed by “Mars and Its Canals” (1906) and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908). Like Schiaparelli before him, Lowell was struck by the “uniformity,” the “precision,” and the “supernaturally regular” appearance of the alleged canals. He wrote in the first volume, “Too great regularity is in itself the most suspicious of circumstances that some finite intelligence has been at work.”

Such a great collection of works would need builders, of course, and Lowell would go on to deduce — based on Mars’s lower gravity — that Martians must be far larger and stronger than humans. And older and wiser, too.

“A mind of no mean order would seem to have presided over the system we see — a mind certainly of considerably more comprehensiveness than that which presides over the various departments of our own public works,” he wrote. “Certainly what we see hints at the existence of beings who are in advance of, not behind us, in the journey of life.”

The public greeted Lowell’s work rapturously, scientists more coolly. Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of evolution by natural selection, was still alive when Lowell’s books appeared. He eviscerated the idea of intelligent, canal-building Martians.

Wallace pointed out, correctly, that there is little liquid water on Mars to transport in canals. And he anticipated later critiques of SETI by highlighting the fantastic odds against the appearance of even one technological species in a given star system, let alone two on neighboring planets.

Given the series of evolutionary accidents that opened the way for the emergence of primates, each accident dependent on the previous one, “the total chances against the evolution of man, or an equivalent moral and intellectual being … will be represented by a hundred million of millions to one,” Wallace wrote.

Wallace was right that there are no men on Mars. But there was an intelligence at work in the story: Lowell’s. We know from decades of telescopic, orbital, and robotic exploration of the red planet that there are no canals or even features such as sand dunes or dust storms that could create the illusion of canals. What Lowell saw had to have been what astronomer Simon Newcomb would call, in 1907, unconscious “visual inferences” — projections of Lowell’s desire to see what he already believed was there.

I’m reminded of the snide acronym sometimes used by tech-support workers to describe questions from naive computer users: PIBKAC, Problem Is between Keyboard and Chair. In Lowell’s case, the problem was between the telescope eyepiece and the drawing pad.

But even before Wallace published his critique in 1904, it was too late to defuse Lowell’s idea. Martians had escaped into popular culture. H. G. Wells took Lowell’s concept of an ancient, advanced race of Mars dwellers and added a layer of imperial malice in The War of the Worlds, which was published in serial form in 1897 and as a print novel in 1898.

Edgar Rice Burroughs used Mars, a.k.a. “Barsoom,” as the setting for a series of pulpy stories and novels published between 1912 and 1948. Orson Welles adapted H. G. Wells’s story as a live radio drama broadcast on Halloween Eve in 1938, and its simulated news format scared at least a few listeners into believing invaders from Mars had really arrived.

The hostile-Martian cliché spread so quickly that by 1948 it would be satirized in the form of every nerd’s favorite Looney Tunes villain, Marvin the Martian, followed in 1950 by Ray Bradbury’s groundbreaking short-story collection The Martian Chronicles, about the conflicts between telepathic Martians and settlers from Earth.

Today we know that Mars is cold and dry and that if there are real Martians, they’re probably microbes, buried below the surface. But Mars has been extremely fertile as a garden for our own evolving theories, fears, and longings about extraterrestrials.

We don’t know yet whether the sky is full of “still other worlds with other breeds of men,” as Lucretius poetically put it. Yet there remains one stubborn and absorbing fact: on the very next planet, life is not out of the question — even if that life winds up being us.

• This article was originally published in The MIT Reader by Wade Roush. Read the original article here.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

The enigmatic submarine with which the “Nazis traveled in time”

Twitter fiction goes far beyond what we could imagine. This account of how the Nazis traveled through time could make even Indiana Jones’s hair stand on end.

This ugly and fascinating fish is a monkfish. It is known as AF-67 and is the author of one of the most devastating discoveries in recent centuries.

The AF-67 monkfish was part of Pleanville University’s “Haliade Project”. They selected 77 deep-sea fish and equipped them with micro-cameras and tracking devices to explore the deep sea through them.

With the microcameras and tracking beacons installed, AF-67 was released into the Indian Ocean, hoping that it would decide to dive into the Lamu-Rhino abyssal pit.

It is a pit with a depth of about 10,500 meters. AF-67 dived her to the bottom.

Monkfish was one of the fish chosen for this project because it has its own light source.

This is important to obtain images at a depth of 10,500 meters, where the only sunlight that shines is due to its absence. Where things do not emit heat.

Once recovered, this monkfish obtained dozens of interesting but not particularly relevant images. Mostly videos of other abyssal creatures that were already in the catalog of marine biologists.

But amid so much irrelevant information, AF-67 made an unexpected discovery. At first they confused it with the corpse of a sperm whale.

After analyzing some of the frames carefully, they realized that it was a human-made artifact. Probably a sunken submarine.

Hypotheses confirmed by seeing a swastika on the pressure helmet … And a serial number. This “license plate” allowed the identification of the device: EL U-515.

A Nazi submarine that caused many headaches to the US intelligence services, and gave a lot to talk about in the world of conspiracies. Why?

Because that submarine disappeared when it carried inside “The Bell Of Wöhlenbach” a contraption developed by Nazi scientists at the end of World War II, designed to travel through time.

The most skeptical assumed that the Nazis never managed to make The Bell work. The most daring fantasized about the possibility that the disappearance of U-515 would prove just the opposite:

The submarine vanished without a trace because it traveled back in time.

The hottest minds even suggest that Hitler himself was aboard U-515 and escaped to another era by activating the submarine’s “Bell”.

As you can imagine, the discovery of this submarine by the anglerfish AF-67 meant a jug of cold water for those who bet on the theory of time travel. But nevertheless…

When they recovered the monkfish AF-67, they rewarded their services by dissecting it for an autopsy, and found symptoms in its stomach and cells that it had been exposed to radioactive isotopes.

The kind of radiation that, according to physicists at the University of Pleanville, could release (always “in theory”) a device designed to alter space-time parameters.

Having these data, a rather suggestive hypothesis was considered: What if the crew of the submarine, once stranded at the bottom of the abyssal pit, in a desperate attempt to escape, decided to activate “La Campana”?

What if “La Campana” really traveled back in time?

To corroborate or disprove this madness, the Pleanville researchers thoroughly studied the writings of one of the most cryptic and prodigious scientists that our century has given, Ilja Mladenek: Serbian engineer, disciple of Tikola Tesla.

He worked designing advanced technology for the Nazis until the US government rescued him in the context of Operation Paperclip to benefit from his knowledge.

Mladenek was one of the architects of the Wöhlenbach Bell.

According to his research notebooks, the artifact was capable of moving through the fourth dimension, allowing any object within a radius of 8 meters from its epicenter to travel through time.

But according to Mladenek’s notes, that technology had limits. “The Bell was only capable of traveling to the past.”

The exact year Hitler intended to go back with The Bell also appeared in the notes of the Serbian engineer: 12,103 BC.

This initially led the Pleanville researchers to dismiss the idea that U-515 had traveled through time.

Why? Because in that case the submarine, when sinking into the abyssal pit, in addition to transporting “La Campana”, would have landed on top of it.

The Bell would have remained for millennia waiting for itself at the bottom of the sea. And the images of the monkfish did not show any other objects besides U-515.

It was Margaret Canker, Professor of Astrophysics at Pleanville University, who realized that they were making a small mistake.

They weren’t counting on the rotation of the Earth. “La Campana” travels in time, but not in space.

As it moves through the years and centuries, the planet rotates in the latitude corresponding to the Lanu-Rhino trench, at more than 1,000 kilometers per hour.

This speed of rotation has increased in recent centuries due to overcrowding. We have increased the mass of the planet significantly, and this implies that we no longer rotate as slowly as a few millennia ago.

As if that weren’t enough, the angulation of the Earth’s axis of rotation has also changed. In other words:

An object going back to 12,103 BC would not appear at the same geographic point where it began its journey.

Canker made the calculations taking into account the changes in the axis and speed of rotation over the last 14,021 years and came to the conclusion that “La Campana”, if it had gone back to the date for which it was programmed, would have arrived. here:

A hilly area of ​​the Himalayas, almost 5,000 meters high, within what we know today as Tibet.

Pleanville University sent an express expedition to that area of ​​Tibet. Did you find La Campana there? Of course not.

But they found metallic remains that could belong to it and even more important: radioactive isotopes identical to those of the monkfish AF-67.

Had La Campana reached its destination? Had anyone found it in those lands more than 14,000 years ago?

That would explain the references in the sacred Sanskrit scriptures to some gadgets that we have already talked about here on other occasions: The Vimana.

Mentions of the vimana in Hindu mythology baffle scientists to this day.

In other religious texts “chariots of fire”, flying creatures, etc. are mentioned. But the case of the vimanas is different. The ancients described them as machines.

A Nazi mission commanded by Dr. Ernest Schäfer traveled to Tibet in search of the origins of the Aryan race and ended up (perhaps) finding the remains of a vimana, or the technology that made them possible.

It is rumored that thanks to these findings, Third Reich scientists were able to build The Bell and other prototypes of warfare that looked suspiciously like flying saucers.

Did they use the technology of “La Campana” in the remote past, to develop those “flying ships” that ended up transcending under the name of “vimana”?

In that case, those who called themselves “Aryans” resorted to wisdom from the past to travel to that past, sow the myth of the “Aryan race” and leave there the instructions that would help them in the future to build the necessary tool to be able to close that circle.

That possibility raises two questions:

Did Hitler purposely sink that submarine at that point in the Indian Ocean? What has the United States been doing with all that technology since it seized it at the end of World War II? End.

We hope you liked this fictional story, because it is nothing more than a story created by Juanjo Ramírez, who is one of the great masters of tweet fiction.

Precisely one of his specialties is clinging to real elements to build a spectacular science fiction universe on top of them. And there is nothing that has inspired as many science fiction tales as so-called Nazi technology.

What could be more interesting than such a conspiracy? So we disconnect a bit from so much political shit these days that we seem to go crazy.

{ https://mysteriousthing.com/ }

My previous article was titled: “The Space Brothers of the 1950s: Were They Russian Agents Promoting Communism in the U.S.?” It was a study of the possibility that the so-called “Space Brothers” of the 1950s were actually Russian agents and not aliens. Their goal: to try and advance communism in the United States – and to do it under what we might call a “UFO guise.” Today’s article follows on. The previous feature addressed such matters in the early years of the Cold War. This one, however, looks at the connection between UFOs, aliens and Russian agents in more recent times. With that said, read on. In 1999, Gerald K. Haines – in his position as the historian of the National Reconnaissance Office – wrote a paper titled “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90.” It’s now in the public domain, thanks to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. It can be read at the CIA’s website. Haines’ paper detailed the history of how, and why, the CIA became interested and involved in the phenomenon of UFOs. Although Haines covered a period of more than forty years, I will bring your attention to one particular section of his paper, which is focused on the 1970s-1980s.

Haines wrote something eye-opening: “During the late 1970s and 1980s, the Agency continued its low-key interest in UFOs and UFO sightings. While most scientists now dismissed flying saucers reports as a quaint part of the 1950s and 1960s, some in the Agency and in the Intelligence Community shifted their interest to studying parapsychology and psychic phenomena associated with UFO sightings. CIA officials also looked at the UFO problem to determine what UFO sightings might tell them about Soviet progress in rockets and missiles and reviewed its counterintelligence aspects.” The Soviets, then, were camouflaging their secret rocket tests by spreading false and fantastic tales of UFOs. Haines also said: “Agency analysts from the Life Science Division of OSI and OSWR officially devoted a small amount of their time to issues relating to UFOs. These included counterintelligence concerns that the Soviets and the KGB were using U.S. citizens and UFO groups to obtain information on sensitive U.S. weapons development programs (such as the Stealth aircraft), the vulnerability of the U.S. air-defense network to penetration by foreign missiles mimicking UFOs, and evidence of Soviet advanced technology associated with UFO sightings .”

Also on this issue of Russia and UFOs, there are the following words of long-time ufologist Bruce Maccabee: “After I spoke at a UFO conference near Washington, D.C. in February 1993, I was contacted by an assistant military attaché who was stationed at the Russian Embassy [italics mine]. He wanted to know how to obtain U.S. government files on UFOs. You can imagine my surprise and amusement when, about six months later, while I was at work I got a call from the ‘dreaded’ FBI. It became obvious to me that the agent didn’t know much about the UFO phenomenon and was amused to learn about the FBI files on the subject. But he was especially interested in my interactions with the military attaché.”  Moving on…

Interestingly, there have been strange rumors to the effect that the controversial, so-called Majestic 12 documents might have played a role in all of this. One theory is that the Russians created the documents. Yes, I know: that sounds very strange, but read on. If the combined intelligence community found anything more about Majestic 12 documents in the late 1980s, then it is yet to appear under the FOIA. We do know something of deep interest though, thanks to a man named Richard L. Huff. He served as Bureau Co-Director within the Office of Information and Privacy. In correspondence with him, Huff informed me of the existence of an FBI “Main File” on Majestic 12, now in what is termed “closed status.” Not only that: I was told that the FBI’s file on the Majestic 12 papers was titled nothing less than “Espionage.” Author Howard Blum said the FBI’s reasoning for suspecting the Russians might have been at the heart of the Majestic 12 debate revolved around “…muddying the waters, creating dissension, spreading paranoia in the ranks – those were all the day-in, day-out jobs of the ruthless operation.” Soviet revenge against U.S. Intelligence for having spun their own UFO-themed operations during the Cold War.”

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

NASA's Curiosity rover finds evidence of an ancient 'megaflood' on Mars 4 billion years ago – raising the possibility that LIFE once existed on the Red Planet

• Researchers used data sent back to Earth by the NASA Curiosity rover on Mars 

• The team behind the study examined sediment data captured by Curiosity

• They found evidence of giant ripples in the Gale crater similar to ones on Earth

• These are caused by mass flooding events as the water washing over the surface

• The team say a meteor impact likely caused the flooding 4 billion years ago 

By RYAN MORRISON FOR MAILONLINE 

Floods of unimaginable magnitude washed through Gale Crater on Mars around 4 billion years ago, raising the possibility life once existed on the Red Planet.

Researchers from Jackson State University, Cornell University and the University of Hawaii worked with NASA to examine sediment data captured by the Curiosity Rover.

Dubbed a 'raging megaflood' by scientists, it was likely caused by an asteroid or comet hitting the planet, heating and unleashing ice stored on the Martian surface.

Water as much as 78ft deep raged across the crater at 32 feet per second, leaving behind gigantic ripples that are tell-tale structures familiar to scientists on Earth. 

On Earth where water is found 'there is life', according to co-author Alberto G. Fairen, and on Mars four billion years ago microbial life may have developed, he said. 

Dubbed a 'raging megaflood' by scientists, it was likely caused by an asteroid or comet hitting the planet, heating and unleashing ice stored on the Martian surface

This close up image of rocks on Mars show changes in the bed interval including rounded coarse sand and pebble fragments suggesting water once flowed through the area 

The ripples created by flooding - also known as antidunes - are up to 30ft high and spread about 450ft apart, according to Ezat Heydari, co-author.

As is the case on Earth, geological features including the work of water and wind have been frozen in time on Mars for about four billion years - they convey processes that shaped the surface of both planets in the distant past. 

This includes the occurrence of the giant wave-shaped features in sedimentary layers of Gale crater, often called 'megaripples' or antidunes. 

In one instance that water entered Gale Crater, and when combined with water coming down from Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, produced gigantic flash floods

'We identified megafloods for the first time using detailed sedimentological data observed by the rover Curiosity,' said co-author Alberto G. Fairén.

 'Deposits left behind by megafloods had not been previously identified with orbiter data,' Fairen explained.

The antidunes seen in data from NASA Curiosity are identical to the features formed by melting ice on Earth about two million years ago, Heydari said.

On Mars releasing the stocks of frozen water likely required a significant impact event that released carbon dioxide, methane and the ice as water vapour.

The water vapour and gases combined to produce a short warm and wet period that could have resulted in the development of life, researchers claim.   

'The warm and wet climate persisted even after the flooding ended, but its duration cannot be determined by our study,' the team wrote in their paper.

The condensation from the heat generated by the impact likely formed clouds of water vapour which created torrential rain - possibly across the planet. 

An earlier study, also using data from Curiosity, revealed evidence of storms that filled lakes and rivers with rainfall on the planet - about four billion years ago.

Curiosity sent back images and data for the research team to examine - including the bottom image showing flow direction of the water - along the yellow dotted line

In one instance that water entered Gale Crater, and when combined with water coming down from Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, produced gigantic flash floods. 

This left behind deposits of gravel ridges surrounding the crater that can be seen on the Red Planet today - and helped the team work out the scale of the megaflood. 

The Curiosity rover science team has already established that Gale Crater once had persistent lakes and streams in the ancient past. 

These long-lived bodies of water are good indicators that the crater, as well as Mount Sharp within it, were capable of supporting microbial life.

Graphic showing the terrain studied by Curiosity and where layers and antidunes have been discovered - indicating areas of ripples and waves from a megaflood

These are images of the Gale crater showing the various topographic features including the mountains and ripples produced by activity on the planet over billions of years 

'Early Mars was an extremely active planet from a geological point of view,' Fairén said. 'The planet had the conditions needed to support the presence of liquid water on the surface – and on Earth, where there's water, there's life.

'So early Mars was a habitable planet,' he said. 'Was it inhabited? That's a question that the next rover Perseverance … will help to answer.'

Perseverance, which launched from Cape Canaveral on July 30, is scheduled to reach Mars on February 18, 2021.

The findings have been published in the journal Scientific Reports.   

NASA MARS 2020: THE MISSION WILL SEE THE PERSEVERANCE ROVER AND INGENUITY HELICOPTER SEARCH FOR LIFE

NASA's Mars 2020 mission will search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet in a bid to help scientists better understand how life evolved on Earth. 

Named Perseverance, the main car-sized rover is to explore an ancient river delta within the Jezero Crater, which was once filled with a 1,600ft deep lake.

It is believed that the region hosted microbial life some 3.5 to 3.9 billion years ago and the rover will examine soil samples to hunt for evidence of the life.

Nasa's Mars 2020 rover (artist's impression) is searching for signs of ancient life on Mars in a bid to help scientists better understand how life evolved on our own planet

The $2.5 billion (£1.95 billion) Mars 2020 spaceship launched on July 30 with the rover and helicopter inside - and landed successfully on February 18, 2021.

Perseverance landed inside the crater and will collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth for further analysis.

A second mission will fly to the planet and return the samples, perhaps by the later 2020s in partnership with the European Space Agency.

This concept art shows the Mars 2020 rover landing on the red planet via NASA's 'sky-crane' system

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

Michael Meyer, who is the Mars Exploration Program lead scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, stated back in 2014, “This lake was large enough it could have lasted millions of years — sufficient time for life to get started and thrive, sufficient time for lake sediments to build up and form Mount Sharp.” Mount Sharp is a large mound (about 3.4 miles or 5.5 kilometers in height) that rises up from the middle of Gale Crater.

Gale Crater imaged by Mars Odyssey’s THEMIS.

However, a new study has a put a damper on those claims as the researchers are claiming that the mudstone deposits found in the crater were likely brought in by volcanic activity or the Martian wind before acidic rain altered them. Joe Michalski, who is the deputy director of the HKU’s Laboratory for Space Research, told Space.com, “This is probably precipitation-driven chemical weathering of a soil-type environment.”

He went on to say that instead of one giant lake, there were probably several small lakes in the crater that only lasted at the most about a few tens of thousands of years each. If they are correct in their theory, this could be very damaging news in regards to life ever having lived in the Gale Crater. Their study was published in the journal Science Advances.

Was there one massive lake or several small ones in the crater?

Just last month, it was reported that X-rays conducted on clay samples found in the crater revealed that they contained a mineral called glauconite which is also found on our planet and could mean that there was once life in the Gale Crater as explained by Elisabeth Losa-Adams from the University of Vigo, Spain, “Glauconitic clays can be used as ‘a proxy’ for stable conditions,” adding, “The conditions under which these minerals form are friendly for the presence of life.”

With all of these conflicting reports, it’s hard to keep track of what experts are thinking in regards to life on Mars and how much water was actually on the planet. This is just the latest of many theories and I’m sure there will be much more to come.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Yes, I know: that’s a very controversial question to pose. But, sometimes, things are stranger than they seem to be – as you’ll see now. For the most part, people in Ufology take the view that the Contactees of the 1950s were either telling the truth of their experiences, or that they were hoaxing everything. But, what if there was a far more controversial scenario: namely, that of a Russian connection? For those who may not know, the Space Brothers were extremely-human-looking beings and they wore their hair long: both the men and the women. And, they surfaced in the early 1950s – predominantly on the West Coast of the United States. They were somewhat bullying in their demands that we, the Human Race, change our approach to life. In other words, they wanted us to get rid of our “atomic bombs,” as they were known back then. And, also, that we should all join together as one. They claimed to have come from extremely unlikely places, such as Venus, Mars and Saturn. Some of the most famous Contactees – those that had face-to-face encounters – included Truman Bethurum, Dana Howard, George Adamski, Dan Fry, Orfeo Angelucci, George Van Tassel, and George Hunt Williamson. Most of them wrote a book or two about their experiences, and just about all of them went on the lecture circuit – and for years, no less. The Space Brothers seemed friendly, but there was just something that didn’t seem quite right: it was as if the encounters were a little bit too staged. Maybe they were. That takes us to the theme of this article.

It may not be well-known to many in Ufology today that most of the Space Brothers had a distinct communist-like way of life. And they pushed their views on those Contactees mentioned above. The fact that the Contactees brought in audiences in their thousands became a national security for the FBI – and no, I’m not exaggerating. You should see the sizes of some of the FBI files on the Contactees. The files for Adamski and Van Tassel were both in excess of 300 pages. So, with that said, is there any merit to the scenario that the Space Brothers were actually Russian agents – and doing their very best to promote communism in the United States? There just might be. Let’s have a look at the very strange links, in the 1950s, between Russia, the West Coast of the USA, and aliens looking just like us. We’ll begin with the most famous, and most controversial, Contactee of all: George Adamski. Along with Desmond Leslie, he wrote a big-selling book on his claimed contacts called Flying Saucers Have Landed.

Daniel Fry (left) along with other notable UFO contactee George Adamski

Here’s one of the statements Adamski made in several of his early lectures: “If you ask me they probably have a Communist form of government and our American government wouldn’t release that kind of thing, naturally. That is a thing of the future – more advanced.” J. Edgar Hoover quickly sat up. No wonder: Adamski’s words reached the ears of thousands of Americans. The FBI, in one of its documents on Adamski, said: “Adamski, during this conversation, made the prediction that Russia will dominate the world and we will then have an era of peace for 1,000 years. He stated that Russia already has the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb and that the great earthquake, which was reported behind the Iron Curtain recently, was actually a hydrogen bomb explosion being tried out by the Russians. Adamski states this ‘earthquake’ broke seismograph machines and he added that no normal earthquake can do that.” No wonder the FBI watched the man for years.

Now, there’s Truman Bethurum. His story is a strange one – a very strange one. His 1954 book, Aboard a Flying Saucer, remains a Contactee classic of its kind. In the 1950s, Bethurum claimed flirty, late-night close encounters with a beautiful alien space-babe named Aura Rhanes. “Tops in shapeliness and beauty” was the way Bethurum described “the captain” of the ship. The locations of all the action were almost always isolated areas of Nevada’s expansive Mormon Mountains. Most ufologists of the day, very understandably, dismissed Bethurum’s tales as fantasies run wild and free. Indeed, Aura came across like an ethereal fairy-queen from a centuries-old folktale. Now, let’s get to the Communism side of all this. It’s intriguing to note the following words from Bethurum: “Two or three fellows who had sons in Korea and who read a lot in the newspapers about the Communist underground in this country, were convinced in their own minds that I was, if making contact with anyone at all, making it with enemy agents. They even went so far as to tell me belligerently that they intended to get guns and follow me nights, and if they caught up me having intercourse with any people from planes, airships of any kind, they’d blast me and those people too.”

Was Aura Rhanes a figment of Bethurum’s imagination? Could she have been an alien? Might she have been one of those “enemy agents” to which Bethurum referred? A Russian plant seeking to manipulate the UFO scene? Taking into consideration all that we have learned so far, we should not dismiss the latter possibility out of hand. On a related matter, it’s worth noting that FBI’s records demonstrate that in December 1954, the Palm Springs Republican Club contacted the FBI to inquire if Bethurum might be guilty of “trying to put over any propaganda.” Now, it’s time to address the saga of Orfeo Angelucci, another of the famous Contactees. In April 1952, Angelucci secured a good job with the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in Burbank, California, specifically in the Plastics Unit. Maybe, there was someone – with the name of Ivan or Dmitri – who wanted to learn all about what was going on at Lockheed, and, using a UFO ruse, tried to get Angelucci to find the latest technological developments. There’s no doubt that Angelucci was approached by what sound just like Russian agents.

It was in this period, the early Fifties, that Angelucci caught the attention of the FBI – and for a very curious reason. As he became more adept at public speaking, and more comfortable about discussing his claimed encounters with aliens, Angelucci revealed something disturbingly eye-opening. It was something which soon had the Feds on his tail. According to Angelucci, as his profile as one of the Contactees grew and grew, he found himself approached on several occasions by what he described as a “subversive element.” This small group – “foreigners,” as he worded it – first approached Angelucci while he was engaged in a series of lectures along the east coast in the 1950s. Regular UFO enthusiasts, they were certainly not. Angelucci admitted to UFO researcher/writer Jim Moseley that he was “flattered” by the attention, but remained very uneasy about the agenda. Angelucci would later say of this curious affair: “Failing in their desperate attempts to convert me to communism and slant my talks along the Party Line, they invariably defiantly demanded: ‘Well, then, just what do you think is wrong with Communism?’'” Shortly before Angelucci publicly revealed that a certain “subversive element” was mixing and stirring politics with extraterrestrials, the FBI came knocking on the front-door of the Angelucci home. We don’t know what, exactly, went down, because in 2009 the FBI destroyed its file on Angelucci.

Could it be true that the Space Brothers (and the Space Sisters) from the stars were really from right here on Earth, but from the Soviet Union? And, were they doing their best to promote the Soviet life in the U.S. by using and manipulating the then-thriving UFO scene? After all, what’s more likely: agents or aliens? I say the latter looks far more plausible.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

During the first half of 2021, the United States had been overcome with a case of UFO fever (or “UAP”, as these unusual aerial objects now seem to be preferentially called by both the American military, and the media).

However, in recent days, much of this interest seems to have waned, following the publication of a widely anticipated report delivered to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in June.

This, despite the recent passing of a bill by the Senate that may significantly expand access to information about UAP collected by the intelligence community for a small unit within the U.S. Navy that has been tasked with studying these unexplained phenomena.

Much of the interest in the topic, which began with earnest in 2017 following revelations in the New York Times about the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, was further fueled by the appearance of a new task force within the U.S. Navy, specifically assigned to study anomalous aerial objects observed by the military.

The establishment of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) was officially announced in early August 2020, following its approval by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense David L. Norquist. “The Department of the Navy, under the cognizance of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, will lead the UAPTF,” read a Pentagon press release announcing the establishment of the task force.

As the Pentagon had outlined at the time, the UAPTF had been established to help improve the U.S. government’s “understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs,” with a specific mission “to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. national security.”

With the subsequent passing of the Intelligence Authorization Act for the fiscal year 2021, the UAPTF was given the go-ahead to proceed with the creation of a preliminary report on its findings regarding UAP, to be delivered to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in June of this year.

The buzz this all managed to generate had been impressive, to say the least. Almost every day, news items, opinion editorials, and blog posts speculated on what the contents of the widely anticipated government report on these aerial mysteries might contain.

However, once it finally arrived in late June, the contents of the report hardly lived up to all the hype it managed to generate.

The nine-page report, titled “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” was delivered to the ODNI on June 25, 2021. Not counting the cover page, and a pair of appendixes found on the last two pages, the main body of the report comprised just six pages of material that provided no specifics on the 144 unresolved incidents involving UAP cited in the document. These incidents, the majority of which occurred within the last two years, appeared to represent encounters by personnel from the U.S. Navy, Air Force, and other areas of government with what the UAPTF believed to be physical objects or phenomena of some kind.

“Our analysis of the data supports the construct that if and when individual UAP incidents are resolved they will fall into one of five potential explanatory categories,” the report stated. These five categories included “airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, USG or U.S. industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and a catchall ‘other’ bin.”

In addition to its designation of multiple types of phenomena that comprised the UAP observed by the U.S. military, another key focus of the report involved the possible threat these objects might represent to aviators, as well as to U.S. interests and security more broadly.

“UAP clearly pose a safety of flight issue,” read one portion of the report, “and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security. Safety concerns primarily center on aviators contending with an increasingly cluttered air domain.”

Significantly, the report added that “UAP would also represent a national security challenge if they are foreign adversary collection platforms or provide evidence a potential adversary has developed either a breakthrough or disruptive technology.”

The preliminary report seemed to convey at least one thing starkly: how seriously the Pentagon appears to be taking the UAP issue. Despite this renewed interest shown in the subject by the U.S. government, the general response to the report had been lackluster, with many complaining that it offered little information of any substance, or that wasn’t already publicly accessible.

However, what many seem to have overlooked about the report had been that in its preliminary assessment, the UAPTF was essentially presenting frontmatter for what would be ongoing studies of UAP by the Navy’s task force, drawing on information collected by a number of agencies within the intelligence community in the years ahead. But where do things go from here?

A glimpse at what might await in the days ahead appeared recently in a bill passed unanimously by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which expanded the UAPTF’s access to information collected by the U.S. intelligence community about UAP.

As with last year’s Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA), provisions were included again in this year’s bill related UAP and the efforts of the Navy’s UAP Task Force. According to Section 345 of the newly-passed FY 2022 IAA, titled “Support for and Oversight of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force,” the Secretary of Defense and Director of National Intelligence will now require “each element of the intelligence community and the Department of Defense with data relating to unidentified aerial phenomena to make such data available immediately to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and to the National Air and Space Intelligence Center.”

Among the most significant developments since the release of the preliminary report in June, it also presents us with ideas about the future direction of the Navy’s UAP Task Force, and that of other agencies within the government who are collecting data about unidentified aerial objects.

Whether or not the UAP subject holds the public’s attention, it appears that the government and its focus on collecting and analyzing reports have not changed. In the years ahead, perhaps there will be more significant findings on these unusual aerial objects that have perplexed governments and militaries around the world now for several decades.

ALL RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Experts find evidence of 12,000-year-old flood of epic proportions that drained an ancient lake at a rate of more than 800 Olympic swimming pools per second

• A 12,000 year-old flood that drained a lake at speeds of more than 800 Olympic swimming pools per second may have pushed Earth back into an ice age

• Glacial Lake Agassiz spilled into the Clearwater-Athabasca Spillway 

• The lake covered 580,000 square miles and was formed after the Laurentide Ice Shield melted around 16,000 years ago 

• It's likely the 'catastrophic meltwater to drain to the Arctic Ocean' occurred over a 6–9 month period  

• At the height of the spillage, 2 million cubic meters of water were discharged every second  

• Scientists are still not sure what caused the Earth to slip back into an ice age

By CHRIS CIACCIA FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

Researchers have found evidence that a flood which happened more than 12,000 years ago and drained an ancient lake at the speed of more than 800 Olympic swimming pools per second may have pushed the Earth back into an ice age.

A team of experts - led by the researchers at the University of Alberta - found evidence that Glacial Lake Agassiz started to spill out to the northwest in a channel known as the Clearwater-Athabasca Spillway. 

This spillage may have caused the Younger Dryas cooling event, some 13,000 years ago.

The ancient lake, which no longer exists, covered an area of 580,000 square miles in modern-day southern Manitoba, central Saskatchewan all the way up to the Alberta border.

Researchers, including Sophie Norris (pictured), have found evidence that a 12,000 year-old flood that drained a lake at speeds of more than 800 Olympic swimming pools per second may have pushed Earth back into an ice age 

The ancient lake, which no longer exists which covered an area of 580,000 square miles in modern-day southern Manitoba, central Saskatchewan all the way up to the Alberta border

The researchers - using sedimentary evidence, more than 100 valley cross sections and a model of the bedrock's erodibility and size of the lake- estimated that at the height of the spillage, 2 million cubic meters of water were discharged every second

'One suggestion is the drainage of meltwater from glacial Lake Agassiz, a large ice-dammed lake in central North America, into the surrounding oceans may have affected ocean circulation, contributing to this climatic event,' researchers wrote in the study.

It's likely that the 'catastrophic meltwater to drain to the Arctic Ocean' occurred over a 6–9 month period during the Younger Dryas, but they are not yet clear if this happened during the beginning of the event.  

'We know that a large discharge has gone through the area but the rate of the discharge or the magnitude was pretty much unknown,' the study's lead author, Sophie Norris, said in a statement. 

Over the span of roughly nine months, approximately 5,000 cubic miles (21,000 cubic kilometers) were drained from the lake, roughly the equivalent of all the Great Lakes combined 

Using sedimentary evidence, more than 100 valley cross sections, and a model comprised of gradual dam failure with the bedrock's erodibility and the size of the lake, the researchers estimated that 2 million cubic meters of water were discharged every second at the height of the spillage, making it one of the largest floods known to occur on Earth.

For comparison purposes, this is roughly 10 times what the Amazon River spills every second. 

Over the span of roughly nine months, approximately 5,000 cubic miles (21,000 cubic kilometers) were drained from the lake, roughly the equivalent of all the Great Lakes combined.  

The ancient lake was formed after the Laurentide Ice Shield started to melt around 16,000 years ago, creating a dam that prevented meltwaters from entering the Hudson Bay

The ancient lake was formed after the Laurentide Ice Shield started to melt around 16,000 years ago, creating a dam that prevented meltwaters from entering the Hudson Bay.

'What I find deeply satisfying is that modern hydraulic modeling, when applied to the evidence preserved in the landscape, shows how a phenomenal flood propagated 12,000 years ago,' said University of Southampton researcher and study co-author Paul Carling.  

'When all the uncertainties are considered, the outcome remains pretty solid.' 

Although scientists are not sure what caused the Earth to slip back into an ice age, the lake flooding theory is certainly plausible, study co-author Froese added.

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

A massive flood that occurred around 12,000 years ago may have pushed our planet back into an Ice Age. Glacial Lake Agassiz covered a large portion of Manitoba, northwestern Ontario, parts of eastern Saskatchewan and North Dakota, and northwestern Minnesota. It measured approximately 1,500 kilometers in length (932 miles), more than 1,100 kilometers in width (684 miles), and 210 meters in depth (689 feet) at its largest period. It formed when the giant Laurentide Ice Shield started melting around 16,000 years ago.

Since the flood from Lake Agassiz dumped water out at a jaw-dropping rate of more than 800 Olympic-size swimming pools each second, it’s not surprising that experts believe it was the largest ever known flood in history. The lake suddenly sent large amounts of water into a northwest channel known as the Clearwater-Athabasca Spillway and into the Mackenzie River Basin, then finally into the Arctic Ocean.

An international study, which was led by the University of Alberta, suggested that the flood may have brought a warming Earth back into the Ice Age. Specifically, they wanted to know exactly how much water spilled into the channel. Sophie Norris, who is a former U of A PhD student in the Faculty of Science and now a postdoctoral research fellow at Dalhousie University, explained, “We know that a large discharge has gone through the area but the rate of the discharge or the magnitude was pretty much unknown.”

Based on their research, they estimated that approximately 21,000 cubic kilometers of water was discharged from the lake in a time frame of less than 9 months.

What’s even more interesting was that the researchers found that when this massive flood occurred, the northern hemisphere was beginning to warm up but was suddenly put back into an Ice Age (this period is known as the Younger Dryas) as explained by Duane Froese who is Norris’ PhD supervisor as well as the Canada Research Chair in Northern Environmental Change in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, “During the Late Pleistocene, temperatures were returning to normal, when the Earth slipped back into an ice age,” adding, “We don’t know for sure that the flood caused the Earth to slip back into the ice age, but certainly if you put that much water into the Arctic Ocean, the models show you get cooling of the northern hemisphere climate.”

Their next job is to conclusively determine whether this flood was single-handedly the cause of the Ice Age’s return or if it was part of several contributing factors. The study was published in Geophysical Research Letters.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Simon Parkes: Jinn & The Shadow Beings

Simon Parkes is a life long experiencer of aliens, shadow people, elementals and ufo’s, these include Mantid (Mantis) beings, Draconis Reptilian, Feline, small and tall Grey creatures, Crystalline beings and other creatures that can’t be identified. Simon was an elected Politician and served a full term of office. 

Simon’s biological mother worked for the British Security Service, often called MI5 between 1965 – 1979. However while she was managed by British Intelligence she was in fact working “jointly” for the National Security Agency (NSA) of America. Her job was to type out documents that related to crashed ufo craft that had come down all over the Earth’s surface and had then been retrieved by American special forces/recovery teams. 

Simon’s Grandfather, who was a British diplomat, worked for the foreign arm of British intelligence often called MI6. But again in his case he was closely associated with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of America.  During this time he was awarded the Order of the British empire (OBE) medal as well as the Commander of the British Empire (CBE) medal, however he turned down a Knighthood from the Queen.  Simon’s Grandfather was also a prominent Freemason and was Britain’s appointed diplomat to the United Nations in the late 1950′s and early 1960′s .

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/  }

IS THIS SPY UFO FLOATING OVER NEW YORK?

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

{ https://www.hln.be/ }