{ https://nationalufocenter.com/ }

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 06 - 08 - 2021

UFO Sighted Over Rome, Italy ( August 4, 2021 )

Impressive clear daytime UFO Sighting from Comune di Roma Capitale, Rome, Italy on August 4, 2021

They are everywhere

• credit : O.A

Humanoid Sighted Over Memphis, Tennessee ( August 1, 2021 )

And it happened again : Now in 01/08/2021, Memphis, Tennessee a being with the same characteristics was sighted resembling the entity with a strange humanoid form that was recorded in Russia on 20/04/2021 has once again been recorded in Memphis skies, Tennessee.

There is no doubt to me that it is the same guy

They're already among us...

• credit : A.M.C.B

Large UFO Caught As It Passes Over The Moon!

What appears to be a five pointed object passes over the moon.

Source of video MUFON case #.117141

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

Evidence of serious, government concerns about the alien abduction phenomenon began in the 1950s. That was the year in which a young American soldier found himself caught up in a very strange saga that, to a degree, still disturbs him to this very day. It all went down on a chilly night in Utah’s expansive desert. Private Bernard Gerry Irwin was the man whose life took a turn of the decidedly unforeseen type. February 20, 1959 began as a regular day for Irwin, but, it most definitely didn’t end that way. At the time, Irwin was driving to Fort Bliss, Texas, from Idaho – the former being the facility at which Irwin was stationed, and the latter his home state. As night set in, something completely unforeseen and paradigm-shifting happened to Irwin. He was about to be confronted by the UFO phenomenon in spectacular and mysterious fashion.

The night was dark, silent and all but empty of vehicles. As desert highways so often are well after sunset. But, for Irwin this was a night he would never forget – which is somewhat ironic, as a result of the fact that certain portions of his memory were forever erased from his mind. As he drove along the winding, curving road, Irwin was suddenly distracted by a bright light in the night sky – but at a distinctly low level – which descended below a looming ridge. A meteorite? No. A flare, perhaps? Wrong again. Maybe an aircraft in trouble? That was Irwin’s first thought and, with that in mind, he brought his car to a stop at the side of the road, and turned on the blinkers. He quickly got out, and left a note for passing drivers. It read: Have gone to investigate what looks like a plane crash about one-quarter mile to my right. Notify state police immediately. Wearing his Army coat and armed with a flashlight, Irwin headed off into the unknown. Irwin headed for what he suspected – and feared – just might be the site of a plane crash, only to find himself in an even greater nightmare.

The next thing Irwin remembered was waking up in a hospital bed in Cedar City. Where and why, he didn’t know. A doctor and a nurse were standing around the bed, and were soon joined by a local county sheriff. Irwin was confused and scared, which is not surprising. The other three were far more interested in finding out what had gone on. Irwin kept muttering about “survivors,” asking the nurse and the doctor if there were any. Were they all killed? Who “they” might have been, it seems that no-one really knew. That included Irwin, whose mind was in complete turmoil. The doctor then broke the news: Irwin had been unconscious for a full day and night. It was only thanks to a passing warden with the Fish and Game Commission, who came across Irwin’s car, that Irwin was found. The police were soon on the scene, and Irwin was finally found, completely unresponsive, around a quarter of a mile from the road. It was in the early hours before Irwin was finally resting in an unfamiliar bed.

Irwin was kept under observation for several days, but remained unable to recall any of the events of that strange night. Military personnel soon appeared on the scene to fly Irwin back to Fort Bliss, where he was placed under additional observation by a medical team. After around a full week, Irwin was declared back to full health. But, try telling that to Irwin. Only a couple of days after he got the green-light to return to work, Irwin collapsed in a dead faint. He failed to remember the names and faces of the people who had taken care of him on his return to his base. Things got even weirder: in an almost hypnotic state he got a bus ticket to Utah and headed out to the scene of the incident which had caused so much puzzlement and concern. Not only that, in leaving his post, Irwin was officially AWOL – something which would come back to cause significant problems with his superior officers, which is hardly surprising. In somewhat of a daze, Irwin then walked back to Cedar City. While Irwin was certainly in big trouble with his commanding officers – he received a fine and a loss of rank – more intriguing was the response of the medical people who were required to continue to observe Irwin and try and figure out what had happened to him on that lonely, dark night.

Certainly, one of the most notable pieces of evidence that has surfaced via the Freedom of Information Act is a document prepared by a Captain Valentine, who was Irwin’s psychiatrist while he was undergoing treatment for his strange condition. On March 27, 1959, Irwin was injected with sodium amytal. It provoked a strange response from Irwin, which caught Captain Valentine’s deep attention. In his official report on this particular drug-induced session, the captain wrote: “[Irwin] stated there was a ‘special intelligence’ that he couldn’t explain to me, since it would be incomprehensible to me, which has directed him not to remember or not to tell me about any of the events in Utah. He says that if he tells what was behind the incidents in Utah there will be a ‘big investigation’ that he does not want to be bothered with and also because it will harm many people and he doesn’t want that to happen. He states ‘it’ all began at the age of three years,’ although he will not reveal how or what began, stating that it would provide a clue to me as to what is behind all this. Also, he informed me that he could leave this hospital any time if he wanted to by invoking a special force. Following this interview the patient stated he could remember nothing of what he said during it.”

Notably, David Booher – a UFO researcher who has carefully investigated the Irwin saga – says of Irwin’s statement made to Captain Valentine: “It’s intriguing that Gerry speaks of an intelligence which ‘directed him not to remember or not to tell me about any of the events in Utah.’ As we know, in the decades that followed this would become a very common theme in the alien abduction literature, i.e. having memories blocked and/or being warned against telling others about the experience.” The Freedom of Information Act has also shown that the military, despite dosing Irwin with drugs to try and uncover the true story of that night in the desert in 1959, drew nothing but blanks. But, the words of Captain Valentine strongly suggest he suspected that there was much more to the story than met the eye – and particularly so considering that Irwin had alluded to the fact that something happened to him “at the age of three.” It should be noted that alien abduction phenomena very often begins in early childhood. The case of Private First Class Bernard G. Irwin is a most important one.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

NASA Study Highlights Importance of Surface Shadows in Moon Water Puzzle

The Moon is covered with craters and rocks, creating a surface “roughness” that casts shadows, as seen in this photograph from the 1972 Apollo 17 mission. These cold shadows may allow water ice to accumulate as frost even at daytime. The area of detail is highlighted in the following illustration.
Credits: NASA

• The shadows cast by the roughness of the Moon’s surface create small cold spots for water ice to accumulate even during the harsh lunar daytime.

Scientists are confident that water ice can be found at the Moon’s poles inside permanently shadowed craters – in other words, craters that never receive sunlight. But observations show water ice is also present across much of the lunar surface, even during daytime. This is a puzzle: Previous computer models suggested any water ice that forms during the lunar night should quickly burn off as the Sun climbs overhead.

“Over a decade ago, spacecraft detected the possible presence of water on the dayside surface of the Moon, and this was confirmed by NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy [SOFIA] in 2020,” said Björn Davidsson, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “These observations were, at first, counterintuitive: Water shouldn’t survive in that harsh environment. This challenges our understanding of the lunar surface and raises intriguing questions about how volatiles, like water ice, can survive on airless bodies.”

In a new study, Davidsson and co-author Sona Hosseini, a research and instrument scientist at JPL, suggest that shadows created by the “roughness” of the lunar surface provide refuge for water ice, enabling it to form as surface frost far from the Moon’s poles. They also explain how the Moon’s exosphere (the tenuous gases that act like a thin atmosphere) may have a significant role to play in this puzzle.

This illustration zooms in on the area of detail indicated in the previous photo, showing how shadows enable water ice to survive on the sunlit lunar surface. When shadows move as the Sun tracks overhead, the exposed frost lingers long enough to be detected by spacecraft.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Water Traps and Frost Pockets

Many computer models simplify the lunar surface, rendering it flat and featureless. As a result, it’s often assumed that the surface far from the poles heats up uniformly during lunar daytime, which would make it impossible for water ice to remain on the sunlit surface for long.

So how is it that water is being detected on the Moon beyond permanently shadowed regions? One explanation for the detection is that water molecules may be trapped inside rock or the impact glass created by the incredible heat and pressure of meteorite strikes. Fused within these materials, as this hypothesis suggests, the water can remain on the surface even when heated by the Sun while creating the signal that was detected by SOFIA.

But one problem with this idea is that observations of the lunar surface show that the amount of water decreases before noon (when sunlight is at its peak) and increases in the afternoon. This indicates that the water may be moving from one location to another through the lunar day, which would be impossible if they are trapped inside lunar rock or impact glass.

Davidsson and Hosseini revised the computer model to factor in the surface roughness apparent in images from the Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972, which show a lunar surface strewn with boulders and pockmarked with craters, creating lots of shady areas even near noon. By factoring this surface roughness into their computer models, Davidsson and Hosseini explain how it’s possible for frost to form in the small shadows and why the distribution of water changes throughout the day.

Because there is no thick atmosphere to distribute heat around the surface, extremely cold, shaded areas, where temperatures may plummet to about minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 210 degrees Celsius), can neighbor hot areas exposed to the Sun, where temperatures may reach as high as 240 Fahrenheit (120 Celsius).

As the Sun tracks through the lunar day, the surface frost that may accumulate in these cold, shaded areas is slowly exposed to sunlight and cycled into the Moon’s exosphere. The water molecules then refreeze onto the surface, reaccumulating as frost in other cold, shaded locations.

“Frost is far more mobile than trapped water,” said Davidsson. “Therefore, this model provides a new mechanism that explains how water moves between the lunar surface and the thin lunar atmosphere.” 

Davidsson and Hosseini revised the computer model to factor in the surface roughness apparent in images from the Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972, which show a lunar surface strewn with boulders and pockmarked with craters, creating lots of shady areas even near noon. By factoring this surface roughness into their computer models, Davidsson and Hosseini explain how it’s possible for frost to form in the small shadows and why the distribution of water changes throughout the day.

Because there is no thick atmosphere to distribute heat around the surface, extremely cold, shaded areas, where temperatures may plummet to about minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 210 degrees Celsius), can neighbor hot areas exposed to the Sun, where temperatures may reach as high as 240 Fahrenheit (120 Celsius).

As the Sun tracks through the lunar day, the surface frost that may accumulate in these cold, shaded areas is slowly exposed to sunlight and cycled into the Moon’s exosphere. The water molecules then refreeze onto the surface, reaccumulating as frost in other cold, shaded locations.

“Frost is far more mobile than trapped water,” said Davidsson. “Therefore, this model provides a new mechanism that explains how water moves between the lunar surface and the thin lunar atmosphere.”

One hypothesis is that water molecules are trapped within lunar material (left). But a new study posits that water molecules (right) remain as frost on the surface in cold shadows and move to other cold locations via the thin exosphere.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A Closer Look

While this isn’t the first study to consider surface roughness when calculating lunar surface temperatures, previous work did not take into account how shadows would affect the capability of water molecules to remain on the surface during daytime as frost. This new study is important because it helps us to better understand how lunar water is released into, and removed from, the Moon’s exosphere.

“Understanding water as a resource is essential for NASA and commercial endeavors for future human lunar exploration,” Hosseini said. “If water is available in the form of frost in sunlit regions of the Moon, future explorers may use it as a resource for fuel and drinking water. But first, we need to figure out how the exosphere and surface interact and what role that plays in the cycle.”

To test this theory, Hosseini is leading a team to develop ultra-miniature sensors to measure the faint signals from water ice. The Heterodyne OH Lunar Miniaturized Spectrometer (HOLMS) is being developed to be used on small stationary landers or autonomous rovers – like JPL’s Autonomous Pop-Up Flat Folding Explorer Robot (A-PUFFER), for example – that may be sent to the Moon in the future to make direct measurements of hydroxyl (a molecule that contains one hydrogen atom and an oxygen atom).

Hydroxyl, which is a molecular cousin of water (a molecule with two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom), can serve as an indicator of how much water may be present in the exosphere. Both water and hydroxyl could be created by meteorite impacts and through solar wind particles hitting the lunar surface, so measuring the presence of these molecules in the Moon’s exosphere can reveal how much water is being created while also showing how it moves from place to place. But time is of the essence to make those measurements.

“The current lunar exploration by several nations and private companies indicates significant artificial changes to the lunar environment in the near future,” said Hosseini. “If this trend continues, we will lose the opportunity to understand the natural lunar environment, particularly the water that is cycling through the Moon’s pristine exosphere. Consequently, the advanced development of ultra-compact, high-sensitivity instruments is of critical importance and urgency.”

The researchers point out that this new study could help us better understand the role shadows play in the accumulation of water ice and gas molecules beyond the Moon, such as on Mars or even on the particles in Saturn rings.

The study, titled “Implications of surface roughness in models of water desorption on the Moon”, was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on August 2, 2021.

{ https://www.nasa.gov/ }

In October of last year, NASA revealed that their Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) had confirmed the presence of water on the moon’s sunlit surface. More specifically, the amount of water was about the same as what would fit in a 12-ounce bottle and it was discovered in a cubic meter of soil in the Clavius Crater.

While that was incredibly exciting news, scientists were still baffled as to how water could be present during the hot daytime temperatures on the lunar surface. The daytime temperature on the sunlit surface can reach temperatures as high as 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius). To put this into better perspective, water boils at an average temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius) depending on where you are located.

So, if the sunlit surface is hot enough to boil water, why is there still water ice in certain areas? According to a new study by NASA scientists, the “roughness” of the lunar surface in addition to its shadows could help to keep it from evaporating.

A previous study published in 2009 stated that the amount of water on the lunar surface changed throughout the day – there was less water before noon (the hottest part of the day) but when the temperatures cooled down in the afternoon, the amount increased. This suggested that some of the water was able to move around from being boiled to freezing over again. However, the thermophysical models used in that study were conducted on a mostly flat lunar surface. Another paper was published last year that described how water could have been held in small “cold traps” across the lunar surface.

In this most recent study, the researchers focused on desorption (a phenomenon where a substance is released through or from a surface) in addition to using a much more accurate model of the actual lunar surface. In fact, astrophysicist Björn Davidsson from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and JPL researcher Sona Hosseini referenced photos taken from the Apollo missions in order to update their model to a lot rougher lunar surface with craters and boulders.

In this new model, they realized that the roughness on the moon created shadows that kept the surface cool enough for the water to move around and not evaporate as Davidsson explained, “Frost is far more mobile than trapped water,” adding, “Therefore, this model provides a new mechanism that explains how water moves between the lunar surface and the thin lunar atmosphere.”

The researchers detailed their findings the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society which read in part, “The model of the surface temperature of the Moon described in this paper has significant implications for understanding the presence and evolution of water on the lunar surface.” “It is of critical importance to take account of the surface roughness to get an accurate picture of the amount of water on the surface of the Moon.”

An illustration depicting the shadows on the rough lunar surface can be seen here.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

If you’re into UFOs, you’ll know of the wave of activity that occurred in the skies of the United States in the latter part of the 1890s. Then, during the Second World War, there were the Foo Fighters. And, when the Second World War was over, we had the Ghost Rockets of Scandinavia. Flying Saucers followed within a year. In the early 1990s, the Black Triangles put in appearances, but never really went away. There’s another important time-frame to all of this, however. I’m talking about the very earliest years of the 1900s. You may not know, but there are some classic cases from that period, and particularly from 1909. Let’s begin. Nigel Wright is a long-time UFO researcher based in England, and – with Jonathan Downes, the director of the British-based Center for Fortean Zoology – the co-author of the book, The Rising of the Moon, which is a fine study of paranormal phenomena that I recommend to one and all. In their book, Nigel cites a report that he found within the May 21, 1909 edition of England’s Exmouth Journal newspaper, and, to which, are attached definitive M.I.B. overtones. Titled Invasion Scares – Queer Stories from Humberside, the article reads as follows: “A strange story was told the Yorkshire Post, Grimsby correspondent by workmen from Killingholm near Immingham new dock works on Tuesday night. They declared that they were seated at noon on the roadside at Killingholm, when a large motor car drove up and two men alighted who walked to the bank on which the workmen were seated and asked if any airships [italics mine]had been recently seen near. The workmen replied: ‘No,’ whereupon the motorists asked the distance between Killingholm and Spurn, and whether any mines were laid in the Humber between the two places. The workmen referred their interrogators to a coastguard, saying he would be able to answer them. It does not matter,’ replied the motorists, and, after enquiring the way to the nearest refreshment house, they jumped into their car and drove quickly away.” Now, onto another case from that early period:

Brett Holman, who has extensively studied this issue, says: “On the night of 23 March 1909, a police constable named Kettle saw a most unusual thing: a strange, cigar-shaped craft passing over the city of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. His friends were skeptical, but his story was corroborated, to an extent, by Mr Banyard and Mrs Day, both of nearby March, who separately saw something similar two nights later. In fact, these incidents were only the prelude to a series of several dozen such sightings throughout April and especially May, mostly from East Anglia and South Wales.” In May of the same year, the London Standard newspaper told its readers that with “few exceptions” the witnesses described seeing “a torpedo-shaped object, possessing two powerful searchlights, which comes out early at night.”

Artist’s rendering of the airship purportedly seen during late 1896 and into the summer of 1897.

May 18, 1909 was the night on which one of the most amazing encounters occurred. A Mr. C. Lethbridge was walking to his Roland Street, Cardiff home, via the 271-meter-high Caerphilly Mountain. As he did so, Lethbridge was astonished by the sight of a cigar-shaped vehicle – in excess of forty-feet in length – which was sitting on the grass, at the edge of a mountain road. In his very own words… “When I turned the bend at the summit I was surprised to see a long tube-shaped affair on the grass on the roadside, with two men busily engaged with something nearby. They attracted my close attention because of their peculiar getup; they appeared to have big heavy fur coats and fur caps fitting tightly over their heads. I was rather frightened, but I continued to go on until I was within twenty yards of them, and then my idea as to their clothing was confirmed.

“The noise of my little spring cart seemed to attract them, and when they saw me they jumped up and jabbered furiously to each other in a strange lingo — Welsh or something else; it was certainly not English. They hurriedly collected something off the ground, and then I was really frightened. The long thing on the ground rose up slowly. I was standing still at the time, quite amazed, and when it was hanging a few feet off the ground the men jumped into a kind of little carriage suspended from it, and gradually the whole affair and the men rose in the air in a zigzag fashion. When they had cleared the telegraph wires that pass over the mountain, two lights like electric lamps shone out, and the thing went higher into the air, and sailed away towards Cardiff.” It seems that 1909 was a hotbed for UFO activity in the U.K.!

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

8 key takeaways from the US Government’s big UFO report

Moment student captures ‘large UFO’ hovering over Devon seafront

Sinead Butler

 

The picture of large UFO captured by Matthew Evans, 36 in Devon

(Matthew Evans / SWNS)

A student believes that he could have witnessed a large UFO hovering for several seconds on the Devon seafront.

Matthew Evans, 36, from Tidmouth couldn’t believe what he saw last week when he looked out his top-floor flat window.

He said he spotted a bright object with four lights in triangular formation flying in the night’s sky.

Within a matter of seconds, the object “zoomed off,” but luckily the mature student was able to get his phone out in time to photograph what he saw.

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He told SWNS: “I couldn’t help but see it. My kitchen window gives a great view of the sea so when it came across the horizon.

“It wasn’t moving like a plane would. It was moving a lot slower and went up and down for a bit before hovering a good ten seconds.

“It stayed in one spot long enough for me to pull out my phone and get those snaps.

“Then it quickly zoomed off at some speed and I couldn’t see it anymore.”

He added: “The light was really bright.

“I just didn’t know what it could be so I decided to take a picture.

“I’m not quite losing my marbles yet.

“But it’s hard to place it so I suppose it is an unidentified flying object.”

Pictures showed lights in a triangular-shaped formation lingering in the sky

(Matthew Evans / SWNS)

This sighting comes just after the US government released a highly anticipated report on UFOs.

It looked into 144 reported sightings of “unidentified aerial phenomenon,” or “UAPs”, since 2004, mostly recorded by US Navy personnel first-hand.

The sightings were categorised into five categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, U.S. government or American industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems and “other.”

Only one out of the 144 sightings could be explained as “airborne clutter” while the rest were categorized as “other” as there wasn’t enough conclusive evidence to provide an explanation.

Spooky...

{ https://www.indy100.com/ }

Woman says she thinks she’s found a UFO in her back yard and shared ‘evidence’ on Tiktok

Really fast UFO filmed over Isla Cristina, Spain 2-Jul-2021

This really fast object was filmed in the sky above Isla Cristina, a city and municipality located in the province of Huelva, Spain on 2nd July 2021.

Witness report (Google translate):

 I was in the living room managing the security camera with a Wi-Fi connection previously installed on the roof of the house. I turned on the infrared lamp from the laptop in the device software a few minutes later I saw an object passing by at high speed so I started recording the video. I was able to follow the trajectory of it by controlling the software.

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

ANCIENT PROTO-MATH FOUND IN BABYLONIAN TABLET

TUCKED AWAY in a seemingly forgotten corner of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, Daniel Mansfield found what may solve one of ancient math’s biggest questions.

First exhumed in 1894 from what is now Baghdad, the circular tablet — broken at the center with small perpendicular indentations across it — was feared lost to antiquity. But in 2018, a photo of the tablet showed up in Mansfield’s inbox.

Mansfield, a senior lecturer of mathematics at the University of New South Wales Sydney, had suspected the tablet was real. He came across records of its excavation and began the hunt. Word got around about what he was looking for, and then the email came. He knew what he had to do: travel to Turkey and examine it at the museum.

Hidden within this tablet is not only the oldest known display of applied geometry but a new ancient understanding of triangles. It could rewrite what we know about the history of mathematics, Mansfield argues.

These findings were published Wednesday in the journal Foundations of Science.

It’s generally thought that trigonometry — a subset of geometry and what’s displayed on the tablet in a crude sense — was developed by ancient Greeks like the philosopher Pythagoras. However, analysis of the tablet suggests it was created 1,000 years before Pythagoras was born.

Babylonian mathematics, which already holds a place of renown in the pantheon of ancient math, might’ve been more sophisticated than historians have given it credit for.

“The way we understand trigonometry harks back to ancient Greek astronomers,” Mansfield tells Inverse. “I like to think of the Babylonian understanding of right triangles as an unexpected prequel, which really is an independent story because the Babylonians weren’t using it to measure the stars, they were using it to measure the ground.”

Dr. Mansfield observes the tablet.  University of New South Wales Sydney

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW FIRST

Mansfield is no stranger to a pair of white gloves and following his mathematical curiosity.

Years before discovering this latest tablet, dubbed Si.427, Mansfield was hot on the trail of another ancient Babylonian “document:” Plimpton 322. While the location of this artifact was known (it’s located at Columbia University) its true purpose was not.

Like Si.427, which dates back to roughly 1900 to 1600 BCE, Plimpton 322 is covered in geometric markings — riddles academics have tried to decipher for years. While the reigning theory was that these markings were a kind of teacher’s cheat code for Babylonian homework problems, Mansfield and colleagues were not convinced.

The Plimpton 322 clay tablet: it’s about the size of a postcard.  Wikimedia Commons

In a 2017 paper, Mansfield and colleagues propose Plimpton 322 might be a kind of proto-trigonometry table of values — suggesting it predates the development of trigonometry as we know it today.

“A modern analogy would be to say that it contains a mix of elementary school problems alongside the unsolved conjectures of mathematics,” writes Mansfield in the new paper.

WHAT’S NEW

Now, Mansfield argues the discovery of Si.427 could confirm his Plimpton 322 hunch.

In essence, Si.427 is argued to be a case study of how this proto-trig could be used in practice.

Si.427 is what’s known as a cadastral document. These are used to document the boundaries of land ownership. There are other examples on record, but Mansfield argues this tablet is the oldest known example from the Old Babylonian period — a range that stretches from 1900 BCE to 1600 BCE. On the tablet are legal and geometry details about a field that was split after some of it was sold.

This research suggests Plimpton 322 was used similarly: It might have been a surveyor’s cheat sheet, instead of a teacher’s. It’s possible Plimpton 322 was the theoretical solution to the practical problems a surveyor using Si.427 might have encountered.

“It’s a discovery that has come to us far outside our mathematical culture,” Mansfield says. “It seems new and fresh to us, even though it’s almost 4,000 years old.”

Using the principles of right triangles and perpendicular lines, ancient surveyors could evenly divide land to avoid disputing neighbors. University of New South Wales Sydney

WHY IT MATTERS

While these tablets are the kind of thing you might easily walk past on display in a museum, Mansfield said this discovery could actually have a huge implication for how we understand these ancient mathematics.

Namely, it means mathematicians were working with so-called Pythagorean triples (trios of numbers that satisfy the infamous a^2+b^2 = c^2 equation) long before Pythagoras himself was even born.

It also helps answer a slightly less academic question: How do you evenly divide up disputed land?

“This is from a period where land is starting to become private — people started thinking about land in terms of ‘my land and your land,’ wanting to establish a proper boundary to have positive neighborly relationships,” Mansfield explains in a statement.

“And this is what this tablet immediately says. It's a field being split, and new boundaries are made.”

HOW DOES IT WORK?

As for how triangles sketched in clay translate to farmer’s fields, it all comes down to perpendicular lines.

Essentially, surveyors would choose two Pythagorean triples (which were inherently right triangles) and extend the boundary line of the resultant rectangle by eye to create true perpendicular lines that spread across the entire field.

“This proves that our Babylonian surveyor had a solid theoretical understanding of the geometry of rectangles and right triangles and used it to solve practical problems,” Mansfield says in the video.

Extending the boundary of these triangles allowed surveyors to create incredibly straight lines without manually measuring or laying them out beforehand. University of New South Wales Sydney

There are also instances of resizing these triangles to better fit the physical shape of the field at hand, which surveyors would’ve liked done by referencing a table of trig values like Plimpton 322, the study suggests. This table would’ve been a comprehensive list of Pythagorean triples and the steps to resizing them.

WHAT’S NEXT

This discovery may have laid to rest one ancient math mystery, there’s still plenty more where that came from, Mansfield says.

“Ancient mathematics is not as sophisticated as modern mathematics,” he says. “But sometimes you want to simple answers instead of sophisticated ones.”

He’s not “just talking about how mathematics students want their exams to be.” The advantage of a simple approach is its quickness — and Mansfield wants to examine whether or not this approach has any real-world applications.

“This approach might be of benefit in computer graphics or any application where speed is more important than precision,” he says.

Abstract: 

Plimpton 322 is one of the most sophisticated and interesting mathematical objects from antiquity. It is often regarded as teacher’s list of school problems, however new analysis suggests that it relates to a particular geometric problem in contemporary surveying.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

Astronomers Find Small Rocky Planet – Just Half the Mass of Venus

By EUROPEAN SOUTHERN OBSERVATORY

This artist’s impression shows L 98-59b, one of the planets in the L 98-59 system 35 light-years away. The system contains four confirmed rocky planets with a potential fifth, the furthest from the star, being unconfirmed.
In 2021, astronomers used data from the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) instrument on ESO’s VLT to measure the mass of L 98-59b, finding it to be half that of Venus. This makes it the lightest planet measured to date using the radial velocity technique.
Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

A team of astronomers has used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile to shed new light on planets around a nearby star, L 98-59, that resemble those in the inner Solar System. Amongst the findings are a planet with half the mass of Venus

">Venus — the lightest exoplanet ever to be measured using the radial velocity technique — an ocean world, and a possible planet in the habitable zone.

“The planet in the habitable zone may have an atmosphere that could protect and support life,” says María Rosa Zapatero Osorio, an astronomer at the Centre for Astrobiology in Madrid, Spain, and one of the authors of the study published today (August 5, 2021) in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The results are an important step in the quest to find life on Earth-sized planets outside the Solar System. The detection of biosignatures on an exoplanet depends on the ability to study its atmosphere, but current telescopes are not large enough to achieve the resolution needed to do this for small, rocky planets. The newly studied planetary system, called L 98-59 after its star, is an attractive target for future observations of exoplanet atmospheres. Its orbits a star only 35 light-years away and has now been found to host rocky planets, like Earth or Venus, which are close enough to the star to be warm.

This infographic shows a comparison between the L 98-59 exoplanet system (top) with part of the inner Solar System (Mercury, Venus, and Earth), highlighting the similarities between the two.
L 98-59 contains four confirmed rocky planets (marked in color in the top panel), orbiting a red-dwarf star 35 light-years away. The planet closest to the star is around half the mass of Venus, making it the lightest exoplanet ever detected using the radial velocity technique. Up to 30% of the third planet’s mass could be water, making it an ocean world. The existence of the fourth planet has been confirmed, but scientists don’t yet know its mass and radius (its possible size is indicated by a dotted line). The team also found hints of a potential fifth planet, the furthest from the star, though the team knows little about it. If confirmed, it would sit in the system’s habitable zone where liquid water could exist on its surface.
The distances from the stars and between the planets in the infographic are not up to scale. The diagram has been scaled to make the habitable zone in both the Solar System and in L 98-59 coincide. As indicated by the infographic, which includes a temperature scale (in Kelvin [K]), the Earth and the fifth (unconfirmed) planet in L 98-59 receive similar amounts of light and heat from their respective stars. Assuming their atmospheres are similar, this fifth planet would have a similar average surface temperature to Earth and would support liquid water at its surface.
Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser (Acknowledgment: O. Demangeon)

With the contribution of ESO’s VLT, the team was able to infer that three of the planets may contain water in their interiors or atmospheres. The two planets closest to the star in the L 98-59 system are probably dry, but might have small amounts of water, while up to 30% of the third planet’s mass could be water, making it an ocean world.

Furthermore, the team found “hidden” exoplanets that had not previously been spotted in this planetary system. They discovered a fourth planet and suspect there is a fifth, in a zone at the right distance from the star for liquid water to exist on its surface. “We have hints of the presence of a terrestrial planet in the habitable zone of this system,” explains Olivier Demangeon, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, University of Porto in Portugal and lead author of the new study.

The study represents a technical breakthrough, as astronomers were able to determine, using the radial velocity method, that the innermost planet in the system has just half the mass of Venus. This makes it the lightest exoplanet ever measured using this technique, which calculates the wobble of the star caused by the tiny gravitational tug of its orbiting planets.

The team used the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) instrument on ESO’s VLT to study L 98-59. “Without the precision and stability provided by ESPRESSO this measurement would have not been possible,” says Zapatero Osorio. “This is a step forward in our ability to measure the masses of the smallest planets beyond the Solar System.”

The astronomers first spotted three of L 98-59’s planets in 2019, using NASA

">NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). This satellite relies on a technique called the transit method — where the dip in the light coming from the star caused by a planet passing in front of it is used to infer the properties of the planet — to find the planets and measure their sizes. However, it was only with the addition of radial velocity measurements made with ESPRESSO and its predecessor, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) at the ESO La Silla 3.6-metre telescope, that Demangeon and his team were able to find extra planets and measure the masses and radii of the first three. “If we want to know what a planet is made of, the minimum that we need is its mass and its radius,” Demangeon explains.

The team hopes to continue to study the system with the forthcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), while ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), under construction in the Chilean Atacama Desert and set to start observations in 2027, will also be ideal for studying these planets. “The HIRES instrument on the ELT may have the power to study the atmospheres of some of the planets in the L 98-59 system, thus complementing the JWST from the ground,” says Zapatero Osorio.

“This system announces what is to come,” adds Demangeon. “We, as a society, have been chasing terrestrial planets since the birth of astronomy and now we are finally getting closer and closer to the detection of a terrestrial planet in the habitable zone of its star, of which we could study the atmosphere.”

More information

• This research was presented in a paper entitled to appear in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
• Reference: “A warm terrestrial planet with half the mass of Venus transiting a nearby star” 5 August 2021, Astronomy & Astrophysics.
  DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202140728
• The team is composed of Olivier D. S. Demangeon (Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Universidade do Porto, Portugal [IA/UPorto], Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto, Portugal [CAUP] and Departamento de Física e Astronomia, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade do Porto, Portugal [FCUP]), M. R. Zapatero Osorio (Centro de Astrobiología, Madrid, Spain [CSIC-INTA]), Y. Alibert (Physics Institute, University of Bern, Switzerland [Bern]), S. C. C. Barros (IA/UPorto, CAUP and FCUP), V. Adibekyan (IA/UPorto, CAUP and FCUP), H. M. Tabernero (IA/UPorto and CAUP), A. Antoniadis-Karnavas (IA/UPorto & FCUP), J. D. Camacho (IA/UPorto & FCUP), A. Suárez Mascareño (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Tenerife, Spain [IAC] and Departamento de Astrofísica, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain [ULL]), M. Oshagh (IAC/ULL), G. Micela (INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo, Palermo, Italy), S. G. Sousa (IA/UPortol & CAUP), C. Lovis (Observatoire de Genève, Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland [UNIGE]), F. A. Pepe (UNIGE), R. Rebolo (IAC/ULL & Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain), S. Cristiani (INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Trieste, Italy [INAF Trieste]), N. C. Santos (IA/UPorto, CAUP and FCUP), R. Allart (Department of Physics and Institute for Research on Exoplanets, Université de Montréal, Canada and UNIGE), C. Allende Prieto (IAC/ULL), D. Bossini (IA/UPorto), F. Bouchy (UNIGE), A. Cabral (Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal [IA/FCUL] and Departamento de Física da Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal), M. Damasso (INAF – Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino, Italy [INAF Torino]), P. Di Marcantonio (INAF Trieste), V. D’Odorico (INAF Trieste & Institute for Fundamental Physics of the Universe, Trieste, Italy [IFPU]), D. Ehrenreich (UNIGE), J. Faria (IA/UPorto, CAUP and FCUP), P. Figueira (European Southern Observatory, Santiago de Chile, Chile [ESO-Chile] and IA/UPorto), R. Génova Santos (IAC/ULL), J. Haldemann (Bern), J. I. González Hernández (IAC/ULL), B. Lavie (UNIGE), J. Lillo-Box (CSIC-INTA), G. Lo Curto (European Southern Observatory, Garching bei München, Germany [ESO]), C. J. A. P. Martins (IA/UPorto and CAUP), D. Mégevand (UNIGE), A. Mehner (ESO-Chile), P. Molaro (INAF Trieste and IFPU), N. J. Nunes (IA/FCUL), E. Pallé (IAC/ULL), L. Pasquini (ESO), E. Poretti (Fundación G. Galilei – INAF Telescopio Nazionale Galileo, La Palma, Spain and INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, Italy), A. Sozzetti (INAF Torino), and S. Udry (UNIGE).
• ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organization in Europe and the world’s most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It has 16 Member States: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, along with the host state of Chile and with Australia as a Strategic Partner. ESO carries out an ambitious program focused on the design, construction, and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organizing cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal, and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope and its world-leading Very Large Telescope Interferometer as well as two survey telescopes, VISTA working in the infrared and the visible-light VLT Survey Telescope. Also at Paranal ESO will host and operate the Cherenkov Telescope Array South, the world’s largest and most sensitive gamma-ray observatory. ESO is also a major partner in two facilities on Chajnantor, APEX, and ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-meter Extremely Large Telescope, the ELT, which will become “the world’s biggest eye on the sky.”

{ https://scitechdaily.com/ }

Fastwalker UFOs Are So Fast They Appear As Mere Streaks To Unaided Human Eye

They are called Fastwalkers (or Fast Walkers) and travel at speeds well over 20,000 miles per hour making these UFOs mere “streaks” of light to the unaided human eye.

Their name comes from a 1984 NORAD incident which tracked an unidentified Fastwalker UFO moving at speeds over 22,000 MPH as it screamed towards the earth.

The May 1984 NORAD Fastwalker event

In May of 1984 at 1400 hours Zulu time, an alert was triggered at the North America Air Defense Command (NORAD) when ultra-sensitive orbiting USDSP military satellites (highly-classified satellites that serve as early ICBM launch detection systems) spotted a mysterious UFO heading towards earth at a mind-boggling 22,000 miles per hour.

As it passed in front of Earth and less than 20 miles from the USDSP satellite, officials determined it was not a ballistic missile nor a meteor. After classifying it as “unknown”, it was given the code name “Fast Walker”.

NORAD data revealed the unidentified object was a hot, fast, solid object that swept in quickly from space, approached Earth, then sped off into space.

The event was intended to be kept secret but an official (a retired military official) leaked details about the event to an investigator (special agent Joe Stefula) along with a diagram of the incident. According to Stefula:

“I haven’t been able to determine that the document’s absolutely authentic but I have been able to confirm that the DSP printout for that date shows an event at the same time with the same characteristics.

“What makes this particular Fast Walker so peculiar is that it came in from outer space on a curved trajectory, passing within three kilometers of the satellite platform, and then disappeared back into space. Whatever it was, it was tracked for nine minutes.”

The 1984 Fastwalker event obviously alarmed government officials – the sighting resulted in a 300-page internal report which basically “looked at every possibility and couldn’t explain [the unidentified object] by natural or man-made means.” A researcher explained whey the NORAD sighting was significant:

“Where it appeared in the (satellite’s) sensor field would indicate that the object came into the sensor field from outer-space, went in front of the sensor, and left, departing back into deep space. It would indicate that it was some type of craft that had the ability to maneuver. And there you have hard evidence.

“You have telemetry from that satellite, you have information, you have systems, you have data that you can go back and investigate and check and verify. In the past, usually UFO events are of just eye-witness testimony…

“There you have a very sensitive defense system that sent you information to the ground. I don’t even know if you can solve it… maybe it’s one of those enigmas that’s just gonna be with us forever. What type of craft would have that ability? Some people might say, ‘A UFO’.”

In 1993, after word of Fastwalkers had leaked to the public, the Department of Defense declassified unrelated satellite information which confirmed that satellites were routinely picking up unidentified hi-speed moving objects in space which were neither missiles nor meteorites/asteroids. According to the official who leaked the documents, an average of two to three Fastwalkers are detected each month.

The Observatory Journal documents a “candidate for an alien probe”

Additional stunning evidence was presented in April 1995, when The Observatory journal published an article by Duncan Steel (University of Adelaide, Australia), an expert on the danger of near-Earth objects, that described a recently sighted Fastwalker.

The article revealed that a December 1991 object passing near earth was designated a “candidate for an alien probe”. For all intents and purposes, the object looked and moved like an artificial satellite – only much faster.

Fastwalkers – alien surveillance probes

Below is a FOIA request submitted in 2013 which confirms NORAD’s search for “Fastwalkers” and “Slowwalkers” in internal document databases produced a representative hit. However, as noted in the response below, information on Fastwalkers is still classified and unavailable for public review.

For reference, Fastwalkers travel much faster than orbiting satellites but much slower than deep space asteroids. When discussed together, slower anomalous flying objects are termed “Slowwalkers”.

Many in the UFO community theorize the Earth may be under surveillance by advanced alien races whose motives are unclear. They believe Fastwalkers are alien surveillance vehicles or probes which conduct routine surveillance missions gathering data on our planet and its inhabitants.

They surmise that governments know of their existence, and their intent, but choose to keep details of their activities from the public.

Source: 

• altereddimensions.net

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{ https://anomalien.com/ }

USSR General Claimed Soviets Learnt To Attract UFOs & Made A Contact With Them In The 1980s

During the cold war, it was impossible to leak information outside the Soviet Union. Due to top-tier secrecy, military officers and personnel never discussed UFOs during the Soviet era. Meanwhile, in the United States, UFO conferences were conducted due to the surge in UFO sightings. After the collapse of the USSR, people came forward to talk about UFOs in Russia, including the officers from Soviet Air Forces. Major General Vasily Alexeyev claimed that the Soviets had made contact with UFOs.

In 1997, Dr. Valery Uvarov interviewed the Head of the USSR’s Flight Safety Service Major General Vasily Alexeyev on the subject of UFOs. Dr. Uvarov is the head of the Department of UFO Research, Paleosciences, Palaeothechnology of the National Security Academy of Russia. Later, the text of the interview was exclusively released in the German edition of MAGAZINE 2000plus in May 2000.

There is always a doubt over the existence of Major General Alekseyev, but he exists. His identity was confirmed in the book entitled “Russia’s Air Power At The Crossroads” written by Benjamin S. Lambeth. All the research mentioned in this book was funded by the United States Air Force, which makes it the most credible source to confirm this Soviet General’s existence.

Read also:

• Podesta-Fish Leaked Emails: UFOs Had Landing & TakeOff Spot In Ocean Near Bermuda
• Russian Cosmonauts’ Shocking UFO Encounters In Space During Salyut 6 Space Missions
• Ex-US Navy Officer Encountered Tic Tac UFO Underwater, Off The Coast Of Haiti In 2010
• Mystery Of Britain’s Clearest UFO Photo From Calvine Incident Will Be Solved In 2072

During the 1980s, General Alekseyev had been working in the central staff that involved him with the units in the field. From there, he learned about many reports of unexplained phenomena. There were eye-witnesses to the phenomenon and that was reflected in specific documents and the reports of officials. This triggered the Soviet Defence Ministry and other departments to investigate. They sent the experts to the places where UFOs were spotted frequently.

He said that the UFOs appeared often on several military bases or any place where “there is a high concentration of advanced science and, to some degree, danger. Because every nuclear rocket, every new airforce installation represents a breakthrough both in science and in military terms.”

Moreover, he stated that individual officers and commanders who knew about the phenomenon had no official guidelines or instruction on the matter, so they investigated it in their own way.

“I know that in some places they even learned to create a situation which would deliberately provoke the appearance of a UFO. A UFO would appear where there was increased military activity connected, say, with the transportation of “special” loads. It was enough to artificially stimulate or schedule such a move for a UFO to appear,” General Alekseyev claimed.

Additionally, the Soviets learned to make contact with UFOs. According to him, the military personnel would move his hand in various directions which caused the sphere (UFO) to flatten in the same direction.

For example, if you raised your arms three times, the UFO would flatten out in a vertical direction three times as well. In the early 1980s, the Soviets ordered to carry out the experiments using technical devices (theodolites, radar stations, and others), as a result of which the unidentified objects were firmly recorded as instrumental data.

General Alekseyev shared one incredible incident when a team of Soviet scientists and other experts had an encounter with the UFO in the mid-air. They flew to Novosibirsk from Moscow to investigate an air crash. While returning, a UFO accompanied their plane in the air. As a research team, they observed the object, sketched it, and even collected data for scientific analysis.

He understood that the Defence Ministry, the Academy of Sciences and the intelligence services had been studying the UAP/UFOs, but those who were not directly into the investigation had no idea what was going on. He blamed the politics for not letting an open invention into the undefined objects. “I think that politics interfered with science here. Investigation of what was unidentified and not understood was carried out above all to clear matters up,” he said.

General Alekseyev even talked about encounters between UFOs and military personnel. He remembered one incident that happened to two warrant officers outside Moscow. One of them telepathically made a contact with the ship and even was invited inside it, but he refused as he was afraid to enter the spaceship. Alekseyev personally saw the drawings of the ship made by that officer. Soviet General believed that there are higher chances that UFOs are extraterrestrial or belong to other civilizations.

References:

• http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc465.htm

{ https://www.howandwhys.com/ }

Ever wondered just how much strange, mysterious, paranormal and ufological activity has taken place at military and government facilities? Just about everyone knows about Area 51, so I won’t go down that path. And, just about everyone who has an interest in UFOs will know about the Rendlesham Forest “UFO landing.” It took place at the Royal Air Force Woodbridge military base in December 1980. But, let’s now take a look at some lesser-known cases of strange phenomena at other such, secure facilities. I’ll begin with the late 1940s and a U.S. government program titled “Project Twinkle.” Its top secret mandate was to investigate reports of strange, brightly lit, green fireballs, many of which were seen near the Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. Many of the staff believed the fireballs were under intelligent control: personnel at Kirtland were unsure as to what the balls of light were. Theories included Russian devices, perhaps even sent to get photos of the base. There was also the possibility of secret, domestic devices of the U.S. military. And, there was the extraterrestrial angle, too. Confusingly, all of the theories had some degree of merit. While the Twinkle program was ultimately closed and fell into a degree of obscurity, the now-available files offer an intriguing insight into the phenomenon. Now, let’s look at werewolves at military bases. Yes, you did read that right!

Linda Godfrey’s first-class research into American werewolves has demonstrated connections to cemeteries, to areas that were perceived as sacred and magical by Native Americans, and – bizarrely – to old military bases, too. Her books Hunting the American Werewolf and Real Wolfmen make that abundantly clear. “Wes” is someone who encountered a werewolf at a weapons storage area at a British military base – Royal Air Force Alconbury, situated in the county of Cambridgeshire – in the 1970s. The beast, said Wes, had a flat snout, very big eyes, a height of around five feet, and a weight in the order of two hundred pounds. It slowly vanished into the surrounding woods. Moving on, in January 2010, I spoke at a New York State conference called Ghosts of Cooperstown, which was organized by the stars of the SyFy Channel’s Ghost Hunters series. It was on the Saturday night of the event that an American soldier, who had then recently returned from serving with the military in the Middle East, revealed to an audience in the hotel bar that he had heard tales of large, marauding werewolves roaming by night the mountains of Afghanistan and some of the more ancient parts of Iraq – and also seen on the perimeters of military facilities.

This next one comes from Hillary Gough, of the town of Hampshire, England. The date was early 1974, and the setting, the Marconi Space and Defense Systems, Ltd., at Frimley, England. At the time, Gough was employed as a draftswoman in the Central Services branch – having previously served an apprenticeship in a division of the British Royal Navy – something that ensured she had access to much of the establishment. “Something very serious has happened, hasn’t it?” she inquired.”Yes,” was the quiet response. “We’ve had a break-in. I can’t say anymore.” Over the course of several weeks, however, further pieces of the puzzle fell into place. It transpired that the break-in was far more than simply an unauthorized entry. What occurred was nothing short of the penetration of a highly sensitive facility by what some of the staff suspected was an extraterrestrial creature. I was cautiously advised that the incident had occurred late at night, and the one witness was a security guard who had been patrolling the building as part of his routine duty. While walking along a corridor, the guard was startled by a dazzling blue light that emanated from one particular room. But this was no ordinary room: it was a storage facility for top secret documentation generated by Marconi as part of its work on behalf of the British Government and the Ministry of Defense, much of which was related to classified, radar-based programs.

Realizing that no-one – at all – should have been in the area at that time of night, the guard burst into the room, only to be confronted by a shocking sight. There, literally sifting through pages and pages of top secret files was a gray-skinned humanoid – but decidedly non-human – creature which quickly de-materialized before the shocked guard’s eyes. Although severely traumatized by the event, he was able to provide a brief description of the being to his superiors and noted that the blue light emanated from a helmet which encompassed the head of the entity.

Another person who had something to say something very strange was a man named Ron Petersen, who I met a couple of years ago, after he read my book, Monster Files. He told me a third-hand story of how a U.S. Army man stationed at the Dugway Proving Ground – in 1983 – went into a certain room “by mistake” and saw before him the bodies of three, massive, hair-covered creatures: Bigfoot. They were all upright and in large, see-through containers. One of them was badly burned. The man stared – amazed and shocked – and then quickly exited the room, concerned that he had just violated security. True? I don’t know. All I can do is hope that someone else comes forward and adds weight to the story. Now, to our final story:

Official investigations within the U.K. of unusual aerial phenomena started during the First World War. One of the most notable UFO-style reports can be found within the archives of the British Admiralty and dates from, rather incredibly, 1915. Prepared by a Lieutenant Colonel W.P. Drury, the Garrison Intelligence Officer at the military facility Plymouth Garrison, Devon, England, a four-page document tells the story. It concerns a series of strange events that occurred on the wilds of Dartmoor (the setting for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles). Lt. Col. Drury advised personnel at the Admiralty that on 28 June 1915 he and a colleague, one Lt. C. Brownlow of Naval Intelligence, had interviewed a Miss Cecilia Peel Yates at Dolbeare Cottage, Ashburton, about an unusual experience: “She informed us that a few mornings previously, just before dawn, having been awakened by the barking of dogs, she saw from her bedroom window a bright light in the sky, bearing N., and apparently suspended a short distance above the earth. It was too large and bright for a planet, and, as she watched, it swung to the N.E., and disappeared. Haytor is due North of Ashburton and 4 miles distant as the crow files.”

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

Machu Picchu is 'several decades' OLDER than expected: Carbon dating of human remains found at the famous Inca site indicates it was in use in 1420 - over 20 years earlier than previously thought

• Research finds Machu Picchu is several decades older than previously thought

• Carbon dating of human remains at the Inca site indicates it was in use in 1420

• Archeologists said that is more than 20 years earlier than they had expected

• Experts thought it was built around 1440 as an estate for Emperor Pachacuti

By SAM TONKIN FOR MAILONLINE

The famous Inca site of Machu Picchu is several decades older than previously thought, archaeologists have discovered. 

Carbon dating of human remains suggests that it was in use in 1420 – more than 20 years earlier than scientists expected. 

Machu Picchu was built as an estate for Emperor Pachacuti, who according to historical records rose to power in 1438 before conquering the area where the site is located.

This led experts to believe it was built after 1440, and perhaps as late as 1450. 

Scroll down for video

Surprise discovery: The famous Inca site of Machu Picchu (pictured) is several decades older than previously thought, archaeologists have found

Carbon dating: Researchers dated 26 individuals recovered from three cemeteries in Machu Picchu during excavations in 1912. Archaeologists are pictured at the site in 1911

'Machu Picchu is among the most famous archaeological sites in the world,' said the study's lead author, Prof Richard Burger from Yale University.

'But until now estimates of its antiquity and the length of its occupation were based on contradictory historical accounts written by Spaniards in the period following the Spanish conquest.' 

He added: 'This is the first study based on scientific evidence to provide an estimate for the founding of Machu Picchu and the length of its occupation.'

Prof Burger and a team of experts from several US universities carried out accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of human remains from Machu Picchu. 

AMS dating is an advanced form of radiocarbon dating that can date skeletons with only small amounts of organic material left, expanding the pool of remains that can be examined. 

In this case, the team dated 26 individuals found at three cemeteries in Machu Picchu and recovered during excavations in 1912.

The study found the site was in use from 1420 to 1530 – ending around the time of the Spanish invasion of the Inca Empire. 

It also suggests that Pachacuti ascended to the throne and began his conquests decades before the accepted historical records indicate. 

Pachacuti took control of a city-state but his reign put the Inca on the path to becoming the most powerful empire in pre-Columbian America. 

Researchers said the discovery could have dramatic implications for our understanding of Inca history, and also challenges the reliability of using historical records of colonial forces. 

'The results suggest that the discussion of the development of the Inca empire based primarily on colonial records requires revision,' said Prof Burger.

'Modern radiocarbon methods provide a better foundation for understanding Inca chronology than the contradictory historical records.'

Machu Picchu is located in modern-day Peru's Cusco region, on a 7,970ft-long (2,430m) mountain ridge.

It was built in the classical Inca style, with polished dry-stone walls.

The site was abandoned during the time of the Spanish conquest, but was not discovered by the invading forces. 

Geological analysis has suggested that the citadel's location above a network of intersecting tectonic faults was deliberately chosen.

These would have provided an abundance of easy-to-work rock as well as a source of water and drainage.

Carbon dating, also referred to as radiocarbon dating or carbon-14 dating, is a method that is used to determine the age of an object. 

Machu Picchu is pictured during the 1912 expedition when the remains tested were first found

Machu Picchu was built as an estate for Emperor Pachacuti, who according to historical records rose to power in 1438 before conquering the area where the site is located 

The study found the site was in use from 1420 to 1530 – ending around the time of the Spanish invasion of the Inca Empire. They analysed the remains from three cemeteries (pictured right)

Carbon-14 is a carbon isotope that is commonly used by archaeologists and historians to date ancient bones and artefacts.

Lat year radiocarbon dating of ancient seafood remains revealed that Aboriginal Australians settled in the continent's Riverland region 22,000 years earlier than previously thought.

The dated shell middens – remnants of 'meals eaten long ago' – captured a record of Aboriginal occupation that goes back 29,000 years in the Katarapko Riverland Floodplains, South Australia.

They had to deal with unpredictable river flows and heavily-salted valley waters that may have limited their seafood options.

Radiocarbon dating was first invented in the 1940s by an American physical chemist called Willard Libby, who won the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery. 

The new study has been published in the journal Antiquity.

Who were the Inca? People indigenous to South America who ruled from modern Ecuador to central Chile by 1532

The Inca, also spelled Inka, were a people indigenous to South America who, at the time of the Spanish conquest in 1532, ruled an empire that spanned from the northern border of modern Ecuador to central Chile. 

Establishing their capital at Cusco (a city in modern-day Peru) in the 12th century, the Inca began a campaign of expansion in the early 15th century which would see some 12 million people come under their rule.

Much of the information we have today comes from the written records of Spanish conquistadores as the Inca passed on their history through story telling and other oral traditions.

Machu Pichhu is the best-known site remaining from the Inca Empire, once the largest and richest in the Americas

Best known for the brutal practice of human sacrifice, the Inca Empire is also notable for its advanced agricultural techniques, unique art and architecture.  

 At its peak, the Inca Empire was the largest and richest in the Americas. Its downfall is thought to have come about through rebellion, disease and the Spanish invasion. 

The most famous and perhaps best-preserved site that remains from Inca times is the citadel of Machu Picchu, located in Peru.

Source: Britannica, Ancient History Encyclopaedia 

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• doi.org/10.15184...

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Video Shows UFOs Over Manhattan - Empire State Building - August 2021

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LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 05 - 08 - 2021

UFO Sighted By Moon From Joshua, Texas ( August 2, 2021 )

Impressive UFO sighting of a UFO flying past the moon from a telescope on August 2, 2021 in Joshua, Johnson County, Texas.

Here I present the original and following with approaching and speed reduction

• credit : U.D.

UFOs Sighted Over Nagoya, Japan ( August 3, 2021 )

UFOs were sighted over Nagoya, Japan on August 3, 2021

STATEMENT : I recorded this in the city of Nagoya, Japan; can someone explain to those ′′ lights ′′ that by the way flew over the clouds

• credit : Orlando Yamaguchi

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Strange Lights Over Jinan, Shandong, China

UFOs or Strange lights were sighted over Jinan, Shandong province China on June 6, 2021 

STATEMENT : 中国.山东.济南
外星人降临地球!
China. Shandong. Jinan
Aliens come to Earth!

• credit : 刘剑

Huge Fireball Sighted Over İzmir, Turkey ( August 1, 2021 )

A huge fireball lights up the night sky in Izmir, Turkey. During the night between 31 July and 1 August

Inhabitants reported a heavy explosion and tremors at some points in the city. A meteor explosion took place in Turkey that caused the sky to turn green. Several users shared videos of the same on their social media platforms.The phenomenon is that when the meteors enter the earth's atmosphere, they heat up.

A user wrote, 'A green meteor was seen over Izmir Turkey. This is not a meteor, just a tiny/demo missile/bomb shot from a satellite. Notice the fire as meteor enters the earth's atmosphere.'

{  https://www.youtube.com/ }

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - MUFON CASES - - 5 - 8 - 2021

MUFON CASE : 117166 Manhattan, New York ( August 4, 2021 )

Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Huge ufo ejects orb video 

Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117166

Date aug 3 2021

Date Submitted : 2021-08-04

Date of Event : 2021-08-03

MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : ufoorb.mp4

{  https://www.youtube.com/ }

Astrophysicist J. Allen Hynek displays a photo of a fake UFO at a 1966 press conference.

Image: AP

UFOs and the Boundaries of Science

GREG EGHIGIAN

On June 25 of this year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a brief report entitled “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.” It fulfilled a 2020 directive from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired at the time by Marco Rubio, which ordered the national intelligence director to publish an unclassified, public appraisal of the “potential aerospace or other threats posed by the unidentified aerial phenomena to national security, and an assessment of whether this unidentified aerial phenomena [UAP] activity may be attributed to one or more foreign adversaries.” The request came partly as a response to news reports that Navy personnel had, in recent years, filed a number of incident reports involving UFOs.

Since 1947, UFOs have been caught in cycles of periodic, animated interest from government officials, enthusiasts, and scientists. But results are always inconclusive.

In the lead-up to the report’s release, both believers and skeptics were abuzz with anticipation. Chatter on social media was lively, and the self-styled crusader for government disclosure about UFOs, former intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, announced he would run for Congress if the report seemed misleading.

In the end, the preliminary assessment proved a mixed bag. Enthusiasts could be buoyed by the government’s admissions that most reported UFOs were real objects, that only 1 in 144 could be definitively explained, and that fear of ridicule had thus far stymied witnesses and thereby inhibited effective inquiry. Debunkers, on the other hand, could point to the fact that most reports suffered from a lack of “sufficient specificity,” that the overwhelming majority of UAP demonstrated conventional flight characteristics, and that there remained a great many mundane explanations for the phenomena. All sides felt vindicated, all could claim victory.

And so, ambiguity reigns. To anyone familiar with the history of unidentified flying objects, this represents a familiar state of affairs. The first modern report of a UFO took place in Washington State in 1947, and since then the phenomenon has been caught in cycles of periodic, animated interest from government officials, civilian enthusiasts, and scientists. During such moments, it always seems that the riddle of UFOs is about to be solved. But the result is always inconclusive findings and a dispersal of interest, leaving few minds changed and everyone returned to their corners to await the bell for the next round. The seeming effervescence of our current moment notwithstanding, it’s doubtful we should expect anything different this time around.

It’s easy to forget that, not long ago, the media was not giving regular updates on UFOs.

This most recent fanfare surrounding UFOs—or UAP, as those seeking distance from UFOs’ outsize reputation now prefer—began in December 2017, when the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico all published exposés revealing the existence of a secret government program which, between 2007 and 2012, had investigated UFOs. Then followed viral videos of Navy pilots encountering unusual objects (reported upon in the same outlets); a cable television series on the incidents featuring Elizondo and former Blink 182 band member Tom DeLonge; announcement of the first human-detected interstellar object to enter our solar system (’Oumuamua); and a highly publicized, though admittedly frivolous, attempt to storm Area 51 in Nevada. And in July, astronomer Avi Loeb announced the creation of a new project at Harvard University, called Galileo, that will use high-tech astronomical equipment to seek evidence of extraterrestrial artifacts in space and possibly within Earth’s atmosphere. This follows closely on the publication of Loeb’s book Extraterrestrial, in which he argues that ’Oumuamua might be an artificial light sail made by an alien civilization.

It’s easy to forget that, not long ago, the media was not giving regular updates on UFOs. On the contrary, during the past two decades, public discussion of UFOs has been limited. But interest in UFOs has cycled through a couple of phases of ups and downs. The 1960s ushered in a revival of the supernatural in popular culture that flourished throughout the seventies, eighties, and into the nineties. If you’re old enough—say, over the age of forty—you may still have memories of Leonard Nimoy narrating the occult and mystery TV series In Search Of (1977–82); of listening to interviews with telepathic spoon benders and alien abductees on the daytime talk shows of Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, and Phil Donahue; or of browsing through the extensive paranormal section at your local public library or Waldenbooks. New Age philosophy, extrasensory perception, exorcisms, reincarnation, telekinesis, astrology, channeling, psychic healing, cryonics, Satanic ritual abuse claims: UFOs were sucked up into this paranormal wave and boosted by the lively syncretism of it all. The rising paranormal tide lifted all boats.

All this publicity surrounding the supernatural also gave rise to a revival of debunking, with prominent figures taking it upon themselves to call out erroneous claims and expose frauds. In 1976 a group of dedicated skeptics founded the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), headed initially by philosopher Paul Kurtz and sociologist Marcello Truzzi. At the organization’s inaugural conference, Kurtz expressed worry about the growing number of “cults of unreason and other forms of nonsense.” Noting the popularity of related beliefs in Nazi Germany and under Stalinism, he lamented the fact that “Western democratic societies are being swept by other forms of irrationalism, often blatantly antiscientific and pseudoscientific in character.” Skeptics needed to be decisive. “If we are to meet the growth of irrationality,” he insisted, “we need to develop an appreciation for the scientific attitude as a part of culture.” During the seventies and eighties, a number of well-known personalities associated with SCICOP—including aviation journalist Philip J. Klass, illusionist James Randi, and astronomer Carl Sagan—agreed and assumed the roles of public myth-busters.

Mudslinging over convictions is familiar to historians of religion, a domain of human existence marked by deep divisions over interpretations of belief. But science has often found itself engaged in similar debates and conflicts.

Over the last fifty years, the mutual antagonism between paranormal believers and skeptics has largely framed discussion about unidentified flying objects. And it often gets personal. Those taking seriously the prospect that UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin have dismissed doubters as narrow-minded, biased, obstinate, and cruel. Those dubious about the idea of visitors from other worlds have brushed off devotees as naïve, ignorant, gullible, and downright dangerous.

This kind of mudslinging over convictions is certainly familiar to historians of religion, a domain of human existence marked by deep divisions over interpretations of belief. But science too has found itself engaged in similar debates and conflicts over the centuries. Venerated figures and institutions have regularly taken it upon themselves to engage in what has been dubbed “boundary work,” asserting and reasserting the borders between legitimate and illegitimate scientific research and ideas, between what may and what may not refer to itself as science.

When scientists engage in boundary work, they are doing something more than saying “this is true” or “that is false.” Instead, they are setting up the ground rules for what will be considered acceptable questions, methods, and answers when it comes to doing science. In essence, they are saying, “this is a question we may pursue in science” or “that is an impermissible way of conducting an experiment.” And there are any number of examples of this in the modern world.

Take psychology, for instance. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, it was a subject that largely fell under the domain of philosophy. Then, during the second half of the century, some scholars interested in psychology took their cue from the natural sciences and started conducting experiments with animals and human beings. In this way, psychology began to establish itself as an independent social scientific field. That status remained contested, however, and psychologists had to defend their claims of being a legitimate science for decades. Boundary work was essential to this mission. So, when prominent researchers such as William James, Frederic Myers, and Eleanor Sidgwick argued that psychical research—the study of the power of mediumship, telepathy, clairvoyance, and life after death—should be included as part of academic psychology, many practitioners bristled. Experimentalist Wilhelm Wundt, Science editor James Cattell, and Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg were just some of the influential figures to repudiate the phenomena as “nothing but fraud and humbug” and to bemoan research about them for “doing much to injure psychology.” Their judgments eventually won the day and, as a result, parapsychology was shifted from science to pseudoscience.

Boundary work has also been evident in policing the how and what of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). When SETI takes the form of astronomers using telescopes to seek evidence of intelligent radio signals and mechanical objects in outer space, it is accepted as a mainstream (though, admittedly, underfunded) academic pursuit. The study of UFOs, on the other hand, is brushed off as pseudoscience. UFO investigation has, consequently, been largely privately funded and conducted by committed individuals in their free time.

This stark divide did not happen overnight, and its roots lie in the postwar decades, in a series of events that—with their news coverage, grainy images, celebrity crusaders, exasperated skeptics, unsatisfying military statements, and accusations of a government cover-up—foreshadow our present moment.

When astronomers use telescopes to seek evidence of extraterrestrials, it is accepted as a mainstream academic pursuit. The study of UFOs, on the other hand, is brushed off as pseudoscience. This stark divide did not happen overnight.

It all started in June 1947, when a private pilot, Kenneth Arnold, reported seeing a group of bat-like aircraft flying in formation at high speeds near Mt. Rainier. He described their motion to the media as moving like a saucer would if skipped across water, and an enterprising journalist had found his headline: he christened them “flying saucers.” That summer, flying saucers were reported across the United States, and the press began wondering what exactly was going on.

The thought that the objects might have been extraterrestrial visitors did not rank highly on the list of possibilities considered by most people at the time. A Gallup poll published just a few weeks after the Arnold sighting asked Americans what they thought the things were: while 90 percent admitted having heard of “flying saucers,” a majority either had no idea what they could be or thought that witnesses were mistaken. Gallup didn’t even mention if anyone surveyed brought up aliens. Ten years later, in August 1957, Trendex conducted a similar survey of the American public and found that now over 25 percent believed unidentified flying objects could be from outer space.

Three things had happened in the meantime that made this possible. First was media saturation. Newspapers and magazines across the world covered and outright promoted the flying saucer saga, especially after 1949. Then, what had begun as a distinctly U.S. phenomenon soon became a global one, as UFOs began to turn up in Southern Africa, Australia, Europe, and South America. By the mid-1950s, few in the world could say they had never heard of flying saucers.

Second was the rise of flying-saucers-from-outer-space promoters. In 1950, three influential books by pulp and entertainment writers—Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers Are Real, Frank Scully’s Behind the Flying Saucers, and Gerald Heard’s The Riddle of the Flying Saucers—hit bookshelves, each arguing that the overwhelming evidence showed that aliens were visiting, more likely than not in response to the detonation of atomic bombs. The authors provided the model for a new kind of public figure: the crusading whistleblower dedicated to breaking the silence over the alien origins of unidentified flying objects.

Third, some Americans were so curious about the phenomenon that they sought out like-minded others. Inspired by the development of science fiction fan clubs and newsletters in the 1930s and ’40s, enthusiasts beginning in the early ’50s organized local saucer clubs where members could meet to discuss the latest developments. By the end of the decade, some had grown into vibrant organizations, with national, even international followings and monthly newsletters which actively solicited contributions from members about their own sightings and theories.

So, by the end of the 1950s, flying saucers didn’t just make news; they had champions who helped make them news. Some enthusiasts, however, believed interest in UFOs needed to be channeled into something more than a hobby or pastime. The Air Force had been conducting its own investigations into the flying saucer phenomenon since 1947. Saucer groups, however, placed little confidence in the military and were especially frustrated by the secrecy surrounding its work. They believed it was time for civilians to seize the day and to begin investigating cases in a more thorough and open manner.

Keyhoe, Leonard Stringfield, Morris Jessup, and Coral and Jim Lorenzen were some of the leading pioneers in this effort. At first, most civilian investigators had to rely exclusively on newspaper and magazine articles for their source materials. By1965, however, the Lorenzens and Keyhoe were directing large organizations (the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization and the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, respectively) with national reach, allowing them to send members into the field to conduct interviews and examine sites. By 1972 the Lorenzens had put together a manual for field investigators, guiding them through the kind of equipment and procedures to use when going about their work.

The first generation of ufologists was buoyantly optimistic. They saw themselves as trailblazers who, though now dismissed, would one day be vindicated when ufology was established as a legitimate research enterprise.

In this way, a new field of study was born—“ufology,” as it was dubbed. That first generation of ufologists was buoyantly optimistic. They saw themselves as trailblazers—it was not uncommon for comparisons to be made to Galileo—who, though now dismissed by the establishment, would one day find their endeavors vindicated when ufology was established as a legitimate research enterprise.

Major scientific associations and most academic scholars saw matters differently. They considered ufology yet another example of a pseudoscience. While some went about publicly debunking its methods and findings, most academics opted to simply pay ufology no heed.

By the mid-1960s, however, a few scientists working at major U.S. universities had reached a different conclusion. They believed that UFOs were genuine physical phenomena that warranted serious scientific study. Northwestern University astronomer J. Allen Hynek was one such figure. Hynek was the scientific consultant to the Air Force in its investigations into unidentified flying objects. At first skeptical about the claims of witnesses, he grew puzzled by the growing number of cases that seemed to defy conventional explanation.

In the early sixties, Hynek began holding UFO discussion meetings in his home with interested colleagues—at first from Northwestern, but then from other universities as well. The group included French computer scientist Jacques Vallée, who would go on to become a leading voice in ufology. Soon, Hynek was referring to the circle as The Invisible College—a reference to the secretive group of seventeenth-century natural philosophers who had touted experimental research and defied church dogma. The name stuck, and continues to be used to refer to academics who study and exchange ideas about UFOs but do so clandestinely for fear of hurting their careers.

Another ufologist who rose to prominence in the 1960s was James McDonald, an internationally respected atmospheric physicist at the University of Arizona. An expert in cloud physics and micrometeorology, he had begun privately looking into UFOs in the late fifties and joined a leading UFO organization. In 1966 he suddenly went public as an outspoken advocate for the position that UFOs were, as he put it, “the greatest scientific problem of our times.” Though a latecomer to the scene, McDonald was a constant public presence, making the case for the scientific study of UFOs in press conferences, public lectures, and TV and radio interviews. He railed against what he considered the Air Force’s incompetence in handling the matter, and he took it upon himself to interview hundreds of witnesses.

Though widely acknowledged to be accomplished and eloquent, many of his fellow scientists found McDonald to be dogmatic and abrasive. So when it was announced in October 1966 that the University of Colorado at Boulder had agreed to serve as the home for a scientific committee funded by the Air Force to study the UFO phenomenon, McDonald was not invited to serve as a member. Like Hynek and Vallée, McDonald instead was asked to consult now and again with the committee, but all three were left out of the group’s day-to-day activities and deliberations.

The project’s director was nuclear physicist Edward Condon, who had spent decades working in and with the government dating back to the wartime Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. His involvement with the military, however, hadn’t stopped him from criticizing it for being too secretive. After the war, he was also a leading voice insisting that civilian authorities be put in control of atomic energy, and he had to face down accusations before the House Un-American Activities Committee on several occasions. Here, then, was a no-nonsense academic, who was not easily intimidated and despised government secrecy. He seemed the ideal choice to head up this first-ever funded scientific study of UFOs by academic researchers.

The Condon Committee began its work in November 1966. Excitement and anticipation surrounded the start of the project. Ufologists, UFO enthusiasts, members of the Invisible College, the Air Force, and the general public all expressed high hopes that the world would finally have an answer to the riddle of the flying saucers. Their enthusiasm was soon quashed. While some ufologists were asked to make presentations before the committee, word inside the Colorado group was that Condon considered the possibility of alien visitors to be preposterous. Disgruntled insiders reported that researchers were being steered toward concluding that the UFO phenomenon had a psychological explanation.

Condon came to consider his involvement in the study of UFOs “the biggest waste of time that I ever had in my life.”

McDonald was careful to cultivate contacts within the Colorado project. His personal papers, now housed in the archives at the University of Arizona, show that he received surreptitious updates from Boulder on an almost daily basis. As he did, he became more and more frustrated by what he saw as Condon’s attempt to stop any serious consideration that UFOs might have extraterrestrial origins. In early 1968 he, along with several people serving on the Condon Committee, confronted Condon with evidence that he had no intention of conducting a legitimate scientific investigation into unidentified flying objects.

The move outraged Condon, who fired the committee members for dereliction of their duties. McDonald went to the media, finding a journalist at Look to write an exposé chronicling what was portrayed as Condon’s incompetent and imperious management of the project. And with that, all bridges had been burned. Ufologists dismissed the work of the committee even before it had released its report in January 1969. McDonald demanded a new scientific study be conducted. The Air Force formally shut down its UFO task force. And Condon came to consider his involvement in the study of UFOs “the biggest waste of time that I ever had in my life.”

The Condon Committee’s final report did not mince words. “Our general conclusion,” it stated, “is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge”—this despite the fact that around a third of the cases examined remained unexplained. No one was terribly surprised, least of all people in the UFO community. Rather than settling the matter of UFOs for good, it simply escalated the mutual mistrust between believers and skeptics, between amateur ufologists and academic scientists.

Was the Condon Committee a failure then? At first glance, it would appear so. Without question, it fell victim to the political machinations of bad actors such as McDonald. Nevertheless, one has to wonder if any study at the time could have resolved the matter. If the 2020–21 UAP task force found itself confronted with ambiguities and a lack of information, this was surely even more the case in the 1960s.

And it must be said that both back then and today, there are many people for whom the mystery is the matter. UFOs may well be far more interesting to ponder than to actually solve. And fittingly, the decades that followed saw the rise of the UFO as mystery, with increasingly bizarre stories of alien abductions capturing the attention of readers and TV audiences between 1975 and 1995. Yes, there had always been outlier abduction reports dating back to the ’50s and ’60s. But now the floodgates opened, and with them a new generation of UFO advocates.

Chief among them were artist Budd Hopkins, horror writer Whitley Strieber, historian David Jacobs, and psychiatrist John Mack: each came onto the scene in the 1980s and ’90s insisting on the veracity of those claiming to have been kidnapped, examined, and experimented upon by beings from another world. The ufology of investigating the nuts and bolts of unidentified flying objects gave way on the public stage to these new missionaries who simultaneously played the role of investigator, therapist, and advocate to their vulnerable charges.

There are many people for whom the mystery is the matter. UFOs may well be far more interesting to ponder than to actually solve.

In many ways, it was Mack’s involvement that signaled both the culmination and end of the headiest days of alien abduction. A distinguished Harvard psychiatrist, when Mack began working with and publishing accounts of abductees—or “experiencers,” as he called them—in the early 1990s, he lent the study of extraterrestrial captivity an air of legitimacy it had been lacking. A five-day conference at MIT in 1992 on the alien abduction phenomenon, followed by a book on the subject two years later, brought him the affection of many in the UFO community and the scorn of many of his colleagues. The Harvard Medical School initiated a review of his position; he retained tenure, but after, as review board chairman Arnold Relman later put it, he was “not taken seriously by his colleagues anymore.” Claims of alien abduction have continued since then, but one would have to search far and wide to find a clinician of Mack’s stature who would go on record saying they believed them.

And so here we are a quarter century later, and we are again hearing some rumblings from within the scientific community. Some scientists involved with SETI have publicly called for the interdisciplinary study of UFOs. And now Loeb (another Harvard professor) has announced the Galileo Project. With an initial private investment of nearly $2 million with which to work, the Galileo Project will certainly have access to equipment qualitatively better than what existed in the fifties and sixties. Will this make a difference? Many of Loeb’s colleagues are skeptical about the prospect. If history is any guide, it’s questionable a project like this will succeed in persuading diehard believers and skeptics to rethink their positions.

{ http://bostonreview.net/ }

A video has captured the moment a b

right object in the sky explodes over the city of Izimir in Turkey before crashing towards earth on July 31, 2021. 

The spectacular event has sparked speculation, many people are convinced that the object may have been a meteor, but others suggest that the object could have been space junk, rocket debris or even a crashing UFO.

  

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

Elon Musk Talks About Aliens

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

Now THAT'S a sunny garden! Amazing images of solar flares are captured by an amateur photographer in his back yard

• Dave Tyler, from a village near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire used a five inch refracting telescope with specialist filters to take the images

• 72-year-old captured violent solar flares and spots on the sun’s surface, which is 5,505°C and 93million miles (150million km) away from Earth

• The images show solar flares as the sun goes through its ‘solar maximum’ – a period when it is most active that occurs approximately every 11 years
  

By SARAH GRIFFITHS

Most people are content with spotting birds and butterflies in their garden.

But a British amateur photographer has set his sights a lot higher and has taken incredible images of the sun’s raging surface from his back yard.

The 72-year-old managed to capture violent solar flares and spots on the sun’s surface, which is 5,505°C and approximately 93million miles (150million km) away from Earth.

This incredible image of a violent solar flare was taken by a British amateur photographer from his back garden in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire

Dave Tyler, from a village near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire has spent the last 40 years scouring the skies using an array of powerful telescopes, which have set him back over £2,000.

His latest images are spectacular and show solar flares as the sun goes through its ‘solar maximum’ – a period when it is most active, which comes around every 11 years.

‘The sun is a star 10 times as close to us as the planet Saturn - a thought I always find sobering,’ Mr Tyler said.

The 72-year-old managed to capture violent solar flares (pictured) and spots on the sun¿s surface, which is 5,505°C and approximately 93million miles (150million km) away from Earth

Dave Tyler (pictured), from a village near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire has spent the last 40 years scouring the skies using an array of powerful telescopes

‘Right now solar activity is at its maximum, but not its most spectacular.'

‘My favourite image is the solar flare with an associated outburst, just inside the solar limb [‘edge’ of the sun]. Its position gives a nice 3D effect.'

He added: ‘I also like the wide horizon shot showing general surface activity.’

The small black areas are sunspots, which are a little cooler than the surrounding surface of the star

The amateur astronomer and photographer has spent 40 years scouring the skies and used specialist equipment to capture the swirling surface of our star, including solar flares (the white flash) and dark sun spots (also pictured)

Mr Tyler captures the images by replacing the eyepiece on his telescope with a miniature charged-coupled device camera, a gadget often used for deep-sky, planetary, lunar and solar photography.

He can take thousands of frames before using computer software to piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Mr Tyler said: ‘Sometimes the image is as much art as science and the image is often coloured to best serve the original wow factor from the live view.’

The amateur photographer's latest images are spectacular and show solar flares as the sun goes through its 'solar maximum' - a period when it is most active, which comes around every 11 years

Mr Tyler captures the sun's violent surface (pictured) by replacing the eyepiece on his telescope with a miniature charged-coupled device camera, which are often used for deep-sky, planetary, lunar and solar photography. This is one of his favourite images

Mr Tyler has been a keen astronomer for the last 40 years and built his first telescope when he was 29. He has been fascinated ever since. Here the sun's swirling gaseous surface is pictured

Solar flares are created when magnetic energy builds up and is suddenly released. They extend out to the layer of the sun called the corona – the outermost atmosphere of the sun.

The small black areas are sunspots, which are a little cooler than the surrounding surface of the star.

Mr Tyler has been a keen astronomer for the last 40 years and built his first telescope when he was 29. He has been fascinated ever since.

Mr Tyler captures the images by replacing the eyepiece on his telescope with a miniature charged-coupled device camera, a gadget often used for deep-sky, planetary, lunar and solar photography. His current telescope set-up is pictured

The father-of-one usually uses a five inch refracting telescope equipped with a hydrogen-alpha solar filter to take his images of the solar flares (pictured)

A flare (pictured) occurs when magnetic energy that has built up in the solar atmosphere is suddenly released. This image is the photographer's favourite as he thinks the solar flare, just inside the solar limb ['edge' of the sun] gives the image 'a nice 3D effect'

The father-of-one usually uses a five inch refracting telescope equipped with a hydrogen-alpha solar filter to take his images.

Despite being millions of miles away from the sun, he always urges caution when trying to capture it.

‘You have to be careful. Never look at the sun through anything other than equipment specialised for direct solar viewing or it will blind you,’ he warned.

Solar flares (pictured) extend out to the layer of the sun called the corona, which is the outermost atmosphere of the star and is made up of highly rarefied gas

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

NASA spots powerful X-Class solar flare for the first time in five years

Mysterious GodSelf Icon Found Worldwide: Lost Symbol of an Ancient Global Religion?

Significant evidence now exists that ancient cultures worldwide were all connected by a powerful religious symbol which I call the “GodSelf Icon,” that is especially conspicuous among the pyramid cultures.

The pyramid cultures shared the “Triptych Temple” and “GodSelf Icon.”

In my 2011 book, Written in Stone , I revealed how these pyramid cultures all employed the same three-door “Triptych Temple” pattern. Another discovery that I announced concerns the GodSelf Icon, an image depicting a central figure, a hero or god, facing forward and holding in either hand parallel objects or animals.

THE GODSELF ICON

My new book, The Missing Link, shows more than 500 spectacular images as evidence of the central role the GodSelf Icon played in civilizations as diverse as Egypt, India, China, Persia, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and ancient Europe:

GodSelf Icons found worldwide.

Just as the crucifix symbol unites millions of Christians under one universal religion, so the GodSelf Icon symbol did the same for our ancient ancestors.

GodSelf Icons found worldwide.

TRIPTYCH TEMPLES
Parallel art and architecture in Antiquity—pyramid-building, corbel arches, and mummification—always interested me, so much so that I began traveling at a young age in an effort to examine these parallels as well as discover as many more parallels that I could find:

The ancients shared a common wisdom and possibly a common heritage.

Written in Stone tells the heroic story of how organized guilds of medieval stonemasons— who officially surfaced in 1717, calling themselves “Freemasons”— attempted to take back the religious narrative from priests by embedding the lost secrets of this universal religion into Gothic cathedrals. Gargoyles have nothing to do with Christianity. I realized that the standard blueprints of Gothic cathedrals, which called for a large central door flanked by two smaller doors, and two towers on either side of the central entrance hall, were a memory of pagan temples in Egypt, Mexico, Peru, China, India, etc.:

Central door flanked by two smaller doors seen in architecture around the world.

The center door is the “source”—the “soul” inside the body. The twin doors are the opposing bodily forces of duality that surround the soul on either side, and that the soul must confront and master in life.

• The Mystery of the Guanches and the Pyramids of Tenerife
• 16 Ancient Pyramids, Burial Sites for a Vanished Kingdom, Found in Sudan
• Pyramids of Meroë stand as Last Remnants of a Powerful Civilization

The Universal Religion of the Triptych Temple formed the foundation of other Secret Societies besides Freemasonry, including the Knights of Pythias, Skull & Bones, and Shriners, all of whom use the Triptych entrance into their headquarters:

The Lost Universal Religion of the Triptych Temple

The main façade of Rockefeller Center in New York City depicts one of the most striking esoteric Triptychs of modern times. It shows a "god" image in the center doorway (the “GodSelf”) balanced between male / female opposites. Note that the god holds a compass—a key Masonic symbol :

Triptych façade, Rockefeller Center, NYC.

As with the Triptych, the GodSelf Icon represents the soul of the hero or sage who balances his opposing bodily forces, represented by the twin objects held symmetrically in each hand. The GodSelf Icon calls upon us to develop our inner strength and spiritual potential by means of balancing the twin opposing forces within us (through meditation) and by carefully cultivating our physical and mental powers.

The concept of an external “God,” as in the familiar monotheistic and polytheistic religions, is a distraction from what I believe is the true purpose of religion, which is to recognize the eternal nature of our own spiritual being and to nurture the “GodSelf” within ourselves.

The GodSelf Icon inspired the logos of companies like Starbucks.

Starbucks logo. (Source: BrandsoftheWorld.com)

A beautiful variation of the GodSelf Icon is visible at Rockefeller Center. The “twin opposites” are symbolized by the Comedy and Tragedy masks, held aloft on the right and left sides of the goddess:

Rockefeller Center in New York City, USA

THE GOLDEN AGE
The origins of the GodSelf Icon can be traced to a Golden Age “Mother Culture” that may have existed in the prehistoric past. Some Victorian-era scholars associated the Golden Age with Plato’s Atlantis, and with ideas of the rise and fall of civilization over a period corresponding with the Zodiacal precession of the equinoxes which takes roughly 25,000 years. Plato called it the “Great Year”; the ancient Greeks, even before Plato, linked the Great Year with the seasons. Similar theories lay behind such phenomena as the Mayan and Aztec calendars, and the Hindu Yuga concept.

• Chronicles from the Future: A True Story Kept Hidden by the Masons now Revealed
• The Roman god Bacchus as a Christian icon

Recently, some alternative researchers have latched onto this Golden Age idea, claiming that a “technologically” advanced civilization flourished in the distant past. These researchers are making the mistake of projecting the spirit of our own times onto the distant past, rather than paying attention to what the ancients were trying to tell us. Plato describes the Golden Age as a “spiritually” advanced civilization, not “technically” advanced. The demise of this civilization occurred because the Atlanteans ceased identifying with their “divine” nature (i.e., their GodSelf nature):

“For many generations…they obeyed the laws and loved the divine to which they were akin…But when the divine element in them became weakened…and their human traits became predominant, they ceased to be able to carry their prosperity with moderation.”
—Plato, Timaeus

SURPRISING FIND: MORE ANCIENT = MORE ADVANCED

We see evidence of the remnants of the Golden Age not only in the common language of symbolism left by our ancient ancestors, but also in the common architecture (like the Triptych Temple). Ancient civilization is characterized by remarkable skill in stonemasonry. One of the most amazing facts about ancient stone masonry is that many of the greatest works are among the oldest: 

The most ancient stone structures are the most advanced.

In Italy, for example, Etruscan aqueducts and monuments are more tightly put together than later Roman-era constructions. The Great Pyramid at Cheops is thousands of years older than the inferior pyramids that surround it. The aqueduct in Segovia, Spain (said to be Roman) is far more advanced than later aqueducts. The development of many technologies in the ancient world often seems to reflect more degeneration and decay than progress. Perhaps this is really a result of a genuine pattern of a Great Year cycle of the decline and fall of civilizations, where the great period of spiritual achievement occurred over ten thousand years ago, and has been followed by a period of ever-accelerating spiritual decline. The purpose of my new book is to help uncover the real truth of the human past, in order to understand and eventually to reverse this decline.

MASONIC GODSELF ICONS
Much evidence that would illuminate the meaning of the GodSelf Icon was destroyed by the conquistadors, Crusaders, Mongol Hordes, and slave traders. My presentation emphasizes the critical role of medieval stonemasons in preserving ancient symbols like the GodSelf Icon into the present. Gothic cathedrals are full of marvelous examples of the GodSelf Icon:

GodSelf Icons in cathedrals.

The clincher for me was the image of the Rebis, an androgynous alchemical drawing published in 1613. The sun is over its right shoulder; the moon over its left:

The Rebis is an ancestor of Masonic tracing boards that feature similar dualities; like the tracing boards, the message of the Rebis is to overcome dualities by means of mystic techniques involving the ancient practice of balancing opposites to find the center. Note the Masonic Square and Compass symbols in the left and right hands of the Rebis—simple tools used to build incredibly advanced stone monuments (pyramids, aqueducts, cathedrals) which to this day remain a testament not to the “technological” power of the ancients, but to their “spiritual” centeredness.

Most Freemasons have no idea what their symbols mean. My research has convinced me that the “lost secret of Freemasonry” is the same as the “lost secret of the Incas” and the same as the “lost secret of the Egyptians.” The GodSelf icon, which is identical in form and meaning in places as far apart as Egypt and Peru, is an important key for understanding the origins and destiny of mankind.

• Richard Cassaro ’s new book, The Missing Link , is available on Amazon.com and on his website www.RichardCassaro.com.
• Top Image: Deriv; Step Pyramid of Djoser, Egypt. ( CC BY-SA 2.0 ), El Castillo (pyramid of Kukulcán) in Chichén Itzá, Mexico ( CC BY-SA 4.0 ), Candi Sukuh in eastern Central Java ( CC BY-SA 3.0 )
• Images, unless otherwise noted, via author Richard Cassaro.

By Richard Cassaro

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

TWEE MEREN ONTDEKT ONDER DE ANTARCTISCHE IJSKAP

Vivian Lammerse

Bronmateriaal:

• "NASA Space Lasers Map Meltwater Lakes in Antarctica With Striking Precision" - NASA
• Afbeelding bovenaan dit artikel: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Dr. Kelly Brunt

GERELATEERDE VIDEO'S, gekozen en gepost door peter2011

{ https://www.scientias.nl/ }

In 2019, a National Geographic and OceanX underwater photographer appeared in a video and said this:

“I think, in the ocean, I have come across potentially beings from another heavenly body that are more highly advanced than humans.”

The photographer is Luis Lamar and the video appears to have been made by or for OceanX, an ocean exploration initiative whose website describes a “mission to explore the ocean and bring it back to the world.” Does that mission include bringing photos of underwater aliens back to the world?

“I’ve seen giant deep sea arachnids, venomous sea snakes far offshore with, like bright-yellow heads. Sharks in a frenzy, Orcas swarming all around me. Some sort of you know, hyper-advanced aquatic alien creatures inhabiting the shallow waters, which almost look like stingrays.”

I think I know that alien!

According to the Meeko TV YouTube channel, Lamar stated that he was waiting for an underwater film crew to assemble when he saw the sharks in a frenzy. When he approached them, he saw the “hyper-advanced aquatic alien creatures.” While they looked like stingrays, Meeko TV reports he said something about them didn’t feel right, something that wasn’t normal. The original report and video was said to have been made by The War Zone, which is well known for its in-depth reports on advanced military aircraft and strange encounters. In fact, in 2019 it was fact reporting on U.S. nuclear submarines having a number of encounters with unidentified submerged objects or USOs.

And that is where the plot thickens. The War Zone has no record of Luis Lamar. Links to the original video no longer work. Lamar is definitely a real person and National Geographic photographer — his photos appear in a 2019 story titled “If alien life exists in our solar system, it may look like this.” That’s “may.” However, the underwater alien encounter story is still alive, having popped up on various paranormal and UFO sites and on Reddit. This week on the UFO Reddit, a follow-up on this story was alluded to. u/MFLUDER posted a tweet by filmmaker Steven Greenstreet … who retweeted a post by Andrew Harbinson (@sSamscwantch), a “Para experiencer” who contacted Luis Lamar to asked for clarification on his encounter in light of the recent UFO/USO/UAP encounter disclosures by the Pentagon. Luis Lamar responded with this:

“this was a stupid joke video my friend made while we were bored on a shoot – for kids on Instagram or whatever. It’s complete bullshit. Stop wasting your time.”

What was that word again?

Sigh. This is why we can’t have nice things … like accurate and honest reports on UFOs and USOs. Some commenters tried to save it by saying that Lamar could have been pressured by the government to disavow the video and remove it, but it sounds more like his employers may have been behind it. Or Lamar just got tired of being contacted by serious researchers about his “joke” video. These days it’s hard to be a comedian or satirist or just a plain old person trying to have some fun, especially when trying to joke about politics or world affairs. It’s getting to be the same way with UFOs.

Let that be a warning to UFO or USO hoaxers – payback can be a bitch.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

My previous article was on the matter of some of the lesser-known aspects of the Rendlesham Forest “UFO landing” of December 1980. With that said, today I’ve decided to do something similar with the Roswell case. Namely, share with you some of the aspects of Roswell that many might not be aware of. So, let’s begin: when personnel at the Roswell Army Air Field announced, in July 1947, that they had recovered a crashed flying disc, one thing was one hundred percent absent: any mention of bodies. And, needless to say, the body angle was also absent from the hasty follow-up explanation of a weather-balloon recovery. The body angle was also denied in the Air Force’s July 1994 report on Roswell (titled Report of Air Force Research Regarding the Roswell Incident), as the following extract shows: “It should also be noted here that there was little mentioned in this report about the recovery of the so-called ‘alien bodies.’ The wreckage was from a Project Mogul balloon. There were no ‘alien’ passengers therein.'” Three years later, however, things had changed. In a then-new document – The Roswell Report: Case Closed – it was stated by the Air Force that: “‘Aliens’ observed in the New Mexico desert were probably anthropomorphic test dummies that were carried aloft by U.S. Air Force high altitude balloons for scientific research…The  reports of military units that always seemed to arrive shortly after the crash of a flying saucer to retrieve the saucer and ‘crew’ were actually accurate descriptions of Air Force personnel engaged in anthropomorphic dummy recovery operations.”

While the dummy theory is well-known in Ufology, there’s one far-lesser-known story that can be found in the U.S. Air Force’s large report. On one occasion northwest of Roswell, a local woman – who was wholly unfamiliar with the test activities – arrived at a dummy landing site prior to the arrival of the recovery personnel and had the scare of her life. The woman saw what appeared to be a person embedded head-first (no less!) in a snowbank and became hysterical. The woman screamed, “He’s dead! He’s dead!” Even though I don’t buy into the crash-test dummy picture, this tale is undeniably  bizarre! Moving on, there’s the story of Frank Edwards and Roswell – and of another lesser-known story. Edwards was a radio broadcaster and someone who had a deep interest in the UFO subject. Indeed, he wrote two books on UFOs. They were Flying Saucers – Here and Now! and Flying Saucers – Serious Business. Edwards also wrote a handful of books on the world of the paranormal. So, you might ask: what does any of this have to do with Roswell? Well, I’ll tell you. It was early July 1947 when the Roswell event took place. And although the story, at the time, got widespread coverage from the world’s media, it was actually quickly forgotten. That is, until the mid-1970s, when Bill Moore and Stan Friedman resurrected the story and dug deep into it. However, there’s something else. It’s a little-known fact that Edwards gave the Roswell story brief coverage in Flying Saucers – Serious Business. Indeed, between 1947 and the 1970s, when Moore and Friedman were getting moving on the case, Edwards was the only person to have promoted the case.

In Serious Business, in 1966, Edwards wrote: “There are such difficult cases as the rancher near Roswell, New Mexico, who phoned the Sheriff that a blazing disc-shaped object had passed over his house at low altitude and had crashed and burned on a hillside within view of the house. The sheriff called the military; the military came on the double quick. Newsmen were not permitted in the area. A week later, however, the government released a photograph of a service man holding up a box kite with an aluminum disc about the size of a large pie plate dangling from the bottom of the kite. This, the official report explained, was a device borne aloft on the kite and used to test radar gear by bouncing the signals off the pie pan. And this, we were told, was the sort of thing that had so excited the rancher. We were NOT told, however, how the alleged kite caught fire – nor why the military cordoned off the area while they inspected the wreckage of a burned-out kite with a non-inflammable pie pan tied to it.” Admittedly, Edwards’ version of the story was way off-course. But, the man – for all of his flaws – was the first to give Roswell any significant coverage in the post-1947 period.

Moving on, there’s another not particularly well-known story concerning Roswell. It all revolves around the matter of the United States Capitol. It goes as follows: Jesse Marcel, Jr. was the son of Major Jesse Marcel who was present at the Roswell crash-site itself in July 1947. According to Marcel, Jr., in the early 1990s he received an invite to meet with a “mysterious government official” in none other than the Capitol Building. The meeting went ahead. The subject: the Roswell events of 1947. Marcel, Jr. said of that same official figure: “He told me that he had been charged with the responsibility of investigating the operation of a ‘black government’ within the government, where funds were being spent without appropriate oversight to maintain a false story about the Roswell incident and cover the true story up. He said that his job was to report to the Senate Appropriate Committee, and advise them as to where these dollars were going, and why.” The mystery of all those secretly siphoned dollars still exists.

Finally, there’s the mysterious issue of Roswell files that can’t be found. But, that should have been found. This was a specific issue that the General Accounting Office (today, it’s called the Government Accountability Office) addressed when it went looking for the truth of Roswell in the early 1990s. Its staff said: “In 1947, Army regulations required that air accident reports be maintained permanently. We identified four air accidents reported by the Army Air Forces in New Mexico during July 1947. All of the accidents involved military aircraft and occurred after July 8, 1947 – the date the RAAF public information office first reported the crash and recovery of a ‘flying disc’ near Roswell. The Navy reported no air accidents in New Mexico during July 1947. Air Force officials told us that according to record- keeping requirements in effect during July 1947, there was no requirement to prepare a report on the crash of a weather balloon. In our search for records concerning the Roswell crash, we learned that some government records covering RAAF activities had been destroyed and others had not. For example, RAAF administrative records (from Mar. 1945 through Dec. 1949) and RAAF outgoing messages (from Oct. 1946 through Dec. 1949) were destroyed. The document disposition form does not indicate what organization or person destroyed the records and when or under what authority the records were destroyed.”

And, that’s where, today, our story comes to its end. No doubt, there are far more Roswell secrets that, one day, will surface. Whether they will provide answers or even more mysteries is something that, right now, is hard to predict.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 04 - 08 - 2021

UFOs Sighted Over Jiutepec, Mexico ( August 3, 2021 )

UFOs were sighted over Jiutepec, Mexico on August 3, 2021

STATEMENT : Will it be planes coming out of the cloud? One after another??

ORIGINAL : Serán aviones saliendo de la nube? Uno tras otro??

They are here

• credit : J Arellano

UFOs Sighted From Plane Over Middle East At 40, 000 ft ( August 2, 2021 )

STATEMENT : I saw these lights in the sky from our plane window, at 40,000 ft, on Monday morning, somewhere over the Middle East. I’ve not seen anything like it previously and wonder if anyone else has? What are they?

• credit : Miles Ellerby 

UFO Sighted Over Duque de Caxias. Brazil ( August 1, 2021 )

A personal friend of mine filmed this Sunday the 01/08/2021th Flamengo game time...Duque de Caxias RJ A strange and unusual situation.. stood still for about 5 minutes in the same spot without making a noise and in a blink of an eye it was gone

ORIGINAL : Um amigo meu pessoal filmou nesse domingo dia 01/08/2021 horário do jogo do flamengo ...duque de caxias ,RJ. Uma situação de fato estranha e inusitada ..ficou parada por volta de 5 minutos no mesmo lugar sem fazer barulho e num piscar de olhos sumiu

2 videos

• credit : Digo Arruda

Flying Saucer Shaped UFO Sighted Over Italy ( July 30, 2021 )

This UFO flying saucer or flying disc was sighted over Italy on July 30, 2021. : This flying craft has a disc or saucer-shaped body, Classic Flying saucer Saucer commonly : anomalous flying object.

STATEMENT : Classic Flying saucer Saucer

• credit : think tank

Future of flight? Black Fly electric flying vehicle. UFO?

August 1, 2021 Live : 09:20

STATEMENT : Future of flight? Black Fly electric flying vehicle. UFO? : The difficult thing will be for us to distinguish what comes from the outside and what is right here.

• credit : Marcel Evandro

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - MUFON CASES - - 4 - 8 - 2021

MUFON CASE : 117150 Los Angeles, California ( August 3, 2021 )

Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : 12 ufo orbs appear no airplanes or anything else around.

Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117150

• There were no airplanes or anything else around. Witnessed by me & my g/f

Date Submitted : 2021-08-03

Date of Event : 2021-08-02

MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : 12ufos.mp4

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

Strange object in sky caught on camera in Croatia. What is it?

In Croatia, residents have been thrown into a fright after a bizarre story emerged regarding peoples being scared at a street location by what has been described as a “strange UFO”.

That and more strange events caught on tape. Real or fake?

Video here:

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

'Top Secret UFO Projects: Declassified': Tom DeLonge's Mind Was Blown by This Encounter

Harry Reid tells the government to continue studying UFOs after landmark report leaves more questions

However, he explained, there are decades of reports and investigations about UFOs to uncover what they are. None of those were included in the report and Reid wants to know why sightings between 2004 and 2021 were the only things considered. Some of the videos have been examined and released to the public with little information. Reid believes that there should be ongoing study as we learn more and technology gets better.

"We've been talking about these UFO's for 70 years and we have not gotten any place other than to understand that the more we learn, the more we need to learn," he explained. "And so I am satisfied that the medical Pentagon is doing the right thing."

He said that he's "ready" to find out specifics about what these UFOs actually are.

• Listen to the full interview here.

Stealth Fighters, Not UFOs—What Really Goes On in Area 51

Area 51's location - Groom Lake - was perfect as an experimental aircraft testing site: it was far from prying eyes and "smooth as a billiard table."

Here's What You Need To Remember: The Groom Lake facility at this time acquired the designation “Area 51” as it expanded and developed specialized facilities for the striking supersonic jets: larger additional hangars, a longer 10,000 foot runway, safer backup landing areas, over 130 housing units for personnel, and enlarged fuel stores for the exotic high-temperature JP-7 fuel used in the A-12.

Area 51, the highly secretive U.S. Air Force test facility in the deserts of southern Nevada, is enjoying a resurgence of popular interest thanks to an internet meme—as if being featured in X-File episodes, arcade shoot’em up games and films weren’t enough.

Despite the countless dubious conspiracy theories attributed to the site also known as “Dreamland” or “Groom Lake,” there’s no doubt that for over six decades the base hosted all sorts of “black project” aircraft whose existence was not formally disclosed by the Pentagon. 

Though the CIA only obliquely admitted to the site’s existence in 2013, we actually know a fair bit about how Area 51 came to be—and even how it first became a subject of juicy UFO stories.

A Private Testing Ground for Eisenhower’s Top-Secret Spy Plane

In the early 1950s, the United States was super keen on monitoring the Soviet Union’s rapidly developing nuclear ballistic missile program. As the first spy satellites remained a few years away from being launched, the only way to reliably spy on these sights was to fly above them and snap pictures with giant cameras. But by the early 1950s, the Soviet Union’s new air defense system and high-flying jet interceptors made spy flights excessively risky.

To overcome these defenses, Lockheed engineer Kelly Johnson proposed a glide-liker spy plane that would simply fly too high to be intercepted at over 70,000 feet. This still involved illegally violating Soviet airspace—but as long as the spy planes couldn’t be shot down, Moscow couldn’t prove the spy flights were happening at all.

In November 1954, Eisenhower approved development of this U-2 spy plane in a program known as “Project Aquatone” to be operated by the CIA. While the plane would be built at Lockheed’s famous Skunkworks facility, an aircraft designed for illegal spy overflights needed to be tested somewhere more discrete.

Johnson asked Lockheed test pilot Tony LeVier to find a suitably clandestine airfield. As described in the book Dark Eagles by Curtis Peebles, test pilot Tony LeVier departed from the Skunkworks facility in Palmdale, California flying a Beechcraft Bonanza light plane, ostensibly on a “hunting trip.” In reality, they proceeded to survey 50 decertified sites in Arizona, California and Nevada over two weeks—but none seemed sufficiently remote.

However, Air Force liaison Col. Osmond Ritland recalled an abandoned X-shaped landing strip that had served as a gunnery field during World War II.

CIA officer Richard Bissell, LeVier and Johnson flew down to inspect the strip, which lay next to a dry Nevada salt flat called Groom Lake. Bissell described the site as “…a perfect natural landing field… as smooth as a billiard table without anything being done to it.”

Johnson indicated “We’ll put it right there. That’s the hangar.”

A fake company called CLJ, created to obscure Lockheed’s involvement, recruited contractors to build up the facilities in the sweltering summer of 1955 at a cost of $800,000.

The desolate site, deceptively nicknamed “Paradise Ranch,” started out with a nearly mile-long runway, two hangars, a control tower, fuel and water storage tanks, an access road, and trailers for onsite personnel. LeVier personally road about the lakebed to clear it of debris and spent shell casings to make it safe for landing.

Finally, on July 24, 1955, the prototype U-2, dubbed Article 341, was disassembled and stowed into a hulking C-124 Globemaster transport plane, which transported it to the “Ranch”—landing with deflated tires so as not to break through the thin runway.

LeVier took the gawky aircraft around on taxi tests, hitting 80 miles per hour on the runway—only for the aircraft’s lengthy wings to lift his plane twenty feet into the air during his second run. The U-2 flew over a quarter-mile, before LeVier was able to get the lift-prone aircraft back down on the lakebed on his second attempt—though the hard landing caused one of the jet’s tires to burst and catch fire.

The U-2 went on to see several successful flight tests and in a matter of months was deployed on spy flights over the Soviet Union with CIA pilots.

Civilian airline pilots and air traffic controllers began spotting the silvery U-2s flying at supposedly impossible heights. Given that the Air Force couldn’t explain the sightings by telling the truth, it devised weather-related incidents to explain them away. These often unconvincing explanations only fed the fervor of conspiracy theorists.

The Blackbirds: A-12, D-21 and SR-71

When a Soviet S-75 surface-to-air missile blasted Gary Powers’s U-2 in 1960, and he subsequently confessed to performing espionage flights) it became clear that altitude alone would not provide an adequate defense. Kelly Johnson had already anticipated this vulnerability in 1958, when he began exploring a new spy plane concept: combining high altitude with sustained speeds exceeding three times the speed of sound, and radar-stealth—hopefully making the jet too high and fast to ever intercept.

This CIA-Lockheed “black project”—codenamed “Project Oxcart”—spawned the futuristic-looking A-12 single-seat spy plane, the progenitor of the famous (and unclassified) two-seat SR-71 Blackbird flown by the U.S. Air Force. 

The Groom Lake facility at this time acquired the designation “Area 51” as it expanded and developed specialized facilities for the striking supersonic jets: larger additional hangars, a longer 10,000 foot runway, safer backup landing areas, over 130 housing units for personnel, and enlarged fuel stores for the exotic high-temperature JP-7 fuel used in the A-12.

The first A-12s arrived in 1962 along with elite military pilots temporarily discharged and placed in the employ of the CIA, a protocol known as “sheep-dipping.” Though the White House never dispatched A-12s on overflights of the Soviet Union, they did fly thirty-two missions over Vietnam and North Korea in Project Blackshield before being retired in favor of the Air Force’s SR-71s, which had side-looking cameras that didn’t require overflight of hostile airspace.

Lockheed also devised a D-21 spy drone that resembled a miniature, single-engined Blackbird, carried on top of a Blackbird-derived carrier aircraft called the M-21.   

Tragically, one of the piggybacked D-21 drones collided with its M-21 carrier during a test launch. Though both of the M-21’s crew ejected, one drowned before he could be rescued, and Johnson canceled M-21 program.

However, the CIA did later try to make use of the D-21s by launching them from B-52 bombers to snap footage of Chinese nuclear test sites. However, a series of mishaps meant the Air Force was unable to recover footage from any of the five drone missions it dispatched.

Birthplace of the Stealth Jet

While the A-12 and Blackbird had limited stealth characteristics, by the 1970s, the Air Force was interested in taking another crack at a low-radar-observable jet, this time with combat application.

In 1977, the Skunk Works used new computer modeling technology to design and build two pale aircraft with diamond-like faceted surfaces coated with radar-absorbent iron ball paint. These “Have Blue” aircraft were disassembled and flown to Area 51 in a giant C-5 cargo jet November 16, then rebuilt and test flown.

Lo and behold, the Have Blues did exhibit drastically reduced radar cross-sections—but they were also highly aerodynamically unstable, and both crashed in 1979.

Lockheed evolved Have Blue into the F-117 Nighthawk attack jet, which used computer fly-by-wire systems to correct the aircraft’s inherent instability. A YF-117 prototype too made its first flight at Groom Lake on June 17, 1981. Production F-117s were then stationed at Area 51 before being redeployed to the nearby Tonopah Test Range.

Though the Pentagon admitted to the existence of a stealth jet in 1983, the secrecy surrounding the F-117 was so effective that the public never had any inkling of the Nighthawk’s true appearance, nor even its designation (widely believed to be the “F-19”) until was finally unveiled in 1988.

Meanwhile, Northrop, too, began refining its stealth technology with the Tacit Blue demonstrator, dubbed the “whale” or “alien school bus” for its decidedly unglamorous appearance. This made its first flight at Groom Lake in February 1982—the first of 135 in all before the demonstrator was retired in 1985.

Conceived as stealthy surveillance plane with a discrete Low Probability of Intercept Radar, Tacit Blue instead pioneered the use of computer-engineered curved-surfaces in stealth aircraft which heavily informed Northrop’s forthcoming B-2 stealth bomber.

• Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.
• This article first appeared in 2019 and is being reprinted due to reader interest.

{ https://nationalinterest.org/ }

The footage was captured at the Glacier Bay National Park and Reserve. The park posted the video to its Facebook page and explained that the mirage is called a "Fata Morgana". 

The strange dome-shaped object in the video is actually your brain being tricked into seeing a distorted version of an island. 

A Fata Morgana is a mirage that appears just above the horizon and can significantly distort an object that's already there. Glacier Bay National Park and Reserve explained on Facebook: "Fata Morgana is a mirage seen within a narrow band on Earth’s horizon. 

Islands in glacier bay turn to UFOs or the flying Dutchman with a little imagination and a pinch of cool science! When air of different densities meet, the air in Earth’s atmosphere acts as a refracting lens, creating the mirage effect we see.

  

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

The Man Who Says He Was Abducted by Aliens

In this clip from a 1994 episode of “The Oprah Show”, guest Peter Faust claims he was visited—and ultimately abducted—by aliens at the age of 8. As an adult, Peter says he’s had terrifying recollections of the abduction, which left him so unsettled he ultimately sought the help of a psychiatrist. Here, John Mack, MD, joins Peter on stage to give credence to his patient’s abduction story, and those of thousands of other people claiming similar experiences.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

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

NASA beams back spectacular images of Jupiter and our solar system's biggest moon, Ganymede

NASA’s Fermi Spots a Weird Pulse of High-Energy Radiation Racing Toward Earth

By FRANCIS REDDY, NASA’S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

On August 26, 2020, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a pulse of high-energy radiation that had been racing toward Earth for nearly half the present age of the universe. Lasting only about a second, it turned out to be one for the record books – the shortest gamma-ray burst (GRB) caused by the death of a massive star ever seen.

GRBs are the most powerful events in the universe, detectable across billions of light-years. Astronomers classify them as long or short based on whether the event lasts for more or less than two seconds. They observe long bursts in association with the demise of massive stars, while short bursts have been linked to a different scenario.

Astronomers combined data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, other space missions, and ground-based observatories to reveal the origin of GRB 200826A, a brief but powerful burst of radiation. It’s the shortest burst known to be powered by a collapsing star – and almost didn’t happen at all.

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

“We already knew some GRBs from massive stars could register as short GRBs, but we thought this was due to instrumental limitations,” said Bin-bin Zhang at Nanjing University in China and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “This burst is special because it is definitely a short-duration GRB, but its other properties point to its origin from a collapsing star. Now we know dying stars can produce short bursts, too.”

Named GRB 200826A, after the date it occurred, the burst is the subject of two papers published in Nature Astronomy on Monday, July 26. The first, led by Zhang, explores the gamma-ray data. The second, led by Tomás Ahumada, a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, describes the GRB’s fading multiwavelength afterglow and the emerging light of the supernova explosion that followed.

“We think this event was effectively a fizzle, one that was close to not happening at all,” Ahumada said. “Even so, the burst emitted 14 million times the energy released by the entire Milky Way galaxy over the same amount of time, making it one of the most energetic short-duration GRBs ever seen.”

When a star much more massive than the Sun runs out of fuel, its core suddenly collapses and forms a black hole. As matter swirls toward the black hole, some of it escapes in the form of two powerful jets that rush outward at almost the speed of light in opposite directions. Astronomers only detect a GRB when one of these jets happens to point almost directly toward Earth.

Each jet drills through the star, producing a pulse of gamma rays – the highest-energy form of light – that can last up to minutes. Following the burst, the disrupted star then rapidly expands as a supernova.

Short GRBs, on the other hand, form when pairs of compact objects – such as neutron stars, which also form during stellar collapse – spiral inward over billions of years and collide. Fermi observations recently helped show that, in nearby galaxies, giant flares from isolated, supermagnetized neutron stars also masquerade as short GRBs.

GRB 200826A was a sharp blast of high-energy emission lasting just 0.65 second. After traveling for eons through the expanding universe, the signal had stretched out to about one second long when it was detected by Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor. The event also appeared in instruments aboard NASA’s Wind mission, which orbits a point between Earth and the Sun located about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away, and Mars Odyssey, which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2001. ESA’s (the European Space Agency’s) INTEGRAL satellite observed the blast as well.

All of these missions participate in a GRB-locating system called the InterPlanetary Network (IPN), for which the Fermi project provides all U.S. funding. Because the burst reaches each detector at slightly different times, any pair of them can be used to help narrow down where in the sky it occurred. About 17 hours after the GRB, the IPN narrowed its location to a relatively small patch of the sky in the constellation Andromeda.

Using the National Science Foundation-funded Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at Palomar Observatory, the team scanned the sky for changes in visible light that could be linked to the GRB’s fading afterglow.

Discovery image of the fading afterglow (center) of GRB 200826A.

Credit: ZTF and T. Ahumada et al., 2021

“Conducting this search is akin to trying to find a needle in a haystack, but the IPN helps shrink the haystack,” said Shreya Anand, a graduate student at Caltech and a co-author on the afterglow paper. “Out of more than 28,000 ZTF alerts the first night, only one met all of our search criteria and also appeared within the sky region defined by the IPN.”

Within a day of the burst, NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory discovered fading X-ray emission from this same location. A couple of days later, variable radio emission was detected by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Karl Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico. The team then began observing the afterglow with a variety of ground-based facilities.

Observing the faint galaxy associated with the burst using the Gran Telescopio Canarias, a 10.4-meter telescope at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands, the team showed that its light takes 6.6 billion years to reach us. That’s 48% of the universe’s current age of 13.8 billion years.

But to prove this short burst came from a collapsing star, the researchers also needed to catch the emerging supernova.

“If the burst was caused by a collapsing star, then once the afterglow fades away it should brighten again because of the underlying supernova explosion,” said Leo Singer, a Goddard astrophysicist and Ahumada’s research advisor. “But at these distances, you need a very big and very sensitive telescope to pick out the pinpoint of light from the supernova from the background glare of its host galaxy.”

To conduct the search, Singer was granted time on the 8.1-meter Gemini North telescope in Hawaii and the use of a sensitive instrument called the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph. The astronomers imaged the host galaxy in red and infrared light starting 28 days after the burst, repeating the search 45 and 80 days after the event. They detected a near-infrared source – the supernova – in the first set of observations that could not be seen in later ones.

The researchers suspect that this burst was powered by jets that barely emerged from the star before they shut down, instead of the more typical case where long-lasting jets break out of the star and travel considerable distances from it. If the black hole had fired off weaker jets, or if the star was much larger when it began its collapse, there might not have been a GRB at all.

The discovery helps resolve a long-standing puzzle. While long GRBs must be coupled to supernovae, astronomers detect far greater numbers of supernovae than they do long GRBs. This discrepancy persists even after accounting for the fact that GRB jets must tip nearly into our line of sight for astronomers to detect them at all.

The researchers conclude that collapsing stars producing short GRBs must be marginal cases whose light-speed jets teeter on the brink of success or failure, a conclusion consistent with the notion that most massive stars die without producing jets and GRBs at all. More broadly, this result clearly demonstrates that a burst’s duration alone does not uniquely indicate its origin.

References:

• “A peculiarly short-duration gamma-ray burst from massive star core collapse” by B.-B. Zhang, Z.-K. Liu, Z.-K. Peng, Y. Li, H.-J. Lü, J. Yang, Y.-S. Yang, Y.-H. Yang, Y.-Z. Meng, J.-H. Zou, H.-Y. Ye, X.-G. Wang, J.-R. Mao, X.-H. Zhao, J.-M. Bai, A. J. Castro-Tirado, Y.-D. Hu, Z.-G. Dai, E.-W. Liang and B. Zhang, 26 July 2021, Nature Astronomy.
  DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01395-z
• “Discovery and confirmation of the shortest gamma-ray burst from a collapsar” by Tomás Ahumada, Leo P. Singer, Shreya Anand, Michael W. Coughlin, Mansi M. Kasliwal, Geoffrey Ryan, Igor Andreoni, S. Bradley Cenko, Christoffer Fremling, Harsh Kumar, Peter T. H. Pang, Eric Burns, Virginia Cunningham, Simone Dichiara, Tim Dietrich, Dmitry S. Svinkin, Mouza Almualla, Alberto J. Castro-Tirado, Kishalay De, Rachel Dunwoody, Pradip Gatkine, Erica Hammerstein, Shabnam Iyyani, Joseph Mangan, Dan Perley, Sonalika Purkayastha, Eric Bellm, Varun Bhalerao, Bryce Bolin, Mattia Bulla, Christopher Cannella, Poonam Chandra, Dmitry A. Duev, Dmitry Frederiks, Avishay Gal-Yam, Matthew Graham, Anna Y. Q. Ho, Kevin Hurley, Viraj Karambelkar, Erik C. Kool, S. R. Kulkarni, Ashish Mahabal, Frank Masci, Sheila McBreen, Shashi B. Pandey, Simeon Reusch, Anna Ridnaia, Philippe Rosnet, Benjamin Rusholme, Ana Sagués Carracedo, Roger Smith, Maayane Soumagnac, Robert Stein, Eleonora Troja, Anastasia Tsvetkova, Richard Walters and Azamat F. Valeev, 26 July 2021, Nature Astronomy.
  DOI: 10.1038/s41550-021-01428-7

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Fermi was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States.

{ https://scitechdaily.com/ }

The Mysterious Ancient Etruscan Monuments of Selva di Malano

Selva di Malano, which may be translated to mean ‘Forest of Malano,’ is an archaeological site located in Viterbo, in the central Italian region of Lazio. The site is known for its carved stone monuments, a number of which have been interpreted to be altars. It is believed that these altars date to the time of the Etruscans, though some of the site’s monuments are thought to be from the Roman period.

There is evidence that some of the Etruscan monuments were reused by the Romans for funerary purposes. It has been suggested that the monuments at Selva di Malano, as well as other Etruscan monuments in the area, played a part in the creation of the 16 ^th century Sacro Bosso (‘Sacred Grove’), located in nearby town of Bomarzo.

The Malano Jungle

Selva di Malano is a wooded area located between the municipalities of Soriano nel Cimino and Bomarzo. The forest is situated in the foothills of the Cimini Mountains, in the Vezza River Valley, and about 4 km (2.5 miles) to the west of the Tiber River . In terms of geology, the Selva di Malano “borders a long, exposed outcrop of quartzolatitic ignimbrite from the Cimini complex.” In other words, this is an area that has access to volcanic rock suitable for construction purposes. And there is evidence that the Romans carried out quarrying activities within the Selva di Malano.

The exploitation of this natural resource in the Selva di Malano, however, predates the Romans, as is evidenced by the monuments in the forest. Before the hegemony of Rome in Italy, the central part of the peninsula was dominated by the Etruscans. At the peak, during the 6 ^th century BC, the Etruscan civilization stretched as far north as the Po River valley and as far south as Campania. Additionally, by this time, the Etruscans had developed into three confederacies consisting of 36 cities. Central Italy, however, remained the heartland of the Etruscan civilization. This region, known as Etruria, corresponds roughly to modern day Tuscany, Lazio, and Umbria.

The Etruscans: The People and Culture That Influenced Rome

The origin of the Etruscans has been debated since antiquity. Some have argued that they were an indigenous people of Italy, while others claim that they came from outside Europe, perhaps from Lydia, or from the Greek island of Lemnos. Though this debate continues even today, it is clear that the Etruscan civilization had a huge impact on Europe and the Mediterranean world, as a result of their influence on the Romans.

The Etruscans made a big contribution to Roman culture, as Rome was once situated within Etruscan territory. Moreover, there is substantial evidence that during the early part of Rome’s history, the city was dominated by the Etruscans. In fact, it was only in 396 BC when the Etruscan city of Veii was sacked by the Romans.

One of the important sources for our understanding of the Etruscan civilization are ancient texts. It may be pointed out, however, that these works were written by Greek and Roman authors, rather than the Etruscans themselves. In addition to these texts, archaeological work has also helped to shed light on this ancient civilization. Nevertheless, archaeology its own limitations. Very few preserved Etruscan constructions have survived, as the Romans who succeeded them built over their settlements.

On the other hand, archaeologists have discovered numerous Etruscan necropolises in the areas where they once inhabited. Amongst the most famous of these are the necropolises of Cerveteri and Tarquinia, which have been designated as World Heritage Sites . The tombs and grave goods unearthed at these necropolises offer us a glimpse into the world of the Etruscans, especially their artistic achievements.

Steps leading to an Etruscan rock altar.

Source: Project Tuscia

The Notable Etruscan Monuments of the Selva di Malano

Although Selva di Malano is an Etruscan site, it is not considered to be a necropolis since the original Etruscan monuments are not believed to have had a funerary purpose. Neither are the monuments that are remnants of a lost Etruscan settlement. Instead, the site is thought to have been a place where ritual ceremonies were carried out. Some have even speculated that sacrifices to the gods were performed by the Etruscans in the forest. Therefore, a number of monuments in the Selva di Malano have been interpreted as being ‘altars,’ or ‘sacrificial altars’.

Sasso del Predicatore or ‘Stone of the Preacher’ in the Selva di Malano.

( Youtube screenshot )

Amongst the most notable monuments in the Selva di Malano are the two so-called Sasso del Predicatore (‘Stone of the Preacher’). The monuments were given this name due to their resemblance to pulpits. Both monuments are quite similar, consisting of an ovoid boulder with an altar on its flattened top. A flight of stairs is carved into the boulder, which allows access to its top. On the top of the first Sasso del Predicatore are the remains of what may have been a small altar. The top of the second Sasso del Predicatore , on the other hand, was modelled into a cube-like structure, which is still visible today.

The actual function of these two monuments is unclear, though it is quite unlikely that the Etruscans used them for preaching. It has been suggested that the monuments were used for haruspicy, a form of divination involving the inspection sacrificed animal entrails. Alternatively, it has been speculated that the two monuments were used for augury, specifically the interpretation of omens based on the flight of birds, or that they were used for astronomical observations .

Incidentally, there is another Etruscan monument not far from the Selva di Malano that resembles the Sasso di Predicatore . Tacchiolo, near Bomarzo, is the location of the so-called Piramide Etrusca di Bomarzo (‘Etruscan Pyramid of Bomarzo’). In spite of its name, the monument bears more resemblance to the Etruscan altars in the Selva di Malano. Like the Sasso del Perdicatore , steps were cut into the rock. The first flight of stairs leads to a pair of intermediate altars. Beyond the altars is another flight of stairs, which leads to the top of the rock, where there seems to have been another altar.

Piramide Etrusca di Bomarzo or the ‘Etruscan Pyramid of Bomarzo.’

(Alessio Pelligrini / Flickr)

Within the Selva di Malano, the second Sasso del Predicatore is not the only monument in the area with a cubic structure. Not far from the first Sasso del Predicatore is another cubic monument called the Ara Cubica (‘Cubic Altar’). Unlike the two monuments mentioned previously, the Ara Cubica is thought to have been created during the Roman period, and that it served as a sepulchral memorial stone. The problem with these three monuments, however, is the fact that there are no identifying or epigraphic marks on them. This means that their date of creation and their purpose are still nothing more than speculations. Nevertheless, one cannot help but marvel at the ability of the Etruscans and Romans to carve such perfectly shaped cubes out of rocks.

Etruscan Sasso del Predicatore rock cube in the Selva di Malano, Italy.

(Project Tuscia / Youtube screenshot )

Rock-cut ‘Dice Tombs’ of The Selva di Malano

At the bottom of a steep tufo (or volcanic tuff) cliff in the Selva di Malano are three rock-cut tombs, which are also believed to have been created during the Roman period. The tombs are known as tombe a dado in Italian, which roughly translates to mean ‘dice tombs.’ They are believed to have been made during the Late Republican or Early Imperial period, based on the observation that they possess both Roman and Etruscan characteristics. One of the tombs is surmounted by a low relief pediment and entablature, which are supported by five fictive Doric columns in sunken relief. As these features were carved into the rock, it looks as though the monument is emerging from the rock.

Etruscan tombe a dado or “dice tombs” in the Salvo di Malano.

(Giulio Monaldi / Flickr)

Another tomb has the inscription “Heros V.A. XXV”, above a niche, indicating that this was the tomb of a 25-year-old slave with the Hellenized name of Heros. Interestingly, a Benedictine abbey called San Nicolao was built on the top of the cliff much later. Today, however, the abbey lies in ruins.  

Epigraphic marks and artistic features allow us to attain a better understanding of the monuments, as seen in the case of the tombe a dado . Another monument where inscriptions have been found is the so-called Coelius Altar, known also as the Coelius Tomb or the Coelius Monument. This monument is believed to have originally been made by the Etruscans. Later on, however, it was reused by the Romans. The inscription on this monument reads “D. Coelius D. L. Alexander / Quintia P. L. Hilara”, which means “Decimus Coelius Alexander, freedman of Decimus and Quintia Hilara freedwoman of Publius.” In addition to this inscription, a small modification was made to the original monument, in order to make it suitable for its new purpose. Two niches were carved on the top of the Coelius Altar. These were meant to hold the ashes of Coelius and Quintia.

• Do not Underestimate the Etruscans: Art and Culture of their Own
• Civita di Bagnoregio - Italy’s Most Enchanting and Surreal Ancient Town Is Dying
• Unlooted Etruscan Tomb Complete with Sarcophagi and Treasures Unearthed in Italy

Glaucus in the Parco dei Mostri, Bomarzo.

( CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Connections Between Selva di Malano and the Parco dei Mostri

The monuments in the Selva di Malano may be regarded as relics of a lost civilization. Nevertheless, it seems that they were not entirely forgotten by the inhabitants of that region. Similarities have been drawn between these ancient monuments and the Sacro Bosso , a Renaissance garden in nearby Bomarzo. This has led to the suggestion that the garden was partly inspired by the monuments of the Selva di Malano.

The Sacro Bosso is known also as the Parco dei Mostri , or ‘ Park of the Monsters ,’ due to its grotesque sculptures. The garden is located beneath Orsini Castle, and was commissioned in 1552 (based on an inscription in the park) by Pier Francesco Orsini, known also as Vicino Orsini. According to one interpretation, the garden was designed as an expression of grief, and was meant to shock those who visited it. In any case, in order to comprehend the Sacro Bosso , one has to first gain some understanding of its patron.

Pier Francesco Orsini was born in 1523. He was the second son of Duke Gian Corrado Orsini of Bomarzo and Clarice di Franciotto di Monterotondo. When he grew up, Orsini became a condottiere (a mercenary captain) like his father and served under the banner of the Farnese family. In the early 1540s, Orsini married Giulia, the daughter of a fellow condottiere, Galeazzo Farnese. During the 1550s, Orsini was active in the field. He retired from military service around 1560.

It was also around the time of Orsini’s retirement that his wife died. It has been argued, therefore, that the death of Giulia left Orsini inconsolable, and that he created the Sacro Bosso in her memory. An alternative interpretation argues that the garden was Orsini’s pet project. This takes into consideration Orsini’s infidelity and the pride he took in taking nobles and learned men (Orsini himself was an accomplished man of letters) around the garden.

As mentioned earlier, the Sacro Bosso was filled with grotesque sculptures, many of which make a clear reference to classical mythology . These include the Orcus Mouth, Proteus with the weapons of the Orsini family, and a triton in a niche. Other sculptures include a war elephant seizing a Roman legionary in its trunk, a turtle with a winged woman on its back, and a giant tearing its victim apart.

If the inhabitants of the region during the Renaissance had no memory or understanding of the Etruscans, then the monuments of the Selva di Malano would have made no sense to them. In this case, the monuments in the forest and the sculptures in Orsini’s garden would have been similar, in the sense that they are both enigmas that puzzle on-lookers. Moreover, both the ancient monuments and the grotesque sculptures are covered with moss and lichen. In Orsini’s garden it is unclear whether he intended his sculptures to have this look, though one may imagine that he was inspired by the monuments in the forest and to allow nature to add the ‘finishing touches’ to his art pieces.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

This could be fodder for moon landing deniers – the Eagle may not have landed a second time. Wait … what? For those who don’t get the reference, on July 20, 1969, Commander Neil Armstrong radioed the following message from the lunar surface: “Houston, Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed.” That meant the Apollo 11 Lunar Module nicknamed ‘Eagle’ descended successfully. On July 21, Armstrong and Aldrin left the surface of the moon with their cargo of 22 kilograms of lunar rock in the ascent stage of Eagle. After docking and unloading, the Eagle was undocked and it was assumed to have ended a retrograde orbit by plummeting back to the surface for a second, albeit un-eagle-like, landing. Unfortunately, it was not tracked and no one knows where it crashed. Or did it?

Space enthusiast and Eagle researcher James Meador is not affiliated with NASA, but perhaps he should be. He tells Discover magazine he became intrigued with what happened to the Eagle after hearing about NASA’s 2012 mission to map the Moon’s gravitational field using a pair of spacecraft called GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory). They showed that the Moon’s mass is not evenly distributed, which causes tiny variations in its gravitational field that make most lunar orbits unstable in the long term.

Rendering of the Apollo 11 command module Columbia, and the lunar module, Eagle.

In 2012, NASA sent a pair of spacecraft called GRAIL to map the Moon’s gravitational field and this mission eventually created a detailed map of this varying field. Meador decided to use the data to calculate where the Eagle’s impact crater debris might be. This was not an issue with the lunar ascent modules from Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 because surface seismometers left by the astronauts recorded their impacts. GRAIL data is available to the public, as is an open-source program called the General Mission Analysis Tool developed by NASA and others to model a spacecraft’s trajectory in any gravitational field.

“The simulations show a periodic variation in eccentricity of the orbit, correlated to the selenographic longitude of the apsidal line. The rate of apsidal precession is correlated to eccentricity. These two factors appear to interact to stabilize the orbit over the long term.”

The model takes into account outside forces such as the gravitational pull of the Earth, the Sun and all the planets except Mercury and calculates how a spacecraft’s orbit changes over time. Meador used the supplied set of starting parameters for the Eagle — the time of jettison, the latitude, longitude and altitude, heading angle and others, and was able to manipulate them to see if they produced different results. Instead, they all came to the same conclusion. (Meador details the research in a pre-print paper.)

“Numerical analysis described here provides evidence that this object might have remained in lunar orbit to the present day.”

In other words, the Eagle HASN’T landed – it may still be in orbit. That means it could be located and observed. The Indian Space Research Organization lost contact with the Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter, less than half the size of Eagle, in 2009 and it was found again in 2016 by modeling where it should be and aiming radar at that spot. In 2019, NASA found Apollo 10’s lunar module named Snoopy which had been left behind by the crew during their test flight for Apollo 11. That one left lunar orbit and was found circling the Sun.

Buzz Aldrin getting ready to leave the Moon

So, finding the Eagle is entirely possible. Will it convince deniers that the Moon landing really happened? Probably not. Will Jeff Bezos offer to retrieve the Eagle and bring it back to Earth so Buzz Aldrin can see it? Only if NASA gives him an exclusive contract.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 03 - 08 - 2021

UFO Sighted Over Ecatepec, Mexico ( August 1, 2021 )

UFO Sighted Over Ecatepec, officially Ecatepec de Morelos, a municipality in the State of Mexico on August 1, 2021.

• credit :
  • Eduargo Lugo
  • Mauricio Escaleij
  • Pedro Durán Ramírez

UAP ORB Sighted In The Scottish Highlands ( June 6, 2021 )

Amazing UAP ORB sighted in the Scottish Highlands !
The distinct singular UAP ORB phenomenon was captured at Dukes Pass, Aberfoyle in Scotland on the 6th of June 2021.

This most fascinating video footage should be seen in its entirety.

• credit : PRET 

Cigar-Shaped UFO Sighted From Plane Over Atlantic Ocean ( July 30, 2021 )

Cigar-Shaped UFO Sighted From Plane Over Atlantic Ocean on July 30, 2021 : I present here the cigar-shaped interstellar object : alien spaceship : original and approach.

More evident every day

• credit : UFO Sightings Footage

Being That Is Just Legs (No Body) Captured On Camera & UFO Invisible To The Naked Eye (Redux)

First Clip:

This footage just appeared on the internet with no source or location but i liked it and this is why i wanted to show it to you guys. I feel that this footage is 100% real ( not CGI or any other trickery) but what do you guys think?

Second Clip:

This footage was filmed on May 23, 2021 from Taxco a town in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. This object which appears invisible to the naked eye and other recording devices but was only picked up by his night vision camera. The night vision that was used to film this was "Sionyx Aurora Pro" and this enabled him and us to see this object. There is a extinct volcano that is part of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range named Cerro Mohinora and this is where this object was filmed hovering over, with the witness recording from his vantage point we get a good view from where he filmed and we can see that there is nothing there....
The witness stated the following "I took this video on may 23, 2021 in Taxco Guerrero around midnight from a well-known hotel next to the magic town of Taxco, watching the song appreciate some lights on the left side of the town which are only perceptible through the night vision of a camera with Sionyx aurora pro."

SOURCE:

MUFON/UFO Stalker: Case Number 116553

• https://ufostalker.com/sighting/116553

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - MUFON CASES - - 3 - 8 - 2021

MUFON CASE : 117138 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ( August 2, 2021 )

Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Giant ring came from cloud footage

Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117138
I never seen anything like this before.

Date Submitted : 2021-08-02
Date of Event : 2021-07-31
MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : J00312021.mp4

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

NASA is Going Ahead With a Hopping Lander to Explore the Lunar Surface

Methods of movement for robotic explorers of other worlds have been as varied as the worlds themselves. Some missions have been simple landers, some rovers, and now there’s even been a helicopter flight on Mars.  But there is an unexplored hybrid mode of movement that will soon be coming to a Moon near you – hopping.  NASA just granted an additional $41.6 million to support development of a hopping lunar lander that will explore the inside of craters that are permanently in shadow.

The mission, known as Micro-Nova, was granted as part of NASA’s $370 million “Tipping Point” contract for technologies that are developing milestone-based new technologies.  The $41.6 million was awarded to Intuitive Machines, a Texas-based company that specializes in developing autonomous systems for drones and other exploration technologies.  To be clear – the “hopping” the Micro-Nova will do is actually a control flight using thrusters rather than the more biological form of hopping that insects do on Earth. The company won’t be working alone on the project – they recruited scientists from Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.  

Those specialists will help to define what Micro-Nova will carry as part of its 1 kg payload.  Most likely it will involve cameras to peer into areas that no person has ever seen before.  The reason Micro-Nova uses its unique mobility technique is to peer into “permanently shaded regions” (PSRs) of the moon.  Rovers would be unable to descend into the craters, and helicopters wouldn’t work with the moon’s lack of atmosphere.  So a hopper is the best bet to reach these difficult environments.

They are not just difficult because they are hard to reach – they are also hard to observe and extraordinarily cold.  Even once Micro-Nova is in the crater, it will still only be able to take full color spectra images of its immediate surroundings, but it should be able to take black-and-white images of a wider swath of the whole crater.  Any information it is able to gather is better than the complete lack available right now at least.

Cold is a completely separate problem, with temperatures in these permanently dark areas dipping to 40°-80° Kelvin (-388° to -316° F).  Most electronics will not function at those temperatures, and even the materials themselves would fail if they were not especially designed to withstand them.

That is a lot to expect from a hopper that measures only 76.2 centimeters on a side.  But with the moon’s miniscule gravity and the hopper’s impressive leaping ability, it should be able to achieve its mission when it is dropped off by a Nova-C lander near the lunar south pole in December 2022.

Learn More:

• ASU – NASA funds hopper to explore lunar polar craters
• The Science Times – NASA Awards Over $41 Million Fund for Lunar Hopper to Hop Around Moon’s Surface, Takes First Pictures Inside Craters
• Intuitive Machines – Intuitive Machines and NASA Finalize Contract for Extreme Lunar Mobility Spacecraft
• NASA – 2020 NASA Tipping Point Selections

Lead Image:

• Artist’s depiction of the Micro-Nova hopper and it’s Nova-C landing craft deployed to the moon. 
  Credit – Intuitive Machines

The post NASA is Going Ahead With a Hopping Lander to Explore the Lunar Surface appeared first on Universe Today.

Source:

•  https://www.universetoday.com/152053/nasa-is-going-ahead-with-a-hopping-lander-to-explore-the-lunar-surface/

Intuitive Machines’ Micro-Nova, a lunar hopper that will explore permanently shaded regions of the moon.

(Credit: Intuitive Machines)

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

Patty’s Triangle Remains Among Michigan’s Most Baffling UFO Sightings

Steve Friess

 

Photograph courtesy of Michigan Chapter of the Mutual UFO Network

What am I looking at?

Nobody really knows. Unofficially, it’s called Patty’s Triangle because a woman named Patty Blackburn caught it on camera on June 14, 2006, near Lansing. In 24 seconds of video, Patty captured an unexplainable triangular configuration of lights that jerked around the sky. Maybe it’s a military aircraft that nobody’s seen before, or maybe it’s extraterrestrial beings from galaxies far, far away accidentally giving Earthlings a glimpse of themselves while surveilling humankind. Those, it seems, are the two most likely options to longtime aficionados of unidentified flying objects or, as the U.S. government has rebranded them, “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

Why are you showing me this particular blur?

Mostly because, as obscured and fuzzy as it is, it’s the best available image of a UFO from a Michigan sighting. Hundreds of sightings are reported each year to the Michigan chapter of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), but the vast majority are resolved as something of clearly human origin. Patty’s Triangle is among the few that remain unexplained, says Michigan MUFON State Director Bill Konkolesky.

OK, but why should I care about something someone saw 15 years ago?

Because UFOs, once relegated to the province of crackpots, are having a big moment. The federal government, partly prompted by videos shot by U.S. Navy sailors of airborne objects moving in erratic manners that defy the understandings of modern physics, even released a report in June from the Defense Department’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force that can be summed up thus:  That is, no evidence that E.T. is phoning home but no earthly ideas, either. Of 144 sightings involving military aviators, the task force was able to explain just one — it was a deflating  balloon. The other 143 remain a mystery. The feds have been taking the matter seriously for more than a decade now. Then-Sen. Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, secured $22 million for UFO research in 2007, and more recently Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, told 60 Minutes this spring that he wants answers, too. Last year, former CIA Director John Brennan told a podcaster these incidents “could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.” And former President Barack Obama sent speculation into hyperdrive by telling TV’s James Corden recently there are “objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.” 

Whoa! Obama believes in little green men?

Not exactly. You don’t have to think a slow-moving alien invasion is underway to accept that there’s weird stuff in the air that defies explanation. But many avid ufologists — yep, that’s a legit word — reason that astronomers claim there are possibly millions of inhabitable planets and moons in the Milky Way or other galaxies. “If life happened somewhere else and they’re even just a couple hundred years more advanced than we are, they probably have the ability to visit us,” says Konkolesky, who notes MUFON officially has no position on the existence of extraterrestrial sentient life. Either way, Konkolesky says interest from credible leaders makes the topic “a lot easier to talk about now. Some neighbors and family members who used to treat it with a giggle now ask with sincere interest. It takes a very short time, when you’re a dedicated, sincere UFO investigator, to conclude something really unusual and unexplainable is happening.”

What’s this Konkolesky guy’s deal, anyway?

He’s a 50-year-old father of two who works in the Academic Support Center at Oakland Community College and found a kinship when he discovered MUFON. He’s  also a Michigan native who says that as a high school senior in February 1989, he and some buddies saw a blue football-shaped, car-sized ball of light the height of two telephone poles arching over their Chevette. Then it morphed into a display of white lights that “ping-ponged all over the sky,” followed by a red ball of light the size of a full moon. “We all saw the same thing,” he says. “It took a few years for me to find a group that actually investigates such things.”

Are there lots of UFO sightings in Michigan?

Michigan’s MUFON chapter received 2,789 sightings from 2010 to 2020, of which 80 to 95 percent turned out to have easy, earthly explanations, Konkolesky says. In 2019, for instance, a third of the reports turned out to be sightings of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, a stream of thousands of machines floating in a line in low-Earth orbit that aims to provide low-cost internet access the world over. There are four still-unexplained sightings that stand out — a 1953 sighting of disc-shaped objects darting across Lake Superior over the Soo Locks; a cluster of sightings in 1966 in which “many hundreds of witnesses” saw UFOs across southeastern Michigan, capped by a claim by a Dexter man of a landing in his backyard; a 1975 incident in which people at four Air Force bases where nuclear weapons were stored around the U.S., including Wurtsmith in Iosco County, saw a white disc descend for a bit before flitting off; and a 1994 sighting outside Grand Rapids that prompted a flood of calls to 911 and front-page coverage in the Detroit newspapers.

What do I do if I see something? 

You can call the police, the military, or your shrink, as many people do. Or you can contact Konkolesky via mufon.com. Be aware, though, that Konkolesky offers this caveat: “If they’re saying something landed in their backyard, there’s not a lot we can do for them.”

{ https://www.hourdetroit.com/ }

2 new ways to find aliens, according to a Nobel Prize winner

 

New files suggest that the “Philadelphia Experiment” was real

In the middle of World War II, “an American battleship put a technology designed by Einstein himself to the test and managed to become invisible and teleport.” This is how the “Philadelphia Experiment” was born.

This is, at least, what some conspiracy theorists say. Here is the true story of the USS Elridge, the ship that “traveled back in time”:

What is popularly known as the Philadelphia Experiment, (or Philadelphia Experiment), alludes to a supposed dark program of the US Navy called Project Rainbow.

Legend has it that the military were testing an electromagnetic field generator with which they were trying to find practical applications to the unified field theory proposed by Albert Einstein.

In one sentence: they wanted to achieve invisibility.

Private technicians who would not know what they were installing would equip two powerful generators, dozens of meters of electrical cable around the hull and other complex electronic devices to the USS Elridge, a 93 meter long battleship.

On July 22, 1943, the first supposed experiment would take place.

“The generators activated an electromagnetic field that made the battleship disappear from view for a few minutes surrounded by a greenish mist.”

“Some sailors complained of severe nausea caused by the test.”

“The equipment was readjusted and the second test took place on October 28. This time, the entire ship completely disappeared and appeared at the navy base in Norfolk , 600 kilometers away and 15 minutes in the past. ”

“He was sighted there during that time. After that he disappeared again in the middle of a blue lightning to return to Philadelphia ”.

Official statements from the navy

As they say, the consequences of this second experiment were so devastating for the crew that the Navy decided to cancel the project.

“Most of the sailors developed schizophrenia and some completely lost their minds.”

“Many were seriously injured when they materialized, and others, less fortunate, fused horribly with the ship’s hull.”

“Some faded days after the experiment and never reappeared.”

This is, broadly speaking, the gruesome story perpetuated by theorists, ufologists, and some science fiction movies. The navy has always denied the existence of the Philadelphia experiment.

In a statement released in November 2000, the Navy Office of Naval Research (ONR) completely denied the existence of any invisibility or teleportation programs, as well as Einstein’s involvement.

But between 1943 and 1944, Einstein worked as a part-time consultant for the navy on theoretical research on explosives and blasting.

Of course, there is no evidence that Einstein has worked on anything related to invisibility or teleportation.

How did the Philadelphia Experiment come to light then?

The answer is through a series of letters sent by Carl Meredith Allen under the pseudonym Carlos Miguel Allende.

Allegedly, Allen was a merchant marine who saw the USS Elridge disappear from his own ship, the SS Andrew Furuseth.

Allen described the alleged teleportation experiment in a correspondence with the writer and ufologist Morris Jessup.

Although the marine never provided any credible proof of what he said, Jessup was fascinated by the story and included it in a book called The Case For The UFO. Continue with more information in the following video:

{ https://mysteriousthing.com/ }

Godlike Power and Monster Malevolence: Mishipizheu of Lake Superior

In Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 song  The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald , he figuratively blames the sinking of that ship on the “witch” of November. Folks more familiar with Ojibway mythology might, however, have pointed to Mishipizheu, one of the most important of the underground mythological creatures of the Northeastern and Midwestern North American tribes.

This pictograph of the Great Lynx known as Mishipizheu was created by Ojibway spiritual leaders at Agawa Rock in Lake Superior Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada.

( Chris Hill  / Adobe Stock)

Was Mishipizheu a God or a Monster? 

The “Great-Lynx” Mishipizheu blurs the line between god and monster and thus sheds light on what it takes to be one or the other. The Ojibway, an indigenous people from southern  Canada and the northern Midwestern United States, believed Mishipizheu was a giant lynx-like creature. An apt description would be that the Mishipizheu was a horned panther covered in copper scales with razor-sharp spikes down its back and a long flexible tail. 

According to Ojibway mythology, Mishipizheu lived under the vast waterways of their territory in the Canadian Shield, in and near the Great Lakes. It exercised complete control over the waterways and had a mean-streak which had to be placated with  copper or tobacco offerings lest it use its tail to create violent whirlpools or harsh waves to drown the people residing in the area. 

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On the one hand, we might consider him a god as he exercised supernatural power over a vast area of waterways and accepted tokens or  sacrifices for his cooperation with human endeavors. On the other hand, he is primarily a malevolent presence, drowning those who forget their offerings to him, creating tumult capriciously with a whip of his tail, and standing in opposition, in many stories, to the heroic Thunderbird. He was godlike in his power, but monster-like in his malevolence.

The SS. Algoma went down on Lake Superior in 1885. It was the worst loss of life in the history of Lake Superior.

( Public domain )

The Malevolent Intentions of Mishipizheu the Underwater Panther

It is no wonder that a malevolent spirit was felt to inhabit Lake Superior. Some people believe Mishipizheu has sunk at least 400  ships on the lake in recorded memory alone, in addition to the Edmund Fitzgerald. Some have even said that the island of Michipicoten, in Ontario (Canada) in the northeastern part of Lake Superior, is the primary abode of Mishipizheu, when he is not swirling through underground tunnels and caverns throughout the region. 

The belief of  indigenous tribes  of the region is that Mishipizheu lives and travels through a vast system of tunnels and caverns underlying the vast waterways of Midwestern United States and  Canada, often wreaking havoc on those who sail those waters. But, why?

Mishipizheu guards the vast amount of copper which, to this day, lies within the  Great Lakes . Native inhabitants of the Great Lakes region, stretching back to about 7,500 BC, discovered copper that was 99% pure in Lake Superior, in veins or just lying around in nugget form. Initially they used the copper for spear points and tools, but as a larger social organization developed the copper was used for personal ornamentation denoting social standing. 

There was only one problem. Lake Superior was not a gentle lake to those extracting the copper, in fact it was quite fierce. The fierceness was attributed to a creature which seemed obviously to be guarding the  copper. Hence the existence of Mishipizheu. Indeed, if we dig a little deeper, the belief in this creature points to why  monsters were created in the first place. In pre-scientific cultures, folks often attributed evil intentions or ill will to events possessing no evil intentions or ill will. 

To this day, in some villages, when someone falls ill a shaman might declare that a personal enemy sent an evil spirit to possess the victim. A person does not just fall ill, someone or something must desire that. Thus it is with the sea and other bodies of water. Unpredictable tragedies occurred and we were quick to attribute the tragedies to an invisible malice or ill will. Anything other than natural causes. 

We seem to be wired, for whatever reason, to be super-keen to perceive and attribute malice and malevolence to adverse things that happen to us. It was too difficult for us to believe that things affecting us negatively could just happen. Mishipizheu became the figuration of the malice of the sea, part godlike in his scope, mostly monstrous in his intentions. But, interestingly, we attributed a reason for his malice – his irrational desire to possess all the copper in Lake Superior.

Stormy sky over Lake Superior, the home of Mishipizheu.

( boundlessimages / Adobe Stock)

Mishipizheu Ancillary Stories

The odds are that the origin of the Mishipizheu myth is derived from the destructive power of Lake Superior and other violent waterways of the Canadian Shield and the emotionally painful tragedies caused by the unpredictable harshness of these bodies of water. Mishipizheu became the malicious element causing the lake to harm innocent people. From this initial birth of the  monster, various tribes added on stories, which is not uncommon in myth-making. In fact, we can look at Mishipizheu as a good example of the possible evolution of a myth.

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Hunting and gathering peoples often have animistic beliefs. Every natural element has a spirit, even stones and streams. Perhaps it was recognized early on that Lake Superior’s was not a gentle spirit. Lake spirits often became personified in world  mythology. If you can imagine one being or creature controlling the lake, it is easier to deal with this entity through sacrifice and bargaining. 

Once you create a god, spirit or monster that you can appease or cajole, then stories concerning the exploits of this being can be constructed. You can even think of the Greek myths this way. Zeus was once a sky and thunder spirit. Then, through story-telling, he morphed into the leader of a pantheon and a character in a rich mythological tradition.

Some of the stories concerning Mishipizheu even purport that he engaged in acts of benevolence, thus adding to his stature as a god and not solely a  monster. In one story Mishipizheu was responsible for the primordial flood. In another story, we learn that swamps and quicksand are due to his slithering on the ground when he chose to take shortcuts from river to river. 

In one particular mythological tale, Mishipizheu is referred to as the ancestor of all  snakes, due to the belief that he was hit by lightning and shattered into thousands of those creatures. Another story tells of Mishipizheu the trickster. A shaman seeks a powerful medicine from Mishipizheu who happily complies. Unfortunately, the medicine only works for the shaman as he remains healthy while he watches his family and loved ones deteriorate and die around him.

Artists rendering of the famed Mishipizheu.

(Australopithecusman /  CC-BY-SA)

Final Verdict On Mishipizheu: Godly Extortion or Defender of Humanity

So is Mishipizheu more monster than god? What might tip the scales is that he does not engage in acts of benevolence. He is predisposed to cause harm continually and only will desist from this if he receives, basically, extortion money. But gods receive extortion money too, do they not? Did the ancient Greeks not placate Poseidon before sea travel? It seems that the gods like to be appreciated and remembered but are also quick to do good things for good people. They also might need to be coaxed a little into supplying help.

And it is not like the gods are a constant threat which has to be avoided. So the scales would seem to tip more toward  monster in this case, yet one interested in mythology might ask whether a primarily malevolent “god” is possible. Or, dare we stretch and say that  Mishipizheu was not at all malevolent but merely attempted, as well as he could, to steer humanity away from the world bought through copper, in an attempt to keep humanity living in a land of paradise.

• Top image: The malevolent Mishipizheu monster-god of Lake Superior.
• Source: SJB1995 /  CC-BY-SA

By Daniel Gauss

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }