Nick Pope and the ‘Missing Toll Booth Encounter’ - PART I
Nick Pope and the ‘Missing Toll Booth Encounter’ - PART II
Nick Pope and the ‘Missing Toll Booth Encounter’ - PART II
RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
The famous psychic Uri Geller says ‘massive alien invasion’ is coming
The famous psychic Uri Geller claims that the Earth is waiting for a massive invasion of aliens. He says he stumbled upon a conversation between “higher beings” 4,000 light-years away.
According to dailystar.uk,Uri Geller warned NASA to prepare for a massive alien invasion of Earth, which will take place in the near future.
Geller is confident that the giant energy source , which astronomers have discovered at a distance of 4000 light years, is most likely a message from “higher beings” from space.
He believes that the aliens are already heading in our direction.
The famous psychic Uri Geller
He announced on Instagram: “A team mapping radio waves in the universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before.
“No doubt in my mind that this is connected to alien intelligence way way superior than ours.
“Start deciphering their messages! They are preparing us for a mass landing soon!”
Astronomers said they have never seen anything like the mysterious new phenomenon before. They believe that it could be a neutron star or a white dwarf with a superstrong magnetic field (magnetar).
Astrophysicist Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker of Curtin University in Australia said: “This object appeared and disappeared for several hours during our observations.
“It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that.
“And it’s really quite close to us — about 4,000 light years away. It’s in our galactic backyard.”
RELATED VIDEOS:
NOTE:
Uri Geller (/ˈʊəri ˈɡɛlər/ OOR-ee GHEL-ər;[1] Hebrew: אורי גלר; born 20 December 1946) is an Israeli-British illusionist, magician, television personality, and self-proclaimed psychic. He is known for his trademark television performances of spoon bending and other illusions. Geller uses conjuring tricks to simulate the effects of psychokinesis and telepathy. Geller’s career as an entertainer has spanned more than four decades, with television shows and appearances in many countries. Magicians have called Geller a fraud due to his claims of possessing truly psychic powers.[2]
Geller was born on 20 December 1946 in Tel Aviv, which was then part of British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel). His mother and father were of Austrian-Jewish and Hungarian-Jewish background respectively. Geller is the son of Itzhaak Geller (Gellér Izsák), a retired army sergeant major, and Margaret “Manzy” Freud (Freud Manci). Geller claims that he is a distant relative of Sigmund Freud on his mother’s side.[3]
At the age of 11, Geller’s family moved to Nicosia, Cyprus, where he attended high school, the Terra Santa College, and learned English. At the age of 18,[4]: 9 he joined the Israeli Army‘s Paratroopers Brigade,[5] with which he served in the 1967 Six-Day War and was wounded in action.[6][7] He worked as a photographic model in 1968 and 1969; during that time, he began to perform for small audiences as a nightclub entertainer,[8] becoming well-known in Israel.[9]
Geller first started to perform in theatres, public halls, auditoriums, military bases and universities in Israel.[10] The parapsychologist Andrija Puharich met Geller in 1971 and assisted him in traveling to the United States.[11][12]
Geller became famous demonstrating on television what he claimed to be psychokinesis, dowsing, and telepathy.[13] His performance included spoon bending, describing hidden drawings, and making watches stop or run faster. Geller said he performs these feats through willpower and the strength of his mind.[14] His apparent ability to bend metal objects during his television appearances came to be known as the “Geller effect” and made Geller a celebrity.[11] Geller’s actual methods were revealed to be stage magic tricks largely due to the work of magician and investigator James Randi.[15][16][17]
In 1973, Geller appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, an appearance recounted in the Nova documentary episode “Secrets of the Psychics” hosted by Randi on PBS.[18]: 9’30″–11’34″ In the documentary, Randi says that “Johnny had been a magician himself and was skeptical” of Geller’s claimed paranormal powers, so prior to the date of taping, Randi was asked “to help prevent any trickery”; accordingly, the show prepared their own props without informing Geller, and did not let Geller or his staff “anywhere near them”.[18]: 9’48″–10’10″ When Geller joined Carson on stage, he appeared surprised that he was not going to be interviewed, but instead was expected to display his abilities using the provided articles. Geller said, “This scares me”, and, “As you know, I told your people what to bring”, and “I’m surprised because before this program your producer came and he read me at least 40 questions you were going to ask me”. Geller was unable to display any paranormal abilities, saying, “I don’t feel strong”, and expressed his displeasure at feeling he was being “pressed” to perform by Carson.[19] According to Adam Higginbotham:
Nancy Grace Roman Will be Launching on a Falcon Heavy Rocket
In 2026, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (RST) – aka. the “Mother of Hubble” – will take to space and begin addressing some of the deepest mysteries of the Universe. This will include capturing the deepest field images of the cosmos, refining measurements of the Hubble Constant (aka. Hubble’s Law), and determining the role of Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the evolution of the cosmos. Alongside its next-generation partner, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the RST will acquire infrared images with over 200 times the surveying power of its predecessor with the same rich level of detail.
On Tuesday, July 19th, NASA announced that it had awarded SpaceX with a Launch Services (NLS) II contract to provide the rocket that will deploy the RST mission to space. As specified in the NLS II, the launch will take place in October 2026 (May 2027, at the latest) and consist of a Falcon Heavy rocket transporting the RST from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to orbit. This indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract is valued at approximately $255 million and covers the launch and other mission-related costs.
Previously known as the Wide-Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST), the RST was originally proposed in 2010 as a successor to Hubble. The proposal was based on the same design as Hubble, with a 2.4-meter (7.9-foot) field of view primary mirror and two scientific instruments. This includes the Wide-Field Instrument (WFI), a 300.8-megapixel camera covering the visible and near-infrared spectrum, and the Coronograph Instrument (CGI) – a high-contrast spectrometer that incorporates starlight-suppression technology.
In May 2020, NASA renamed the telescope to honor Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first Chief Astronomer and a tireless advocate for space-based astronomy. By March 2021, NASA announced that the RST would be getting an upgrade with the addition of a K-band filter. This effectively expands the RST’s infrared imaging range to 0.5 to 23 micrometers – 500 to 23,000 nanometers (nm) – ranging from the near- to the far-infrared spectrum. With these capabilities, the RST’s science program will include dedicated investigations addressing several enduring mysteries in modern cosmology.
These include the study and characterization of exoplanets, which will narrow the search for habitable planets and Earth analogs and complete the census of exoplanets. In particular, the RST will use its tremendous field of view to detect thousands of smaller, rocky planets that orbit closely to their parent stars – in their habitable zones (HZs). These planets will be designated for follow-up observations by Webb, which will use its extremely-sensitive IR optics to obtain spectra from their atmospheres and surfaces.
Its powerful optics will also conduct the deepest surveys of the Universe to reveal the earliest stars and galaxies, which formed roughly 100 million years after the Big Bang. These scientific operations will complement the ESA’s EUCLID mission and allow astronomers to investigate possible causes of cosmic acceleration. Current theories include the existence of Dark Energy or Modified Newtonian Gravity (MOND), which states that General Relativity breaks down on cosmological scales. These operations will also address questions about the fate of the Universe, like if it will tear itself apart someday (the Big Rip theory).
The telescope’s wide-field surveys will also enable new studies into the nature of Dark Matter and its role in cosmic evolution. Furthermore, the RST mission also includes a substantial general investigator program that will allow for further studies of astrophysical phenomena. This will enable opportunities to collaborate with other science missions and space agencies and advance other scientific goals. This is very good news for NASA, its partner agencies, and space-based astronomy fans!
After years of waiting for James Webb to get to space and start shooting the most breathtaking and detailed images ever seen, it’s encouraging to know that the next next-generation telescope is not far behind. While delays are always possible, Roman’s comparatively simple design will likely make for a speedier launch schedule. It’s also good news for SpaceX, which has secured many high-priority and lucrative contracts with NASA in recent years.
These include contracts to build the Human Landing System (HLS) for the Artemis Program – the Starship HLS – that will transport “the first woman and the first person of color” to the lunar surface by 2025. It also includes the launch services for the Lunar Gateway, which will consist of the core elements – Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) and the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) – launching in 2024 (also using a Falcon Heavy rocket).
Further Reading:
The post Nancy Grace Roman Will be Launching on a Falcon Heavy Rocket appeared first on Universe Today.
Source:
Fungus Structures In Crater On Moon, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Fungus Structures In Crater On Moon, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Mother And Daughter Witness Huge Mysterious Dancing Orbs In The Sky Over Alaska
Mother And Daughter Witness Huge Mysterious Dancing Orbs In The Sky Over Alaska
Sheri and Tiffany were at a casual get-together when they noticed the massive moving orange orbs outside a restaurant in Ninilchik. The two conclude the unexplainable bright lights are UFOs that are mining the minerals out of their mountain ranges, explaining the growing number of natural calamities in the area.
Astronomers Have a New Way to Find Exoplanets in Cataclysmic Binary Systems
Have you heard of LU Camelopardalis, QZ Serpentis, V1007 Herculis and BK Lyncis? No, they’re not members of a boy band in ancient Rome. They’re Cataclysmic Variables, binary stars that are so close together one star draws material from its sibling. This causes the pair to vary wildly in brightness.
Can planets exist in this chaotic environment? Can we spot them? A new study answers yes to both.
Cataclysmic Variables (CVs) undergo large increases in brightness. All stars vary in brightness to some degree, even our own sun. But CVs increased brightness is much more pronounced than stars like our Sun, and they happen irregularly.
There are different types of cataclysmic variables: classical novae, dwarf novae, some supernovae, and others. All types share the same basic mechanic. A pair of stars orbit each other closely, and one of the stars is more massive than the other. The more massive one is called the primary star, and it draws gas from the lower mass star, which astronomers call the donor star. The primary star in a CV is a white dwarf, and the donor star is usually a red dwarf. The red dwarf stars are cooler and less massive than the white dwarfs. They have masses between 0.07 and 0.30 solar masses and a radius of about 20% of the Sun’s. White dwarf primary stars have a typical mass of around 0.75 solar masses but much smaller radii, about the same as Earth’s.
When the primary star draws material from the donor star, the material forms an accretion disk around the primary star. The material in the accretion disk heats up, and that causes increased luminosity. The increase can overpower the light from the pair of stars. If there’s a dim third body—a planet—in the system, then its gravity can affect the transfer of material from the donor to the primary star. These perturbations affect the system’s brightness, and that’s at the heart of the new study.
The authors of the study show how the chaotic environments around CVs can host planets and explains how astronomers can spot them. The study is “Testing the third-body hypothesis in the cataclysmic variables LU Camelopardalis, QZ Serpentis, V1007 Herculis and BK Lyncis.” It’s published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS.) The lead author is Dr. Carlos Chavez, from the Universidad Autónoma De Nuevo León in Mexico.
Material drawn to the primary star gathers in an accretion ring and heats up, creating increased luminosity. But the material transfer to the disk isn’t steady; it rises and falls as the stars in the CV orbit each other. Chavez and his colleagues examined four cataclysmic variables in their study: LU Camelopardalis, QZ Serpentis, V1007 Herculis and BK Lyncis. The four CVs exhibit very long photometric periods (VLPPs), which are periods of enhanced luminosity that don’t conform to the binary’s orbital periods.
There’s a point between both stars and the third body called the L1 point, or Lagrangian One point. It’s a gravitational equilibrium point between the stars. The L1 point is dynamic, and its position changes as the stars move. Lead author Chavez showed in a previous paper that a third body, a planet, can cause oscillations in the L1 point.
As the L1 point changes, the amount of material drawn into the primary star—the mass transfer rate—changes. A change in the mass transfer rate creates a change in the luminosity of the entire three-body system.
By measuring the changes in brightness of the four CVs, the researchers calculated the distances and masses of potential third bodies in the systems based on the brightness changes in each system. Their calculations show that the variations have much longer periods than the orbital periods of the stars. According to the team, two of the four CVs they studied have “bodies resembling planets” orbiting them.
“Our work has proven that a third body can perturb a cataclysmic variable in such a way that can induce changes in brightness in the system,” Dr. Chavez said in a press release. “These perturbations can explain both the very long periods that have been observed – between 42 and 265 days- and the amplitude of those changes in brightness. Of the four systems we studied, our observations suggest that two of the four have objects of planetary mass in orbit around them.”
This isn’t the first time scientists have tackled CVs and tried to find an explanation for the variations in the luminosity. In 2017 a separate team of researchers published a paper presenting the four CVs and their VLPPs. They suggested that planets were the cause. But they said that “… the third-body orbital plane should be greater than 39.2 degrees for this mechanism to be effective in disturbing the inner binary effectively.”
“Here we explore a new possibility, namely that the secular perturbation by a low eccentricity and low inclination third object explains the VLPP and also the change of magnitude observed in these four CVs,” Chavez and his co-authors write in their paper. They say that “… a third body on a close near-circular planar orbit could produce perturbations on the central binary eccentricity.”
According to Chavez, their work amounts to a new way to detect exoplanets. Planet-hunters find most exoplanets using the transit system. As an exoplanet transits in front of its star, there’s a detectable dip in starlight. While effective—we’ve found thousands of planets this way—the transit method has limitations. It only works when things are lined up right. We have to be looking at it from the side, as it were, or else the planet doesn’t transit the star from our point of view, and there’s no dip in starlight.
But the method Chavez and his colleagues developed doesn’t depend on planetary transits. It relies on the intrinsic change in luminosity that’s observable from different angles.
More:
The post Astronomers Have a New Way to Find Exoplanets in Cataclysmic Binary Systems appeared first on Universe Today.
Source:
James Webb discovers the oldest galaxy in the universe - a 13.5-billion-year-old system of stars formed 300 million years after the Big Bang
NASA's James Webb Telescope (JWST) has uncovered a 13.5 billion-year-old galaxy that is now the oldest in the universe seen by human eyes.
The galaxy, called GLASS-z13 (GN-z13), formed just 300 million years after the Big Bang that occurred 13.8 billion years ago.
The previous record holder, discovered by the Hubble Telescope in 2015, was GN-z11 that dates back 400 million years after the universe birthed.
JWST captured a look at GN-z13 using its Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument, which is capable of detecting light from the earliest stars and galaxies.
This telescope uses a broad range of infrared light to 'see' back in time, which is done by analyzing the time it takes for light to travel through space.
Scroll down for video
The galaxy, called GLASS-z13 (GN-z13), was formed just 300 million years after the Big Bang that occurred 13.8 billion years ago, making it the oldest in the universe
While investigating the area are GN-z13, JWST also spotted GN-z11.
Scientists from the Harvard and Smithsonian Centre of Astrophysics in Massachusetts note that although they are both old, each of the galaxies are very small, New Scientist reports.
GN-z13 is around 1,600 light years across and GLASS z-11 is 2,300 light years.
This is compared to our own Milky Way that is around 100,000 light years in diameter.
The paper, published in arXiv, notes that both galaxies have a mass of one billion suns, which is because they formed shortly after the Big Bang occurred.
While investigating the area near GN-z13 (top), JWST also spotted GN-z11 (bottom)
The previous record holder, discovered by the Hubble Telescope in 2015, is GN-z11 (pictured) that dates back 400 million years after the universe birthed
The team suggests this occurred as the galaxies were growing and gobbled up stars in the region.
'These two objects already place novel constraints on galaxy evolution in the cosmic dawn epoch,' researchers shared in the paper.
'They indicate that the discovery of GNz11 was not simply a matter of good fortune, but that there is likely a population of UV luminous sources with very high star-formation efficiencies capable of compiling.'
Gabriel Brammer at the Niehls Bohr Institute in Denmark, part of the GLASS team and a co-discoverer of GN-z11, told New Scientist that further analysis will be needed to confirm the distance to the two galaxies.
'They're very convincing candidates,' he said. 'We were pretty confident that JWST would see distant galaxies. But we're a little bit surprised how easy it is to detect them.'
Brammer made headlines this week when he released a never-before-seen image snapped by the JWST.
The paper notes that both galaxies have a mass of one billion suns, noting this is because they formed shortly after the Big Bang occurred. Pictured are the galaxies locations
Gabriel Brammer, part of the GLASS team and a co-discoverer of GN-z11, said further analysis will be needed to confirm the distance to the two galaxies. Brammer made headlines this week when he released a never-before-seen image snapped by the JWST
(pictured)
The astronomer shared a stunning photo of the spiraling arms of the 'phantom galaxy,' formally known as NGC 628 or Messier 74, which sits 32 million light years from Earth.
Webb took the image of NGC 628 on July 17 and sent the data back to Earth where it was stored in the Barbara Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, (MAST), which is open to the public.
Brammer's image caught the attention of other astronomers and space enthusiasts, who wanted to learn more about how he made the image and what it was that they are looking at.
'For a tiny bit more context, the purple color cast here is actually 'real' in the sense that emission from interstellar cigarette smoke (PAH molecules) makes the filters used for the blue and red channels brighter relative to the green,' Brammer wrote in a tweet.
The James Webb telescope has been described as a 'time machine' that could help unravel the secrets of our universe.
The telescope will be used to look back to the first galaxies born in the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago, and observe the sources of stars, exoplanets, and even the moons and planets of our solar system.
The vast telescope, which has already cost more than $7 billion (£5 billion), is considered a successor to the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope
The James Webb Telescope and most of its instruments have an operating temperature of roughly 40 Kelvin – about minus 387 Fahrenheit (minus 233 Celsius).
It is the world's biggest and most powerful orbital space telescope, capable of peering back 100-200 million years after the Big Bang.
The orbiting infrared observatory is designed to be about 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA likes to think of James Webb as a successor to Hubble rather than a replacement, as the two will work in tandem for a while.
The Hubble telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, via the space shuttle Discovery from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.
It circles the Earth at a speed of about 17,000mph (27,300kph) in low Earth orbit at about 340 miles in altitude.
JWST Finds Galaxies Just 300-400 Million Years After the Big Bang, and It’s Just Getting Started
By now, almost everyone has seen the first-release images from JWST and marveled at these amazing views of the infrared universe the telescope was launched to explore. The view of SMACS 0723 seen above illustrates the promise JWST holds. While there are many more early-release images in the observation pipeline, we’re starting to see the first research papers come out. As expected, studies of distant galaxies are grabbing headlines already.
Wow, are these findings amazing! In the last couple of days, websites and social media have been alive with images of a blob that, in reality, is one of the oldest (earliest) galaxies ever seen. It’s one of two—GL-z11 and GL-z13—that show us what they looked like when the Universe was extremely young, about 300 million years after the Big Bang. When confirmed, they’ll mark a milestone in studies of the infant Universe.
A Look back in Time and Across Space
Thanks to JWST and its high-resolution infrared instruments, astronomers can now observe the earliest epochs in cosmic history. Of course, Hubble Space Telescope paved the way for some of this. For example, it provided the first look at galaxy GNz11. Now, JWST is following up with a study of that galaxy and the discovery of another one called GL-z13.
These galaxies exist at a time that has been, until now, largely unexplored. So, a consortium of astronomers (led by Rohan P. Naidu of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian) proposed a JWST search for luminous galaxies in the first several hundred million years after the Big Bang (at a redshift of z > 10). This work was done as part of the JWST Early Release program and the exploration will likely continue for quite some time.
The search revealed that the two galaxies—GL-z11 and GL-z13—are likely billion-solar-mass galaxies. That’s pretty remarkable given their presence in the early Universe, especially since the first stars began forming around one to two hundred million years after the Big Bang. These galaxies are also bright enough that astronomers will be able to do follow-up spectrographic studies to determine more about them. Computer modeling indicates that these galaxies are somewhat small and may well have disks in place, even at their young age.
Based on the early observations with JWST, it seems very likely GL-z11 and GL-z13 have a population of hot, young stars (which would be very bright in ultraviolet light), and that each galaxy could be bursting with star-formation regions. These stars and regions should be very good candidates for follow-up observations using JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph.
Are There More of These Galaxies Out There?
One exciting implication of this discovery is that these two distant galaxies in the early Universe may be just the tip of the iceberg. There could be many more in every direction JWST looks. Remember the excitement when Hubble Space Telescope (HST) performed its first deep-field study? It pointed at what looked like a fairly vacant area of the sky, looking to see what was “out there.” The observations revealed distant galaxies out as far as HST could see. Other deep-field observations in other directions in the sky delivered the same result. It turns out the universe is galaxies all the way out.
So, if these two galaxy discoveries are any indication, JWST is about to explode our view of the infant Universe the same way HST did with its deep field observations. Of course, astronomers will work to confirm these galaxies spectroscopically. And, if what they promise plays out across the sky—with the discovery of at least two (and maybe more) galaxies at redshifts between 11 and 13 in every direction JWST looks—then we’ll be in for some interesting times. At the very least, this amazing infrared observatory is pushing the cosmic frontier much farther out, peeking beyond what we currently know. In the very near future, it could look all the way out to the brink of the Big Bang itself. Stay tuned!
The post JWST Finds Galaxies Just 300-400 Million Years After the Big Bang, and It’s Just Getting Started appeared first on Universe Today.
Source:
Energy Entity Shoots Out Of Storm July 20, 2022, Greer, Ohio UFO Sighting News.
Is This Life On Mars Or Debris? July 22, 2022, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Another Facelift for the UFO Coverup 'Same Playbook' Again!
Really fast UFO filmed over Surrey, BC, Canada 20-Jul-2022
This really fast UFO was filmed in the sky above Surrey, a city in British Columbia, Canada on 20th July 2022.
RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
NASA wil op 29 augustus weer naar de Maan te vliegen
Cape Canaveral
© AP
Artemis-1, de eerste missie waarmee de Amerikanen terug naar de Maan reizen, kan op 29 augustus vertrekken, zo heeft de NASA meegedeeld, uitgerekend de dag waarop 53 jaar geleden voor het eerst een mens voet zette op de Maan. Alternatieve data zijn 2 of 5 september.
Het Artemis-programma beoogt, ten vroegste in 2025, opnieuw mensen op de Maan neer te zetten en terug te halen, waarbij voor het eerst een vrouw en een kleurling. Het Amerikaanse ruimtevaartbureau NASA wil dit, naar analogie van het Apollo-programma, stapsgewijs bereiken. Artemis zal dus een onbemande missie zijn, in het bijzonder om de gigantische nieuwe draagraket te testen, net als de Orion-capsule die in 2024 bij de tweede missie wel bemand zal zijn.
De lancering vindt plaats op Cape Canaveral. De SLS-draagraket moet de Orion naar onze natuurlijke satelliet slingeren. De capsule komt in een baan rond de Maan en komt dan naar de Aarde terug. Naargelang de precieze lanceringsdatum zou de vlucht 39 tot 42 dagen duren.
De Orion is in 2014 al eens in de ruimte getest, na lancering met een Delta-IV draagraket. De capsule maakte twee omlopen rond onze planeet, om in het bijzonder het hitteschild uit te testen.
De laatste keer dat een mens over het oppervlak van de Maan wandelde was met Apollo-17 in 1972.
Japanese Researchers Show how Microgravity Affects Astronauts’ Muscles and Nerves
It’s well-known that spending long periods in microgravity can adversely affect astronaut health and physiology. According to decades of research performed aboard the International Space Station (ISS), like NASA’s much-popularized Twins Study, these effects include the loss of muscle mass and bone density, as well as changes to cardiovascular health, eyesight, organ function, and gene expression. There’s even the possibility that astronauts will experience mood swings and psychological problems while in space or during recovery here on Earth.
According to a recent study by a team of Japanese researchers, one of the lesser-studied effects is how long periods spent in microgravity can damage the skeletal muscles that are important to maintaining our posture. This group of muscles – located mostly in our limbs, back, and neck – are rightly known as our “anti-gravity” muscles because they are load-bearing and allow us to stand upright and move against the force of gravity. This research and the countermeasures they propose could have significant implications for astronauts returning from long-term stays in space.
The research was led by Dr. Yoshinobu Ohira, a Professor of space medicine at Doshisha University’s Research Center for Space and Medical Sciences (RCSMC) in Kyoto, Japan. He was joined by fellow researchers with the RCSMC, the Organization for Research Initiatives and Development (ORID) at Doshisha University, the Kindai University Faculty of Medicine (Osaka), Matsumoto University (Nagano), and Toyohashi SOZO University (Aichi). The paper that describes their findings recently appeared in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.
As they indicated in their study, the team reviewed the neuromuscular properties of the soleus and adductor longus muscles (and their respective dorsal ganglia) in astronauts who had spent extended periods in space. These muscles are located in the calf and inner thigh (respectively) and are responsible for load-bearing and helping us remain upright in normal gravity. When subjected to microgravity, these muscles are “unloaded” and have nothing to work against, leading to the gradual atrophy of their fibers and nerves.
Their study considered how the neuromuscular system’s morphological, functional, and metabolic properties respond to gravitational unloading in microgravity and lower gravity environments. This consisted of running human and rodent simulation models and examining how motoneuron signals between the skeletal muscle and central nervous system (afferent and efferent activity, respectively) regulated neuromuscular properties. Their research appeared in a special issue titled “Space Neurosciences” that commemorates the Moon Landing (NASA’s Apollo 11 mission).
Their analysis confirmed that these signals play a key role in regulating muscle properties and brain activity. This consists of a decrease in the structural unit of muscles (sarcomeres), resulting in a decrease in their development, eventually leading to muscular atrophy – as seen in the soleus and the adductor longus muscles. Their results indicate that exposure to low-gravity environments affects the muscles and nerves, leading to the deterioration of motor control.
This is consistent with symptoms reported by astronauts upon returning to Earth, where they experienced difficulty walking despite regular exercise aboard the ISS – using treadmills, cycles, and resistance training. Their work also showed that additional challenges might arise when astronauts are exposed to microgravity for six months or more, such as they would be while in transit to Mars. In summary, their review indicates that existing countermeasures are inadequate when combatting the effects of gravitational unloading.
Luckily, their research also points the way toward some possible solutions. For starters, they recommend stimulating the soleus muscle during exercise, which can be done by running or walking slowly on a treadmill with a rear foot-strike landing. Adding bungee cords for added resistance and periodic passive stretching of the soleus muscle also appears to reduce the risk of atrophy. This research could play an important role in developing appropriate countermeasures for future long-duration space missions.
These include continued operations aboard the ISS, which were recently extended to January 2031 (according to NASA’s latest announcement). It will also come in handy as astronauts begin to conduct long-term missions to the Moon, which will entail the creation of lunar habitats – like Artemis Base Camp, the International Moon Village, and the Sino-Russian International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). Then there are the crewed missions that NASA and China plan to send to Mars in the next decade, which will involve 6 to 9-month transits.
Ensuring the long-term health of astronauts is part of a constellation of research that will help ensure the health and safety of astronauts as we venture farther from Earth. This research is especially important considering that someday (perhaps sooner other than later) civilians and potential settlers will follow. If humanity’s future does lie in space, every aspect of living and working beyond Earth must be taken into account, and potential solutions devised.
Further Reading:
The post Japanese Researchers Show how Microgravity Affects Astronauts’ Muscles and Nerves appeared first on Universe Today.
Source:
A Dormant Black Hole has Been Discovered Just Outside the Milky Way
What happens when a massive star dies? Conventional wisdom (and observational evidence) say that it can collapse to form a “stellar-mass” black hole. Astronomers detect black holes by the X-ray emissions they emit.
But, what if the black hole isn’t giving off high levels of X-ray emissions? Then, it could be a very rare object indeed: a dormant black hole. Not many of these have been seen. So, it’s exciting to know that a team of astronomers has found one. It’s called VFTS 243. They detected it in Very Large Telescope observations of stars in the Tarantula Nebula, in the neighboring Large Magellanic Cloud.
Finding a Needle in a Galactic Haystack
VFTS 243 is the first dormant black hole to be unambiguously detected outside the Milky Way Galaxy. While there are likely billions of stellar-mass black holes out there, dormant ones are much harder to find. “We identified a ‘needle in a haystack’,” said team leader Tomer Shenar, a Marie-Curie Fellow at Amsterdam University, the Netherlands.
It’s not for lack of looking, and astronomers have searched. “It is incredible that we hardly know of any dormant black holes, given how common astronomers believe them to be”, said team member Pablo Marchant of KU Leuven.
This newly found dormant black hole is at least nine times the mass of our Sun. It’s in a 10.4-day orbital dance with a hot, blue star 25 times the mass of the Sun. The black hole itself has about 9 solar masses. It’s considered dormant because it’s not emitting large amounts of X-rays. Normally, that would happen as material spirals into its accretion disk from the nearby companion star.
Implications for Black Hole Formation
Although astronomers know the general story about how a massive star evolves to become a stellar-mass black hole, there are many details of the process to explore. This discovery gives the team a new way to look at the black hole “factory”. Typically, a stellar-mass black hole forms as the core of a dying massive star collapses. However, for a dormant black hole, it’s not clear if the collapse was followed by a powerful supernova explosion. This new one may have taken a very different route to “black hole-hood”. In fact, there are some interesting clues that point to an alternate evolutionary path. First, it’s in a near-circular orbit and its motions indicate there was little ejected material from an explosion. In addition, there’s no evidence of a form of rebound called a “black hole kick” as the object collapsed. So, what happened?
“The star that formed the black hole in VFTS 243 appears to have collapsed entirely, with no sign of a previous explosion,” said Shenar, who noted that the team’s discovery has implications for understanding the properties of core-collapse supernovae as well as gravitational-wave detections. “Evidence for this ‘direct-collapse’ scenario has been emerging recently, but our study arguably provides one of the most direct indications. This has enormous implications for the origin of black-hole mergers in the cosmos.”
Calling the Black Hole Police
There’s more than a bit of irony in this discovery since team members are sometimes referred to as the “black hole police.” That’s because Shenar and other colleagues have frequently debunked proposed sightings of other black holes. So, the fact that they searched for and found this dormant black hole is an interesting experience. And, their search took a while and a lot of data.
To find VFTS 243, the collaboration used observations of nearly a thousand massive stars in the Tarantula Nebula. The data came from the VLT FLAMES Tarantula Survey, and team members used it to identify stars that might have black holes as companions. Because alternative explanations exist for such objects, identifying these companions as dormant black holes is extremely difficult.
“As a researcher who has debunked potential black holes in recent years, I was extremely skeptical regarding this discovery,” said Shenar. His skepticism was shared by co-author Kareem El-Badry of the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard, in the USA. Thanks to El-Badry’s reputation as a skeptic, Shenar calls him the ‘black hole destroyer’. “When Tomer asked me to double check his findings, I had my doubts,” said El-Badry. “But I could not find a plausible explanation for the data that did not involve a black hole.”
Next Steps
Despite the nickname ‘black hole police’, the team expects very active scrutiny of their dormant black-hole discovery. They also hope that their work will enable the discovery of other stellar-mass black holes orbiting massive stars. As an example of just how plentiful these objects are, the team predicts thousands of them exist in Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds.
“Of course I expect others in the field to pore over our analysis carefully, and to try to cook up alternative models,” said El-Badry. “It’s a very exciting project to be involved in.”
The post A Dormant Black Hole has Been Discovered Just Outside the Milky Way appeared first on Universe Today.
Source:Shocking Creatures That Are Not From This PlanetHere’s M74 Like You’ve Never Seen it Before, Thanks to Judy Schmidt and JWST
The JWST is grabbing headlines and eyeballs as its mission gains momentum. The telescope recently imaged M74 (NGC 628) with its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI.) Judy Schmidt, a well-known amateur astronomy image processor, has worked on the image to bring out more detail.
M74 is a large spiral galaxy that holds somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100 billion stars. It’s about 32 million light-years away from us and is a great example of a Grand Design Spiral Galaxy. The JWST imaged the galaxy as part of the PHANG Survey. PHANG (Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS) studies nearby galaxies in high resolution and is intended to “… understand the interplay of the small-scale physics of gas and star formation with galactic structure and galaxy evolution,” according to the PHANG website.
The survey uses several telescopes to study galaxies, but now that the JWST is operating, it’s making a huge contribution to the effort.
Judy Schmidt (Judy Schmidt@SpaceGeck on Twitter) is involved with the Planetary Society and is one of those rare people who looks at an astounding image from the JWST and thinks, “Hmmmm…Not bad, but I can improve it.” (We’re just kidding and don’t mean to speak for her.) But it does speak to her rare skill set.
In the image description on Judy’s Flickr page, she writes, “Squeezing some color out of the various filters showing all the glowing dust in the center of NGC628.”
She lists the filters as:
To understand the impact the JWST is having, compare a Hubble image of M74 to Judy’s processed JWST image. The Hubble image is a composite of the telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys data taken in 2003 and 2005.
Visit Schmidt’s Flickr feed for more of her work. She’s also on Twitter as @SpaceGeck, and her website is https://geckzilla.com/.
“A very processed (maybe even over-processed) version of Jupiter from JWST,” Schmidt writes in her description. “Here, we’re viewing the planet only in infrared, and the ring, usually invisible, is plain for all to see. The colors are definitely unusual.”
“There is some discussion over what the red blip at the south pole and the disconnected layer of atmosphere on the eastern limb are. Real? Artifacts? We’ll wait for the scientists to figure it out, but I’m leaning toward real. 
”
Flying Saucer Caught on Video in Arizona
The man who revealed the existence of UFOs in Area 51 in the 1970s has gained a lot more credibility
Bob Lazar has provided information that has now been verified, decades after he blew the whistle. The UFO phenomenon is no longer taboo to talk about. People like this deserve to be heard now without ridicule.
The Bizarre Bird That’s Breaking the Tree of LifeIllustration by Jaedoo Lee
When Josefin Stiller was growing up in Berlin, she loved reading about Greek gods in an encyclopedia of mythology. She often lost track of their relationships, however—their feuds, trysts, and betrayals—as she flipped among the entries. Frustrated, she wrote each name on a card and started to arrange children beneath parents on a desk in her bedroom. As lineages became clear, so did family dramas. Sons killed fathers; uncles kidnapped nieces; siblings fell in love. “I wonder if this experience of reconstructing a family tree primed me to appreciate trees and the powerful insights they hold,” Stiller told me in a recent e-mail.
Years later, as a graduate student in biology, Stiller worked on an evolutionary tree for seahorses and their relatives, using DNA to understand the ancestry of different species. Then, in 2017, she moved to the University of Copenhagen and joined B10K, a scientific collaboration that aims to sequence the genome of every bird species—more than ten thousand in all—and to reveal their connections in a comprehensive tree. The amount of data and computing power required for this mission is almost unfathomable, but the final product should be as simple in principle as the diagram Stiller had assembled as a child. “Everything in biology has a history, and we can show this history as a bifurcating tree,” she said.
Birds are the most diverse vertebrates on land, and they have always been central to ideas about the natural world. In 1837, a taxonomist in London told Charles Darwin that the finches he had shot and carelessly lumped together in the Galápagos Islands were, in fact, many different species. Darwin wondered whether the finches might have shared a common ancestor from mainland South America—whether all of life might have evolved through a process of “descent with modification”—and he drew a rudimentary tree in his private notebook, beneath the words “I think.” The tree showed how a single ancestral population could branch into many species, each with its own evolutionary path. “On the Origin of Species,” published twenty-two years later, includes only one diagram: an evolutionary tree. The tree of life became for biology what the periodic table was for chemistry—both a foundation and an emblem for the field. “The time will come I believe, though I shall not live to see it, when we shall have fairly true genealogical trees of each great kingdom of nature,” Darwin wrote to a friend.
The rise of genome sequencing, at the turn of the twenty-first century, seemed to bring Darwin’s dream within reach. “It is now realistic to conceive of reconstructing the entire Tree of Life—eventually to include all of the living and extinct species,” Joel Cracraft, the curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History, wrote, in 2004. The naturalist E. O. Wilson predicted that such a tree could unify biology. Its value to such fields as agriculture, conservation, and medicine would be incalculable; evolutionary trees have already deepened our understanding of sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19. By mapping a major branch on the tree of life, B10K aims to light the way.
When Stiller joined the project, her colleagues were combing through museums and laboratories to sample three hundred and sixty-three bird species, chosen carefully to represent the diversity of living birds. With help from four supercomputers in three different countries, they began to compare each bird’s DNA to figure out how they were related. “I think there was always this idea that, once we sequence full genomes, we will be able to solve it,” Stiller told me. But, early in the process, she encountered an evolutionary enigma called Opisthocomus hoazin. “I was completely amazed by this bird,” she said.
Hoatzins, which live along oxbow lakes in tropical South America, have blood-red eyes, blue cheeks, and crests of spiky auburn feathers. Their chicks have primitive claws on their tiny wings and respond to danger by plunging into water and then clawing their way back to their nests—a trait that inspired some ornithologists to link them to dinosaurs. Other taxonomists argued that the hoatzin is closely related to pheasants, cuckoos, pigeons, and a group of African birds called turacos. Alejandro Grajal, the director of Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo, said that the bird looks like a “punk-rock chicken,” and smells like manure because it digests leaves through bacterial fermentation, similar to a cow.
DNA research has not solved the mysteries of the hoatzin; it has deepened them. One 2014 analysis suggested that the bird’s closest living relatives are cranes and shorebirds such as gulls and plovers. Another, in 2020, concluded that this clumsy flier is a sister species to a group that includes tiny, hovering hummingbirds and high-speed swifts. “Frankly, there is no one in the world who knows what hoatzins are,” Cracraft, who is now a member of B10K, said. The hoatzin may be more than a missing piece of the evolutionary puzzle. It may be a sphinx with a riddle that many biologists are reluctant to consider: What if the pattern of evolution is not actually a tree?
Fossils that resemble hoatzins have been found in Europe and Africa, but today the birds can be found only in the river basins of the Amazon and Orinoco of South America. I live in Germany, so I visited them in Berlin’s Museum of Natural History, where cabinets are filled with thousands of stuffed birds. Sylke Frahnert, the bird curator, kept two taxidermy hoatzins on a shelf near the cuckoos and turacos, which seems as good a place as any. Over the years, there have been so many conflicting trees of birds, she told me. “You would have been crazy to change the collection with every one.” One of the museum’s hoatzins was shot in Brazil more than two centuries ago, and the years have drained the color from its face. I had heard that even the specimens smell like manure, but Frahnert warned me not to sniff them, since birds were once preserved with arsenic.
In the eighteenth century, natural-history museums started using anatomical similarities to classify plants and animals into increasingly specific categories: class, order, family, genus, species. Darwin realized that species share traits because their ancestors were one and the same. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals all have spines, but not because God had given them to each creature separately; rather, the spine suggested a “common parent” living long ago. The construction of evolutionary trees was dubbed “phylogeny,” literally meaning “the generation of species,” by the zoologist Ernst Haeckel. The more traits two species shared, the theory went, the more recently they had shared a common ancestor. Human beings and other great apes evolved from a common ancestor millions of years ago, but even human beings and bacteria have a common ancestor—the first known living organisms, which date to three and a half billion years ago.
Hoatzins—“in some respects the most aberrant of birds,” according to one Victorian ornithologist—were a problem from the beginning. Early European naturalists described them as pheasants, and the first major tree for birds, published in 1888 by Max Fürbringer, placed them on the fowl branch. But, by the early nineteen-hundreds, some scientists were comparing hoatzins and cuckoos on the basis of traits such as jaws and feathers, and others were noting similarities between hoatzins and turacos, pigeons, barn owls, and rails. Even the hoatzin’s parasites defied classification: they hosted feather lice found on no other birds.
One crucial problem in phylogeny was convergent evolution. Sometimes natural selection nudges two organisms toward the same trait. Birds and bats independently evolved the ability to fly. Swifts and swallows each evolved into aerodynamic insectivores with nearly identical silhouettes, but traits such as their vocal organs and foot bones reveal that they are only distantly related. Because taxonomists often disagreed about things such as how to distinguish common ancestry from convergent evolution, the literature grew thick with conflicting trees, to the point that some twentieth-century biologists seemed ready to give up. “The construction of phylogenetic trees has opened the door to a wave of uninhibited speculation,” one wrote in 1959. “Science ends where comparative morphology, comparative physiology, comparative ethology have failed us.”
Phylogeny made a comeback in the seventies and eighties, after the German entomologist Willi Hennig developed more rigorous criteria for identifying common ancestry and drawing evolutionary trees. These innovations laid a foundation for a new wave of research that did not rely solely on physical specimens but, rather, on the emerging science of DNA. “Organisms are related to one another by the degree to which they share genetic information,” two ornithologists wrote in the early nineties, adding that genetics could reveal “a different view of the process of evolution and its effects.” The typical bird genome is a string of more than a billion base pairs that mutate randomly over time. Scientists can compare the same parts of the genome across multiple species to estimate their evolutionary closeness. Typically, species that share mutations have a more recent common ancestor, and species that do not are more distantly related.
Early sequencing was expensive and tedious, but, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, a signal was emerging from the noise. The journal Nature published an article about the promise of a single unified tree of life. But its author also identified a complication: each genome contains many different genes, and each one could generate a different evolutionary tree.
In 2001, a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society identified a pair of bird siblings as unlikely as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito: the flamingo’s closest relative was a little diving bird called a grebe. “That was probably the single most astounding result that anybody’s ever gotten,” Peter Houde, an avian biologist from New Mexico State University, told me. Ornithologists had always reasoned that grebes were closely related to short-legged loons, whereas tall wading birds such as flamingos, storks, and herons probably had a long-legged common ancestor.
That was the first domino to fall. In 2008, Science published a new avian tree based on DNA. Research led by Shannon Hackett, Rebecca Kimball, and Sushma Reddy, scientists affiliated with the Field Museum and the University of Florida, examined nineteen parts of the genomes of a hundred and sixty-nine avian species. The “root” of their tree resembled trees based on physical specimens: large, flightless birds such as ostriches, emus, and kiwis—known collectively as ratites—were first to diverge from all the others, followed by land fowl and waterfowl. The remaining ninety-five per cent of living birds, from parrots to penguins and pigeons, are known as “modern birds” and descended from a common ancestor, probably around the time that an asteroid hit the earth, sixty-six million years ago, and the dinosaurs went extinct. The youngest order—passerines, which include all songbirds—branched out into a staggering six thousand species in the span of tens of millions of years. The genetic tree for modern birds was decked with relationships that few, if any, taxonomists had guessed from anatomy; key groups such as parrots, owls, woodpeckers, vultures, and cranes shifted places.
Scientists had long assumed, for example, that daytime hunters such as hawks, eagles, and falcons all descended from a single bird of prey. But, in the genetic tree, hawks and eagles shared a branch with vultures, yet falcons turned out to be closer relatives of passerines and parrots. This meant that the peregrine falcon is more closely related to colorful macaws and tiny sparrows than to any hawk or eagle. The traditional explanation for flightlessness in ratites—that a common ancestor diverged into ostriches, emus, rheas, cassowaries, and kiwis after the southern continents split apart—also collapsed. DNA showed that the ratites also included flying birds called tinamous, suggesting that the group evolved flightlessness at least three separate times. “That study revolutionized our understanding of how the major groups of living birds are related to each other,” Daniel J. Field, an avian paleontologist at the University of Cambridge, said. Bird-watching guides had to reorganize their contents to reflect the new relationships.
What the study could not settle was the early evolution of modern birds. It was easy to tell when pheasants and ostriches turned off the highway of avian evolution, but modern birds did not follow a simple off-ramp. They seemed to zoom off in different directions, as though each kind of bird took a different exit from a busy roundabout. From their common ancestor—perhaps a little ground bird that pecked seeds and insects out of the ash that the asteroid left behind—modern birds split quickly into more than half a dozen branches. But the fastest computers of the time weren’t fast enough to disentangle them. All but one of these branches diversified into about ten thousand bird species. The last belonged to the hoatzin alone. The strange bird likely made the journey to the present day all by itself. “The enigmatic Opisthocomus (hoatzin) still cannot be confidently placed,” Hackett’s team wrote.
The first human genome sequences required hundreds of scientists and billions of dollars, but the costs fell quickly as the technology improved. In 2010, Tom Gilbert, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen who previously studied mammoth and ancient human DNA, turned his attention to the pigeon genome. “I’m really interested in how regular city pigeons have spread around the world and done so well,” he told me. When he read the Hackett group’s study, he became curious about how the pigeon genome might fit into the larger picture of avian evolution. He wondered, “What if you had the perfect data set—all of the genome and not just parts of it?”
With the neurobiologist Erich Jarvis and the evolutionary geneticist Guojie Zhang, Gilbert assembled a team to pick up where researchers like Hackett had left off. The team, which grew to more than a hundred and twenty researchers, used nine supercomputer processing centers to sequence and analyze the genomes of forty-eight birds. (They got the hoatzin DNA sample from Houde, in New Mexico.) The tree they developed—featured on the cover of Science, along with an image of the hoatzin, in 2014—confirmed many of the Hackett group’s findings, challenged others, revealed new relationships, and used fossils to estimate the dates of divergences. Within fifteen million years of the extinction of dinosaurs, all the major lineages of modern birds emerged. The hoatzin’s long branch connected to the ancestor of cranes and shorebirds. “It kind of is a marshy waterbird,” Jarvis reasoned. But he and the other researchers couldn’t get strong statistical support for the hoatzin branch. He compared the bird’s origins with some of the most difficult questions he has faced in neurobiology. “Studying consciousness or language is the equivalent of figuring out where the hoatzin belongs,” he said.
The next year, the rival journal Nature published yet another tree. The Yale ornithologist Richard Prum argued that forty-eight species were too few, so his team compared a hundred and ninety-eight, sequencing a much smaller portion of their DNA. In this tree, several branches changed places around the time that the dinosaurs went extinct, suggesting new relationships for doves and pigeons; hummingbirds, swifts, and their relatives; and, of course, the hoatzin. Instead of yielding an authoritative tree of life, DNA had entrenched disagreement in the part of the tree most crucial to understanding the diversity of living birds. “There may be no amount of sleuthing or data or analysis that is going to resolve the placement of some of these lineages of birds,” Hackett told me. The conflicting signals in the hoatzin genome may not be analytical errors but biological realities—and they may require a different paradigm than the tree.
The tree is so ingrained in evolutionary biology that scientists encourage “tree thinking.” By learning to think in terms of trees, students can avoid the common fallacy of reading evolution as a ladder in which simpler organisms become more complex, as in the famous image “The Ascent of Man,” which shows a knuckle-walking ape evolving into an upright human. For all its pedagogical value, however, the tree also embeds subtle assumptions about evolution. The tree tends to downplay the genetic variation within species, which can obscure the fact that common ancestors are actually diverse populations that can pass on different versions of a gene to different descendants. It tells a story of endless partition and diversification, with branches that diverge and never reticulate.
While preparing their paper, Gilbert and his team had fiddled with their data set to understand the differences between gene trees. When they told their tree-building software to focus only on regions of the genome that Prum’s team used, it produced a tree that looked like Prum’s. When they shifted focus to other regions, a very different tree emerged. When they divided their bird genomes into thousands of different parts and ran each through their software, they got thousands of different trees, and not one completely matched the “species tree” they had constructed from large portions of genomes. “Different parts of the genome have different stories,” Gilbert realized. Genes do not stay in the lanes of common ancestry but can move much more unpredictably, like zigzagging pieces on a Plinko board. Scientists call this kind of genetic scrambling “incomplete lineage sorting,” and it is especially common during rapid bursts of evolution, such as the one that gave rise to modern birds.
In 2016, Alexander Suh, a biologist on the forty-eight-genome team, superimposed all the different gene trees they had generated. The resulting image of the early evolution of modern birds, around the time the dinosaurs went extinct, was not a tidy series of diverging branches but a kind of web or fishnet, whose contours constantly crossed paths. In a paper, Suh urged his colleagues to consider other patterns of evolution—to argue “less about which species tree is ‘correct,’ and more about if there is such a thing” as a traditional tree of life for modern birds.
As a girl, Stiller sometimes ran into trouble with her mythological family tree. “Placing Zeus was a nightmare because he interacted with everyone at some point,” she remembered. Relatives often shacked up, braiding their separate lineages back together. Something similar happens in nature when one species mates with another, producing a hybrid. Although tree-thinking biologists used to think that hybridization was extremely rare, genetic studies have shown that it actually happens all the time. Human DNA indicates that early Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals and other extinct hominins. Conservative estimates suggest that at least ten per cent of birds hybridize; among South America’s largest group of birds, that number is thirty-eight per cent, according to one recent study.
Hybridization may have been rampant in the aftermath of the asteroid strike, when modern-bird lineages first emerged. Interbreeding would have passed genes from one branch of the tree to another, adding another layer of complexity on top of incomplete lineage sorting. “Lineages that split and never talk to each other again—that’s not how biology works,” Stiller said. Still, she remains hopeful that one day we may build an authoritative diagram of the past. “Our models are still comparatively simple,” she told me. “We should be able to reconstruct evolutionary history if we have the right models and the right data.”
The outlines of animal evolution still look a lot like a tree in many places, which is why scientists continue to spend so much time developing and debating different branches. But, if tree thinking taught biologists that everything is connected, genes are suggesting that the connections can run even deeper than a tree can capture. To gain a more complete picture—and to answer questions like how such an unusual mix of traits came together in the hoatzin—scientists may need to think outside the tree. B10K grew out of the forty-eight-genome group and now includes computer scientists who specialize not in trees but in networks; they try to track the movement of genes between branches, and they often find that even supercomputers aren’t yet up to the job.
In B10K’s preliminary analyses, the hoatzin again winds up closely aligned with cranes and shorebirds, but the conclusion lacks a hundred per cent statistical support. “There’s still a lot of conflict in the data,” Stiller said. “Depending on how you analyze it, you will get different placements.” After B10K finishes its tree for three hundred and sixty-three birds, it’ll move on to the more than two thousand avian genuses, and eventually to every species of bird. These genomes will create a much more complete portrait—but, even then, they may not be able to solve the mystery of the hoatzin, or reconstruct every crook in the early evolution of modern birds.
“If the evolutionary history of the hoatzin conformed to processes we already understand well, then we’d probably have already figured out what it is most closely related to,” Houde wrote via e-mail. “The fact that we don’t know its nearest relative suggests that there were processes involved that we still do not understand.” He indicated that the hoatzin could have more than one set of closest relatives—which he called “an unsettling prospect in the context of existing classification and in the minds of many contemporary biologists.”
This strange-sounding state of affairs is not unique to the hoatzin; we see it in our own DNA. Human beings share their most recent common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos, but more than ten per cent of the human genome is actually more closely related to the gorilla genome. Another tiny fraction of the human genome also seems to be most closely shared with an even more distant relative: the orangutan. “This implies that there is no such thing as a unique evolutionary history of the human genome,” a team of molecular biologists wrote in 2007. “Rather, it resembles a patchwork of individual regions following their own genealogy.”
Darwin ended “On the Origin of Species” with a famous description of “an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.” Molecular biologists hoped that genes would reveal the true and final shape of Darwin’s tree. Instead, they found a new kind of entangled bank, in which species are connected in unexpected ways. “There is grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin wrote of his scene. There is grandeur, too, in the view of life that is encoded in DNA. ♦
RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
Skinwalkers: What Do We Really Know About Them?
Today, we come to one of the most dangerous and terrifying of all monsters: the Skinwalker of Native American lore and legend. And, to those who dare to investigate such phenomena they should tread carefully. Very carefully. Indeed, one only has to ask George Knapp, Colm A. Kelleher and James T. Lacatski, the authors of the recently published book, Skinwalkers at the Pentagon. Accounts of the deadly, shapeshifting Skinwalkers date back a very long time. Indeed, they have been provoking mayhem, chaos, and even death, in their collective paths for absolute centuries. Skinwalkers are often portrayed in Native American history as classic crones – wizened, old witches, in other words. The fact is, however, that the Skinwalkers can transform themselves into multiple forms; one of them being that of a wolf. Or, perhaps more correctly, something that superficially resembles a wolf. I say all of the above because in the last few years there has been a growing amount of interest in the subject. But, what, exactly, what are they? There is no doubt that is the key question to be asked. And to be answered, too.
Some might suggest – and have suggested – that the creatures take on forms that are far less like regular wolves and far more akin to classic werewolves: large and powerful beasts that can walk and run on both two limbs and four. Others, today, refer to them as the Dog-Men. Other forms that the Skinwalkers can mutate into include coyotes, birds, and bears. Indeed, they are supernatural masters of camouflage and subterfuge. The process by which a witch can take on a completely new form is very complicated, to say the very least. Magical rites and rituals can allow a person to morph into an animal – by seeking to emulate the beast that he or she desire to become. In the bulk of such shape-changing, however, a witch will wrap around their body the hide of the very animal they wish to become. The more the witch wears the hide, the more she or he is likely to successfully transform. It’s important to note that it's not just the form that changes: a person who becomes a Skinwalker also takes on the keen senses of smell and sight that so many animals have and that we don't. The same goes for their senses of hearing. And, there are their incredibly fast speeds, too. In other words, these undeniably, deadly creatures are nothing less than lethal killing machines.
Without doubt the most dangerous aspect of the Skinwalker is its ability to supernaturally infect people with deadly diseases and life-threatening illnesses. Strangely, on more than a few occasions, those who have found themselves in the direct, close presence of a Skinwalker have – no less in than mere days - succumbed to very rare medical conditions. Precisely how the Skinwalker can perform such a hostile thing still remains unknown. It is, however, worth noting that the Skinwalker is said to have an expert knowledge of medicine, and both ancient and modern. The answer, somewhere, just might be found in that issue of those medicines. It’s no wonder that many Native Americans avoid these malevolent things at all costs. Who can blame them? Hardly anyone. Of course, there is one critical issue we that have yet to touch upon: namely, why on Earth would anyone even want to become a Skinwalker in the very first place, at all? The answer, as you may have already deduced, is not a good one. Adopting the guise of an animal can, quite literally, allow a person to get away with cold-hearted murder. After all, if the target of the Skinwalker is violently slaughtered by a rampaging bear or a savage wolf, then who would even – or ever - dream of the possibility that the beast was actually a transformed human? Almost certainly not many, that is to be sure!
Although the phenomenon of the Skinwalker has been with us for a very long time, there is absolutely no doubt, at all, that much of the modern day knowledge and understanding of the creatures comes from the publicity that was given to it by Colm A. Kelleher and George Knapp in their hugely popular book of 2005, Hunt for the Skinwalker - a definitive classic of its time. It tells of an absolute myriad of paranormal phenomena at a certain ranch located in Utah. As the description for the Knapp-Kelleher book states: “For more than fifty years, the bizarre events at that remote Utah ranch have ranged from the perplexing to the wholly terrifying. Vanishing and mutilated cattle. Unidentified Flying Objects. The appearance of huge, otherworldly creatures. Invisible objects emitting magnetic fields with the power to spark a cattle stampede. Flying orbs of light with dazzling maneuverability and lethal consequences. For one family, life on the Skinwalker Ranch had become a life under siege by an unknown enemy or enemies. Nothing else could explain the horrors that surrounded them – perhaps science could.” And, as George Knapp noted in Hunt for the Skinwalker, with regard to the many and varied phenomena that caused chaos and mayhem on the ranch: “…reality isn’t what it used to be.” You can say that again!
Now, we come to my very own experiences. I cannot say that I am someone who has come face-to-face with a Skinwalker. I haven't. I have, though, had experiences that could be termed as on the fringe of the phenomenon. As someone who spends a lot of time in the field – so to speak – investigating reports of strange creatures, UFOs, M.I.B., and more, I was very excited when in August 2010 I had the opportunity to head out to the site of a spate of Skinwalker sightings - and for a full week, no less . The location was the desert of California, specifically in Joshua Tree. I was there to be filmed for a new TV show on VH1 that was called Real and Chance: The Legend Hunters. The stars were brothers Kamal and Ahmad Givens. It was a fun, excited, well-executed show that saw the two guys heading around the United States – in road-trip style – and investigating a myriad of mysteries; one of them being the Skinwalker controversy. But, you probably guessed that, right?
On the second day of the shooting, the film crew and I headed out to a local animal sanctuary – that specialized in caring for, and rehabilitating, nothing less than wolves. In doing so, I quickly learned just how much the Skinwalker phenomenon was feared in and around Joshua Tree - and in Utah, too. And, in all likelihood, it still is feared. I also saw for myself a deep reluctance on the part of the staff of the sanctuary to ever utter that dreaded “S word.” By now, you know the word I mean. Then, on the third night – around 1:00 a.m. – we encountered nothing less than a huge wolf staring down at us - from a hilly area - as the film-crew captured us on camera. No, I am not joking. In fact, no-one was. The wolf was only in view for a minute or two, but it was an undeniably bone-chilling situation. Here we were looking for Skinwalkers and we almost walked into a huge wolf that, I suspect, seemed to be waiting for us. And no-one else. Was the whole thing just a really bizarre coincidence? I have to say that I seriously doubted it. More than a decade later, my views have not really changed. I still think that something very strange happened on that night - in the California desert - when the skies went dark and a huge wolf loomed out of the darkness. Sadly, in 2015 Ahmad died at the very young age of thirty-three from cancer.
Sea Serpents: Mighty Creatures That Ruled the Oceans Centuries Ago
With that said, let's have a look back in time, an era when giant monsters almost ruled the waves. For example, the port of Gloucester, Massachusetts was thesite of repeated encounters with massive, dangerous leviathans in the early 17th century. From a man named John Josselyn, we have these words to muse upon: “They told me of a sea serpent, or snake, that lay quoiled [sic] up like a cable upon the rock at Cape Ann; a boat passing by with English on board, and two Indians, they would have shot the serpent, but the Indians dissuaded them, saying that if he were not killed outright, they would all be in danger of their lives.” Obadiah Turner, also in the same time-frame, stated of the creature, in old English style of writing: “Some being on ye great beache gathering of calms and seaweed wch had been cast thereon by ye mightie storm did spy a most wonderful serpent a shorte way off from ye shore. He was big round in ye thickest part as a wine pipe; and they do affirm that he was fifteen fathoms more in length. A most wonderful tale. But ye witnesses be credible, and it would be of no account to them to tell an untrue tale. Wee have likewise heard yt Cape Ann ye people have seene a monster like unto this, whch did there come out of ye land mch to ye terror of them yt did see him.”
It should be stressed that the 19th century was the period in which sea serpents were really in their element, we might say. From 1817, we have the following, notable report from Amos Story: “It was between the hours of twelve and one o’clock when I first saw him, and he continued in sight for an hour and a half. I was setting on the shore, and was about twenty rods from him when he was the nearest to me. His head appeared shaped much like that of the sea turtle, and he carried his head from ten to twelve inches above the surface of the water. His head at that distance appeared larger than the head of any dog I ever saw. From the back of his head to the next part of him that was visible, I should judge to be three or four feet. He moved very rapidly through the water, I should say a mile or two or, at most, in three minutes. I saw no bunches on his back. On this day, I did not see more than ten or twelve feet of his body.” Story’s account was swiftly followed by that of Solomon Allen III, a shipmaster. He said of the incredible beast he spied: “His head formed something like the head of a rattlesnake, but nearly as large as the head of horse. When he moved on the surface of the water his motion was slow, at times playing in circles, and sometimes moving straight forward.”
A particularly detailed account came days later from one Cheever Felch, whose sighting of the Gloucester sea serpent was made when he, Felch, was aboard a U.S. schooner, the Science. He said of the monstrous thing: “His color is dark brown with white under his throat. His size we could not accurately ascertain, but his head is about three feet in circumference, flat and much smaller than his body. We did not see his tail; but from the end of the head to the farthest protuberance was not far from one hundred feet. I speak with a degree of certainty, behind much accustomed to measure and estimate distances and length. I counted fourteen bunches on his back, the first one say ten or twelve feet from this head, and the others about seven feet apart. They decreased in size towards the tail. These bunches were sometimes counted with and sometimes without a glass. Mr. Malborne counted thirteen, Mr. Blake thirteen and fourteen, and the boatman the same number...His motion was partly vertical and partly horizontal, like that of fresh water snakes. I have been much acquainted with snakes in our interior waters. His motion was the same.”
And still the reports kept on coming, as seafarer John Brown noted: “I discovered something about three or four miles distant, about two points on the weather bow, which appeared as a mast, as it rose and sunk in a perpendicular manner, once in about eight or ten minutes. I kept the vessel directly for it, and after look at it with my glass, I observed to my mate that it was a wreck, as I could see timbers sticking up, but as we approached nearer, I found what appeared like timbers to be a number of porpoises and black fish playing and jumping around a large Sea-Serpent, which we had supposed to be the mast.” While there certainly have been sightings of sea serpents in the waters of Gloucester since 1817, none of them – in terms of their frequency, number of witnesses, and credibility – has ever come close to matching those tumultuous, early 19th century days when the people of Gloucester were plagued by a monster.
Then, there is this account, which appeared in the British Literary Gazette on August 1, 1818: “Captain Joseph Woodward of the schooner Adamant reported an encounter off the coast of Cape Ann in May, 1818. He said he shot a cannon at the monster. He was quoted as saying that after the cannon shot: ‘The serpent shook its head and its tail in an extraordinary manner and advanced toward the ship with open jaws; I had caused the cannon to be reloaded, but he had come so near that all the crew were seized with terror, and we thought only of getting out of his way. He almost touched the vessel and, had I not tacked as I did, he would certainly have come on board. He dived, but in a moment we saw him come up again with his head on one side of the vessel and his tail on the other as if he was going to lift up and upset us. However we did not feel any shock. He remained five hours near us, only going backward and forward.”
We’ll now take a look at some more, incredible claims of encounters with monsters; cases that amazed and terrified the crews and passengers of ships and boats on the high seas. Rather notably, a number of such reports have been declassified under the terms of the U.K. government’s Freedom of Information Act. They demonstrate something remarkable and illuminating: namely, that highly incredible sources had seen huge, monsters of the oceans and who were willing to attest to the truth of the amazing incidents. Just such a case can be found in the 19th century-era archives of the Admiralty, which was the U.K. equivalent of the United States Navy. The first report that has been declassified by government personnel dates back to 1830, specifically May 9, 1830. As for the crew that had the amazing encounter, they were aboard the Rob Roy, which was a military craft, and while navigating the Atlantic Ocean. Little did the crew know that when the day began, they would soon come face-to-face with a terrifying monster of the mysterious depths. We have the captain of the ship, one James Stockdale, to thank for having the guts to inform senior naval personnel the incredible creature that had been seen.
I will now share with you the unedited words of Captain Stockdale: “About five p.m. all at once while I was walking on the poop my attention was drawn to the water on the port bow by a scuffling noise. Likewise all the watch on deck were drawn to it. Judge my amazement when what should stare us all in the face as if not knowing whether to come over the deck or to go around the stern – but the great big sea snake! Now I have heard of the fellow before – and I have killed snakes twenty-four feet long in the straits of Malacca, but they would go in his mouth. I think he must have been asleep for we were going along very softly two knots an hour, and he seemed as much alarmed as we were – and all taken aback for about fifteen seconds. But he soon was underway and, when fairly off, his head was square with our topsail and his tail was square with the foremast. My ship is 171 feet long overall – and the foremast is 42 feet from the stern which would make the monster about 129 feet long. If I had not seen it I could not have believed it but there was no mistake or doubt of its length – for the brute was so close I could even smell his nasty fishy smell." There's more to come:
“When underway he carried his head about six feet out of water – with a fin between the shoulders about two feet long. I think he was swimming about five miles an hour – for I watched him from the topsail yard till I lost sight of him in about fifty minutes. I hope never to see him more. It is enough to frighten the strong at heart.” The report of Captain Stockdale and his crew was not the only one that ended up in U.K. military files. There was yet another. This one dated from December 13, 1857. Commander George Henry Harrington was so impressed – and worried – by the extraordinary sighting that he quickly put together a full report on the encounter with the giant beast. It reads like this: “While myself and officers were standing on the lee side of the poop – looking toward the island – we were startled by the sight of a huge marine animal which reared its head out of the water within twenty yards of the ship – when it suddenly disappeared for about half a minute and then made a reappearance in the same manner again – showing us its neck and head about ten or twenty feet out of the water.
“Its head was shaped like a long buoy – and I should suppose the diameter to have been seven or eight feet in the largest part with a kind of scroll or ruff encircling it about two feet from the top. The water was discolored for several hundred feet from the head, so much so that on its first appearance my impression was that the ship was in broken waters, produced, as I supposed, by some volcanic agency, since I passed the island before. But the second appearance completely dispelled those fears and assured us that it was a monster of extraordinary length and appeared to be moving slowly towards the land. The ship was going too fast to enable us to reach the masthead in time to form a correct estimate of this extreme length – but from what we saw from the deck we conclude that he must have been over two hundred feet long. The Boatswain and several of the crew, who observed it from the forecastle, state that it was more than double the length of the ship, in which case it must have been five hundred feet. Captain Harrington signed off: “I am convinced that it belonged to the serpent tribe.”
Filer’s Files July 15 2022 - Life on Titan’s Moon - PART I
Major George A. Filer III ret. USAF
New Jersey State Director
MUFON Eastern Region Director
Special reports are: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and UFOs, Saturn’s Moon Titan Looks Like Earth, Possible Life on Titan, Astronaut Sheppard Golf’s on the Moon, Intelligent Intervention, Congress Discusses UFOs/UAPs, Strange Craft and Carbon 60.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Montana, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Washington.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Belgium, Canada, France, Mexico, Romania, and England in the United Kingdom.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force and DOD investigated UFOs for more than forty years; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFOs are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers. The weekly intelligence report provides you with information on the latest sightings and UFO news that you need to understand the world situation.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and UFOs
Former Prime Minister Margat Thatcher of Great Britain states,
Margaret Thatcher, who was Britain’s Prime Minister during at the time of the Rendlesham incident in 1980. Thatcher, who died on 8 April aged 87, was 19 months into her first term as Prime Minister in 1980 when US airmen at the nuclear-armed twin airbase RAF Bentwaters-Woodbridge reported ‘unexplained lights’ (UFOs) hovering above Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk.
The ‘Rendlesham Forest’ incident happened at the height of the Cold War when tensions in Poland – then behind the Iron Curtain -were reaching crisis point. In the years that followed, the Ministry of Defence drew up secret plans to base US cruise missiles at RAF Greenham Common and US airbases in eastern England and was keen to avoid drawing attention to a persistent story about a UFO landing near one of them.
The military revealed their conclusion that ‘it was highly unlikely that any violation of UK airspace would be heralded by such a display of lights…[we] think it equally likely that any [Soviet] reconnaissance or spying activity would be announced in this way. ‘
Georgina Bruni revealed that she had quizzed Thatcher face-to-face about her knowledge of UFOs and Rendlesham.
The bizarre conversation took place in London at a charity cocktail party when Bruni was working on a book about Britain’s Roswell.
Bruni asked Thatcher het opinion on UFOs. She received this response:
‘“You must have the facts and you can’t tell the people
“You have to know the whole story, and never tell the public. There is only one answer here; Fear of a Panic.” These craft are 300 years ahead of us in technology; we are I believe playing a game of catch-up at Area 51 and Nellis AFB and this has been going on since 1947. Truman knew and so did MJ-12 with General McArthur.
Bill Sell writes, “Frank Edwards has some remarkable evidence recorded in his book Flying Saucers Serious Business and this book should be a mandatory reading for any true Ufologist. The US Government classified this subject two points above the Hydrogen Bomb according to Wilbert Smith.”
Brett Allen writes, “For some reason they (UFOs) seem to have an affinity where there is loss of life.” I just Googled “top states for UFO sightings” and 8 were the scene of Civil War death, one-the top in population, i.e.: deaths, and the other, gold. of course, top countries are in the war-torn Middle East.”
It amazes me so many “researchers” continue to miss the big picture, but then academia ignores the existence of our soul and so, what we are told in our most precious ancient texts is also ignored. So many today also offer opinions like “the Bible is all nonsense,”
Even the fact that (Wild Men, i.e.: Sasquatch) were included on Cathedral walls for a good reason they knew they were heavenly beings! But little by little, the truth is breaking through. Had you heard of last year’s Bigfoot revelation by top Bigfoot researchers who swore they watched a portal open up just like on the Skinwalker Ranch) during a Sasquatch investigation. They swore they could with a flashlight see another world inside.
Chewbacca of Star Wars movie fame looks a lot like Bigfoot.
The Native Americans have long used the same words to describe Sasquatch as Genesis uses to describe Nephilim – part man, part animal, part spirit – beings made by the “fallen” or descended Angels. They have long recounted these creatures as “spirit beings” even connected with the “noseless ones,” and often accompanied by light anomalies. Thanks to Brett Allen.
Saturn’s Moon Titan Has Structures and Life
Saturn’s Moon Titan Looks Like Earth with possible base at 2 above.
Saturn’s largest moon looks remarkably like Earth with a landscape of rivers, lakes, mountains, and volcanoes says Brigham Young’s University’s planetary science professor Jani Radebaugh. However, Titan, is inhospitable — the surface temperature is negative 289 degrees and the liquid isn’t water. It’s thought to be methane. Radebaugh has wrapped up a NASA-commissioned study that focused on radar images to map dunes on Titan’s surface and determine the prevailing winds. It was the first-time scientists have peered through Titan’s thick atmosphere to see the surface, and Radebaugh says they were surprised by the Earth-like features. Titan is the second largest moon in the Solar System and has an atmosphere. Huge craft have been photographed in the Rings of Saturn and life may exist on some of its Moons. the only moon known to have a dense atmosphere and the only object other than Earth for which unmistakable evidence of stable bodies of surface liquid has been found
Titan has atmosphere, methane lakes and structures
Titan is the largest moon of Saturn and the second-largest natural satellite in the Solar System. It is the only moon known object in space other than Earth on which clear evidence of stable bodies of surface liquid has been found.
Humanity could colonize Titan and NASA Hs spent probes to Titan which could be humanity’s best chance at a hospitable planet in our galaxy! Its temperature is very cold but could be warmed. Some sharpening and deepening were added to the Titan moon photos, bringing out detail structures on January 14, 2022. Could it be that Titan was an ancient space station? I noticed that this area was labeled maze or Labyrinth on the Titan map. A labyrinth is a complicated irregular network of paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way, a maze. By labeling this Titan area a maze or labyrinth, NASA has actually confessed to these structures existing!
Titan Moon Blowup Showing structures
Moons orbiting planets create their own heat due to gravity because the moon is on an inclined (tilted) orbit, passing above and below the equator of the planet, will have its tidal bulge constantly moving up and down. The movement of the bulge leads to friction and heat. Heat and water generally explain life as likely on Titan.
The radius of Titan is 2,574 km (1,600 miles) and that would put the width of this maze at about 70 km (43 miles) and the length to be over 400 km (250 miles) long. The walls of some parts of the maze very from .25-75 km (16 to 437 Miles) high. Thanks to Scott C. Waring – map:
Because Titan’s surface is mostly made of water ice, which is abundant in moons of the outer solar system, scientists believe Titan’s ocean underneath is likely mostly liquid water.
NASA Reveals First-Ever Photo of Liquid on another World
NASA scientists revealed a first-of-its-kind image from space showing reflecting sunlight from a lake on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. It’s the first visual evidence of liquid on the northern hemisphere of the moon, scientists said, and the first-ever photo from another world showing a “specular reflection” — which is reflection of light from an extremely smooth surface and in this case, a liquid one. “This is the first-time outside Earth we’ve seen specular reflection from another liquid from another body,” said Ralf Jaumann, a scientist analyzing data from the Cassini unmanned space probe. Photos are from the Cassini Spacecraft orbiting Saturn about a billion miles from Earth.
“It was great because if you look at photos of planets, you mostly see nothing is happening. But in two hours we saw a glint of light getting brighter. “Titan’s similarities to Earth have attracted NASA’s attention for decades. It’s the only body besides our own in the solar system that is believed to have liquid on its surface. Like Earth, Titan has an atmosphere which is mostly nitrogen. Experts believe the presence of liquid on a planet or moon improves the chances that some kind of life could develop there. The glint appears to be coming from the southern edge of a lake called Kraken Mare — a massive body of methane that covers about 150,000 square miles at minus-180 degrees Celsius. That’s larger than the Caspian Sea, which is the largest lake on Earth. Thanks to Thom Patterson,
Titan is the largest moon of Saturn and the only natural satellite known to have a dense atmosphere, and the only object other than Earth for which clear evidence of stable bodies of surface liquid has been found. It is a planet-like moon with a diameter roughly 50% larger than moon. His planet has methane lakes that likely have life.
The Cassini-Huygens mission in 2004 discovered liquid hydrocarbon lakes in the moon’s Polar Regions that likely have methane-based life. The atmosphere is dense and opaque.
During a Cassini flyby in February 2007, radar and camera observations revealed several large features in the north polar region interpreted as large expanses of liquid methane and/or ethane, including one sea (Ligeia Mare) with an area of over 100,000 km (larger than Lake Superior), and another incompletely imaged region potentially the size of the Caspian Sea.
Lake on Titan Compared to Lake Superior at right
The surface is geologically young, although mountains and several possible cryovolcanoes have been discovered, it is smooth and few impact craters have been found. The atmosphere of Titan is largely composed of nitrogen; minor components lead to the formation of methane and ethane clouds and nitrogen-rich organic smog. Methane is formed during Methanogenesis a form of anaerobic respiration used by organisms that occupy landfills, termites, and various animals like cattle and deer. The methane indicates life is functioning on Titan.
Overall, the Cassini radar observations have shown that lakes cover only a few percent of the surface and are concentrated near the poles, making Titan much drier than Earth. The high relative humidity of methane in Titan’s lower atmosphere could be maintained by evaporation from lakes covering only 0.002 – 0.02% of the whole surface.
A flyby of Titan’s southern Polar Regions revealed similar, though far smaller, lake like features. It is uncertain if plants are a source of methane emissions.
The moon is thought to be a possible host for microbial extraterrestrial life.
It’s thought to have a prebiotic environment rich in complex organic chemistry with a possible subsurface liquid ocean serving as a biotic environment. Thanks to NASA
Mel Riley 1987 Remote Viewing training
Description of Personnel Associated with ET Bases
Remote viewing (RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen subject, purportedly sensing with the mind usually drawing pictures of the scene. Typically, a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object, event, person, or location that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance.
Remote viewers have run into three types of alien entities associated with bases at various location within the Solar System.
TITAN Moon BASE All personnel observed at this based on 20 November 1986 appeared to be no different than native earthlings. There were two male technician types sitting at a control panel of some kind. Behind them stood and attractive female with brown shoulder length hair, wearing a pale green lab coat or smock. She appeared to be in some sort of supervisory role.
SOUTH AMERICA: There appeared to be two types of entities associated with this site also. The first had an exceptionally large, round shaped head on a slender neck with very unhuman in appearance. Almost robot like and unable to contact this being. The other entity was almost human like in appearance. His face was devoid of any hair, his complexion was very pale, facial features were very indistinct with the exception of a sharp, slender nose. This entity seemed friendly enough and appeared to (unreadable) CIA-RPD96-00789R003800110001-8
River in Titan with color added to photo
This image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows a vast river system on Saturn’s moon Titan. It is the first-time images from space have revealed a river system so vast and in such high resolution anywhere other than Earth. NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI
Stretching more than 200 miles from its headwaters toward a large and mysterious sea. It’s an incredible image–it has Earth-like meanders, oxbows, and general curvature, indicating it follows the trace of a fault line. This doesn’t necessarily mean Titan has plate tectonics like Earth does, but there are enough fractures in its bedrock to help form large basins. The Titan River is filled with liquid hydrocarbons, which scientists can tell because it appears dark throughout its length. This indicates it has a smooth surface.
Titan is the only other place in our solar system with a hydrologic cycle. Instead of water, it has liquid methane and ethane. It rains methane on Titan, and there are lakes made of ethane–the only other place where liquid exists in a stable form.
Sheppard became the first and only golfer
Their mission was popular because Shepard became the first and only golfer on the moon, while Edgar Mitchell watched from the rover. Mitchell tossed a metal rod making the only “javelin” throws on the moon. Shepard later wrote that Mitchell remained “Mr. Unflappable” during the landing scare.”
Mitchell conducted a telepathy experiment he claimed a success on the three-day ride home that would give Mitchell notoriety. He thought humans weren’t the only intelligent life in the universe. Mitchell wrote in his 1996 autobiography. “It occurred to me that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft itself were manufactured long ago in the furnace of one of the ancient stars that burned in the heavens about me.”
He left NASA in 1972 and founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which is dedicated to exploring the mysteries of the human mind and the universe. Later he devoted his life to exploring the mind, physics, and unexplained phenomena.
During a Television program with the Disclosure Project at the National Press Club, I was introduced by Astronaut Edgar Mitchell who told the audience to listen to what I had to say about UFOs. After the show, we were alone talking and Mitchell told me, “I signed a NASA strict security contract that I had seen no evidence of aliens; therefore, I didn’t see any evidence of aliens on the moon, but all my astronaut friends had.” I asked what was the UFO situation all about? He told me,
“The answer is in the Dead Sea Scrolls. I suggested the War Scroll of the war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. He smiled and said, “That’s the one.”
He told me many of those involved in the Roswell UFO crash came to him because lived nearby, and he was sixth of twelve men who walked on the moon. They all told him the alien crash at Roswell was real. He stated, “I have met with credible professionals within two governments who have testified to their own firsthand experiences with close encounters. They include members of military, intelligence, and government whose official duties involved the extraterrestrial presence. As is expected, they were all bound by strict security oath agreements which prevented them from disclosing any of this.”
He claimed the U.S. government covered up evidence that aliens had landed here and even most generals, admirals and even presidents were not privy to the information. Mitchell courageously spoke out for the Disclosure of the truth, and I consider it a pleasure to have known him.
He may now learn the secrets of eternal life and the universe. He walked on the moon and now will explore heaven.
Intelligent Intervention www.examiner.com/Robert Steven Thomas has authored an excellent book entitled “Intelligent Intervention The missing link in human evolution.” Robert is a retired Executive and Multi-disciplined Historian and of course author. He delves into the creation of humanity and the evidence. As well as an advanced alien presence which includes the Anunnaki legacy. I like his approach to close minded individuals and I really enjoyed this interview and his book. I hope you do to. Presenting.
Tomas states. “The history of the last 200,000 years currently being taught in the schools of advanced nations is fundamentally flawed and outdated.” There are major missing chapters. Ironically, the information and knowledge which form these chapters is becoming increasingly evident as a result of new discovery during the last fifty years. To the detriment of mainstream science and education ignore knowledge of UFOs and aliens and refuse to deal with it in an honest, open exchange
One missing chapter involves the fact that Darwinism Evolutions does not provide a scientifically acceptable beginning for biological life on Earth. Science’s current explanation for the emergence of the first living, self-reproducing cell is a fairy story. The hypothesis of Random Formation is unacceptable and has been mathematically shown to be a statistical impossibility. The reason? Unimaginable complexity confirmed in a cell and in its DNA has been clearly recognized by many of the world’s leading cellular-biologists as self-evidently well beyond statistical random-chance. The development of eyes alone is a miracle.
Science’s Alleged Human Evolution
In another major area, science’s explanation for human evolution from Homo erectus to modern people (or roughly the last 200,000 years of evolution) is fatally flawed. There hasn’t been enough time for the rapid changes we have undergone described as “natural selection” and there simply are no missing links in the fossil record between the alleged animals as predicted and expected by science. None will ever be found because the theory is wrong.
In each of these two examples some form of intelligence is demanded and therefore “intervened” with human evolution – hence, Intelligent Intervention.
. In my book I refer to this concept of God as “Universal Intelligence” or (UI) for short. My years of research have led me to see UI as a scientifically recognizable force of nature. I expect Universal Intelligence will ultimately be established as one of the eleven dimensions predicted by String Theory.
Universal Intelligence was present in the Singularity which preceded the Big Bang and is the matrix upon which everything in the visible-material universe we see around us is formed. How we visualize Universal Intelligence depends on the words we use to describe it and the mental images those words convey. Use the correct modern words and Universal Intelligence is a logical, reasonable concept, not supernatural as both religion and science choose to claim. They each maintain their dogma in opposition to the overwhelming evidence to the contrary … because it is politically expedient for both.
Panspermia
The most scientifically sensible explanation for the existence of life on Earth is Panspermia. Tiny, hibernating, biological microbes finding their way to Earth embedded in the debris from another part of our Galaxy and taking seed here. And/or early life may have been sent and planted by a space-probe when the Earth’s surface was appropriate to sustain it by advanced beings from a nearby star. If we make it through the next century or so, humankind will discover there are intelligent, biological, life-forms dispersed throughout the Universe, all being infused with UI. Everything that experiences biological life has a dilute amount of the same force UI is composed of. The specific amount is based on the level of accumulated knowledge and intellect our soul accrues through the experiences of many past bio-forms and lifetimes. From my research,
I have concluded that advanced aliens are most certainly the ones which correctly explains how man evolved from a hairy beast to being able to travel to the moon and make plans to terraform Mars. Ancient aliens are the missing link. There is an overwhelming amount of solid evidence becoming known which substantiates alien intervention on Earth during the last 200,000 years.
Sumarian writing held by Zecharia Sitchin
The evolution of modern people only could have occurred with help as science, logic and direct evidence shows us. When you get right down to it, there are only four possibilities that have ever been presented in all of human history which account for the impossibly rapid evolution of humanity over the last 200,000 years, and also explain the existence of the archeological anomalies which we find all over the planet. They are:
With June comes increasing temperatures, and things are really heating up in the UFO world. Last month we saw the first congressional hearing concerning UFOs—now called UAPs—in over 50 years. ‘After many years of being taboo, discussions regarding UAPs are becoming mainstream. The hearing held on May 17 was the first congressional hearing since a push by then-Congressman Gerald Ford led to an Air Force report and a 1968 congressional hearing. In advance of the hearing, we spoke with numerous congressional officials, including those on the congressional panel, providing them with information and answering any questions they might have on UAPs. As an organization, we have long investigated UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) sightings and have collected the critical data needed to educate the public on UAPs and their potential impact on society.
We applaud members of the United States House of Representatives and, specifically, the House Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counter-proliferation (C-3) Subcommittee for holding a hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena. MUFON is dedicated to the scientific study of UFOs and UAPs in order to benefit humanity.
I am excited that Congress is taking this critical first step in disclosing what is known. Through our knowledge and database of sightings, we know that there are many unanswered questions. Averaging over 6,000 incoming reports per year, MUFON has been able to explain the preponderance of the sightings—although not all of them, of course. We hope that Congress and the Department of Defense continue to be transparent with the American people. We stand ready to assist the government in any capacity that will add to transparency and full disclosure. Thanks to MUFON.
The True Story of an Air Force Intelligence Officer’s Life with UFOs
U.S. Air Force Major George Filer belongs to the generation of pilots and aviators who first became aware of the strange aircraft showing up in the Earth’s atmosphere after World War II. These men – military professionals who flew planes, served as radar operators and air traffic controllers at airfields around the world – began to whisper amongst themselves about encounters with suspected extraterrestrial aircraft.
During secret debriefings at U.S. bases, pilots and air crew told their commanders of seeing UFOs off their plane’s wings. Award-winning investigative author John Guerra spent four years interviewing Filer, a decorated intelligence officer.
From objects in the skies over Cold War Europe to a UFOs over during the Cuban Missile Crisis to lights over the DMZ in Vietnam Filer leaves nothing out about his Air Force UFO encounters,
Filer’s most memorable case – the shooting of an alien at Fort Dix Army Base in 1978 – is fully recounted for the first time in this book. As a member of the Disclosure Project, military experts, astronauts, and scientists urge the U.S. government to release all it knows about UFOs to the public.
Filer describes his UFO encounters in this incredible book, by John L. Guerra.
Filer’s Files July 15 2022 - Life on Titan’s Moon - PART II
Major George A. Filer III ret. USAF
New Jersey State Director
MUFON Eastern Region Director
Special reports are: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and UFOs, Saturn’s Moon Titan Looks Like Earth, Possible Life on Titan, Astronaut Sheppard Golf’s on the Moon, Intelligent Intervention, Congress Discusses UFOs/UAPs, Strange Craft and Carbon 60.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Montana, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Washington.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Belgium, Canada, France, Mexico, Romania, and England in the United Kingdom.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force and DOD investigated UFOs for more than forty years; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFOs are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers. The weekly intelligence report provides you with information on the latest sightings and UFO news that you need to understand the world situation.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
Sightings are from MUFON CMS
Arizona Lights
Yuma on February 5, 2022, I stood outside my house to take a picture and did not see the UFO when picture was taken.
Note: One of the other lights in the photo could be Jupiter. I am not sure of the identity of the other light. I am not sure of the identity of the multiple lights highlighted in the above photo. Thanks to Will Pucket/www.ufosnw.com/newsite/
California Object
Irvine on May 28, 2022. I am a 26-year-old male who frequently does CE5 with my six-year-old daughter who noticed there were two enormous, shaped discs hovering directly southeast. My daughter said, “They were here for us.” We observed them for eight minutes.
Colorado Light
Aurora on June 16, 2022, m y fiancé and I looked up and saw a little white orb bouncing around and blinking. I went through my photos finding some extremely fast-moving objects. I noticed an odd-looking shaped object just hovering with no sound, just lights.
Florida Disc
Fort Lauderdale on July 10, 2022, I was taking a picture of a cool cloud formation near my home. I did not see the object and saw it in the picture.
Illinois Object
Gurnee on June 26, 2022, at 3 pm I was driving down Rollins Road near the corner of 45 & 132 when I noticed a bright shiny object in the sky. After 5 minutes I pulled over and started shooting pics of it. It started to move very slowly to the Southwest and flew away
Indiana Object
Lafitte on June 30, 2022, I saw 4 to 6 blinking orbs traveling back and forth in the sky with all red lights. it had white lights at tip like headlights with a red tail following.
A loud airplane came through the sky and the object flew under the plane
Kansas Lights
Lovewell on June 19, 2022, I went to night fish at Lovewell Lake at 1 am. I look up and there’s a cloud with a bright floodlight inside it lighting up the cloud as it flew south till it disappeared. We saw a spinning physical vehicle that went down into the water.
Montana Tic Tac
Lake Blaine on June 29, 2022, I was driving west on the valley floor on Foothill Road. I witnessed a bright light floating low in the sky, so I turned my car around and began filming. This light cruised silent over a few house tops, and over me.
New Jersey Lights
Columbia on June 18, 2022, I was searching a field for four leaf clovers with my 9-year-old niece. She pointed up and said, “Uncle Scott what is that?”. I saw a red, Tic Tac shaped object hovering at 400 feet high. It was oriented vertically and spinning along its axis.
Ohio Light
Delaware on July 5, 2022, I found this craft in 20 meters of shallow water. I have been researching UFOs since I was a kid. I’m 54 years old now, but when in recess at school we walked into a field and my friend pointed at a small person whose eyes were huge, we took off running from a typical grey alien.
Pennsylvania Light
Philadelphia on July 3, 2022, I was at the Phillies game taking random pictures during the game. I was looking through my pictures later and I saw the object light. The photo is time stamped at 9:50 pm. The fireworks show didn’t start until well after 10 pm.
Tennessee Lights
Guld on July 3, 2022, multiple TicTac shaped UFOs found in personal photograph of skyline over Tennessee river. This occurred just before the fireworks display on July 3rd, 2022. Also in the photograph are “black holes.”
Washington Lights
Marysville on June 30th, 2022, at 11 PM I was in my hot tub and saw 2 separate orange orbs traveling at different paces and both seeming to appear and disappear instantly. I have a 1-minute-long video attached. Both orbs traveled o south along the same flight path. Note: The witness could have seen Chinese Lanterns. The winds aloft were from the north suggesting that the orbs were drifting with the wind. The description, video and still images suggest that the orbs were Chinese Lanterns. Thanks to Will Pucket/www.ufosnw.com/newsite/
Belgium Disc
April 25, 2014 – Disc shaped UFO filmed passing near a passenger plane over Belgium in an amazing video. It was filmed by Eric Giavedoni’s 300 mm lens and published on UFOvni2012’s YouTube channel.
Canada Object
Montréal on July 1, 2022, very black dot flying in a straight line. It was very dark and no other shape or light visible. Might have been a drone but unlikely.
France Object
Vilsberg on October 15, 2014, motorist independently of the first, reports driving into the town at 11:45 p.m. She saw lights and a circular shape which puzzled. Reporting the facts, the two motorists will come into contact.
Mexico Object
Playa Del Carmen Qroo on July 2, 2022, walking down Colosio Avenue, I realize that it is not a plane, or kite. I take a couple of photos and it moves very strangely after 30 minutes. It gets dark and lights start flashing when it suddenly disappears
Romania Lights
Bucharest on July 11, 2022, bright orb that kind of blinked, it was just silent, pure white, glowing, and an exceptionally smooth motion, with varying flying speed.
UK/England Orb
London on June 26, and July 10, 2022, orb was spotted above Brixton Hill.
Mexborough on June 16, 2022, some of the videos are zoomed in and slowed down to capture the object passing by. First video the object passes by too quickly for the naked eye
Help us increase our reach
Our outreach relies on the generosity of our supporters. Join us today. I have put together a DVD or flash drive of the last twenty years of Filer’s Files for you with hundreds of great photographs and UFO sightings that will explain the phenomena and the importance to your life and your family. Additionally, I have included my book within the DVD that includes George Ritter’s exciting abduction story told by Linda Moulton Howe. Broadcaster David E. Twichell joined me to write the book. We are asking for a donation of only $50 that includes next year’s subscription and our book. Please include your e-mail address and mailing address.
Buy a Great DVD
I have put together a DVD of the last twenty years of Filer’s Files for you with hundreds of great photographs and UFO sightings that will explain the phenomena and the importance to your life and your family. Additionally, I have included my book within the DVD that includes George Ritter’s exciting abduction story told by Linda Moulton Howe. Broadcaster David E. Twichell joined me to write the book. We are asking for a donation of only $50 that includes next year’s subscription and our book. Please include your e-mail address and mailing address.
PayPal and/or Credit Card Donations
Check or Money Order.
Filer’s Files C/O George Filer
222 Jackson Road
Medford, NJ 08055
Products and Books
Advertise in the Filer’s Files Newsletter
Filer’s Files Advertising Rates
1 Time 3 Times
Eight lines $25 $20 each
Quarter Page $50 $40 each
Half Page $75 $50 each
Full Page $100 $75 each
31,000 subscribers and placed in website with 4,000,000 hits average.
Website and Filer’s Files advertising, sign up online here. (Limited space available)
Send email to Email George Filer
Our research is uncovering amazing truths by solving challenging projects deemed too difficult by other firms. We have had some success in finding missing persons. We could use your help in getting more results from our research. I have put together a DVD of the last seventeen years of Filer’s Files for you with hundreds of great photographs and UFO sightings. Additionally, I have decided to include my book within the DVD that includes George Ritter’s exciting abduction story told by Linda Moulton Howe. Broadcaster David E. Twichell joined me to write the book. We are asking for a donation of only $50 that includes next year’s subscription and our book. Please include your e-mail address and mailing address.
Have been digging through the giant DVD you sent recently. As a relatively recent joiner, I was unaware of the years’ worth of consistent reports of the same types of objects all over. This has been very educational. Just wanted to thank you for all you’ve done.
Bruce W. Freeman
Attorney at Law
Sign me up right now for Filer’s Files.
JOIN MUFON!
Become a MUFON member today! Benefits of membership include a subscription to the monthly UFO Journal that contains current investigations, sightings reports, articles by world-renowned researchers and more. To join now, click here JOIN NOW
Filer’s Files is copyrighted 2015 by George A. Filer, all rights reserved. Readers may post the COMPLETE files on their Web Sites if they credit the newsletter and its editor by name, and list the date of issue. These reports and comments are not necessarily the OFFICIAL MUFON viewpoint. Send your letters to Majorstar
Sending mail automatically grants permission for us to publish and use your name. Please state if you wish to keep your name or e-mail confidential. CAUTION MOST OF THESE ARE INITIAL REPORTS AND REQUIRE FURTHER INVESTIGATION. If you wish to stop receiving these files, please send a message to Majorstar
Filer’s Files salutes our fighting men and women; God Bless Our Troops, and Georgie, Elizabeth, and Victoria Filer, and Eddie Pedrick. May the Angels be your guide and take you to paradise.
Put another way, a young person in the U.S. is nearly 11 times as likely to die in a swimming pool than in a school shooting. Few public officials would say pools are doing a poor job protecting swimmers, but the statistics suggest that we need “more lifeguards at pools, as opposed to guards at schools,” Fox said
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFO’s are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
CAUTION MOST OF THESE ARE INITIAL REPORTS AND REQUIRE FURTHER INVESTIGATION. If you wish to stop receiving these files, please send a message to Majorstar@verizon.net.
Filer’s Files salutes our fighting men and women Georgie Filer and Eddie Pedrick my grandsons who both drowned. We pray that God will bless those who read these files spiritually.
LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOSLATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS
UFO over New York??
Strange metallic UFO witnessed over Haverstraw New York.
Video Source MUFON Case Number 123521
RELATED VIDEOS
UFO activity over Winter garden, Florida 11-Jun-2022
UFO activity over Winter garden, Florida 11-Jun-2022
This strange UFO lights were filmed in the sky above Winter Garden, a city 14 miles west of Downtown Orlando in the western part of Orange County, Florida.
Witness report:
I saw something weird hovering in a.straight path over some neighborhoods and I have never seen something like this before. I saw something very odd one night that I never seen before.and I recorded 2 videos of it.
Aliens Are Advanced Form Of Humans Living Underwater Long Before Humans Existed, Suggests Ufologist
The topic of underwater UFO bases is s a very large part of Ufology, We have seen numerous reports of how strange flying objects hid under water or appeared from the water. And if the aliens really have underwater bases on Earth, how long ago were they built?
It is likely that UFOs so often follow American warships for a reason – huge aircraft carriers themselves look formidable and impressive, and if they are also located near the alleged underwater UFO bases, then aliens have something to worry about.
Taking into account that UFO sightings by American sailors in most cases were made at those moments when aircraft carriers were on exercises near the coast of the United States, and according to numerous abductees, the UFO submarine bases where they were moved are not somewhere in the far part of the ocean, as well as not far from the coast, this theory has the right to exist.
Of course, there is information about the existence of probable UFO submarine bases in many places on our planet, but for some reason, there are especially many of them near the US coast. This may simply be a feature of the statistics because there are more American UFO researchers than ufologists from other countries, or maybe there is something else.
If we assume that UFOs belong to beings that have been on Earth for many thousands, or even millions of years, then they were here long before the appearance of people and the ancestors of people, and, in this case, the development of mankind as a species took place before their eyes. And America is the last continent (not counting of course Antarctica), inhabited by people.
Thus, having moved their underwater bases to the shores of America in time, these creatures could observe people from a very convenient place for a long time, remaining as unnoticed as possible.
An interview with American ufologist Anna Whitty was recently published in the British tabloid Daily Star in connection with the release of a new documentary on the Roswell incident, “Roswell 75: The Last Evidence” (premiered July 7 on BLAZE). And Whitty stated that aliens are possibly an “advanced form of humans” that hail from Earth and have “always been here” living underwater.
According to Whitty, she studied the testimony of nurse Shirley Wright in great detail, who allegedly accompanied Albert Einstein to a military base, where they were both shown the bodies of dead aliens (and one survivor) from a ship that crashed in 1947 near Roswell in New Mexico. We previously published an article about this curious story.
Whitty says that Shirley was able to communicate with the surviving creature because they understood and could speak English. And at some point, this creature very interestedly asked Shirley about how far people “penetrated into the ocean”.
“If what Shirley said is true, then these ‘aliens’ are probably not visiting us from another planet, but from somewhere deep in the water,” says Whitty.
Whitty also believes that these creatures are actually not aliens at all, but appeared on Earth as a human race and at some point simply went underwater in order to hide or protect themselves from something.
Illustration of underwater alien beings
According to Whitty, they may have been fleeing the inevitable cataclysms that begin to haunt the developed civilization of people at a certain moment in the development of their society and “throwback” them into the “Stone Age”.
Whitty believes that having gone underwater in time and radically changed their lifestyle, these creatures were able to avoid such a fate, which is why they are now far ahead of us in technology, and maybe even in the capabilities of their body and mind.
“It is also possible that they are not at all what they seem to us, but they can make you think that you are seeing something that is not reality.”
Ex-Area 51 Engineer: US Govt. Allows Human Abduction In Exchange For Alien Technology
According to an article published by International business times, it is believed by the alien and UFO conspiracy theorists that the U.S Government is conducting top-secret alien technology reverse-engineering research at multiple subterranean alien-government complexes.
dvanced Technology
According to conspiracy theorists, the testimony of whistleblowers suggests that the government is concealing the truth concerning contact with extraterrestrial species and exposure to advanced alien technology. It has been claimed by numerous whistleblowers have claimed that they have formerly served as government scientists and engineering contractors in subterranean alien-government research sites, such as the top-secret Area 51 military facility in the Nevada desert.
Believing the conspiracy theorists, it can be said that the crashed UFOs that have been found from the sites are housed in top-secret government facilities such as Area 51 and the Dulce subterranean facility.
Conspiracy theorists claim the accounts of many whistleblowers as evidence of continuous reverse engineering of extraterrestrial propulsion technology at Area 51. One such man is Bill Uhouse, who is around 70 years of age and has claimed that he worked from 1966 through 1979 as an engineer at the top-secret Area 51 facility in collaboration with a Grey alien.
This is believed to be a real photograph of an alien named J-ROD kept at Area 51.
According to Uhouse, who died in 2009, he worked in Area 51 as a mechanical engineer with a Grey extraterrestrial known as “J-Rod.” It has been asserted by him that he collaborated with “J-Rod” to produce a flight simulator for the training of Air Force pilots who were supposed to fly superior USAF stealth reconnaissance planes created by reverse engineering studies of extraterrestrial UFOs.
According to Uhouse, he connected with “J-Rod” using a modified Grey extraterrestrial technology for human use. The technology enabled human scientists and engineers to connect with Grey aliens through telepathy with the help of a complex translation program.
Bill Uhouse claims that “J-Rod” taught people at the facility how to operate an extraterrestrial spaceship. It is said that there are distinct species of the Grey aliens, and they consist of Tall Greys, Short Greys, and Greys of equal size to humans. However, it is unknown which of the three main Grey races “J-rod” belonged to.
Uhouse said that aliens and humans were doing reverse-engineering studies at a number of enormous subterranean complexes around the nation. The Area 51 research facility and the Dulce subterranean research facility are among the most well-known sites.
It is commonly thought that the Dulce alien-government subterranean complex, situated under the Archuleta Mesa near Dulce in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, is significantly bigger and more substantial than Area 51.
Allegedly, the buildings were built with the purpose of accommodating Grey, reptilian, and tall white extraterrestrial alien-human hybrids under the tenure of Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, it is thought that the building of the alien-government facilities started.
The agreement with the Greys and the Reptilians stipulated that the government would let the aliens construct subterranean research centers where alien scientists would undertake bio-genetic research to create superior alien-human hybrids.
In order to assist the supposed bio-genetic research program, the U.S. government authorized the aliens to abduct a restricted number of humans for use as test subjects. The aliens promised to provide the U.S. government with access to their superior technologies, particularly aircraft technology.
UFO conspiracy theorists claim that the majority of alien abductions involve Greys and Reptilians conducting bio-genetic experiments on people in a Nazi-style endeavor to create human-alien hybrids. The U.S. authorities are aware that the extraterrestrials are breaching the provisions of treaties made in the 1950s, but the government is unable to stop the violations.
The subterranean facilities include expansive labs and engineering workshops. In these labs, the captive extraterrestrials and kidnapped humans are treated as Guinea Pigs.
According to Uhouse, there may be hundreds or thousands of Grey aliens working on advanced technologies for the Pentagon as part of their attempts to uphold their agreement with the United States government.
What do you think about such claims? Tell us in the comments section below.
Source
Two Spacecraft Could Work Together to Capture an Asteroid and Bring it Close to Earth for Mining
Humanity seems destined to expand into the Solar System. What exactly that looks like, and how difficult and tumultuous the endeavour might be, is wide open to speculation. But there are some undeniable facts attached to the prospect.
We need materials to build infrastructure, and getting it all into space from Earth is not realistic. (Be quiet, space elevator people.)
Asteroid mining is one of those things that’s been talked about for decades but hasn’t happened. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen; in fact, we’ll have to use resources that are already in space if we want to establish a real presence anywhere other than Earth.
There are enormous resources available in asteroids, especially in the Main Asteroid Belt. But Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) also hold vast quantities of water, metals, and volatiles. There are more than 26,000 NEAs, and they could play a key role in humanity’s space-faring future. The problem is, even though they’re termed Near Earth Asteroids, they’re not that accessible. So lots of the talk around asteroid mining involves moving asteroids into more advantageous and accessible orbits.
We’ve learned a lot about the asteroid population in recent decades, especially in the last two decades. In fact, in 2005, Congress asked NASA to catalogue dangerous objects and to find at least 90 percent of potentially hazardous NEOs sized 140 meters or larger by the end of 2020.
We’ve also come to understand asteroid composition better, and scientists have categorized asteroids into types based on composition. The three types are C-Type, M-Type, and S-Type, meaning carbonaceous, metallic, and silicaceous. They’re also grouped by their orbits, and by families, with each member of a family coming from the same parent body.
We’ve also sent spacecraft to study and sample asteroids, which is akin to prospecting here on Earth, though the sampling is aimed more at science than at resource exploitation. JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and NASA have both launched successful asteroid sample return missions. JAXA has returned samples to Earth, and the sample from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx is on its way.
So we understand asteroids’ composition and their orbits, and we’ll continue to catalogue them and study them. We’ll probably continue to sample them, and NASA has taken its first tentative steps in changing an asteroid’s path by redirecting one with a kinetic impact. It seems certain that we’ll want to bring one closer to Earth and use its resources for our needs.
A new study suggests a unique way of shifting asteroids around and moving them into more advantageous orbits. The title is “A multiple-vehicle strategy for near-Earth asteroid capture,” and it’s published in the journal Acta Astronautica. The lead author is Livia Ionescu from the James Watt School of Engineering at the University of Glasgow.
The study shows how two separate spacecraft could work together to move an asteroid closer to Earth, where its resources can be extracted. One of the spacecraft acts as a pitcher, and one acts as a catcher. “These spacecraft act together as a ‘pitcher’ spacecraft and ‘catcher’ spacecraft, where the pitcher spacecraft hops from asteroid to asteroid and deflects them towards an orbit in the vicinity of Earth, while the catcher spacecraft is stationed at the Earth and captures the incoming asteroids,” the authors write.
In their paper, the authors compare their two-spacecraft proposal to other proposed methods using a single spacecraft. According to them, their method is superior.
One of the strengths of their proposal is the lack of round trips. The pitcher spacecraft needn’t return to Earth each time. A single pitcher spacecraft could nudge successive asteroids toward the catcher spacecraft. After nudging an asteroid, the pitcher could reposition itself for the next nudge.
The team’s analysis shows that their dual-spacecraft method is superior. “Results show that the two-spacecraft strategy is capable of returning more asteroid mass and often at a lower mission duration,” they write. Of course, it’s not quite that simple.
The team analyzed their proposal in three ways. They looked at asteroids following co-planar orbits and circular orbits, they analyzed a set of fictional near-Earth asteroids to create a large data set, and they analyzed some real asteroids as mission targets.
Then the team examined two scenarios to compare single-spacecraft missions with two-spacecraft missions. Each scenario is considered in terms of Delta V. Delta V measures how much acceleration is required to move an object, in this case spacecraft and asteroids. Delta V is the heart of the issue, but so is the amount of mass returned.
The team found that their method uses more Delta V than single-spacecraft methods. But their method returns more mass than single-spacecraft methods because the pitcher doesn’t return to Earth’s neighbourhood. In all cases, the target asteroid is placed in Earth’s heliocentric orbit.
“The analysis showed that the two-spacecraft strategy does not impact the required Delta V in a beneficial manner,” the paper states. “However, the aim of an asteroid capture mission is to retrieve useful mass to the vicinity of the Earth.”
But the results presented so far are based on asteroids that have the same mass and that have fairly simple orbits. That, of course, isn’t realistic, so the team dug deeper.
The deeper analysis looked at artificially-generated NEAs with random but realistic elements to their orbits. “Therefore, in this section, the orbital elements of the asteroids will be randomly generated within specified ranges in order to generate statistical data on the relative performance of the one-spacecraft and two-spacecraft strategies,” the authors write.
In this deeper analysis, the mission architectures remain the same. In the single-spacecraft model, the spacecraft travels to an asteroid, brings it to a heliocentric orbit, then travels to the next asteroid. In the two-spacecraft model, the pitcher moves from asteroid to asteroid while the catcher remains in an Earth heliocentric orbit. In their analysis, each mission visits the same asteroids in the same order, but in real mission planning, that may not be the case.
The researchers found a clear correlation in the single spacecraft scenario. Higher ?V resulted in lower returned mass.
The team ran thousands of simulations. In their simulations, the semi-major axes of the asteroids play a key role. The team found that the further away the semi-major axis is from one astronomical unit (AU), the lower the returned mass is.
The paper is full of detail that can’t all be explained here. Overall, it shows that the two-spacecraft mission has some advantages. But that’s only when asteroids are brought to Earth’s heliocentric orbit.
But as we’ve written about here at Universe Today, it may not be necessary to bring asteroids close to Earth. Maybe Mars orbit is a better location.
The paper also doesn’t explore spacecraft design, although the authors acknowledge that if two spacecraft need to be developed, designed, and built, it increases mission complexity. And increased complexity means increased costs. But for the researchers, two things are clear: “The advantages of the two-spacecraft strategy are a higher quantity of retrieved mass and a shorter mission duration. Both imply a potential increase in revenue.”
Of course, any real benefits will depend on individual missions and the orbits and masses of individual asteroids. “Thus, the two-spacecraft has the potential to deliver a higher mass within a lower amount of time, but it still remains dependent on the targeted asteroids and launch date, such that a case-by-case analysis is necessary,” they write.
When the team looked at three specific asteroid missions with each mission architecture, the two-spacecraft advantage was clear. “Two mission cases have been presented with three target asteroids, where the two-spacecraft strategy is able to return approximately 1.5 times its initial mass, while the one-spacecraft strategy is only capable of bringing less than its initial mass.”
The authors don’t speculate much beyond their results. But they do point out that it might be possible for two or more pitcher spacecraft to service a single catcher. The two spacecraft mission is already more complicated than the single spacecraft mission because the pair of spacecraft have to be closely coordinated. Adding additional pitchers would only increase the complexity.
Asteroid mining is a ways off in the future, though, if it ever happens. For now, we’re building a more accurate and complete catalogue of asteroids, we’re bringing asteroid samples back to Earth for analysis, and we’re testing kinetic impactors to influence asteroid orbits.
More:
The post Two Spacecraft Could Work Together to Capture an Asteroid and Bring it Close to Earth for Mining appeared first on Universe Today.
Source:
458 Photos of UAP Between Apollo 16 Module around the Moon, April 1972, Video, UFO Sighing News.
1965 Interview: Pioneer aviator on witnessing a 'Tic Tac' UFO during his 1931 flight from New Zealand to Australia
THE MAN WHO SAW ALIEN BASES ON THE MOON | The Amazing True Story of Ingo Swann
THE MAN WHO SAW ALIEN BASES ON THE MOON | The Amazing True Story of Ingo Swann
THE MAN WHO SAW ALIEN BASES ON THE MOON
Ingo Swann claimed to be a psychic who was employed by the CIA to remote-view the dark side of the moon. Specifically to look for an alien presence. It sounded like science fiction. But in 2006, when the CIA started releasing documents on the Stargate Project, Swann’s participation in the program was confirmed. When Swann was asked about the existence of extraterrestrials, he said not only were they already here, but they *are* building something on the far side of the moon. And, according to Swann, these aliens — aren’t friendly. Let’s find out why.
Cash-Landrum UFO Incident 1980: A Diamond Shaped UFO, Military Helicopters & Long Term Illnesses
In 1980, close to Huffman, Texas, Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum, and 7-year-old Colby Landrum came into contact with a UFO that they claimed was surrounded by a group of military-style helicopters. Following the incident, all three were subjected to various health conditions.
The Cash-Landrum UFO incident remains unresolved to this day
On the evening of December 29, 1980, near Huffman, Texas, three occupants of a 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass witnessed an astounding sight. Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum, and Vickie's seven-year-old grandson, Colby, on their way home to Dayton were driving through the southern tip of the East Texas piney woods when they noticed a large light above the trees in the distance.
The light was briefly lost to view, but they saw it again, when after rounding a curve they found themselves on a straight stretch of two-lane road on Highway FM 1485. This time it was approaching them, floating above the road at less than treetop height and belching flames from its bottom. Cash and the Landrum's were only about 130 feet from the object.
Getting away from the UFO was impossible because the road they were on was that narrow and the ground surrounding the road was soggy and damp. Betty Cash was driving, and she knew if she attempted to turn around the car would get stuck. Betty stopped the car and both she and Vickie stepped outside, the frantic screaming of young Colby soon brought the women back towards the car.
The UFO, a dull metallic silver in colour and shaped like a huge, upright diamond, with the top and bottom cut off so that they were flat rather than pointed. The women claimed that small blue lights ringed the centre of the object, while periodically over the next several minutes, flames would shoot out of the bottom in an outwards manner, creating a cone effect.
All the while the witnesses felt their faces burning. The car was too hot to touch. At one point Vickie Landrum, leaning out the front window, steadied herself by putting her hands on the dashboard, only to find it molded to the shape of her fingers. (The imprints were still there when John Schuessler of the Mutual UFO Networth - MUFON - examined the car.) A few minutes later, when Cash tried to get back into the car, the doorhandle burned her fingers.
With a final blast of fire and heat, the UFO ascended slowly into the sky. But just as it was clearing the treetops, helicopters flew in from all directions. The helicopters and the UFO were then lost to view. The three resumed their journey. They passed along another long curve in the road and in five minutes arrived at the intersection of FM 1485 and FM 2100, where they saw the UFO and the helicopters again. Cash counted 23 helicopters, all clearly visible because the light from the diamond-shaped object was reflecting off them. Many of the aircraft were subsequently identified as large, double-rotor Boeing CH-47 Chinooks, a kind used by the Army and the Marines.
Cash drove on, the diamond UFO and the helicopters still in front of her, until she came to a road that would take them to Dayton. Even then she could see the object in the rearview mirror for the next few minutes. The whole incident lasted a total of 20 minutes.
Cash dropped the Landrums off at their house and proceeded on to her own. Once home she sat in a chair and waited for the sick feeling to pass, but the headache and nausea would not go away, and large knots formed on her neck and scalp. Soon they became blisters. Meanwhile, her skin was reddening, and her eyes swelled. She threw up repeatedly and experienced severe diarrhea.
The Landrum's were suffering similar distress, though not quite so intensely. Their skin looked and felt badly sunburned, but their stomachs were upset.
By morning, friends feared Cash was near death. She had lapsed into near unconsciousness. Cash had previous heart problems in the past but now was too groggy to identify her cardiologist; her friends were forced to call unknown physicians. Those they could reach during the holiday period would not take on an unfamiliar patient with a history of cardiac disorder and, moreover, with a crazy story about having been injured by a UFO.
Knowing nothing else to do, the friends brought Cash to Vickie Landrum's house. Landrum attempted to feed Cash, but she rejected food and water and grew ever weaker. Finally, Landrum persuaded a local pharmacist to look through his prescription records for the name of Cash's cardiologist. As soon as he had it, Landrum phoned and was instructed to take Cash to the Parkway Hospital emergency room.
Betty Cash was taken into the hospital on January 3, 1981. She could not walk and lost large patches of skin and clumps of hair. She was released after 12 days, though her condition was not much better, and she later returned to the hospital for another 15 days. The Landrum's improved slightly, though the sores on their skin and the damage to their eyes persisted. Vickie suffered periodic sickness for the next few years, and her eyesight never entirely recovered. Colby had problems with chronic illness, sores, and hair loss.
A radiologist who reviewed the victims' medical records for MUFON concluded, "We have strong evidence that these patients have suffered damage secondary to ionizing radiation. It is also possible that there was an infrared or ultraviolet component as well."
Ufologists learned of the case when the witnesses reported it to a NASA representative in Houston. He suggested they talk with John Schuessler, an aerospace engineer and NASA supervisor with a longstanding interest in UFOs. Schuessler and some MUFON colleagues then interviewed other witnesses, some of whom had seen the UFO and the helicopters for as long as an hour and a half. They also sought the source of the helicopters. The Fund for UFO Research commissioned Allan Hendry, one of ufology's most trusted investigators, to find out where the aircraft had come from. No airport, civilian or military, would own up to a knowledge of the helicopters.
Cash and Landrum began a long, frustrating campaign to get answers from government agencies. Eventually, their senators, John Tower and Lloyd Bentsen, talked with representatives of the Department of Defense. They urged Cash and Landrum to take their complaints to the Judge Advocate Claims Officer at Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin. In August 1981 they met with Air Force Lawyers at Bergstrom. They were told that if they could find a lawyer willing to represent them, they should file a claim with the US government for compensation for their injuries. The case worked its way through military and federal courts over the next few years, but the witnesses and their attorney could not prove that either the diamond-shaped object or the helicopters were official property. On August 21, 1986, the US District Court judge dismissed the case.
The only known official investigation of any significance was conducted by lieutenant Colonel George Sarran, whom the Department of the Army Inspector General (DAIG) directed to look into the case in 1982. Sarran concluded:
"Ms Landrum and Ms Cash were credible... The policeman and his wife (who had reported seeing 12 Chinook helicopters in the Huffman area on the night of the incident) were also credible witnesses. There was no perception that anyone was trying to exaggerate the truth. All interviewees were extremely cooperative and eager to be helpful in any manner. Through the course of inquiry, the DAIG investigator tried to concentrate on any reason or anyone or any organization which might have been flying helicopters that particular evening in that general area. There was no evidence presented that would indicate that Army, National Guard, or Army Reserve helicopters were involved. "
Meanwhile, according to Schuessler:
"Betty Cash has been hospitalized at least 25 times and had had two operations for cancer (after having shown no previous signs of it). She has had blood problems and trouble with her eyesight. Her hair has regrown, though in a different texture, but she is still very weak and has to spend a good deal of time in bed."
The Cash-Landrum UFO encounter is another fascinating example of aerial phenomena that has been accompanied by both government and military denial, despite witnesses watching their involvement with their own eyes.
RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
How big a deal is NASA's new UFO study?
Experts weigh in.
In early June, NASA announced that it's commissioning an independent study on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), as UFOs have recently been rebranded.
The intent is to move the scientific understanding of UAP forward, said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for science.
"NASA believes that the tools of scientific discovery are powerful and apply here also," Zurbuchen said in a statement(opens in new tab). "We have access to a broad range of observations of Earth from space – and that is the lifeblood of scientific inquiry. We have the tools and team who can help us improve our understanding of the unknown. That's the very definition of what science is. That's what we do."
The UAP study team will be led by astrophysicist David Spergel, previously the chair of the astrophysics department at Princeton University.
"Given the paucity of observations, our first task is simply to gather the most robust set of data that we can," Spergel said in the NASA statement. "We will be identifying what data — from civilians, government, non-profits, companies — exists, what else we should try to collect and how to best analyze it."
Space.com reached out to a number of UAP and UFO (unidentified flying object) groups and leading experts in the field to get their thoughts on NASA's new endeavor.
"During their press conference, it was clear that they would provide an exemplary approach to the subject by combining scientific rigor, transparency and a fundamental curiosity about this longstanding mystery," Powell said. "All scientists interested in the study of these phenomena should welcome NASA's entry into the arena as an indication that the time has come for the scientific community to openly examine this subject, and it is hoped that Congress will appropriate funding to open the study of this enigma to all of academia."
Powell said that the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies would urge NASA to tap into the background knowledge that has already been obtained by other science organizations and become familiar with "the pitfalls and successes in the study of this subject." This will enable more rapid scrutiny of UAP development areas that need expanded scientific involvement, he said.
"In order to facilitate a rapid acquirement of known data, the new NASA UAP group should consider identifying an individual that can coordinate data and information sharing with established UAP organizations," Powell said. "This will help avoid duplication of efforts."
Also welcoming NASA's new study is Avi Loeb, head of Harvard's Galileo Project, a systematic scientific search for evidence of extraterrestrial technological artifacts.
The Galileo Project is currently assembling its first telescope system on the roof of the Harvard College Observatory, planning an expedition to retrieve fragments from the first known interstellar meteor, studying satellite data on UAP and designing a space mission to rendezvous with the next anomalous ('Oumuamua-like) interstellar object that zooms into our solar system.
Loeb recently summarized his thoughts about the NASA announcement in an essay titled "Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery(opens in new tab)."
Overall, this outcome is gratifying and represents a "win-win" development, Loeb said. "The Galileo Project is now likely to receive a boost to its funding from wealthy individuals and foundations with which I am in close contact," he wrote in the essay. "But most importantly, the Project's scientific mission narrative is now echoed within the government. It does not matter who tells the truth as long as it is being told."
Loeb said that it's wonderful that NASA will be engaged in trying to unravel the mysterious nature of UAP. He tags this quest as a "fishing expedition," one that will end up with a mixed bag of natural and human-made objects.
"But even if we have high-quality data on just a single object that demonstrates something else, such as an extraterrestrial technological origin, it would represent the most important discovery in human history," Loeb told The Jerusalem Post recently(opens in new tab).
Loeb said he would be delighted to provide any input that could help NASA's study, "because it shares the intellectual DNA of the Galileo Project," he wrote in the essay. "Government agencies and academia should be working together towards the collection of new evidence-based knowledge on UAP."
Open mindedness applies also to scientific research, Loeb said. "We should explore the unknown by seeking evidence agnostically and not assuming what we might find. Gladly, we now know that both the Galileo Project and NASA agree on following this principle."
"NASA's new UAP initiative is very encouraging, perhaps even more so than the formation of the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group in the Pentagon," said Mark Rodeghier, the scientific director of the Center for UFO Studies in Chicago.
UAP are best investigated openly, Rodeghier said, "both because this will allow a range of qualified researchers to be involved, but also because this will permit the results of the investigation to be shared with the public."
The military has advanced sensor capabilities, and that may be crucial for gathering critical data on the phenomenon, said Rodeghier. "But I have concern that findings will, as a matter of course, not be shared with the public. Those of us who have been advocating for years that more resources be devoted to studying UAP have always recommended that this be done openly and transparently."
Rodeghier said that, at this stage, NASA is conducting reconnaissance to learn what data are available and how best to study the phenomenon — which is exactly the right start — and he is not concerned about coordination with the military.
"Down the road, there could be potential for overlap and redundancy in the two efforts, but science is normally best done with multiple research groups working on the same problem, and UAPs are no different," Rodeghier told Space.com. "I do hope that NASA reaches out to the serious UFO community, because we can advise them on data and data-quality issues that we understand from long experience. Our involvement will make their study more robust and comprehensive."
"I think it's great that NASA, the U.S. Navy, and other organizations are starting to take the UFO question seriously. However, I find it strange that the U.S. Air Force, which has been openly investigating this phenomenon since the 1940s(opens in new tab), is completely quiet on the issue in modern times," said Michael Masters, a professor of biological anthropology at Montana Technological University.
In his new book, "The Extratempestrial Model" (Full Circle Press, 2022), Masters makes the case that UFOs and aliens are our future human descendants, coming back through time to visit and study their own evolutionary past.
Masters spotlights a number of case studies of close encounters. It seems that whenever a case involved military personnel specifically, he said, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations was all over it. "Why are they so quiet now? Why aren't these offices talking to each other and sharing information and data they've collected across multiple decades?"
"I think NASA's involvement is extremely significant," said investigative journalist Leslie Kean, author of The New York Times bestseller "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record" (Harmony Books, 2010).
"We have to remember that when Jimmy Carter was president, he asked NASA to conduct just the sort of assessment that the agency is undertaking now. NASA said no to the president of the United States. Now, NASA has initiated data gathering on its own. Clearly the stigma has lifted. We are living in a different world with respect to UAP," Kean said.
At this stage, NASA's task is simply to gather data, Kean said — to find out what data researchers have, what more they should collect and then determine how to analyze it.
"So we may not be given any major revelations in the near term," she added. "However, this is clearly the first step. And what's really important is that they are looking for data from civilians as well as from government. They will not be working with classified data and will make everything transparent to the public. This should stimulate additional scientific investigation, and it will greatly help lift the stigma even further within the scientific community."
NASA's UAP look-see should help groups like the Galileo Project, and hopefully data can be shared between those two organizations, said Kean. "I hope NASA accesses data from space. If we can document the existence of UAP in space, then we really have something."
Kevin Knuth is an associate professor of physics at the University at Albany (State University of New York). He is an active UAP researcher.
"Given that pilots have been, and still are, reluctant to come forward regarding encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena, one must seriously ask whether NASA astronauts have seen significant unidentified phenomena in space," Knuth said. "I would hope that the NASA UAP investigation interviews NASA astronauts to determine what may have been witnessed in space. Perhaps there will also be interviews of former or current cosmonauts?"
Given that civilian organizations are becoming more active in space, there is the potential for a new safety issue involving UAPs, said Knuth. "Does NASA plan to require astronauts to report encounters with unknown objects in space like the U.S. Navy now does?"
Knuth points out that there are a number of former and current NASA scientists actively working to study UAPs via several research groups, including Loeb's Galileo Project. "I would hope that the NASA study team takes advantage of their energy, experience and expertise on the topic," Knuth said.
Not everyone is enthusiastic about the NASA UAP effort.
"NASA says that they are establishing an independent group of investigators to look into UAP reports, but it's difficult to see why this is expected to accomplish anything," said Robert Sheaffer, a leading skeptical investigator of UFOs.
For 75 years there have been plenty of people looking into UFO/UAP claims, some of them very educated, and still no solid findings have emerged, Sheaffer said. "So what does NASA bring to the table that wasn't there before? Do people really think that no astronomers or physicists have ever investigated UFO reports until now?"
Sheaffer pointed out that NASA's budget for its UAP appraisal is a modest $100,000, "which in the overheated world of government contracts won't even pay for a single full-time researcher for one year."
By contrast, from 2008 to 2011, the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program gave $22 million to the Nevada-based company Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies to investigate UAPs and their allegedly "collocating" weirdnesses, Sheaffer said.
"It ended up with reports of poltergeists, paranormal wolf-like creatures and malevolent blue orbs attacking people, but they still learned nothing about the nature of UAPs," he said. "The Department of Defense refused to appropriate any money after that."
Sheaffer senses that the problem is not that there is too much data to analyze; rather, there are only anecdotal reports, blurry photos and other shaky information.
"Those who are familiar with the history of 75 years of UFO reports understand the perils of taking eyewitness reports at face value, a lesson that government investigators of high strangeness apparently have yet to learn," Sheaffer said.
Ariel School 62 Children Witnessed Landing Of Grey Aliens In Zimbabwe 1994, New Photo Evidence
According to UFO expert Jerome Clark, one of the most remarkable encounters with the third kind happened on September 16, 1994, at the Ariel School, Ruwa, Zimbabwe. 62 students, whose average age was 10, saw mysterious objects in the sky at 10:15 local time. They later described them as round structures with a metal surface and red lights. Their lights were flashing. The UFOs seemed to dissolve several times, and then reappear in another place.
One of the three UFOs began to descend at a leisurely pace and finally landed on the ground behind trees, 100 meters from the school. This incident frightened the children and they called the teachers. Just at the time of the UFO landing, all the teachers of the school were attending a meeting and did not immediately take the children’s cries seriously.
As the students later said, they ran to the landing site in front of the Ariel school and saw a bunch of light hovering or standing on the ground behind a small grove. This light turned out to be a giant round UFO with a metallic surface. Some children claimed to have seen humanoid figures standing near the flying object.
According to the children, the humanoids were short, wore black overalls, and had a pale complexion. Their eyes were oval and black (similar to the descriptions of Greys). The schoolchildren described the hair of aliens as long and black. The aliens reportedly did not speak.
However, several children claimed to have heard fragmentary phrases that dealt with the topic of environmental pollution on Earth. Most of the students at Ariel Elementary School got scared and ran back to the school to tell the teachers about their encounter. The teachers confirmed that there was a panic among the children.
Read also:
Just a few minutes after the landing in the field of the Ariel school, the UFO took off again. The teachers also approached the object’s landing site but found no trace of the flying saucer there. The stories of the schoolchildren differed in some details regarding the UFO itself, the aliens, and the sequence of events.
Four days after the incident, local reporter Cynthia Hind analyzed it by first having the students writing down their impressions on paper and then asking them what exactly had happened there. In addition, Hind conducted interviews with the teachers and parents of schoolchildren.
The journalist believed that the children were telling the truth, although their stories sounded bizarre. Hind, who died in 2000, had publicly acknowledged her own experiences with otherwordly beings in the past, and had dedicated a decade and a half of her life to investigating UFO sightings on the African continent on behalf of the Mutual UFO Network, and then publishing her findings in the very collectible newsletter, UFO Afrinews.
“I had brought along a printout of Issue 11, which I opened on the bar counter before Sarah on Hind’s article “UFO flap in Zimbabwe: Case No 95”. It begins: “Wednesday, 14th September 1994, was an exciting night for Southern Africa. Roundabout 20:50 to 21:05 hours, a pyrotechnic display of some magnificence appeared in the almost clear night skies of this part of the continent.”
Some thought that the figures were Zvikwambo (spirits of humans, raised by magic) or tokoloshe (evil goblin creatures of Shona and Ndebele folklore). Hind believed these different interpretations, accompanied by similar drawings and descriptions, gave more credibility to the idea that the children had all seen a similar event.
She also believed that the kids would not have had access to the media about UFOs which could have tainted their testimony or planted similar images in their imaginations, telling the TV show Sightings “a lot of these children don’t go to the movies. They live in the country. Parents are farmers”. The argument that if they had not encountered these images before and then described something similar gives more credibility to their alien encounter being real.
Two months later, in November 1994, Dr. John E. Mack, a Pulitzer prize-winning author (awarded for his 1977 study of Lawrence of Arabia, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of TE Lawrence) and a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School performed his analysis, which lasted for 48 hours. And, based on the results of the interviews, he came to the conclusion that the students had really experienced the event and perceived it exactly as they described it.
“It looked like it was glinting in the trees. It looked like a disc. Like a round disc,” one child witness told the BBC a few days after the incident. “I saw something silver on the ground amongst the trees. And a person in black,” another child said.
Mack has recently been investigated by Harvard for giving credence to the idea of the witnesses who had “reported a ‘close encounter’ with an Extraterrestrial life form that this experience might well have been real.”
In 2008, the documentary “Ariel Phenomenon,” directed by Randall Nickerson, was released. He interviewed many former students who witnessed the visit of aliens near the Ariel school, and they all insisted that everything happened exactly as they described it.
Based on the descriptions of the students who witnessed the incident near the Ariel School, the humanoid alien figures are very similar to typical Greys. At the same time, one detail differs from the classic image of the grey: the creatures that were seen near the Ariel school in Zimbabwe had long black hair on their heads.
One student drew a picture of an alien that allegedly came out of the UFO in front of the group of school children
UFO sketch by Ariel school children
UFO sketch by Ariel school children
UFO sketch by Ariel school children
Nickerson believes he himself is a victim of UFO abduction, suggesting it on The Oprah Winfrey Show. This will lead some to believe that his work is biased to reinforce his own preconceptions of what UFOs might be.
Recently, Dailymail has published photographs of wedge-shaped impressions in the “rock-hard” soil and an oval indentation in the long grass allegedly left by the craft on the ground. Photographer Gunter Hofer was one of the first on the scene to document what happened, and shared his photos with DailyMail.com.
Hofer realized some of the children had also seen UFOs the day before on the other end of the campus, which led him to discover the physical evidence.
“We noticed some of the kids drew two objects. One object looked like a cigar, and they labeled that ‘Thursday. Then they drew what they saw on Friday the 16th which is more of a disc-like, oval-shaped object,” Hofer told to Dailymail.
Hofer said two boys had told him that on Thursday, September 15, 1994, they saw a craft with flashing lights flying above the power lines at the other end of the playground.
“It was moving, disappeared, instantly reappeared somewhere else, and then vanished,” he said.
He further added: “It was in that location he found the flattened grass and wedge markings. The earth there was rock-solid due to a long drought in Zimbabwe.
So whatever made that mark really dug in hard.”
The Ariel school report takes its place among a number of other prominent mass sightings of strange UFOs involving schoolchildren. In 1966, approximately 200 students and staff reported seeing a cigar-shaped UFO, landing near their school in Melbourne, Australia. A similar witness report came from a school in Miami, Florida, in 1967. So did children in Britain report a UFO landing near their school in 1977, some also claiming to have seen strange beings outside the craft.
The existence of a dead humanoid civilization on Mars that was destroyed by a massive nuclear explosion is explained by physics
The greatest justification for what may have occurred on Mars comes from a 2015 research written by physicist John E. Brandenburg. A tremendous thermonuclear explosion decimated the planet’s atmosphere, which formerly resembled Earth’s. The Cydonian Hypothesis and Fermi’s Paradox were taken into account in the investigation.
In light of the imaging and geochemical findings, Brandenburg thought about the Cydonian Hypothesis. He used the Giza Pyramids, the Sphinx, and Olmec heads as analogs under the Principle of Mediocrity with attention to detail to adopt a model of Earthlike degraded archeology for comparison with Mars relics.
Enrico Fermi investigated the issue of an active universe that may support intelligent life. In addition, he was aware of how old the universe was in comparison to us. Other species had plenty of time to evolve, create radio and television transmissions, and spread across the cosmos to all inhabited worlds.
John E. Brandenburg
Since its inception, NASA has anticipated the possibility of discovering relics of earlier intelligent activity within the Solar System: “Though intelligent or semi-intelligent life may exist elsewhere in our solar system, it is very likely that if intelligent extraterrestrial life is discovered in the next twenty years, it will be by radio telescope from other solar systems. Artifacts left on the moon or other planets may potentially provide evidence of its presence.
The Cydonian Hypothesis, which postulates the existence of an old, native culture on Mars that dates to the roughly Bronze Age, was supported by evidence from the two Martian locations Cydonia Mensa and Galaxias Chaos, as demonstrated by physicist Brandenburg in his study. There is proof that a large mixed fusion-fission explosion occurred on Mars close to Cydonia Mensa, according to isotopic and gamma-ray data from the planet.
Large Thermonuclear Explosions On Mars in the Past: Evidence
The noble gases, whose original relative abundances are thought to have been fixed by primordial nucleo-synthesis predating the formation of the solar system, remain nearly free of chemical reactions with the environment, and which provide clues to the processes that have shaped modern planetary atmospheres.
Two noble gas isotopes, 129Xe and 40Ar, dominate their other isotopes in relation to Earth and other inventory, which is a distinguishing characteristic of Mars’ atmosphere. Due to nuclear processes occurring in a planetary environment, both of these gases are known to be radiogenic. Due to its distinctive isotopic characteristics, Mars was identified as the parent body of the SNC meteorites.
It implies that significant radiological processes that produced a significant number of signature isotopes and blanketed the Martian surface in a thin layer of radioactive debris enriched in particular elements relative to its underlying rocks likely took place there. Two significant abnormal nuclear explosions that occurred on Mars in the past can be attributed to this pattern of phenomena.
Since it assumed that the same processes: life, evolution, and civilization, which produced the Pyramids and the Sphinx on Earth, had operated on Mars and for a comparable period of time, it was the most straightforward explanation that could be formulated, based on Viking data, for the apparent archeology on Mars.
Based on evidence that biology started early on Mars, as it did on Earth, and persisted for the majority of its geologic history. This evidence includes an ocean bed on the youngest part of Mars, a high degree of oxidation in the surface and sediments of Mars, and evidence that both planets evolved with a liquid water environment on their surfaces.
The Face in Cydonia and the neighboring D&M Pyramid were the two places where the Cydonian Hypothesis was founded, along with evidence of a prolonged Terrestrial climate on Mars.
The author now comes to the conclusion that the CH has been confirmed after higher resolution images of the face and D&M pyramid in Cydonia Mensa revealed apparent brickwork and new anatomical and artistic details not seen in Viking Images, as well as new images of the face “Galaxias A” in Galaxias Chaos (also known as the Utopia site), which confirmed its similar structure to the face in Cydonia Mensa and new details suggesting brickwork.
That is to say, some places on Mars have obvious eroded archeology from a long-dead indigenous culture, which is compatible with a long-lived, highly developed biosphere on Mars in the past, similar to the one on Earth. In passing, it’s also important to note that the nuclear catastrophe detailed in the paper would have spared certain bacterial species, and these might have been found in Gilbert Levin and Patricia Straat’s 1976 Viking Labelled Release Experiments.
The presence of a long-dead humanoid society on Mars is entirely compatible with both the planet’s apparent long-lived Earthlike past climate and the Principle of Mediocrity, which holds that any long-lived Earthlike environment will eventually give rise to intelligent life. This Martian civilisation likely vanished as a result of an unidentified global disaster that transformed Mars’ environment from being Earthlike to what it is now in a very short amount of geologic time. But was it a major nuclear assault that brought this civilisation to an end?
All things considered, the evidence points to Mars being the site of a nuclear war on a planetary scale. Thus, Mars could hold the key to solving Fermi’s paradox. To learn as much as possible about what happened there, Brandenburg suggested that a mission for human habitation of Mars be launched right now.
RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter211
The real thing: Pentagon Confirms F18 Navy Pilot Recording UFOs in Sky on His Phone (PHOTO)
In one of these three encounters, an object (UFO) fell from 60,000 feet high right down to sea level and then began to hover immediately, and all of this happening in less than a second. This same device (identical) would then transfer to other areas simultaneously and then materialise in other areas, what seemed to be remote time travel, an instant transfer of the ship. All this while allegedly predicting the Navy Pilot’s future position!
The New York Times also published a report entitled ‘off world cars’ being recovered. Many similar and related encounters have been published as the paperwork has become declassified over the the last twenty years. Only one event from the Navy has received significant mainstream publicity in that time.
Christopher Mellon, the Former Deputy Assistant Secretary Of Defense For Intelligence tweeted out about a possible leak which brought it to our attention. It came with several photographs as well as video footage for the Navy troops.
The Debrief States..
The Pentagon has acknowledged that US Navy Troops recorded multiple leaked photographs and a video exhibiting unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, involving instances presently under investigation by the Department of Defense’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. Susan Gough, a Pentagon spokesperson informed the debrief in an email.”
Susan Gough, the founder of the Black Vault, which is a well known Government website did end up verifying the tapes in her statement. There was also an interview with former CIA director James Woolsey.
On April 6, 2021 these photos were leaked. KLAS investigative journalist George Knapp released the first photo, now known as “Acorn” as well as two other new photos indicating unidentified flying objects.
The other two photos were coined “the metallic blimp” and “spherical” were named by Knapp. These were said to be obtained within 30 minutes of each other on the same day.
The second image seems to be clear and transparent as well as spherical. Take a look for yourself:
“We are talking about objects that have been seen by Navy and Air Force pilots or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain,” “movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.”
According to data from the National UFO Reporting Center, sightings of unidentified objects in the air reportedly rose in 2020 by about 1,000 nationwide, to more than 7,200 sightings
Perhaps the most startling video is the one recorded from the deck of the USS Russell, which appears to show several unidentified flying triangles “flashing” in the clouds off the coast of San Diego. The brief video was shot through a night-vision camera in July of 2019, Corbell says.
“I can confirm that the referenced photos and videos were taken by Navy personnel,” Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough said in a statement to the Black Vault, a site with a long history of obtaining UFO-related documents through freedom of information laws.
“They confirmed they are all genuine, but won’t give their designation,” site operator John Greenewald said.
“The UAP (Task Force) has included these incidents in their ongoing examinations,” Gough said.
“As we have said before, to maintain operations security and to avoid disclosing information that may be useful to potential adversaries, DOD does not discuss publicly the details of either the observations or the examinations of reported incursions into our training ranges or designated airspace, including those incursions initially designated as UAP.”
“These are authentic photos and video from actual military encounters with UFOs — generated to educate high-level intelligence officers within our military on the nature and presentation of the UAP/UFO phenomenon,“ he wrote on his website.
Physicist from Finland’s University of Helsinki Decodes Strange Crop Circle With a Binary Code and Alien Face
Vigay says that the message was encoded in ASCI binary code, an eight-bit code used in computer programming.
Meanwhile, a paper has been published on the circles titled ‘Crop Circles and Life at Parallel Space-Time Sheets.’
“Crabwood message consists of two parts. An alien picture and a picture representing spiral like bit sequence starting from the center of the picture and proceeding counterclockwise. It has been proposed that the message is coded using 9-bit code and that 8-bit portions obey ASCII code.
If this is in fact true, the message reads as follows:
‘Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES. Much PAIN but still time. EELI!UVE. There is GOOD out there. We OPpose DECEPTION. Conduit CLOSING\’
Pitkonen concludes that whoever made the circle is “extremely artistically, technologically and mathematically advanced to a point beyond belief.”
Final Thoughts on These Crop Circles
The question we should be asking ourselves now is, why are findings like these from world class researchers constantly dismissed, without even so much as a second thought?
Why does the mainstream media ignore them, and will things ever change? That is of course a rhetorical question, but in the meantime let’s do our best to share this information with anyone willing to listen — these researchers are doing brilliant work that simply cannot be ignored any longer.
Take a look at what he added here:
Solar probe captured strange event near the sun
Alien and UFO Encounters from Another Dimension
The universe is so complex that even the greatest scientific minds on earth ultimately acknowledge that we do not understand the forces and true nature of the cosmos, let alone our place within it. Now for the first time, the un-seeable and unbelievable has been caught on video by multiple individuals who have not only captured mind bending video of Entities, UFOs and Angels, but have been profoundly affected by their experiences. Confronted by the unknown, they all share a deep and unwavering need to know and understand the phenomenon they are experiencing. These individuals did not seek recognition or compensation, they are driven by the questions: “Who are we? What is real?” The sky is alive and has been for millennia with non-human activity, much of which is not visible to the naked eye. See concrete evidence with real video from beyond human perception and discover a realm of fallen angels and otherworldly visitors in a universe that is beyond our comprehension. Dare to ask yourself, what is our place in the cosmos?
RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
This Is What Top Missile Defense Executives Just Said About UFOs
The U.S. military constantly monitors the airspace over and around the country for threats ranging from wayward Cessnas to truly unidentified craft, primarily using a network of radars, many of which are shared with the FAA, as well as alert fighter aircraft. This ecosystem is increasingly eyed for enhancements as the nature of the threat to the homeland morphs, especially in terms of the danger posed by cruise missile and drone attacks. At the same time, Congress is literally holding public hearings about unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, more classically referred to as UFOs. The topic exploded in the media thanks mainly to a media blitz by retired defense intelligence officials. In fact, Congress is now considering providing something akin to blanket immunity to public officials, military personnel, and even contractors, with any info on the UAP topic.
With this in mind, The War Zone thought the Center For Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) gathering yesterday of missile defense managers from top defense contractors that were brought together to discuss homeland cruise missile defense was a great opportunity to get perspective on the highly contentious UAP issue through their unique lens. We had a question about how existing and future airspace-monitoring and air defense systems aimed at countering cruise missiles could be harnessed to address the challenges presented by UAPs and the moderator, Global Business Editor at Defenseone.com, Marcus Weisgerber, was kind enough to present it to the panel.
Before we get to their responses, we need to provide a bit more background.
There have been a concerning number of reportedly unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft or objects over military facilities, near military aircraft and warships, and in designated test and training airspace in recent years. In particular, it is no secret that unidentified objects with small radar cross sections have been detected in military training ranges along both coasts with alarming regularity. The War Zone detailed a rash of encounters by Navy fighter pilots with unidentified craft off the U.S. East Coast over the last decade. There also was a bizarre string of events off Southern California in 2019. While it may be possible that these recent sightings include encounters with objects with extreme or unexplainable abilities, we have yet to see evidence of this. That doesn't mean evidence doesn't exist, though. What we do know for a fact is there have been many sightings that are explainable, but still extremely troubling.
An existing network of sensors monitors these same areas for potential nefarious actions, but upgrading this architecture to be able to better detect low-flying and small radar cross-section cruise missiles and drones is becoming a massive priority. This spurred the upgrade of F-15C/D and F-16C/D jets tasked with homeland defense with active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars, for instance, which can detect small, low-flying targets. The addition of infrared search-and-track (IRST) systems will help these fighters further to detect, identify, and engage these hard-to-spot targets. But these are just some first steps and a much more extensive sensor upgrade will be needed to better surveil the approaches to the continental U.S. and monitor for these threats. These same capabilities could be brought to bear for detecting and classifying UAPs. This includes having networking and sensor fusion capabilities so that even more complex targets – like those employing electronic warfare tactics – can still be detected, understood, and dealt with if need be.
Nick Bucci, vice president of defense systems and technologies at General Atomics, expounded on this idea.
“Maybe something that is designed to spoof one particular sensor can’t spoof another thing,” Bucci said. "So if I can ensure detection from, say, an [eleoctroptical/infrared] sensor or a [radio frequency] sensor, now I can start pulling that picture together better and getting better characteristics because I've looked at it different ways."
“Using passive sensors is another great way to get different information. Why don't we talk about acoustic sensors?" he continued. "There are a lot of really good acoustic sensors out there, which we happen to make – one that has been used for cruise missile defense and counter-UAS. Those are important sensors to now bring into this architecture. So that you can get that broader picture of the characteristics of a particular threat or object so you can tell whether it's a threat, to be sure you're going to do the right thing.”
Creating a multi-spectrum architecture where a sufficient number of sensors of various types are continuously monitoring the airspace is a costly proposition, said Doug Booth, director of radar and integrated air and missile defense at Lockheed Martin. Still, using ground radar installations in conjunction with airborne radars will help to paint a better picture of objects approaching, entering, or transiting the U.S. National Airspace, he said.
“I think there are multiple things that can be done there to help us solve the problem,” Booth said.
Jonathan Casey, director of small-to-medium ground-based air defense mission capability at Raytheon Missiles & Defense, said identifying objects as threats will always be difficult and that increased levels of scrutiny should be applied depending on whether the nation is at war or perceives an imminent national security threat – a point we discussed previously in great detail as it pertains to UAP. In times of war, the military could put less effort into parsing what an object is by assuming every unidentified object detected is a potential threat and treating it as such, he said.
“When there's a very, very high level of alert, do you reduce the level of confirmation you need in terms of combat ID?” Casey said. “I think that's a difficult decision. … Other than getting eyes on the target. It's never gonna be 100 percent. I mean, that's the 100 percent way to do it.”
Artificial intelligence and algorithmic analysis could sift through large quantities of airspace monitoring data to highlight abnormalities for human technicians to consider, Casey said. Social media companies take the same approach when trying to identify bot accounts among the millions of legitimate users and the level of scrutiny could be dialed up or down depending on the current threat alert state, he said.
David McFarland, senior director of missile defense programs at BAE Systems and a retired Navy captain, said the military services already employ different standards for combat identification in the missile defense arena, depending on threat levels. But those standards outlining flight characteristics and electronic emissions of various known enemy missiles can be circumvented, he said. Adversaries can use the crowded U.S. airspace to mask nefarious activity or even attacks, he said.
And crowded it is. We have cataloged and geolocated thousands of official FAA safety reports involving drones from pilots, many of which are unidentified, from across the country in recent years. You can check that out here and read more about our findings here and here.
"When I think about defense of the National Capital Region [NCR], boy, I can make a Tomahawk [cruise missile] kind of fly like a commercial airliner," McFarland said. "I could probably get into squawk mode and code that looks like a commercial airliner. Oh, by the way, there's this nice mountain range ... right outside of D.C. that can mask my approach and come in that way. Squawk and emote and code and looking all great. I can get away with it one time at least right? But that one time matters."
The NCR is the most highly surveilled and defended airspace in the United States. Nothing else exists like in the country in terms of a standing advanced integrated air defense system that includes many types of sensors and surface-to-air missiles. Still, concerns exist regarding its vulnerability to emerging capabilities and asymmetric attacks.
His solution was to thwart missile defense threats before they are within striking range of the U.S. homeland. McFarland used the example of Cold War-era anti-submarine warfare (ASW), in which the Navy would use satellite imagery to count Soviet Oscar class submarines in their homeports. When one was “missing,” the Navy would then dispatch ASW aircraft to go find it, he said.
“Before it becomes an air defense problem, make it an ASW problem,” McFarland said. “We’ve got to start thinking big. We’ve got to start thinking about the battlespace differently. It's now the homeland, which means everything else, you know, we have to be out there with our forward-deployed forces with the mindset that we are defending the homeland.”
The Navy is certainly concerned with the homeland, as it now considers the Atlantic a contested environment, and Russian submarines, some of which are extremely hard to detect, operate untracked in that body of water. China's ability to reach out and put the U.S. at risk of attack is also increasing.
But the Navy shoulders no official burden to police the U.S. National Airspace. That responsibility lies with the Air Force, which talks a lot about cruise missile defense, but says next to nothing about UAPs. The two issues are almost inextricably linked because an object flying toward or into U.S. airspace must be considered a threat until it can be positively identified as benign.
That requires seamless sensor fusion and split-second data analytics, McFarland said.
"We have to flow information openly," McFarland said. "It all comes back down to data."
The U.S. has sufficiently advanced intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to identify most aircraft and other objects that enter its airspace, but there are not enough sensors deployed and they must be upgraded on par with threats that could spoof or evade them, said Michael Noble, senior director of advanced missions at Anduril Industries.
“We have fantastic radar,” he said. ”We have fantastic EO [electro-optical], awesome [signals intelligence], etc. It will continue to improve and we need more sensors, absolutely. But I think a key thing to realize here is this is not something we solve. The enemy has a vote here, so the way we do combat ID is going to vary from one target to another and they're going to adjust. … This architecture is going to have to evolve.”
Noble said the future U.S. air defense architecture should include the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) layered atop other overhead satellite-based sensors, ground radars, and airborne assets. All of those things must be integrated into a single system through which information flows seamlessly, he said.
HBTSS satellites are designed to provide continuous tracking and targeting of enemy missiles launched from land, sea, or air, according to Northrop Grumman, the company developing the system. They are one part of the Overhead Persistent Infrared (OPIR) multi-layered constellation of satellites, “which can sense heat signatures to detect and track missiles from their earliest stages of launch through interception,” one company press release says.
Bucci agreed with Noble's prescribed approach, but said the optimal multi-layered, multi-spectrum airspace defense architecture is far enough in the future that an intermediate plan to handle detection and missile-defense warnings is needed.
"Persistence is what we need,” Bucci said. “You don't have persistence until you get that fully-populated constellation of satellites that gives you 24/7/365 heads-up data. In the meantime, you have search capabilities. You put out medium altitude, high altitude, long-endurance UAVs with the right sensor suites on them to be able to search to where indications and warnings have given you some level of information that I now have a rogue submarine off the East Coast.”
While most people think “flying saucer” and “aliens” when they hear UFO, discussions of unknown airspace intrusions are now mainstream enough to be seriously considered in the halls of power in Washington. The government’s reframing of the issue as unidentified aerial phenomenon is one indication that the debate is moving from the realm of science fiction and conspiracy theory to real-world national security. And there are a multitude of good reasons for this that have nothing to do with hunting for the paranormal or visitors from space invaders. The biggest being that the next big weapons capability breakthrough may very well look and act unlike what came before it — alien in nature, if you will. An adversary could and likely would leverage silly cultural stigmas against reporting unidentified flying objects to their advantage, even making the mundane appear anything but.
Regardless, that a panel of high-ranking defense industry executives fielded a question about UAP with straight faces underlines both the reality that the issue is a serious one and that missile-defense technology is a potential solution to detecting, tracking, and identifying these phenomena.
Ultimately, as they said, solving the UAP issue will require a greater number of more-advanced sensors, signaling a secondary market for the technologies their companies already sell to or could develop for the government to defend the U.S. homeland against enemy missiles. They likely understand that if Congress believes UAP are a threat to national security, dollars will flow toward that problem set. And considering that the Pentagon is already standing up a much more deeply mandated and resourced office dedicated to this issue, and those who hold the purse strings are a driving force behind its establishment, they would be right.
Onderzoek naar leefbare planeten en de levensloop van sterren(stelsels): dit kunnen we de komende 20 jaar verwachten van de James Webb Space Telescope
Fotomontage HLN: De spiegels van de James Webb Space Telescope en het Kwintet van Stephan, een groep van vijf sterrenstelsels.
© Laura Betz / AP en NASA / AFP
Vier prachtige foto’s van sterrenstelsels, een analyse van de atmosfeer van een planeet ver weg van ons en donderdag als verrassing een testfoto van Jupiter. De James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) heeft al een goede eerste indruk nagelaten, maar deze week was eigenlijk slechts een voorproefje. Wat kunnen we nog verwachten van de ruimtetelescoop? Waarom kostte de ontwikkeling ervan tientallen miljarden euro’s en duurde dat meerdere decennia? En hoe lang zal de JWST nog operationeel blijven? We zochten het voor je uit.
De JWST heeft deze week getoond waar het goed in is: prachtige en vooral enorm gedetailleerde foto’s maken van plekken in het universum die miljarden lichtjaren van ons verwijderd zijn.
Dat kan dankzij de enorme, iconische spiegel bestaande uit de achttien zeshoekige segmenten, die allemaal apart af te stellen zijn. De totale breedte ervan is 6,5 meter, vergeleken met de spiegel van de Hubble-ruimtetelescoop die 2,4 meter breed is. Daardoor is de JWST tien tot honderd keer gevoeliger. Hieronder zie je een vergelijking tussen de Hubble en JWST.
Die gevoeligheid maakt het mogelijk om meer licht op te vangen en vooral licht dat minder energie bevat. Dat maakt de JWST ideaal om sterren en andere objecten te observeren die enorm ver weg van ons liggen. Hoe verder die van ons verwijderd zijn, hoe zwakker het licht dat ze uitstralen of reflecteren.
De onderkant van de James Webb Space Telescope heeft verschillende hitteschilden die de apparatuur moeten beschermen tegen de kracht van de zon.
© NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez
Licht van die verre sterren ligt daarom op het infrarode deel van het elektromagnetische spectrum. Onzichtbaar voor het blote oog, maar detecteerbaar voor de JWST. Dat infrarode straling ook door warme objecten zoals de zon wordt uitgezonden, betekent dat de ruimtetelescoop afgekoeld moet worden tot min 370 Fahrenheit of min 223 graden Celsius.
Dat de JWST operationeel is en foto’s kan doorsturen, is zowat een wetenschappelijk wonder. Het kostte vele jaren werk en er was een gigantisch budget voor nodig.
De spiegel van de telescoop is namelijk zodanig gigantisch dat die opgevouwen moest worden om op een raket te passen. Na de lancering op 25 december 2021 hadden ingenieurs weken lang werk om de spiegel te ontvouwen en juist af te stellen.
Een testbeeld van de James Webb Space Telescope dat bestaat uit 72 verschillende foto's die werden genomen tijdens een periode van 32 uur, nog voor de instrumenten goed waren afgesteld.
© AFP
Dat was een kwestie van een foto nemen, de data ervan te verwerken om op basis daarvan de instellingen lichtjes aan te passen om de resultaten te verbeteren. Dat proces moest stap voor stap meerdere keren worden herhaald, getuigen NASA-werknemers bij ‘The Verge’.
Dat gebeurde bovendien vanop een afstand van zo’n anderhalf miljard kilometer van de aarde. De hitte van onze planeet zou het de JWST namelijk extra moeilijk maken. Bij de Hubble-telescoop was het nog mogelijk om astronauten reparaties te laten uitvoeren, de nieuwe ruimtetelescoop onderhouden is praktisch onmogelijk.
De ontwikkeling en het testen van de JWST startte in 1996, met een oorspronkelijke planning in 2007 en een budget van 500 miljoen dollar. Omgerekend is dat bijna 874 miljoen euro, rekening houdende met de inflatie.
In 2005 werd er echter besloten om de plannen te schrappen en opnieuw te beginnen. Ook gooide de coronapandemie op het einde nog wat roet in het eten. Het totale budget werd uiteindelijk eind vorig jaar berekend op 9,7 miljard dollar of ruim 9,6 miljoen euro. Dat is voor de volledige ontwikkeling en het toestel werkzaam te houden in de ruimte.
Bekijk ook: Wetenschapsexpert Martijn Peters legt uit hoe de James Webb Space Telescope werkt
Ook moest er nieuwe technologie ontwikkeld worden om het concept werkbaar te maken. Experts zeggen volgens ‘The Verge’ dat de JWST zo uniek en complex is dat NASA nooit een realistische inschatting kon maken van de ontwikkeltijd en -kost.
De ingenieurs en wetenschappers zijn er gelukkig in geslaagd om de JWST op een erg efficiënte manier op z’n plek te krijgen. Daardoor wordt geschat dat de telescoop nog zo’n twintig jaar in gebruik kan blijven. Dat zei projectleider Bob Ochs tijdens een persconferentie, schrijft de website ‘Space.com’.
Al is daar een flinke portie geluk voor nodig, want kleine meteorieten kunnen ernstige schade toebrengen aan de spiegels. Wat dus onmogelijk gerepareerd kan worden. Begin juni was het al zover, maar ingenieurs kon de schade beperken door de spiegels opnieuw af te stellen, rekening houdend met de vervorming.
De JWST heeft meerdere instrumenten aan boord, waaronder NIRSPEC. Dat is een spectograaf en kan dus straling meten die bijna infrarood is en afkomstig van objecten als sterren(stelsels). Die werd getest in de faciliteiten van het Centre Spatial de Liège.
Samen met de andere instrumenten zullen wetenschappers op basis van gegevens die de JWST verzamelt onderzoek doen naar vier thema’s.
Zo wordt er gekeken naar het universum vlak na de oerknal. De telescoop kan namelijk licht detecteren dat miljarden jaren de tijd nodig had om tot bij de aarde te geraken. De JWST kan dankzij z’n gevoeligheid 13,6 miljard jaar in het verleden kijken.
Daarnaast zal ook onderzoek worden gedaan naar hoe sterrenstelsels evolueren in de loop der tijd. De grote spiralen, zoals die van het Melkwegstelsel, zijn namelijk niet per se de standaard. Zo zijn er ook elliptische stelsels, die ontstaan zijn door het samensmelten van kleinere exemplaren. Sterrenstelsels die ver weg liggen zijn bovendien eerder klonterig. Hoe die dan veranderen naar een duidelijkere structuur is dus de vraag.
Een afbeelding van Jupiter en zijn manen, gemaakt door de James Webb Space Telescope.
© NASA, ESA, CSA, en STScI
Ook wil men met de JWST kijken naar de geboorte van sterren. Dat kon al met de Hubble-telescoop, maar het feit dat het nieuwe apparaat veel beter infrarode straling kan opvangen, is beloftevol. Er zal opnieuw gekeken worden naar de Pilaren der Creatie in de Adelaarsnevel. Een foto ervan uit 1995, gemaakt door de Hubble-telescoop, is één van de bekendste beelden van het universum, maar er valt nog meer te ontdekken door de kracht van de JWST.
Tot slot: exoplaneten. Er zal met de JWST gekeken worden naar plaatsen buiten ons zonnestelsel waar de bouwstenen voor het leven te vinden zouden zijn. Wetenschappers kunnen namelijk de telescoop gebruiken om te kijken naar wat er in de atmosferen van die planeten zit. Verschillende chemische elementen breken het licht van sterren namelijk op een andere manier, wat kan worden gedetecteerd met een spectograaf zoals de NIRSPEC.
De JWST en wetenschappers hebben dus nog veel fascinerend onderzoek voor de boeg. En het brede publiek zal nog vaak kunnen genieten van prachtige foto’s van de sterren en daar voorbij.
Lees ook:
Bekijk ook:
A new Record for the Strongest Magnetic Field Seen in the Universe: 1.6 Billion Tesla
A team of astronomers using the Chinese Insight-HXMT x-ray telescope have made a direct measurement of the strongest magnetic field in the known universe. The magnetic field belongs to a magnetar currently in the process of cannibalizing an orbiting companion.
Magnetars are nasty, but thankfully rare. They are a special kind of neutron star that power up the strongest known magnetic fields.
Astronomers don’t know the exact origins of these ultra-powerful fields, but as usual they have their suspicions. While neutron stars are made of almost entirely neutrons, they do contain small populations of protons and electrons. When neutron stars are born in supernova explosions of a massive star, those charged particles can briefly create a strong magnetic field. In normal neutron stars, the magnetic field quickly melts away from all the complex physics happening in the explosion. But for some neutron stars, the magnetic field locks itself in before that happens. When the neutron star finally reveals itself, it retains this impressive magnetic strength, and a magnetar is born.
But most of the time astronomers have to make due with indirect measurements of magnetar magnetic field strengths. Thankfully, sometimes astronomers can get lucky.
Recently a team of astronomers used the new Chinese Insight-HXMT observatory to study J0243.6+6124, an ultraliminous pulsar in the Milky Way. This pulsar has an orbiting companion that wandered too close. The pulsar’s extreme gravity is currently in the process of tearing apart the companion, forcing its material into a thin accretion disk around the pulsar.
Occasionally the gas in the accretion disk flares, producing a flash of incredibly bright x-rays. In the spectrum of those x-rays the astronomers found an absorption line caused by electrons knocking away x-rays. Those electrons can only get that kind of energy if they’re powered by a magnetic field, and so through that observation the astronomers were able to directly measure the magnetic field strengths.
They estimated a field strength of 1.6 billion tesla, which is about a million billion times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field.
Glowing Object When Calling ET To Them, Independence, Missouri, UFO Sighting News.
Three Landed UFOs Near Las Vegas, Nevada July 14, 2022, UFO Sighting News.
Orb Fleet Seen Over Brickell, Florida On July 16, 2022, UFO Sighting News.
Strange Repeating Heartbeat Radio Signal Detected In Depths Of Space
Triangle UFO caught in Bolivian during thunderstorm
Extraterrestrial Ties to Japan’s Holiest Monument
Ancient astronaut theorists believe a monument located in Honshu, Japan is linked to aliens, in this clip from Season 18, “Ancient Aliens On Location: Incredible Structures.”
New James Webb image of the 'phantom galaxy' that looks...
Solar storm creates stunning auroras across the northern US...
