US is allegedly collecting technology from aliens held in captivity, claims a former Area 51 engineer

The engineer said that a deal between the US and the UN had allowed the existence of aliens to remain a secret.

Aliens do indeed exist on earth, according to conspiracy theorists. These conspiracy theorists contend that the American administration is aware of the existence of alien life and is concealing this information out of concern for public outcry.

An ex-engineer who claims to have worked at Area 51 has added fuel to this seemingly absurd hypothesis by asserting that the US holds aliens imprisoned.

Engineer Bill Uhouse asserts that the US government is attempting to obtain alien technology from Area 51 using extraterrestrials.

According to Uhouse we’re dealing with an extraterrestrial race when it comes to technology.

Additionally, he stated that a US-UN agreement has allowed for the concealment of the existence of foreigners.

The engineer explained that EBEs were used to identify any aliens that were there (Extraterrestrial Biological Entities). He mentioned that three different classifications were made to keep an eye on the aliens, with The Greys being ranked as little, medium, and tall. the head of Israeli space security on aliens

A few months ago, Haim Eshed, a former head of space security for Israel, asserted that extraterrestrial life exists on earth. Eshed claims that major nations including the USA and Israel are collaborating with extraterrestrials.

He also said that humans and extraterrestrials collaborate in a covert subterranean outpost on Mars.

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Astronomers Reveal The Biggest 3D Map of the Milky Way and it’s Ridiculously Stunning

The greatest three-dimensional map of the Milky Way has been developed by an international team of scientists, and the results have been published in the journal Science.

Researchers created a 3D map that shows the S-shaped structure of the Milky Way galaxy’s combined star disc, our cosmic address, by calculating the distance from our Sun to hundreds of pulsating stars spread around our galaxy.

“Our map shows that the Milky Way disk is not flat. Instead, it is deformed and twisted in shape,” revealed study co-author Przemek Mróz of the University of Warsaw in Poland.“This is the first time we can use individual objects to display it in three dimensions,” he added.

Much of our present understanding of the spiral shape and structure of our galaxy is based on indirect observations of celestial objects and conclusions based on other distant galaxies in the Universe.

However, as scientists have discovered, the galactic map provided by these restricted observations is insufficient.

The classical Cepheids (giant stars that burn hundreds, if not thousands, of times brighter than our Sun) pulse frequently and are visible through the huge interstellar dust clouds that often cover less luminous interstellar objects, much like numerous distant lighthouses.

Distances to these stars may be estimated precisely owing to periodic fluctuations in brightness.

Dorota Skowron of Warsaw University, in collaboration with scientists from Ohio State University in the United States and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, traced the distance to over 2,400 cepheids along the Milky Way, the majority of which were discovered by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), a project that helped double the number of known galactic classical cepheids.

he researchers were able to create an extremely precise three-dimensional model of the Milky Way by assigning coordinates to each distant pulsing star in reference to our Sun.

As a consequence, a beautiful, never-before-seen map of the Milky Way Galaxy has been created.

The findings of the study have helped astronomers better grasp our cosmic surroundings and precisely depict the form of the galaxy.

And it’s not flat, but it does have an unusual form.

As noted by Space.com, “this new map helped reveal more details on distortions that astronomers had “previously detected in the shape of the Milky Way.”

The map took scientists six years to create, but as participating astronomers disclosed, “it was worth it.”

At a distance of almost 25,000 light-years from the galactic core, we discovered that the galaxy’s disc is not flat. It’s twisted. This bending might have been generated by interactions between the galaxy and nearby galaxies, intergalactic gas, or even dark matter.

“Warping of the galactic disk has been detected before, but this is the first time we can use individual objects to trace its shape in three dimensions,” explained Mróz in a statement.

The quantity of ‘warping’ observed in our galaxy was shockingly pronounced, according to the researchers. “It is not some statistical fact available only to a scientist’s understanding,” Mróz said. “It is apparent by eye.”

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{ https://astronomy.vercel }

Peter Khoury Abduction: Mystery Of Blonde Alien Woman Hair Found On His Body In 1992

Peter Khoury’s case is the first alien abduction where an alien specimen was found on a human body, revealed in a DNA test. He was born in Lebanon in 1964, and in 1973 migrated to Australia where he met his future wife Vivian in 1981, and the couple married later in 1990. They have 2 children.

Peter’s first encounter with a UFO happened when he was only 7 years old. It was the summer of 1971, and he was playing with seven other children when all of them decided to go to a rooftop. As he came there, an egg-shaped UFO was hovering above other children who were standing like a statue.

After some time gap, all the children found themselves on the ground floor with no memory of the incident. The next encounter happened in February 1988, when Peter and Vivian were in Sydney. That time, they saw a strange moving light. But the incident that happened later in July completely changed Peter’s life.

Read also:

It was around 11 PM, and Peter was staying with his family. That night, his brother Sam invited him to watch a movie in his room. Peter lay in his bedroom, but what happened next was completely frightening.

As he was laying on the bed, he felt a paralysis in his whole body and could move only his eyes.

“While…lying on my bed, I felt something grab my ankles. As I felt this, a strange numbness, tingling and churning sensation crawled up through my body and right up to my head. I was paralyzed, I could not move any part of my body but for the exception of my eyes, which I could move, open or close. My brain was functioning but I could not do anything physically. I tried to call out to family members but I could not force the words out. At this stage I started to panic thinking I would not walk again. I thought I was truly paralyzed.”

Peter Khoury and his wife Vivian

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As the experience unfolded Peter’s first thought was that this was a form of payback, a punishment for the less than satisfactory life he had led for about six years before he returned to the family fold. He thought, if he survived this, that his community would think, God’s punishing him, God paid him back. What followed — the encounter with the hooded, three- to four-foot-tall creatures with black, wrinkled faces — changed everything.

“The fear was so extreme. I’m gone! I’m dead! It’s real! I was petrified and paralyzed. Irrational fears were crowding in. They were going to kill me. I could be killed. The fear level was extraordinary. I was stressing out, how could I get out of this?

I became aware of some sort of communication, seemingly telepathic, no sound made, and yet I could hear the message in my mind. I was told not to worry and I would not be harmed and to relax. As I moved my eyes and looked to the left side…I made eye contact with two beings who looked so different to the others. These were thin, tall with big black eyes and a narrow chin. They were goldish-yellow in color.

Astonishingly the stress was gone immediately. The whole fear thing washed away as quickly as a light switch on. How could I be so calm after such a level of fear? My heartbeat was no longer racing. [A whole different situation was unfolding.]

Peter said he saw three- to four-foot-tall creatures with black, wrinkled faces around him. He communicated with the aliens telepathically. He heard them saying that they would not harm him and even made eye contact with the two of them. Peter even noticed that one alien was male and another female, wearing masks.

One of them inserted a needle into his head, and he blackout. Peter described him as tall and thin with large black eyes in the golden yellow suit.

After he got consciousness, he found out the creatures had also drugged his family members. Further, he thought that only 10 minutes had passed but in reality, it was 1 to 2 hours.

After this, Peter was totally petrified and had no clue what to do next. He even had surgical marks on his head which could prove his encounter with aliens. He had not much knowledge about alien abductions and struggled to understand them.

Eventually, he understood about the abduction experiences, jumped into, the world of Ufology, and started a group named the UFO Experience Support Association (UFOESA).

He continued helping other victims who claimed to encounter aliens, but his personal experiences did not finish.

On July 23, 1992, he came home after dropping off his wife at the train station. It was around 7 AM, and he was not feeling very well as he had got head injuries during an assault at the job site. So, he decided to go to bed and get some sleep.

Peter felt something alighting on the bed. As he got up, he was shocked to see two strange naked women kneeling near his bed.

He described one had an appearance of Nordic with an elongated face, big blue eyes, and a sharply pointed chin. Another one looked like an Asian. “I got the shock of my life because right on top of me was this female, a blonde female. She was just milky white in color. Her eyes were probably two-three times bigger than human eyes. She had protruding cheekbones and a narrow face that narrowed down to a pointy chin and on the side of the bed on the corner of the bed there was another female an asian looking female and then she the blonde female touches her stomach and points to the sky,” Peter said.

Although no normal communication occurred, the Nordic woman seemed to be in charge, and Khoury got the impression she was giving the Asian-looking woman some sort of instruction.

She was 6 feet tall and very strong. She tried to copulate with Peter by pulling him towards her breasts, but he resisted and even bit her which made him cough. Moments later, he looked up again, but both women had vanished.

The coughing stimulated him to go to the bathroom to drink water. After that, he tried urinating and found blonde hair on the genital of that Nordic alien woman. He kept the hair in the plastic bag with a seal.

Prof. John Mack, Peter Khoury, Bill Chalker & Dominique Callimanopulos

" data-medium-file="https://www.howandwhys.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/tuathadedanaan06_04.jpg" data-large-file="https://www.howandwhys.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/tuathadedanaan06_04.jpg" loading="lazy" class=" wp-image-8478" src="https://www.howandwhys.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/tuathadedanaan06_04.jpg" alt="The Khoury abduction" width="646" height="455" srcset="https://www.howandwhys.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/tuathadedanaan06_04.jpg 250w, https://www.howandwhys.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/tuathadedanaan06_04-100x70.jpg 100w" sizes="(max-width: 501px) 100vw, 501px" />

Peter refrained himself telling about it to Vivian for 2 weeks, although she had been very supportive of him for the 1988 abduction.

In 1996, Harvard psychiatrist John Mack did a hypnotic regression on Peter to understand what had happened to him in 1988. Under hypnosis, Peter said that he was taken to a room full of lights. He was on the table with one creature above him but could not find out more than that.

Because of the bizarre and controversial nature of the 1992 episode, Peter was more comfortable describing his 1988 experience.

Because of the 1988 and 1992 experiences, Peter’s case was widely discussed and came into the knowledge of UFO researcher Bill Chalker. He began an investigation into the case and did the world’s first PCR (polymerase Chain Reaction) DNA test on the hair sample.

The test result showed that the hair was biologically close to human genetics but came from an unusual human race, probably a rare Chinese Mongoloid type.

Could Peter Khoury’s July 1988 alien encounter be an example of the well-established phenomenon known as “sleep paralysis”?

John O’Neill, a member of Australian Skeptics, argued that sleep paralysis could explain the paralysis Peter Khoury experienced, hallucination could explain his experience with extraterrestrials, falling asleep could explain his missing time, and “the puncture wound and scab could be from anything — a pimple, an insect bite or anything else in approximately the right location.” O’Neill accepted that Peter’s experience was genuine, as he himself had had a sleep paralysis episode. But his experience was typically vague, like most sleep paralysis episodes — “the feeling of some other entity being in the room, but [I] did not know and could not see what.” That vague description falls far short of the detailed and ordered description Peter Khoury offers of his experience.

Several aspects of Peter’s encounter actually defy this simplistic categorization. First of all, he was not asleep, nor had he reached the state that precedes sleep, the hypnagogic state, that often yields fleeting imagery of a hallucinatory nature. Furthermore, his experience has an ordered sequence of events that were recollected consciously; they were not vague sensory experiences of fragmented sleep. Then there are the physical marks, namely the injury to his head, where he felt the strange needle being stuck in, along with the biopsy-like mark on his leg, which certainly can’t be accounted for as a classic sleep paralysis episode or as a product of the sleep/awake interface that spawns hypnagogic imagery.

{ https://www.howandwhys.com/ }

NASA Releases A Video Of A Massive Comet That Just Crashed Into The Sun

The doomed comet was almost certainly a 'Kreutz sungrazer,' a fragment from a giant comet that broke apart many centuries ago," astronomer Tony Phillips wrote for Spaceweather.com. 

"A swarm of these fragments orbits the sun, and at least one gets too close every day and disintegrates. Most, measuring less than a few meters across, are too small to see, but occasionally a big one like today's attracts attention."

The comet couldn't resist the intense gravitational pull of the sun, CNET reported.

Taking the above image as a reference, it's safe to say that the sungrazer has evaporated in the face of the sun's high and powerful heat. 

Small solar system bodies that begin to heat up and release gas as they pass near the sun are called comets. Comets can range in size from a few hundred meters to tens of kilometers. 

According to NASA, "Comets are cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, rock, and dust that orbit the Sun. When frozen, they are the size of a small town. When a comet's orbit brings it close to the Sun, it heats up and spews dust and gases into a giant glowing head larger than most planets. 

The dust and gases form a tail that stretches away from the Sun for millions of miles. There are likely billions of comets orbiting our Sun in the Kuiper Belt and even more distant Oort Cloud." 

Let's get to know "Kreutz sungrazers" 

Characterized by their orbits extremely close to the sun, Kreutz sungrazers are thought to be fragments of a large comet that broke apart a few centuries ago. 

Named after the German astronomer Heinrich Kreutz, these objects can sometimes be seen around the sun in the daylight. The most recent of these was Comet Ikeya–Seki in 1965, which may have been one of the brightest comets in the last millennium.

The article was first published on InterestingEngneering.

{ https://thespaceacademy.physics-astronomy.com/ }

The Most Incredible Crop Circle Designs of Great Britain... 2022 Documentary

2022 Documentary Crop Circle Reality - This phenomenon stretches far beyond the boundaries of England with over a thousand crop circles spanning the globe.

Although there have been some claimants to come forward to take responsibility for the creation of some crop circles, this documentary seeks out the most incredible crop circle designs and a possible E.T connection to their making. Realities that some may never have been exposed to before in regard to the UFO and crop circle phenomena.

• Watch Free (US): https://bit.ly/3NyoLA4
• Watch Here (UK): https://apple.co/3JXtCsQ
• Subscribe to Darcy Weir's channel for new content here: https://www.youtube.com/c/OccultJourneys
• Experience More of These Documentaries for Free here (US): https://bit.ly/3DlDqdu
• Experience More of These Documentaries for Free here (UK): https://amzn.to/3Mol535
• Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@occultjourney...

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Anti-satellite weapons: History, types and purpose

Rainwater No Longer Safe to Drink Anywhere on Earth Due to Cancer-Causing Chemicals, Scientists Warn

Scientists in Europe have concluded that levels of man-made “forever chemicals” in rainwater have made it “unsafe to drink” around the world—even in the most remote areas of the planet like Antarctica.

Rainwater almost everywhere on Earth has unsafe levels of ‘forever chemicals’, according to new research.

How has this happened and what’s the fallout? 🧵

— Euronews Green (@euronewsgreen) August 9, 2022

There is now reportedly no safe spot in the world to escape these cancer-causing chemicals.

In a new study published on August 2 in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Technology, researchers from Stockholm University and ETH Zurich argue that the amounts of per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) considered acceptable for drinking water, surface water and soil in official guidelines have decreased “dramatically” over the past 20 years “due to new insights into their toxicity.”

“There has been an astounding decline in guideline values for PFAS in drinking water in the last 20 years,” explained Ian Cousins, a professor at the Department of Environmental Science, Stockholm University and lead author of the study.

“Based on the latest US guidelines for PFOA in drinking water, rainwater everywhere would be judged unsafe to drink,” Cousins said.

“Although in the industrial world we don’t often drink rainwater, many people around the world expect it to be safe to drink and it supplies many of our drinking water sources.”

Cousins called the decline “astounding.”

In a press release, Cousins said the recommended safe drinking water guideline value for one chemical in particular—the cancer-causing perfluorooctanoic acid—has dropped by 37.5 million times in the United States.

“Forever chemicals” are a large group of human-made chemicals that are known to cause cancer and don’t occur naturally in nature. They can be found in household items including food packaging, electronics, cosmetics, and cookware because they have non-stick or stain-repellent characteristics.

PFAS are referred to as “forever chemicals” because they don’t ever break down in the environment.

Extensive research has been conducted on the effects being exposed to PFAS may have on one’s health

According to some of the findings, scientists say these chemicals could be linked to infertility issues, an increased risk of cancer, developmental delays in children, and more.

However, others claim that no cause and effect can be proven.

While one of the compounds’ manufacturers, 3M, has attempted to phase them out for 20 years, scientists warn that some dangerous PFAS are not significantly decreasing in the atmosphere.

“The extreme persistence and continual global cycling of certain PFAS will lead to the continued exceedance of the above-mentioned guidelines,” warned study co-author and professor Martin 

Scheringer claims that because of this, “it makes sense to define a planetary boundary specifically for PFAS and, as we conclude in the paper, this boundary has now been exceeded.”

Companies shouldn’t be permitted to “benefit economically while polluting the drinking water for millions of others, and causing serious health problems,” added Jane Muncke, the managing director of the Food Packaging Forum in Switzerland who was not involved in the study.

“The vast amounts that it will cost to reduce PFAS in drinking water to levels that are safe based on current scientific understanding need to be paid by the industry producing and using these toxic chemicals,” Muncke said.

“The time to act is now.”

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Source: The Mind Unleashed

Source: 

• https://www.naturalblaze.com/2022/08/rainwater-no-longer-safe-to-drink-anywhere-on-earth-due-to-cancer-causing-chemicals-scientists-warn.html

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

Fort Lupton, Colorado UFO Sighting

Check out this interesting footage of a huge daytime UFO in the sky above Fort Lupton, Colorado. This was filmed on 6th August 2022!

Witness report: 

Thought it was a ballon but it was not moving with the wind and we were experiencing high winds and rain at time of sighting. Was moving slow to the west and had to stop video taping. Then went straight up real high and parked or hovered there for a while and that’s when second time I started filming again. Zoomed in on my video and it looks like a ball of energy. A straight beam would come out of it really weird.

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

Bob Lazar was right, the U.S. Military has recovered wreckage from off-world vehicles not made of this earth and one of the recovered wreckage is the UFO that crashed in Roswell in 1947 as well as they found the alien crew from which three aliens didn't survive the crash. The surviving alien was taken to Wright Patterson Air Force Base where it stayed for about nine months before it passed away. 

The Roswell UFO crash is perhaps the biggest UFO cover up in history but over the years eyewitnesses told what they had witnessed and all stated that they had seen the surviving alien too. 

Read the report Eye-Witnesses’ accounts of the Surviving Alien in which the eyewitnesses tell in detail about the surviving alien that walked away from the crash. All the witnesses stated the same; The being was child-size, four feet, maybe a little more, no hair, and a large head and big eyes shaped like tear-drops, the arms were a bit longer, and the skin was ashy, gray and kind of scaly. 

What's more, Bob Lazar said that wreckage were found in an archeological dig, meaning some of these things are ancient. I believe these flying saucers and other craft come from the antediluvian age, or as the world knows it, the age of the lost city of Atlantis. 

 My guest today, Timothy Alberino says the answer to all these things is found in the Bible and also the ancient book of Enoch, one of the oldest books in the world, which is said to be a historical account of the antediluvian era and a record of a lost civilization.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

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

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS

Fast Mover(UFO SIGHTING)

Drone operator catches unidentified white object that speeds through the point of view of his drones 4K camera.
Video Source MUFON Case # 123978

RELATED VIDEOS ( peter2011)

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Paranormal Caught On Camera: The UFO Whisperer! (Jim Martin scene)

Travel Channel’s Paranormal Caught on Camera aired my UFO footage! The episode is called “Haunted Texas Hotel and More”. (S5/E4) Special thanks to Travel and Paranormal Caught on Camera!

by: infamousfanclub

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

First Images of Rivers and Lakes on Titan!

Previously, it was widely considered that moons were lifeless celestial bodies. However, as we now know, these constant companions of the planets can contain more life than we’d ever dared to think. Titan is one of the most magnificent and spectacular natural satellites.

An artist impression of what the lakes might look like on Titan

As many of you are probably aware, the surface of Saturn’s biggest satellite is covered not only by a thick coating of methane hydrate and water ice, but also by numerous rivers and lakes of liquid ethane and methane. And it’s these intriguing natural structures that folks at Space Daily want to look at in further detail.

Images from the Cassini mission show river networks draining into lakes in Titan’s north polar region.

Image: NASA/JPL/USGS

We’ll look at how these incredible structures form, what part they play in Titan’s natural processes, and what diverse forms the unusual methane lakes on Saturn’s moon take. Watch the video below for more:

{ https://astronomyscience.vercel }

US Testing New $150 Million Drone in Middle of the Ocean.

The US Navy is regularly at work modifying its carrier-based vehicles and replenishing its already fierce arsenal with new drones.

And it’s one of these that will be in the spotlight of today’s video. The MQ-25 Stingray is a tanker drone that could radically change the rules of the game as far as the intense air battles of the future go!

UAV’s will play an important role once they’ve matured. The applications could be limitless and they’ll free up aircrews. The “Loyal Wingman” project is very promising. The “stealth” versions could be invaluable in SEAD missions.

{ https://jackie88.com/ }

UFOs and UAP: History, sightings and mysteries

The Voyager probes are not fully powering down ... yet

Astronomers Capture the Sharpest Image yet of a Monster Galaxy 12.4 Billion Light Years Away

A team of scientists obtained a magnificent photograph of a faraway galaxy, reminding us all how little we are in the grand scheme of things.

This monster galaxy’ is around 12 billion light-years away from Earth and produces new stars 1,000 times faster than our own Milky Way galaxy.

Scientists utilized the £1.1 billion ALMA Observatory in Chile to capture views of the galaxy with a resolution ten times better than any previous attempt, naming it ‘COSMOS-AzTEC-1.’

The measurements revealed previously unknown information on the structure of this starburst galaxy, which is thought to have originated in the first billion years following the big bang.

Monster galaxies, or starburst galaxies, form stars at a startling pace; 1000 times higher than the star formation in our Galaxy. But why are they so active? To tackle this problem, researchers need to know the environment around the stellar nurseries. Drawing detailed maps of molecular clouds is an important step to scout a cosmic monster.

Tadaki and the team targeted a chimerical galaxy COSMOS-AzTEC-1. This galaxy was first discovered with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawai`i, and later the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) in Mexico found an enormous amount of carbon monoxide gas in the galaxy and revealed its hidden starburst. The LMT observations also measured the distance to the galaxy, and found that it is 12.4 billion light-years.

Monster galaxy COSMOS-AzTEC-1 observed with ALMA. ALMA revealed the distribution of molecular gas (left) and dust particles (right). In addition to the dense cloud in the center, the research team found two dense clouds several thousand light-years away from the center. These dense clouds are dynamically unstable and thought to be the sites of intense star formation.

(Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Tadaki et al.)

Artist’s impression of the monster galaxy COSMOS-AzTEC-1. This galaxy is located 12.4 billion light-years away and is forming stars 1000 times more rapidly than our Milky Way Galaxy. ALMA observations revealed dense gas concentrations in the disk, and intense star formation in those concentrations.

Credit: National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

Astronomers obtained the most detailed anatomy chart of a monster galaxy located 12.4 billion light-years away. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the team revealed that the molecular clouds in the galaxy are highly unstable, which leads to runaway star formation. Monster galaxies are thought to be the ancestors of the huge elliptical galaxies in today’s Universe, therefore these findings pave the way to understand the formation and evolution of such galaxies.

“One of the best parts of ALMA observations is to see the far-away galaxies with unprecedented resolution,” says Ken-ichi Tadaki, a postdoctoral researcher at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, the lead author of the research paper published in the journal Nature.

Researchers have found that COSMOS-AzTEC-1 is rich with the ingredients of stars, but it was still difficult to figure out the nature of the cosmic gas in the galaxy. The team utilized the high resolution and high sensitivity of ALMA to observe this monster galaxy and obtain a detailed map of the distribution and the motion of the gas. Thanks to the most extended ALMA antenna configuration of 16 km, this is the highest resolution molecular gas map of a distant monster galaxy ever made.

“We found that there are two distinct large clouds several thousand light-years away from the center,” explains Tadaki. “In most distant starburst galaxies, stars are actively formed in the center. So it is surprising to find off-center clouds.”

The astronomers further investigated the nature of the gas in COSMOS-AzTEC-1 and found that the clouds throughout the galaxy are very unstable, which is unusual. In a normal situation, the inward gravity and outward pressure are balanced in the clouds. Once gravity overcomes pressure, the gas cloud collapses and forms stars at a rapid pace. Then, stars and supernova explosions at the end of the stellar life cycle blast out gases, which increase the outward pressure. As a result, the gravity and pressure reach a balanced state and star formation continues at a moderate pace. In this way star formation in galaxies is self-regulating. But, in COSMOS-AzTEC-1, the pressure is far weaker than the gravity and hard to balance. Therefore this galaxy shows runaway star formation and has morphed into an unstoppable monster galaxy.

The team estimated that the gas in COSMOS-AzTEC-1 will be completely consumed in 100 million years, which is 10 times faster than in other star forming galaxies.

But why is the gas in COSMOS-AzTEC-1 so unstable? Researchers do not have a definitive answer yet, but galaxy merger is a possible cause. Galaxy collision may have efficiently transported the gas into a small area and ignited intense star formation.

“At this moment, we have no evidence of merger in this galaxy. By observing other similar galaxies with ALMA, we want to unveil the relation between galaxy mergers and monster galaxies,” summarizes Tadaki.

Publication: K. Tadaki, et al., “The gravitationally unstable gas disk of a starburst galaxy 12 billion years ago,” Nature volume 560, pages 613–616 (2018)

{ https://scitechdaily.com/ }

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS

Triangular Shaped UFO REC Lurking In Storm Clouds!!(UFO SIGHTING)

Triangular shaped UFO hiding in storm clouds over Pekin Illinois! Video

Source

• MUFON Case #124032

RELATED VIDEOS ( peter2011)

 }

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

UFOs – Ultra-red Flattened Objects – revealed by Webb

New faint, distant and cold brown dwarf discovered

by Tomasz Nowakowski , Phys.org

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers have detected a new faint, distant, and cold brown dwarf. The newly found object, designated GLASS-JWST-BD1, turns out to be about 31 times more massive than Jupiter. The discovery was detailed in a paper published July 29 on arXiv.org.

Brown dwarfs are intermediate objects between planets and stars. Astronomers generally agree that they are substellar objects occupying the mass range between 13 and 80 Jupiter masses. One subclass of brown dwarfs (with effective temperatures between 500 and 1,500 K) is known as T dwarfs, and represents the coolest and least luminous substellar objects so far detected.

Studies of T dwarfs could help astronomers better understand objects near the disputed planet/star boundary, for instance, giant exoplanets. However, although many brown dwarf have been detected to date, T dwarfs are not so common, as only about 400 such objects have been identified.

Now, a group of astronomers led by Mario Nonino of the Astronomical Observatory of Trieste in Italy, reports the finding of a new brown dwarf that is most likely of T dwarf subclass. The discovery was made as part of the Through the Looking GLASS (GLASS-JWST) project—a JWST Early Release Science (ERS) program targeting the massive galaxy cluster Abell 2744 with JWST's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSPEC) and Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS).

"We present the serendipitous discovery of a late T-type brown dwarf candidate in JWST NIRCam observations of the Early Release Science Abell 2744 parallel field. The discovery was enabled by the sensitivity of JWST at 4 µm wavelengths and the panchromatic 0.9–4.5 µm coverage of the spectral energy distribution," the researchers wrote in the paper.

According to the study, GLASS-JWST-BD1 has a mass of about 31.43 Jupiter masses and an effective temperature of some 600 K. The age of this brown dwarf was estimated to be 5 billion years.

Comparison with theoretical models suggest that GLASS-JWST-BD1 is a late-type T dwarf. Its distance was measured to be between 1,850 and 2,350 light years, in a direction perpendicular to the Galactic plane. The results indicate that this object is likely a member of the Galactic thick disk or halo population.

The astronomers noted that further observations of GLASS-JWST-BD1 are required in order to confirm its T-dwarf nature. In particular, kinematic or chemical abundance data are needed to get more insights into the properties of this object.

In concluding remarks, the authors of the paper underlined how their discovery demonstrates the capability of JWST to investigate distant low-mass Galactic stellar and substellar objects.

"The large estimated distance of GLASS-JWST-BD1 confirms the power of JWST to probe the very low-mass end of the stellar and substellar mass function in the Galactic thick disk and halo, enabling exploration of metallicity dependence on low-mass star formation and the evolution of brown dwarf atmospheres," the scientists wrote.

• Astronomers detect substellar companion of HD 47127

{ https://phys.org/ }

CAUGHT IN A SOLAR STORM ON THE WAY TO MARS

BY: AAS NOVA 

A chance alignment between Earth and a Mars-bound spacecraft has given us a rare glimpse into the movement of high-energy particles from the Sun.

A chance alignment between Earth and a Mars-bound spacecraft has given us a rare glimpse into the movement of high-energy particles from the Sun. The data from this event can help researchers understand the radiation environment near Mars — a key factor in planning crewed missions to our neighboring planet and beyond.

ENERGETIC PARTICLE PARADE

Illustration of energetic particles being ejected by the Sun.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

The space between the planets in our solar system is filled with a wispy sea of charged particles that flow out from the Sun’s atmosphere. This particle population is augmented by cosmic rays — speedy protons and atomic nuclei accelerated in extreme environments across the universe — which ebb and flow against the 11-year solar activity cycle. This undulating particle background is punctuated by bursts of high-energy particles from the Sun, which can be unleashed suddenly in violent solar storms.

Spacecraft that venture out from the protection of Earth’s magnetic field must navigate this ocean of particles and weather solar storms. And if we someday wish to send astronauts to other planets, we’ll need to know how high-energy solar particles, which pose a risk to the health of astronauts and electronic systems alike, travel through the solar system.

WHEN SPACECRAFT ALIGN

Location of Tianwen-1 (TW-1) relative to Solar Orbiter (SolO), Parker Solar Probe (PSP), and STEREO-A (STA), Earth, and Mars. The black arrow marks the location of the active region that launched the solar storm.
Adapted from Fu et al. 2022

In a new publication, a team led by Shuai Fu (Macau University of Science and Technology), Zheyi Ding (China University of Geosciences), and Yongjie Zhang (Chinese Academy of Sciences) studied the high-energy solar particles produced in an event in November 2020, when the Sun emitted a solar flare and a massive explosion of solar plasma called a coronal mass ejection.

This event coincided with a chance alignment of multiple spacecraft along the same solar magnetic field line. This alignment meant that several spacecraft near Earth and the Tianwen-1 spacecraft en route to Mars measured the same burst of energetic particles millions of miles apart, providing a rare opportunity to study how energetic particles from the Sun travel through space along magnetic field lines.

DIFFUSION AND EVOLUTION

Comparison of proton fluence (number of particles collected per unit area) measured by spacecraft at Earth (blue) and by Tianwen-1 at 1.39 au (red). The time increases from (a) to (h). The spectra at Earth and at Tianwen-1 “break” or bend at roughly the same energy, suggesting that there is little evolution as the particles travel outward. Click to enlarge.
Fu et al. 2022

By comparing the timing of measurements from Tianwen-1 to those from three spacecraft near Earth, the team discerned that the magnetic field line that connected the spacecraft did not connect back to the origin of the particles. This means that the particles must have traveled, or diffused, across magnetic field lines to reach the spacecraft.

In addition, the team found that the shape of the particle energy distribution remained the same at moderate and high energies as the particles traveled between Earth and Tianwen-1’s location at 1.39 au. This suggests that the shape of the energy distribution is determined earlier, at the time the particles are accelerated to high energies, rather than as the particles travel through space.

The November 2020 event marked the first solar energetic particle event observed by Tianwen-1, but surely not the last. The spacecraft will continue to monitor high-energy particles from its station in Mars orbit as the solar cycle revs up, collecting valuable data for understanding the radiation environment around Mars and planning future missions.

CITATION

• “First Report of a Solar Energetic Particle Event Observed by China’s Tianwen-1 Mission in Transit to Mars,” Shuai Fu et al 2022 ApJL 934 L15. doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ac80f5

• This post originally appeared on AAS Nova, which features research highlights from the journals of the American Astronomical Society.

Solar Storm-Hunting Spaceship Looking for a Name, Submissions Accepted ...

SVS: Solar Wind Strips the Martian Atmosphere

{ https://skyandtelescope.org/ }

Was a UFO accidentally filmed during an ARD live broadcast recording of a wildfire in eastern Germany? 

The video footage appears to show a high speed cylindrical object flying by in the background. 

The object has no obvious signs of propulsion and no wings, also it can't be a bird either since we don't see flapping wings. Maybe an insect flying close to the camera? But can an insect fly that speed? What could it be? 

Original ARD video footage, see UFO at about 3.42 minutes.

  

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

UFO fireball in the western skies looking from Anza, California 6-Aug-2022

This bright UFO was seen and recorded in the sky above Anza, California on 6th August 2022.

Witness report: 

I saw a fireball in the sky that changed colors from red to orange and changed in size. I was able to get a video of it on my iPhone 13. There was also a small white light that blinked intermittently on the left of it. The red object seemed to have control of the power like a jet engine going on and off. It hovered for a while and then it just disappeared.

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

Astronomers Discover A Disappearing Space Object That Turns On And Off Every 20 Minutes And Sends Highly-Polarized Radio Signals

According to a research paper published in Nature, astronomers detected a “really weird” object 4,000 lightyears distant from Earth. Every other minute, the object vanishes from view and produces a massive burst of radio waves three times an hour.

Tyrone O’Doherty, a Curtin University student, first noticed the enigmatic object while scanning the sky in rural Western Australia. “It’s exciting that the source I identified last year has turned out to be such a peculiar object,” stated O’Doherty in a press statement.

The object, which the scientists claim is unlike anything else they’ve observed, emits a tremendous beam of radiation that, every 20 minutes, shines brightly in the sky. It also spins and vanishes every minute.

Scientists refer to space objects that “turn” on and off in the night sky as “transients”.

“When studying transients, you’re watching the death of a massive star or the activity of the remnants it leaves behind,” said Dr. Gemma Anderson, an ICRAR-Curtin astrophysicist and co-author of the work.

Slower transients, such as supernovae, might arrive in a matter of days and last for several months. Fast transients, such as neutron stars, “flash” on and off many times per second. However, transients between those two speeds are uncommon, and the current discovery is “really weird” and “completely unexpected.” according to the researchers.

“It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there’s nothing known in the sky that does that,” said astrophysicist Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker, who headed the research team. “And it’s really close to us – about 4000 lightyears distant. It’s there in our galaxy’s backyard.”

Hurley-Walker characterized the enigmatic object as being smaller than the sun yet brilliant, radiating highly polarized radio waves three times an hour. These radio pulses imply that it has an “extremely strong” magnetic field, which may correspond to a previously anticipated astrophysical object that has never been verified to exist. Scientists refer to the hypothetical item as an “ultra-long period magnetar.”

“It’s a type of slowly spinning neutron star that has been predicted to exist theoretically,” Hurley-Walker explained. “However, no one anticipated to immediately discover one like this since they were not thought to be that brilliant. It converts magnetic energy to radio waves considerably more efficiently than anything else we’ve seen previously.”

-

Astronomers believe it is a rare sort of neutron star or a collapsing white dwarf, but they need to examine it again to establish if it is a fluke or a new type of space object.

{https://astronomyscience.vercel. }

Ancient Source of Oxygen for Life Discovered Hidden Deep in the Earth’s Crust

By NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY

Researchers have uncovered a source of oxygen that may have influenced the evolution of life before the advent of photosynthesis.

Scientists at Newcastle University have discovered a source of oxygen deep in the Earth’s crust that may have influenced the evolution of life before the advent of photosynthesis.

The pioneering research project uncovered a mechanism that can generate hydrogen peroxide from rocks during the movement of geological faults. The study was led by Newcastle University’s School of Natural and Environmental Sciences and published today (August 8) in the journal Nature Communications.

While hydrogen peroxide in high concentrations can be harmful to life, it can also provide a useful source of oxygen to microbes. This additional source of oxygen may have influenced the early evolution, and possibly even origin, of life in hot environments on the early Earth before the evolution of photosynthesis.

In tectonically active regions, the movement of the Earth’s crust not only generates earthquakes but also riddles the subsurface with cracks and fractures. These are lined with highly reactive rock surfaces containing many imperfections, or defects. Water can then filter down and react with these defects on the newly fractured rock.

Master’s student Jordan Stone simulated these conditions in the laboratory by crushing granite, basalt, and peridotite – rock types that would have been present in the early Earth’s crust. These were then added to water at varying temperatures under well-controlled oxygen-free conditions.

The research investigates a source of reactive oxygen associated with geological faulting; a potential oxygen source prior to cyanobacteria oxygenating the Earth’s atmosphere. This reactive oxygen may have had a role in the evolution of life from an oxygen-free to an oxygenated world and contributed to prebiotic chemistry in subsurface fractures prior to the origin of life.

Credit: Jon Telling / Jordan Stone / Newcastle University

The experiments revealed that substantial amounts of hydrogen peroxide – and as a result, potentially oxygen – were only generated at temperatures close to the boiling point of water. Importantly, the temperature of hydrogen peroxide formation overlaps the growth ranges of some of the most heat-loving microbes on Earth called hyperthermophiles, including evolutionary ancient oxygen-using microbes near the root of the Universal Tree of Life.

Lead author Jordan Stone, who conducted this research as part of his Master of Research in Environmental Geoscience, said: “While previous research has suggested that small amounts of hydrogen peroxide and other oxidants can be formed by stressing or crushing of rocks in the absence of oxygen, this is the first study to show the vital importance of hot temperatures in maximizing hydrogen peroxide generation.”

Lead author Jordan Stone, who conducted this research as part of his MRes in Environmental Geoscience at Newcastle University, UK, sets up one of the experiments.

Credit: Jon Telling / Jordan Stone / Newcastle University

Principal Investigator Dr. Jon Telling, Senior Lecturer, added: “This research shows that defects on crushed rock and minerals can behave very differently to how you would expect more ‘perfect’ mineral surfaces to react. All these mechanochemical reactions need to generate hydrogen peroxide, and therefore oxygen, is water, crushed rocks, and high temperatures, which were all present on the early Earth before the evolution of photosynthesis and which could have influenced the chemistry and microbiology in hot, seismically active regions where life may have first evolved.”

Reference:

• “Tectonically-driven oxidant production in the hot biosphere” 8 August 2022, Nature Communications.
  DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32129-y
• The work was supported through grants from the Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) and the UK Space Agency. A major new follow-up project led by Dr. Jon Telling, funded by NERC, is underway to determine the significance of this mechanism for supporting life in the Earth’s subsurface.

{ https://scitechdaily.com/ }

NASA's 'Helical Engine' could reach 99% the speed of light

When it comes to space, there's a problem with our human drive to go all the places and see all the things. A big problem. It's, well, space. It's way too big. Even travelling at the maximum speed the Universe allows, it would take us years to reach our nearest neighbouring star.

But another human drive is finding solutions to big problems. And that's what NASA engineer David Burns has been doing in his spare time. He's produced an engine concept that, he says, could theoretically accelerate to 99 percent of the speed of light - all without using propellant.

He's posted it to the NASA Technical Reports Server under the heading "Helical Engine", and, on paper, it works by exploiting the way mass can change at relativistic speeds - those close to the speed of light in a vacuum. It has not yet been reviewed by an expert.

But while this concept is fascinating, it's definitely not going to break physics anytime soon. As a thought experiment to explain his concept, Burns describes a box with a weight inside, threaded on a line, with a spring at each end bouncing the weight back and forth. In a vacuum - such as space - the effect of this would be to wiggle the entire box, with the weight seeming to stand still, like a gif stabilized around the weight.Overall, the box would stay wiggling in the same spot - but if the mass of the weight were to increase in only one direction, it would generate a greater push in that direction, and therefore thrust.

According to the principle of the conservation of momentum - in which the momentum of a system remains constant in the absence of any external forces - this should be not completely possible.

But! There's a special relativity loophole. Hooray for special relativity! According to special relativity, objects gain mass as they approach light speed. So, if you replace the weight with ions and the box with a loop, you can theoretically have the ions moving faster at one end of the loop, and slower at the other.

But Burns' drive isn't a single closed loop. It's helical, like a stretched out spring - hence "helical engine".

"The engine accelerates ions confined in a loop to moderate relativistic speeds, and then varies their velocity to make slight changes to their mass. The engine then moves ions back and forth along the direction of travel to produce thrust," he wrote in his abstract.

"The engine has no moving parts other than ions traveling in a vacuum line, trapped inside electric and magnetic fields."

It sounds really nifty, right? And it is - in theory. But it's not without significant practical problems.

According to New Scientist, the helical chamber would have to be pretty large. Around 200 metres (656 feet) long and 12 metres (40 feet) in diameter, to be precise.

And it would need to generate 165 megawatts of energy to produce 1 newton of thrust. That's the equivalent of a power station to produce the force required to accelerate a kilogram of mass per second squared. So a lot of input for a teeny tiny output. It is horribly inefficient.

Burns notes the efficiency problem in his presentation, and also adds that his work hasn't been reviewed by experts, and there may be errors in his maths. We don't exactly have the blueprints for a fully functional space travel engine here.

What we do have is a piece of groundwork that could be used to develop such an engine. What we have is a dream of the stars.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{https://blog.sci-nature.com/ }

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The physics of accretion: How the universe pulled itself together

Material from an accretion disk swirls around the young star FU Orionis in this artist’s concept.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Accretion is one of the most fundamental processes in the cosmos. It is a universal phenomenon triggered by gravity, and the process by which bits of matter accumulate and coalesce with more bits of matter. It works inexorably on all scales to attract and affix smaller things to bigger things, from the tiniest dust grains to supermassive black holes. 

Accretion creates everything there is: galaxies, stars, planets, and eventually, us. It is the reason the universe is filled with a whole bunch of somethings instead of a whole lot of nothing.

The fact that matter tends to glom together may seem intuitive. But to scientists, accretion remains a mysterious topic, filled with unanswered questions.

For instance: Why do some stellar nurseries form a few massive stars instead of lots of smaller ones? What causes so much accreting material to ultimately fall inward onto its central object, instead of just circling it forever? And how do space rocks ultimately stick together to form planets instead of just bouncing off each other? No one knows the definitive answers to any of these questions yet, but there are some theories gaining traction — and evidence.

The Taurus Molecular Cloud is a vast star-forming region threaded by a network of filaments. It was captured here by the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory, which operated from 2009 to 2013.

ESA/Herschel/NASA/JPL-Caltech, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO; Acknowledgement: R. Hurt (JPL-Caltech)

All objects great and small

Accretion is the inevitable result of gravitational forces operating on all scales, and on all types of material — gas, dust, plasma, even dark matter. Gravity makes matter accrete. And when matter accretes, it forms objects. Thus, accretion and formation are very closely related in astronomy: The former can be considered an aspect of the latter. 

The Soviet scientist Otto Schmidt devised the first accretion model of planetary formation in 1944, and his countryman Viktor Safronov fleshed out the mathematics of accretion in 1969. The underlying principles of gravitational attraction have since been applied to the formation of stars and even galaxies. The discovery of quasars and compact X-ray sources in the 1960s, using optical, radio, and X-ray observations, set the field in motion.

But the true renaissance began a decade ago, when the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an array of 66 radio telescopes in Chile, came online. With the ability to study distant, cool objects in detail came the data necessary to understand the process of accretion in a variety of circumstances. Seeing accretion in action promised to be a game-changer.

Today, ALMA and other advanced telescopes are observing numerous objects of different sizes and stages of evolution: galaxy groups, molecular clouds, stellar nurseries, protostars, planetary disks, black holes, and many more. We now know that whether on scales of kilometers or light-years, accretion operates on the same broad principles. The particular mechanisms remain mysterious, but the veil is beginning to lift.

The reason that the gas in a molecular cloud can accrete into a star may be due to magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), the physics of how magnetic fields interact with hot ionized gas.

Interstellar space and everything in it is permeated by a weak magnetic field. Normally, this background magnetic field has no effect on a cold, dense cloud of gas and dust.

But this changes when a collapsing cloud heats up and begins to generate plasma. Because plasma is electrically charged, it is linked to the magnetic field: As it moves, it drags the magnetic field lines with it. As the cloud collapses further and begins to form an accretion disk, the magnetic field becomes wound up by the disk’s rotation. The magnetic field also becomes stronger as the field lines bunch together.

All of these magnetic field lines then act as highways for plasma to escape the strong magnetic field: Following the field lines, the charged particles zip away from the accretion disk into space. This MHD wind carries angular momentum away from the disk — and this, astronomers suspect, helps the cloud collapse into a star.

---

The Giant GRB Ring is a suspected superstructure — a collection of nine gamma-ray bursts (immensely powerful stellar explosions) arranged in a loose ring that spans 5.6 billion light-years, as shown in this artist’s concept.

Pablo Carlos Budassi/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0

Stellar nurseries at the crossroads

The largest structures in the universe are groups of galaxies that are gravitationally bound to each other. We are not yet able to see them, but peculiar arrangements of objects have been interpreted as evidence of such superstructures. They are given various names according to their observed shapes, such as arcs, rings, or walls.

The observable portions of superstructures consist mostly of molecular clouds of gas millions of light-years across. Over the eons, these diffuse regions are perturbed by a variety of effects: the chaotic motions of the galaxies within them, the winds thrown by quasar jets, the passing wakes of rotating black holes, and blasts from supernovae. Here and there, a confluence of gas and dust will become dense enough that gravity takes over and a domino effect begins, as more and more mass is drawn into a conglomeration, where a star-forming region is born.

The mechanics of these stellar nurseries, from which hundreds or thousands of stars are created, are not completely understood. Sometimes a region containing a few hundred solar masses of dense gas and dust will form 100 Sun-like stars. Other times a few massive stars will also appear. This difference is of particular interest to astronomers because massive stars can alter the evolution of a galaxy. What guides the seemingly random accretion process on these vast scales?

One theory posits that there are “filaments of flowing gas, which thread through these clusters,” says Todd Hunter, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Astronomers are starting to see evidence of these filaments. “They fragment and intersect at certain places, especially in the center of clusters,” says Hunter. “And where they meet is where protostars have access to a lot of gas on a short timescale” — which feeds the formation of massive stars.

The accretion disk that surrounds the elliptical galaxy M87 feeds its central supermassive black hole (SMBH) and relativistic jet in this artist’s concept.

ESO/M. Kornmesser

These objects are called infrared dark clouds, and they are very large, very cold objects that were difficult to detect and resolve until recently. The first observations were made with the Infrared Space Observatory in 1996. It was a serendipitous find, made during the first detailed survey of stellar populations in the galactic plane. Nowadays these regions are studied in detail with ALMA and the Submillimeter Array in Hawaii, which are more sensitive and have higher resolution at submillimeter wavelengths where cold molecular gas is easiest to detect.

These facilities have allowed astronomers to map the gas flows they believe provide the necessary supply for the growth of massive stars. One survey, published in The Astrophysical Journal in 2019, identified hundreds of protostellar and prestellar core candidates in a particular region and studied how they affect each other. The researchers suggest a kind of “competitive accretion” process takes place, alongside what they call “global hierarchical collapse” — where chaotic gravitational forces cause a series of collapses within collapses, with small-scale events happening later and faster than large-scale events. This process works over a couple of million years, eventually transforming a diffuse cloud of starless cores into a flattened disk of protostars.

A widening gyre

Where there is gravity and matter, there will also be accretion. Infalling matter forms a swirling accretion disk. This gravitational gyre forms because the infalling material — like everything else in the universe — had some motion and angular momentum before becoming caught up by an object’s gravity. The laws of physics state that angular momentum must be conserved — so, to fall into a star, black hole, or other object, material must lose its angular momentum first. It cannot be simply sucked toward the core along a straight line. Instead, it forms a flattened structure called an accretion disk.

At just 450 light-years away, the Taurus Molecular Cloud is an ideal place to search for accretion disks. Two examples are the young stars HL Tauri (bright blue, at upper center left) and V1213 Tauri (lower right). The latter is hidden by an accretion disk, though the star partly illuminates the disk above and below it. The visible disk and the jets comprise the object HH 30.

ESA/Hubble and NASA; Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt

The closer the material is carried to the center, the faster it spins. (Physicists often use the metaphor of a figure skater to demonstrate this effect; when the skater pulls their arms in, they spin faster.) There’s just a small problem: For material to actually fall onto the core, it must slow down and eventually come to a stop. But how can this happen when the closer it gets, the faster it moves? Why doesn’t it just swirl around forever? What dissipates the angular momentum, allowing gravity to win the tug-of-war?

There are two prevailing theories. “The old idea is that disks are turbulent, and this turbulence generates a kind of viscosity,” or friction within a fluid, says Ilaria Pascucci, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. In this scenario, the disk is full of eddies, which means the gas particles don’t orbit smoothly. As inner material accelerates, it drags the material outside of it along for the ride, like a jar of molasses being stirred. “The viscosity redistributes angular momentum outward, enabling disk gas close in to accrete,” says Pascucci.

This turbulence-viscosity model of disk accretion was first suggested around 40 years ago. But astronomers have never really been able to make the numbers add up. The models required disks to be stickier and more viscous than turbulence could probably account for.

Then, in the last decade, an overlooked characteristic of accretion disks — magnetic fields — started to show promise. “What if the angular momentum is not redistributed in the disk, but extracted through winds?” Pascucci says.

The ghostly halo we see in the groundbreaking image of an SMBH from the Event Horizon Telescope is the hot, glowing plasma in the accretion disk surrounding it.

Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

Star-forming regions have magnetic fields running through them. While they do not affect neutral gas, particles that have been heated and ionized have an electric charge and will tend to follow these magnetic field lines. As the large-scale clouds collapse under their own gravity, these magnetic field lines also become twisted and tangled. And if magnetic field lines are somehow bent outward, anchored to plasma that remains outside the collapsing cloud, plasma that is zipping along the magnetic field might be able to overcome gravity and accelerate away from the disk. Astronomers call these outflows magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) winds, and they could carry away angular momentum. This would enable the leftover disk material to fall onto the forming protostar.

Both observations and simulations seem to point toward the MHD wind hypothesis. The best evidence so far for an MHD wind is a 2021 study in The Astrophysical Journal of an active young star, where astronomers have measured how high the wind appears to sustain itself as it flows away from the disk. Measuring how powerful these winds are — and therefore how much angular momentum they carry away — will be the next major task in testing the theory.

Disk worlds

At the same time a star is forming, so are the planets that will orbit it. Both star formation and planet formation happen within disks via accretion. As gas and dust swirls around the star, delineations begin to appear in the disk. Astronomers saw this for the first time in 2014 in a young star called HL Tauri. This observation, made using ALMA, was a major advancement in our understanding of how planets form.

In a nascent planetary system, the congregation of matter depends on lots of different factors. Turbulence, magnetic fields, and the play of viscosity between gas and dust may cause a kind of traffic jam that eventually congeals to form protoplanets. Closer in, most of the gas gets consumed by the star, leaving rocky material and heavy metals, which form terrestrial planets.

In 2014, the ALMA radio telescope revealed distinctive gaps in HL Tauri’s accretion disk. They mark regions where planets are accreting and sweeping up material.

ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

But there is a long-standing question about how rocky bodies accrete, involving a concept called the bouncing barrier. Electrostatic forces cause small grains to stick together and larger planetesimals are attracted to each other by gravity. But how does a particle become a planet? Models show that objects in that middle range between tiny and massive just tend to bounce off each other. So how do amassing objects overcome this barrier to growth?

One theory is that the particles experience a drag force as they move through gas in the disk. “There’s a strong interaction between solid particles and the gas in the disk,” says James Stone, an astrophysicist at Princeton University. “This causes clumps to form, which over time can produce larger and larger objects.”

So far, this protoplanetary evolution mechanism, called streaming instability, seems to be a promising way to grow things from centimeter to kilometer sizes. The most intriguing part of the theory is that the gas is the crucial component: Without it, dust in the disk couldn’t coalesce to form planetesimals. But there is not yet direct evidence.

The hope is that within a decade or two, we will have seen lots of planets at different stages of formation. This will stand in as a kind of time-lapse and we can judge how well predictions of prevailing hypotheses, like streaming instability, match up to actual exoplanets. This ambitious venture received a kickstart in 2021 with the discovery of the youngest planet ever observed: 2M0437b. The discovery image, taken by the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, shows a world still glowing hot from energy released during its formation, meaning it just recently (astronomically speaking) finished accreting. The study, led by Eric Gaidos of the University of Hawai’i, also fills in our picture of how quickly planetary systems form, because the star is only about 2.5 million years old.

Supercomputer simulations reveal the turbulent and hierarchical dynamics of collapsing infrared dark clouds (IRDCs), forming filaments within filaments. In the densest regions of this simulation, shown in red, molecular clouds are forming cores that will become massive stars.

Richard Klein, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Pak Shing Li, University of California, Berkeley; Tim Sandstrom, NASA Ames Research Center

Gathering dust

Every star grows up on its own schedule. The protostar stage is like a star’s volatile teen years. When its accretion disk stabilizes and material stops falling into the core, it becomes a main sequence star. There may still be a debris disk and the planets around might still be figuring out where they orbit, but accretion has largely stopped. That doesn’t mean there won’t be any more accretion in the star’s future, though. Depending on its mass, when fusion ceases, it will then transition into either a white dwarf, a neutron star, or a black hole, all of which can form accretion disks of their own.

The supply for this new disk can come from a variety of sources. Compact objects, like white dwarfs and black holes, may siphon gas from a companion star. A white dwarf may also pull in material that it puffed off in the earlier red giant phase. And when black holes grow and merge to become the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centers of galaxies, they draw material from the vast roaming stars, clouds, and nebulae within the galaxy itself.

As material from the disk falls into the central object — whether a star, planet, or singularity — it releases energy in the form of radiation. The disk itself also radiates as it swirls around the gravity well and heats up, with different factors like viscosity, friction, and speed making some parts hotter than others. The stronger the draw of the central object, the more powerful the radiation emitted, as gas can be transformed into plasma. The groundbreaking 2019 image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87 is not of the hole itself, but of the black hole’s shadow on the charged plasma swirling around it.

A black hole gains mass from everything it accretes over time. But while we understand how Sun-sized black holes form, we don’t know how SMBHs got as big as they are. For example, the SMBH at the center of the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) in Canes Venatici has a mass equivalent to 1 million Suns. There is no way for a single small, stellar-mass black hole to accrete enough material to grow this large at the universe’s current age.

“It’s one of the biggest mysteries of black hole research,” says Joanna Piotrowska, a graduate student at Cambridge University. The laws of physics limit how quickly an object can accrete matter, called the Eddington limit. Above that limit, the radiation from the accretion disk is so intense, it blows material away — preventing more accretion from happening. “The mass of [SMBHs] exceeds what is expected from continuous accretion at the Eddington limit over the lifetime of our universe,” says Piotrowska.

One proposed solution is that SMBHs were big to start with. Perhaps in the early universe, even before the first stars, there were molecular clouds with just the right conditions to collapse straight away into singularities. The James Webb Space Telescope might be able to shed some light on this dark topic when it comes online this year. It was designed especially to see the first galaxies and stars, and those primordial formations could help us to understand the initial distribution of potential collapsible matter.

IRDCs appear as shadows splayed across the bright mid-infrared background of the Milky Way, as seen in this false-color image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Though they are some of the darkest objects in the sky, these ultracold and dense clouds give birth to the brightest, most massive stars in the galaxy.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

And that’s not all ...

It’s tempting to picture accretion as a peaceful, gradual, and constructive process, like erosion in reverse. It can certainly take time to get going. But the methods by which an accretor gains mass can be quite quick and chaotic. Recently, observers have seen what they call accretion bursts around protostars — instances of extreme instability in a disk, where large amounts of material suddenly plunge into the star. Hunter recently observed this on NGC 6334 I, a protostar cluster in the Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334) in the constellation Scorpius, using the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (or SOFIA). He theorizes that a high proportion of the total accretion of some stars — up to 50 percent — may actually happen in this way.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

Dwarf Galaxies Found Without Influence From Dark Matter

Ask astronomers about dark matter and one of the things they talk about is that this invisible, mysterious “stuff” permeates the universe. In particular, it exists in halos surrounding most galaxies. The mass of the halo exerts a strong gravitational influence on the galaxy itself, as well as on others in the neighborhood. That’s pretty much the standard view of dark matter and its influence on galaxies. However, there are problems with the idea of those halos. Apparently, some oddly shaped dwarf galaxies exist that look like they have no halos. How could this be? Do they represent an observationally induced challenge to the prevailing ideas about dark matter halos?

Finding Perturbed Dwarf Galaxies

In the so-called “Standard Model” of cosmology, shells or halos of dark matter protect galaxies from the gravitational influence of nearby galactic neighbors. However, when astronomers at the University of Bonn and Saint Andrews in Scotland looked in the nearby Fornax Cluster, which lies some 62 million light-years away from us, they saw something strange. It contains a number of dwarf galaxies with distorted, perturbed shapes. This is odd, especially if they should be surrounded by dark matter halos.

Let’s take a quick look at dwarf galaxies. They’re small and faint and usually found riding along in galaxy clusters or near much larger companions. The Milky Way Galaxy has a coterie of dwarf galaxies around it,. It is, in fact, cannibalizing ones such as the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal. Interestingly, recent studies show that at least one of the dwarf galaxies near ours, an ancient one called Tucana II, has an astoundingly massive dark matter halo.

So, what’s happening in Fornax that’s different? There, dwarf galaxies could be “disturbed” by gravitational tides from nearby larger ones in the cluster. Tides happen when gravity from one body pulls differently on different parts of another body. These are similar to tides on Earth when the Moon pulls more strongly on the side of Earth that faces it.

The distorted shapes of the dwarf galaxies seen by the team indicate a problem with our understanding of dark matter. “Such perturbations in the Fornax dwarfs are not expected according to the Standard Model,” said Pavel Kroupa, Professor at the University of Bonn and Charles University in Prague. “This is because, according to that model, the dark matter halos of these dwarfs should partly shield them from tides raised by the cluster.”

Dwarf galaxy NGC1427A, part of the Fornax galaxy cluster.

(ESO)

Explaining Distorted Dwarf Galaxies

Kroupa and Ph.D. student Elena Ascencio analyzed observations of the perturbed dwarfs in Fornax. They wanted to understand the extent of gravitational distortions these galaxies show and what causes them. The expected levels of distortion depend on a couple of factors. One is the internal characteristics of the dwarf galaxy. In addition, their distance to the center of the cluster is important. That’s where gravitational influences are much stronger. As a rule, galaxies with large sizes but not many stars could be easily disturbed by strong gravitational tides. The same is true for galaxies closer to the core of the cluster.

The team members compared what they saw in the cluster with observations made by the VLT Survey Telescope at the European Southern Observatory. Asencio pointed out that what they found seems to point to problems with the Standard Model. “The comparison showed that, if one wants to explain the observations in the standard model,” she said, “the Fornax dwarfs should already be destroyed by gravity from the cluster center even when the tides it raises on a dwarf are sixty-four times weaker than the dwarf’s own self-gravity.”

Not only is this counter-intuitive, she said, it also contradicts previous studies. The team also found that the force needed to disturb a dwarf galaxy is about the same as its self-gravity.

What Does This Mean for the Standard Model?

The research team points out that it’s difficult to explain these perturbed, disturbed shapes of the dwarf galaxies in Fornax if they’re surrounded by dark matter. In other words, they shouldn’t be misshapen if they do have halos. Yet, there they are with disturbed-looking shapes. That means that there are no dark matter halos around those galaxies.

Obviously, if what the astronomers found is confirmed, then the Standard Model needs some tweaking. And, there is at least one alternative explanation for the strange galaxy shapes. It’s called the MOND model (short for Modified Newtonian Dynamics). It suggests that Newton’s law of universal gravitation should be modified to account for the observed properties of galaxies. It could be applied to explain why misshapen galaxies look the way they do.

According to Hongsheng Zhao, a member of the research team from the University of Saint Andrews, finding disturbed dwarfs without dark matter halos is a major challenge to the current view. It states that galaxies have halos. It appears not all of them do, he points out. “Our results have major implications for fundamental physics,” he said. “We expect to find more disturbed dwarfs in other clusters, a prediction which other teams should verify”.

For More Information

• No trace of dark matter halos
• The distribution and morphologies of Fornax Cluster dwarf galaxies suggest they lack dark matter
• Modified Newtonian Dynamics

The post Dwarf Galaxies Found Without Influence From Dark Matter appeared first on Universe Today.

Source: 

• https://www.universetoday.com/157056/dwarf-galaxies-found-without-influence-from-dark-matter/

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

Ancient records and religious texts describe multiple "Gods" (aka extraterrestrials) creating humanity in a series of genetic experiments and warring among themselves over who would be dominant in influencing Earth's future. 

The world's oldest known creation story, Sumer's Enuma Elish, and other ancient texts introduce the different creator Gods and how they formed grand assemblies to resolve their differences over the destiny of humanity. 

This new video is the official trailer/short film for the "World Religions and Extraterrestrial Contact" webinar to be held on August 13. In addition to the above issues, the trailer discusses the rise and fall of Atlantis in relation to creator Gods/extraterrestrials alarmed over humanity's rapid technological development. 

Finally, this short film covers the return of the creator Gods (Elohim/Anunnaki) to our solar system and what this means for us today.

  

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

Stationary blinking UFO over Boynton, Florida 31-May-2022

This blinking unidentified flying object was filmed above the sea near Boynton in Florida. This happened on 31st May 2022.

Witness report: 

Here’s the 12 minutes video of various times during the 45 + minute sighting. However, please study this at 10 minutes and 35 seconds into the video above when a very large Ufo streaks across the screen from top right to bottom left quadrant!

So, let’s use logic. This craft flew at least 2 1/2 miles over the sea (which is a VERY conservative estimate because it really appears to have gone over the horizon which is 35 miles away). Theirs 3,600 seconds in one hour. IF this craft only went 2 1/2 miles in 1/10 th of a second – that would put the speed of the Ufo at 90,000 per hour!

However, if it’s gone out of sight over the horizon (35 miles) in 1/10 th of a second , using the same equation…(3,600 seconds in one hour) that would put the speed of the Ufo at an Astounding 1,260,000 mph!!

RECENT UFO-VIDEOS FLORIDA, selected and posted by peter2011

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

Kosmisch overgewicht: waarom sterren, planeten en manen rond zijn

Hoe bewust maken we onze eigen dood mee?

Hoe het voelt om dood te gaan zullen we pas echt weten als het zover is. Al krijgt de wetenschap wel steeds meer inzicht in wat er in de hersenen gebeurt rond het moment van overlijden. ‘We hebben de activiteit van het brein in het proces van doodgaan lang onderschat.’

{ https://www.eoswetenschap.eu/ }

Future Space Travelers May Follow Cosmic Lighthouses

For centuries, lighthouses helped sailors navigate safely into harbor. Their lights swept across the water, cutting through fog and darkness, guiding mariners around dangerous obstacles and keeping them on the right path. In the future, space explorers may receive similar guidance from the steady signals created by pulsars.

Scientists and engineers are using the International Space Station to develop pulsar-based navigation using these cosmic lighthouses to assist with wayfinding on trips to the Moon under NASA’s Artemis program and on future human missions to Mars.

Pulsars, or rapidly spinning neutron stars, are the extremely dense remains of stars that exploded as supernovas. They emit X-ray photons in bright, narrow beams that sweep the sky like a lighthouse as the stars spin. From a great distance they appear to pulse, hence the name pulsars.

An X-ray telescope on the exterior of the space station, the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer or NICER, collects and timestamps the arrival of X-ray light from neutron stars across the sky. Software embedded in NICER, called the Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology or SEXTANT, is using the beacons from pulsars to create a GPS-like system. This concept, often referred to as XNAV, could provide autonomous navigation throughout the solar system and beyond.

“GPS uses precisely synchronized signals. Pulsations from some neutron stars are very stable, some even as stable as terrestrial atomic clocks in the long term, which makes them potentially useful in a similar way,” says Luke Winternitz, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The stability of the pulses allows highly accurate predictions of their time of arrival to any reference point in the solar system. Scientists have developed detailed models that predict precisely when a pulse would arrive at, for example, the center of Earth. Timing the arrival of the pulse to a detector on a spacecraft, and comparing that to when it is predicted to arrive at a reference point, provides information for navigating far beyond our planet.

“Navigation information provided by pulsars does not degrade by moving away from Earth since pulsars are distributed throughout our Milky Way galaxy,” says SEXTANT team member Munther Hassouneh, navigation technologist.  

“It effectively turns the ‘G’ in GPS from Global to Galactic,” adds team member Jason Mitchell, director of the Advanced Communications and Navigation Technology Division in NASA’s Space Communication and Navigation Program. “It could work anywhere in the solar system and even carry robotic or crewed systems beyond the solar system.”

Pulsars also can be observed in the radio band but, unlike radio waves, X-rays are not delayed by matter in space. Additionally, detectors for X-rays can be more compact and smaller than radio dishes.

But because X-ray pulses are very weak, a system must be robust enough to collect a signal sufficient for navigating. NICER’s large collection area makes it nearly ideal for XNAV research. A future XNAV system could be made smaller, trading size for longer collection time.

“NICER is roughly the size of a washing machine, but you could dramatically reduce its size and volume,” Mitchell says. “For example, it would be interesting to fit an XNAV telescope into a small satellite that could independently navigate the asteroid belt and characterize primitive solar system bodies.”

As published in a 2018 paper, SEXTANT already has successfully demonstrated real-time pulsar-based navigation aboard the space station. It also studied the use of pulsars for time-keeping and clock synchronization and is helping expand the catalog of pulsars to use as reference points for XNAV.

The SEXTANT team also includes Samuel Price, Sean Semper and Wayne Yu at Goddard; Naval Research Lab partners Paul Ray and Kent Wood; and NICER principal investigator Keith Gendreau and science lead Zaven Arzoumanian.

The team now is studying the possibility of using XNAV autonomous navigation as a technique on NASA’s Gateway platform, to study support for crewed missions to Mars.

These kinds of experiments could bring cosmic lighthouses to guide spacecraft to their destinations another step closer to reality.

• For daily updates, follow @ISS_Research, Space Station Research and Technology News or our Facebook. Follow the ISS National Lab or information on its sponsored investigations. For opportunities to see the space station pass over your town, check out Spot the Station.

Melissa Gaskill

International Space Station Program Research Office

Johnson Space Center

{ https://www.nasa.gov/ }

Water in Ganymede’s atmosphere

Hubble Space Telescope finds evidence for water around Jupiter’s largest moon.

Depiction of Ganymede centered over 45° W. longitude.

Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

An international team of astronomers has used Hubble to peer into the atmosphere of Jupiter’s biggest moon, Ganymede – and find evidence for water vapour there.

More on  Ganymede

• Jupiter’s aurorae put the Earth’s to shame
• Summer on Saturn and an icy pole
• The biggest moon in the solar system

Ganymede is the biggest of our Solar System’s moons, with a diameter of 5,200km – 1.5 times bigger than our own satellite. It’s a cold world, made up of equal amounts of rock and water, with an ocean below the surface that may contain more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.

But it’s also the largest body in the Solar System without any kind of substantial atmosphere. When the Voyager 1 spacecraft soared by in 1979, it didn’t detect any atmosphere, although a couple of decades later the Hubble Space Telescope managed to spot a very thin and tenuous one comprised primarily of oxygen molecules (O₂).

These molecules are thought to be created when charged particles and solar radiation hit the icy surface of Ganymede. This splits up the water molecules into various groups of molecules and atoms, including atomic hydrogen (H) and molecular oxygen. The lighter hydrogen is quickly lost, while the moon’s gravity holds onto the heavier oxygen molecules.

Astronomers have long suspected that there must be some water in Ganymede’s atmosphere, too, created from the same process on the surface. In particular, the icy surface “sublimates”, with ice turned directly into water vapour (H₂O) and skipping the liquid stage.

Modelling has suggested that H₂O should dominate the atmosphere at Ganymede’s subsolar point – that is, the warmest part of the atmosphere where the Sun’s radiation directly hits – while molecular oxygen dominates the rest.

Now, this new research has turned Hubble’s eyes back to the Jovian moon to settle this. The team, led by Lorenz Roth from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, used Hubble’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to study the chemical composition of Ganymede’s atmosphere.

Their findings were consistent with the modelling: spectral signatures indicated that H₂O was more abundant around the subsolar point, but O₂ was more abundant elsewhere.

• The result is published in Nature Astronomy.

The team notes that finding water in Ganymede’s atmosphere will inform future space missions, including the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE). Expected to reach the gas giant in 2031, JUICE will make several fly-bys of the moons before settling into orbit around Ganymede in 2034 for at least 280 days.

“Several science instruments are equipped to measure Ganymede’s neutral gas environment and particularly the H₂O abundance by remote sensing of UV, optical, infrared and submillimetre emissions, as well as in situ sensing with the neutral particle detector,” the authors explain in their paper.

“Our results place observational constraints on the contribution of sublimation to the atmosphere, and provide the JUICE instrument teams with valuable information that may be used to refine their observation plans.”

Read more:

• Jupiter’s moon Europa may glow in the dark
• Mystery solved: Jupiter’s X-ray aurora explained
• Hydrothermal vents on Saturn’s moon Enceladus may harbour life

{ https://cosmosmagazine.com/ }

60 Unsolved Mysteries That Cannot Be Explained

60 UNSOLVED MYSTERIES THAT CANNOT BE EXPLAINED – PREMIERED 2022

60 unsolved mysteries that cannot be explained | compilation.Today, we take a look at 60 unsolved mysteries that cannot be explained.

There is nothing more tantalising to the human species than a good mystery. Thrillers in the forms of novels, movies, and even campfire tales are often consumed by the thousands by those who love the adrenaline rush of solving a mystery. However, some of the most pervasive mysteries are those that occur in real life, and these are the ones that are often most difficult to solve. So today, here at unexplained mysteries, we take a look at these 60 unsolved mysteries that cannot be explained.

Thank you for watching!

Thank you to CO.AG for the background music!

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{  https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

Elon Musk says Tesla would continue to do very well even if he was kidnapped by aliens or 'went back to my home planet' UFO Sighting News.

Date of announcement: Aug 6, 2022

 

During a live Tesla interview with Elon Musk, he stated that he is an alien from another planet. Now he says it with a smile and there is laughter, but I have long said he is an alien and not of this world. Here, he admits it 100%. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

"We have a very talented team here. So I think Tesla, you know, would continue to do very well even if I was kidnapped by aliens, or went back to my home planet," the Tesla CEO said at the firm's 2022 Cyber roundup meeting of stock owners. He was responding to a question from stockholder Gary Black, a managing partner of the Future Fund, concerning how Tesla's board would potentially handle his succession.

 

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

Plane Buzzes UFO Over Airport, El Paso, Texas, Aug 4, 2022, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Aug 4, 2022
Location of sighting: El Paso, Texas, USA

 

Here is an interesting video from Texas, one of the top 3 UFO hotspots of America. Someone caught a UFO over the airport during sunset, then the UFO flew closer and began to pass over the neighborhood. He even said when he went to start his truck...it just would not start and had to leave it till morning. This has all the signs of a real UFO. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

 

Eyewitness states:

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

Farmers find large and rare pieces of China space junk in the Snowy Mountains, UFO Sighting News.

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

Out of the Blue - UFO Phenomenon ( VIDEOS )

Producer James Fox and his team travel the globe, interviewing eyewitnesses and high-ranking military & government personnel about their UFO knowledge and experiences. As narrator, actor Peter Coyote guides the viewer through these interviews and through new and historic film footage & information related to the UFO Phenomenon.

{  https://www.youtube.com/ }

Blue UFO filmed over Denver, Colorado 21-Jul-2022

This blue UAP or Orb was filmed in the night sky above Denver, Colorado on 21st July 2022.

Witness report: 

I was driving westbound on Evans near Zuni and I seen this blue orb looking object flying fast!

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

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

The Egyptian myth of intelligent giant snakes killed by a flying Death Star

A condensed version of an ancient Egyptian legend goes as follows: the wise servant tells his master how he survived the shipwreck and came ashore on a mysterious island where he met a great talking serpent who called himself the Lord of Punt. All good things were on the island and the sailor and the snake converse until a ship is hailed and he can return to Egypt.

The Tale of The Ship-Wrecked Sailor is a text dated to the Middle Kingdom of Egypt (2040-1782 BCE). © Image Credit: Freesurf69 | Licensed from Dreamstime.Com (Editorial/Commercial Use Stock Photo) ID: 7351093

A number of the myth’s fragments lead to some interesting reflections. The size of the enigmatic reptile is the first thing that strikes you as astonishing. The surviving sailor recounts his misadventures in this manner:

“The trees were cracking, the ground was shaking. When I opened my face, I saw that the serpent was approaching me. Its length is thirty cubits. His beard is more than two cubits long. His scales are of gold, his eyebrows are of lapis lazuli, his body is curved upwards.”

Lord of Punt as a gigantic talking serpent. © Image Credit: Tristram Ellis

This myth’s serpent is quite fascinating. Signs point to him having a beard and eyebrows thick enough to resemble the legendary golden Chinese dragons of Chinese mythology. However, a little beard was occasionally depicted on sacred snakes in Egypt. Ancient Egyptian and East Asian traditions about enormous reptiles appear to be derived from the same source.

The Chinese dragon, also known as lung, is a legendary creature in Chinese mythology. © Shutterstock

The second unusual thing you notice is that, there is a reference made in the legend to a particular star that was responsible for the death of the entire serpent family. This is what the last serpent told the man:

“Now since you have survived this accident, let me tell you of a tale of calamity that befell me. I once lived on this island with my family – 75 serpents in all without counting an orphan girl who was brought to me by chance and who was dear to my heart. One night a star came crashing down from heaven and they all went up in flames. It happened when I wasn’t there – I wasn’t among them. Only I was spared, and behold, here I am, utterly alone.”

What kind of star was it that burnt down seventy-five enormous creatures all at once? – let’s remember the size of the serpent. What an accurate and effective hit and what a powerful striking factor!

Ancient Egyptian art depicting Apep in the tomb of Pharaoh Seti I of the Nineteenth Dynasty, Burial chamber J, Valley of the Kings, Egypt © Image Credit: Carole Raddato | Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Let us recall another myth from ancient Egypt, in which Sekhmet, the dreadful eye of the deity Ra, is said to have severed the head of a giant snake or serpent Apep (also known as Apophis). Apep was viewed as the greatest enemy of Ra, and thus was given the title Enemy of Ra, and also “the Lord of Chaos”.

In this particular instance — the tale of Serpent Island — this destruction of serpents by a star resembles a real celestial punishment, in the literal sense of the word!

Let’s take a step back from the myth for a moment and concentrate on the specifics. The last surviving sailor describes waves of eight cubits, and he estimates the length of the snake to be thirty cubits. These are key comparative measurements that can be used to estimate the scale:

“And now the wind is getting stronger, and the waves are eight cubits high. And then the mast fell into the wave, and the ship was lost, and no one survived except me.”

In other words, based on the narrative, there can be no doubt regarding the size; the waves are big, and the snakes are at least three times larger than the waves. And with one swift strike from a certain “star,” all of this enormous “snake pit” of the seventy-five giant serpents is eradicated. It is clear that the explosion had a significant amount of power.

What struck the intelligent serpents? Somehow, it is difficult to accept a “crazy” asteroid hitting at random.

There is no doubt that ancient sources that tell about the history of peoples often include fictional tales in their folklore. We believe that this story parallels the ancient mythology of peoples that lived a long way from Egypt, where gods or heroes fought with reptiles or dragons in ancient stories. Why were such myths popular among ancient cultures?

 

Humans have been in the Arctic for over 40,000 years, new discoveries reveal

BY NEIL EN

The discovery was made by scientists from the Siberian Section of the Russian Academy of Sciences (СО РАН) conducted radiocarbon analyses of reindeer antler fragments found at the Kushevat Paleolithic site in the Lower Ob region.

The Ob River. © Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In addition to the antler bones, scientists also examined a woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), a steppe bison (Bison Priscus), Elk (Alces alces), deer (Cervus elephus sibiricus), and, potentially, a musk ox (Ovibos moschatus). Analyses of the bones dated them back to a series of 20 different radiocarbon dates, all ranging from the period between 20 and 40 thousand years ago.

Although this finding solely points to animals, and not humans, inhibiting the Arctic region 40,000 years back, the discovery has now become the basis of further analyses, which currently date human activity in the Ob region back to 40,000 years ago. This is because two reindeer antlers held traces of human activity amongst this group of bones, which have only recently been analyzed.

The question of the initial settlement of the Arctic and Subarctic by an ancient man of the modern type (Homo sapiens sapiens) has long been of interest to scientists. The valley of the Ob River is often considered a potential migration route for Paleolithic man. It is believed that modern man came to Europe and Asia 50,000-60,000 thousand years ago.

What is still unclear is where the modern man lived before and how he crossed the Urals? For a long time, the hypothesis prevailed that 12,000-30,000 years ago, the north of Western Siberia was covered by a large glacier (just like the north of America and Europe). To the south of this glacier was a dammed basin reaching 130 meters.

For this reason, it was believed that looking for archaeological sites dating back to the period of 30-40 thousand years ago in the north was pointless. It was confirmed by the almost complete absence of finds (tools, sites, organic matter).

Fragment of reindeer antler with traces of anthropological impact. © Image Credit: Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Siberian Branch of the RAS

Thanks to the international research program using AMS dating and optical-stimulating luminescence, researchers from Europe and Russia proved that there was no ice cover in the north of Western Siberia 12,000-30,000 years ago. It was much earlier: 90,000-60,000 years ago north of Salekhard. The level of the ice-dammed basin in the Ob valley did not exceed 60 meters.

This is an entirely different paleogeographic picture. For thirty years, I was convinced that in the north of Western Siberia, there were all the conditions for the existence of an ancient person. Now we had the opportunity to try to prove it: to find traces of Homo sapiens in the north of the Ob 30,000-50,000 years ago, – the project manager, head of the laboratory of the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy named after V.I. V.S commented in a press statement.

As reported by the Barents Observer “the analysis suggests that Homo sapiens and not only Neanderthals inhabited the Arctic Circle in the Upper Paleolithic age. About two decades ago, it was only certain that Neanderthals, and not Homo sapiens, were occupants in the region during the period.”

This was discovered by radiocarbon dating a set of bones unearthed in 2001 at the Yakutia site. The radiocarbon analysis suggested that the Neanderthals had found themselves in the region approximately 28,500-27,000 years ago.

The new AMS analysis has hence provided two major breakthroughs. The first one is that Homo sapiens, as well as Neanderthals, inhabited the Arctic circle during the Paleolithic Age, and the second finding is that Homo sapiens lived north of the Arctic circle already 40,000 years ago.

{ https://mysteriesrunsolved.com/ }

Humans have been in the Arctic for over 40,000 years, new discoveries reveal

BY NEIL EN

The discovery was made by scientists from the Siberian Section of the Russian Academy of Sciences (СО РАН) conducted radiocarbon analyses of reindeer antler fragments found at the Kushevat Paleolithic site in the Lower Ob region.

The Ob River. © Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In addition to the antler bones, scientists also examined a woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), a steppe bison (Bison Priscus), Elk (Alces alces), deer (Cervus elephus sibiricus), and, potentially, a musk ox (Ovibos moschatus). Analyses of the bones dated them back to a series of 20 different radiocarbon dates, all ranging from the period between 20 and 40 thousand years ago.

Although this finding solely points to animals, and not humans, inhibiting the Arctic region 40,000 years back, the discovery has now become the basis of further analyses, which currently date human activity in the Ob region back to 40,000 years ago. This is because two reindeer antlers held traces of human activity amongst this group of bones, which have only recently been analyzed.

The question of the initial settlement of the Arctic and Subarctic by an ancient man of the modern type (Homo sapiens sapiens) has long been of interest to scientists. The valley of the Ob River is often considered a potential migration route for Paleolithic man. It is believed that modern man came to Europe and Asia 50,000-60,000 thousand years ago.

What is still unclear is where the modern man lived before and how he crossed the Urals? For a long time, the hypothesis prevailed that 12,000-30,000 years ago, the north of Western Siberia was covered by a large glacier (just like the north of America and Europe). To the south of this glacier was a dammed basin reaching 130 meters.

For this reason, it was believed that looking for archaeological sites dating back to the period of 30-40 thousand years ago in the north was pointless. It was confirmed by the almost complete absence of finds (tools, sites, organic matter).

Fragment of reindeer antler with traces of anthropological impact. © Image Credit: Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Siberian Branch of the RAS

Thanks to the international research program using AMS dating and optical-stimulating luminescence, researchers from Europe and Russia proved that there was no ice cover in the north of Western Siberia 12,000-30,000 years ago. It was much earlier: 90,000-60,000 years ago north of Salekhard. The level of the ice-dammed basin in the Ob valley did not exceed 60 meters.

This is an entirely different paleogeographic picture. For thirty years, I was convinced that in the north of Western Siberia, there were all the conditions for the existence of an ancient person. Now we had the opportunity to try to prove it: to find traces of Homo sapiens in the north of the Ob 30,000-50,000 years ago, – the project manager, head of the laboratory of the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy named after V.I. V.S commented in a press statement.

As reported by the Barents Observer “the analysis suggests that Homo sapiens and not only Neanderthals inhabited the Arctic Circle in the Upper Paleolithic age. About two decades ago, it was only certain that Neanderthals, and not Homo sapiens, were occupants in the region during the period.”

This was discovered by radiocarbon dating a set of bones unearthed in 2001 at the Yakutia site. The radiocarbon analysis suggested that the Neanderthals had found themselves in the region approximately 28,500-27,000 years ago.

The new AMS analysis has hence provided two major breakthroughs. The first one is that Homo sapiens, as well as Neanderthals, inhabited the Arctic circle during the Paleolithic Age, and the second finding is that Homo sapiens lived north of the Arctic circle already 40,000 years ago.

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The 2-billion-year-old nuclear reactors in Africa baffle researchers!

BY AVIS LEE

In 1942, physicist Enrico Fermi and a team of workers built what they thought was the first nuclear reactor in a Chicago racket ball court. Unfortunately, nature had beaten them to the punch — by eons.

Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1) was the world’s first artificial nuclear reactor. On 2 December 1942, the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was initiated in CP-1, during an experiment led by Enrico Fermi. But is this the first? © Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Truth be told, self-sustaining nuclear power reactor was invented in Africa, 2 billion years ago! It’s a 100-kilowatt nuclear plant that produced pulses of power every three hours for a period of about 150,000 years.

Contents  ▴ 

I. The discovery of the prehistoric Oklo nuclear plant

II. The advanced process self-sustaining fission

III. It needs the pure natural water

IV. The radioactive rock samples

V. The incredible hypotheses

The discovery of the prehistoric Oklo nuclear plant

Illustration of the secret nuclear lab in the canyon, Digital painting. © Image Credit: Zishan Liu | Licensed from DreamsTime.com (Editorial/Commercial Use Stock Photo, ID:185429361)

On June 2, 1972, a French nuclear fuel reprocessing plant discovered that 200 kg of uranium from a uranium mine in the Oklo region of Gabon Republic had been refined. Fearing that someone (or a secret organization) would build a nuclear bomb, the French Atomic Energy Commission immediately opened an investigation.

In 1972, French miners in Gabon, Africa discovered evidence that a self-sustaining nuclear reactor had formed about 2 billion years ago from a concentration of the fissionable element uranium 235. From the main mine that humans made in the Oklo region, one of the prehistoric reactors is accessible via an offshoot, as illustrated here. © Image credit: NASA/Robert D. Loss, WAISRC

Finally, researchers and scientists from all over the world, after conducting detailed investigation, came to the conclusion that, six large nuclear reactors as old as 2 billion years old are located near Gabon’s uranium mine, and has been active for at least 150,000 years!

The advanced process self-sustaining fission

The ancient nuclear reactors use surface water and groundwater to modulate and reflect sequenced fission neutrons, its operation is much more advanced than that of modern nuclear reactors. Moreover, scientists found geological evidence that uranium in lens-shaped veins of uranium ore had undergone self-sustaining fission chain reactions, generating intense heat.

In this process, subatomic neutrons released by radioactive decay of uranium atoms induce decay of other uranium atoms, leading to a cascade of nuclear fission and substantial release of energy as heat. This is what modern nuclear reactors use to produce power.

The Uranium-235 chain reaction that both leads to a nuclear fission bomb, but also generates power inside a nuclear reactor, is powered by neutron absorption as its first step, resulting in the production of three additional free neutrons. © Image Credit: E. Siegel, Fastfission / Wikimedia Commons The puzzle, however, is why the Oklo reactors didn’t plunge straight into a runaway chain reaction, leading to meltdown of the veins or even to an explosion. In nuclear plants the reaction is kept under control by using ‘moderators’. These are substances that either slow down the chain reaction by absorbing some of the fission neutrons or encourage it by adjusting the neutron energies.

It needs the pure natural water

Former head of the United States Atomic Energy Commission and Nobel laureate Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg points out: For uranium to continue to “burn”, all conditions must be completely free of bias. The water involved in the nuclear reaction must be very pure, a few parts per million of pollutants will create a “toxic” reaction that causes the reactor to stop working. Nowhere in the world is there such pure natural water.

The radioactive rock samples

A selection of some of the original samples from Oklo. These materials were donated to the Vienna Natural History Museum. © Image Credit: Ludovic Ferrière/Natural History Museum

In April 2018, two rock samples recovered during drilling campaigns in Oklo were donated to the Vienna Natural History Museum. The donation (and ceremony) was made possible with funding from nuclear fuel company Orano and France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). The French Permanent Mission to the UN in Vienna supported the effort.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which helped monitor radioactivity levels and handling of those samples, the two samples emit a radiation of about 40 microsieverts per hour “if you stand 5 centimetres away from them, which roughly compares to the amount of cosmic radiation a passenger would receive on an eight-hour flight from Vienna to New York.”

The incredible hypotheses

The Oklo nuclear reactor in Gabon has been operating for 1500,00 years. How to produce water of such high purity has become another unsolved mystery. The rationality of the structural design of prehistoric nuclear reactors is absolutely baffling to experts.

Some scientists and theorists believe that the reactor is extremely advanced, suggesting that highly intelligent beings existed 2 billion years ago. While another hypothesis is that it was constructed by prehistoric human civilization (like described in the Silurian Hypothesis by NASA scientists) using techniques that were lost to subsequent humans.

Illustration of a dark and strange monolith in the distant past during an advanced lost civilization with ruins of an ancient structure that used to live there. © Image Credit: Keremgo | Licensed from DreamsTime.com (Editorial/Commercial Use Stock Photo, ID: 79765642)

However, most of the mainstream researchers believe that Oklo is the world’s only identified naturally occurring reactor which was created by accident. As scientists Norman Schwers and John A. Miller from Sandia National Laboratories explain in a 2017 paper, the concept of a naturally occurring reactor was originally documented in 1956 using reactor theory or the infinite multiplication constants.

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Scientists Successfully Sent A Particle Back in Time Using A Quantum Computer

Time travel was fiction before Einstein, but his calculations took us into the quantum world and we were introduced to a more complex picture of time. Einstein’s equations permitted time travel into the past, as Kurt Gödel discovered. The issue? None of the hypothesized time travel systems were ever physically feasible.

So, before sending a particle back through time, Argonne National Laboratory, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and ETH Zurich scientists wondered, “Why stick to physical grounds?

Many physics laws treat the future and the past as continuous. A closed system progresses from order to disorder according to the second rule of thermodynamics (or entropy). If you scramble an egg to produce an omelet, you’ve added a lot of chaos to the closed system that was the egg.

The arrow of time is an essential consequence of the second law. A process that develops entropy, like whisking an egg, is irreversible. An omelet won’t turn back into an egg, and billiard balls won’t spontaneously reassemble a triangle. Entropy, like an arrow, goes in one direction, and we see it as time.

The second rule of thermodynamics holds us captive, but an international team of scientists sought to test it in the quantum world. Since nature cannot do such a test, scientists utilized an IBM quantum computer.

Ordinary computers, such as the one you’re reading this on, work with bits of data. A bit is either a 1 or a 0. A qubit is a fundamental unit of information used by quantum computers. A qubit may be both a 1 and a 0, allowing the system to process data considerably quicker.

The researchers used qubits to simulate subatomic particles in a four-step experiment. They entangled the qubits first, such that whatever occurred to one affected the others. Then they utilized microwave radio pulses to evolve the quantum computer’s initial order into a more sophisticated state.

A specific algorithm changes the quantum computer to bring order out of chaos. They’re zapped by another microwave pulse, but this time they go back to their old selves. That is, they are de-aged by a millionth of a second.

Argonne National Laboratory researcher Valerii M. Vinokur compares it to pushing against a pond’s waves to restore them to their source.

Success was not guaranteed since quantum mechanics is about probability. In a two-qubit quantum computer, however, the algorithm accomplished a time leap 85 percent of the time. With three qubits, the success rate decreased to around 50%, which the scientists blamed on flaws in current quantum computers.

• The findings were just reported in Scientific Reports.

The results are exciting but don’t go buying flux capacitors just yet. This experiment also illustrates that manipulating even a simulated particle in time is difficult. Our ability to produce such an external force to influence even one quantum wave is limited.

To time-reverse even ONE quantum particle is impossible for nature alone, says research author Vinokur.  “The system comprising two particles is even more irreversible, let alone the eggs — comprising billions of particles — we break to prepare an omelette.”

A press release from the Department of Energy notes that the “timeline required for [an external force] to spontaneously appear and properly manipulate the quantum waves” to appear in nature and unscramble an egg “would extend longer than that of the universe itself.” In other words, this tech specifically binds to quantum computation.

But the study isn’t just a high-tech exercise. While the approach won’t help us build real-world time machines, it will improve quantum computation.

Einstein’s equations don’t prohibit time travel, but they make it a difficult task, as Kurt Gödel demonstrated.

Reference(s):

• The New York Times | For a Split Second, a Quantum Computer Made History Go Backward
• Nature.com | Arrow of time and its reversal on the IBM quantum computer

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New claims in film by the ‘lad who photographed flying saucers’

Alex Birch whose photographs of UFOs puzzled experts on both sides of the Atlantic has released a film about his experiences – that he claims included meetings with the British royal family and a phone conversation with JFK.

In Beyond Perception Sheffield-born Alex says he attended private meetings with Prince Philip, who died age 99 in 2021 and Lord Mountbatten of Burma who asked the then 14-year-old Alex to call him Dickie. Both men were known for their fascination with the UFO mystery at that time.

But in the new film Alex, now 74, also claims he took part in a transatlantic telephone conversation with President John F Kennedy in 1962 after his photo of a fleet of flying saucers made news headlines across the world.

In the 30-minute film Alex says a military car collected him and his father from their home near Sheffield from where they were taken to a US military base. On arrival they met USAF officials and the base commander. During the visit he was taken to an adjoining room where he was put through to a man he believes was JFK.

The man quizzed Alex ‘asking if there was any visible markings on the objects, also how high were the objects and how big they were and many other questions’. He says Kennedy was concerned the Russians had ‘secret weapons and were already exploring space’. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 after launching NASA’s Apollo space programme that put the first men on the moon.

Shortly before the call Alex, then 14 years old, had travelled to London with his father where his black and white photograph and Box Brownie camera were examined by officials at the Air Ministry. A MoD file documenting the meeting was released at The National Archives in the 1990s.

Alex Birch’s photo showing a fleet of UFOs over Mosborough, near Sheffield, in March 1962 (Copyright A. Birch)

After the media furore surrounding this photograph Alex faded from the public eye. But flying saucers, and UFOlogists, continued to haunt him. He was taunted at school and everywhere he went he was known as ‘the lad who had photographed flying saucers.’

So in 1972, when he was 24 years old, he contacted the Daily Express and confessed it was a hoax. He even appeared on TV with the pane of glass on which the ‘saucers’ had been painted. For ten years he had fooled his family, friends and even the Air Ministry who had them tagged as ‘ice crystals’.

The ruse, for according to Alex it was a ruse, worked. Alex says he knew the photo was genuine but his manipulation of the media removed the heat; interest in him diminished and he was able to concentrate on building a career and supporting a family. But his interest in photography remained and over the years he became an accomplished practitioner, entering and wining numerous competitions.

Daily Express, 6 October 1972

Meanwhile his iconic flying saucer photograph continued to be reproduced in books and magazines worldwide. In 1998 Alex, who no longer possessed a copy of the original negative, decided to step back into the public spotlight to reclaim his own copyright on the image. He also wanted the world to know the truth: he really did see, and photograph, flying saucers in 1962.

After a short flurry of media and UFOlogical interest, his U-turn was again quickly forgotten. Alex didn’t care who believed him and, now a grandfather, he believed his adventures in UFOlogy were now a thing of the past.

Until Tuesday, 27 January 2004. On that evening Alex, now 55, was sitting in his bungalow watching TV with his wife when it began snowing heavily. At the time Alex was trying to think of a suitable photograph to enter in his local photographic society’s competition and this unexpected snowfall made him think he might get an unusual night time shot.

Leaving the house at 9.15 pm, without even telling his wife, Alex drove through heavy snow to the market town of Retford, in rural Nottinghamshire, where he parked in the square. The thick snow and the relatively late hour meant the square was completely deserted and silent. Alex spent some time taking a variety of photographs of the square, road and buildings that were covered in snow and reflecting lights from lampposts and buildings. He was using 35mm Fujia Sensia 200ASA reversal film (a slide film).

After using the roll of thirty six frames Alex returned home and shortly afterwards sent the film for processing. When the slides were returned he spent some time looking at them on a small battery operated viewer, trying to identify a suitable slide for entry in his local photography club’s competition. He found three shots that were perfect and then noticed an odd image on one of the slides. To his amazement when he looked closer he saw a UFO, a saucer shaped UFO at that, just to the side of Retford Town Hall. The Town Hall clock fixes the image in time at 23.08.

UFO? Retford, Nottinghamshire, 27 January 2004 (Copyright A Birch)

Alex was naturally keen to tell us about his new photograph. We were, naturally, skeptical. After all, the chances of someone taking a photograph of a genuinely anomalous UFO once are massive. To do so twice in a lifetime would be, well, Fortean. We recalled the furore over Alex’s 1962 photograph, his 1972 confession and his subsequent revelation that it was genuine after all. What was going on?

Alex wasn’t going to let the problems which plagued his 1962 photograph affect this new one and he decided to eschew any publicity. He just wanted to know what he had caught on film. The first time we saw the new UFO image was on a copy of a slide he sent to us.

We thought it was obviously a lens flare; there are numerous lights on lamps and buildings and even though we couldn’t prove it, a lens flare of some kind seemed to be the only logical conclusion. Most tellingly Alex did not see the object whilst taking the photographs and it is axiomatic that an image which is noticed only after processing is almost always a bird, lens flare, camera or film fault. Alex disagreed and told us he firmly believed the image on the film was of an object in the sky:  a real UFO.

Despite the prospect of fresh media attention and money from this photograph Alex wasn’t interested. He wanted to get to the bottom of it privately and, rather than trust the photograph to the care of the UFO community, of whom he has a profound mistrust, he set about investigating it himself.

Sheffield University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy ruled out any celestial or astronomical phenomena and local airfields confirmed there were no aircraft over Retford that night. He then took the slide to the Kodak Laboratories in Lincoln. Their technical analysis ruled out any possibility of lens flare, double exposure, drying stains, re-touching or a host of other possibilities. Indeed, the Kodak analysis found that the UFO image had the same density pattern, colour and grain as the surrounding picture. This suggested to the Kodak analysts that whatever ‘it’ was, it was in the sky when photographed. Robert Smith of Kodak’s labs went so far as to write on the back of the photograph, ‘This image has not been altered or manipulated in any way.’

The News of the World, 2 September 1962

Then he tried his old bete noir, the Ministry of Defence. After several phone calls to the MoD’sWhitehall building Alex made an appointment to see the UFO desk officer, Linda Unwin. She suggested a meeting and told Alex that ‘defence experts’ would be interested in viewing the slide.

A meeting was duly arranged for 9 March 2004 and Alex asked Andy Roberts to accompany him. It is highly unusual for a UFO witness to be interviewed by MoD personnel and even more unusual for them to be invited to visit the MoD Main Building. The last time this had happened was in 1962 when Alex, then a schoolboy, visited the Air Ministry with his father and allowed experts to examine his Box Brownie camera and his other picture of ‘flying saucers.’

The 2004 visit did not go to plan. Alex and Andy were met in the reception area by Linda Unwin and a colleague, who seemed to be unaware of the promised ‘meeting’ or the possibility of defence experts viewing the slide. She was happy to take a copy for analysis, but Alex and Andy got no further than the ornate reception area. Alex believes the meeting was cancelled because he had not told them he was bringing guests (his son in law was also present).

In a follow-up letter Unwin asked for a copy of the negative for scrutiny by a ‘defence imagery analyst.’ Using the Freedom of Information Act we discovered that a copy of the slide was sent by Unwin’s branch to the MoD’s Defence Geographic and Imagery Intelligence Agency (DGIA), based at RAF Brampton in Cambridgeshire. Experts there analyse aerial photographs and other military-sourced images for intelligence purposes. In this case, Alex was told that UFO photographs are ‘not within the normal course of work’ for the imagery experts ‘but [they] have agreed to fit this in around essential defence work.’

The Graphics and Digital Imaging Section completed their assessment on 2 August 2004. A scan at 2,400dpi allowed them to investigate ‘at greater magnification the structure of the anomaly’ but found no indication of reflections or lens flares. The brief report ends with these words: ‘No definitive conclusions can be gathered from evidence submitted, however, it may be coincidental that the illuminated plane of the object passes through the centre of the frame, indicating a possible lens anomaly e.g. a droplet of moisture.’

A page from the DGIA (JARIC) report on analysis of the Retford photograph (Crown Copyright)

Alex claims he has subsequently had other meetings and conversations with MoD personnel, but maintains that neither he nor they are any closer to resolving what he has captured on film. When we visited Alex in the spring of 2007 he was enthusiastic about his new photograph and remained convinced that, based on the evidence from Kodak and other experts, he had captured an unknown aerial object on film.

But now there was more. Alex had previously told us that he had, over the years, been subject to what can only be described as psychic phenomena. He had been plagued by poltergeists and bizarre audio and electromagnetic anomalies. Lights in the sky appeared to follow him around and on one occasion he had been struck by lightning. These phenomena had been witnessed by other members of his family who were happy to confirm it to us.

Alex was now telling us that there was something else unusual about his second saucer photograph. He had experienced flashbacks to that snowy night in Retford; flashbacks involving visions of a gigantic saucer hovering over the square. He also suspected there may have been a period of missing time.

Alex with his 1962 photo and Box Brownie camera (Copyright David Clarke)

What to make of all this? Is Alex a complete fantasist who has repeatedly tried to fool the media, UFO investigators and possibly his family for over 45 years? The simple fact is, we just don’t know. It would be easy to dismiss Alex as a hoaxer and a fantasist, partly because everyone ‘knows’ real UFOs don’t exist and partly because of his (later retracted) admission that he had hoaxed the 1962 photograph.

But no-one could prove exactly how – if – his original photo was hoaxed and no-one, not even the MoD’s imagery experts can say with certainty what is on the photograph he took on 27 January 2004.

Alex has thought long and hard before allowing his second photograph to be revealed to a wider audience. He is not interested in public exposure or in financial gain, although this does not rule him out as a hoaxer. He is only concerned that his stories are told factually and objectively. As skeptical forteans we have known Alex for more than 20 years and find him and his family to be completely normal, open and honest. We are perplexed. But there has to be an answer, now matter how prosaic or extraordinary. So what is it?

Speaking after the release of his film on YouTube and Vimeo, Alex told us:

‘Its basically a documentary which explains what happened within my life from early childhood regarding UFO’s and the paranormal. Although the doc only scratches the surface and there is much more to tell. I had to think long and hard about publishing certain things within the documentary film. I am now hardened towards the remarks of skeptics, trolls, and those who seek a living from defaming people, when in reality they know absolutely zero about me.’

Text copyright David Clarke and Andy Roberts 2022

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