Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
Berichten van 1 augustus 2024 tot 31 augustus 2024
NASA's Endurance Rocket lifts off from Svalbard in 2022. The results are in and the rocket successfully measured Earth's global electric field. Image Credit: NASA/Brian Bonsteel
A NASA Rocket Has Finally Found Earth’s Global Electric Field
Scientists have discovered that Earth has a third field. We all know about the Earth’s magnetic field. And we all know about Earth’s gravity field, though we usually just call it gravity.
Now, a team of international scientists have found Earth’s global electric field.
It’s called the ambipolar electric field, and it’s a weak electric field that surrounds the planet. It’s responsible for the polar wind, which was first detected decades ago. The polar wind is an outflow of plasma from the polar regions of Earth’s magnetosphere. Scientists hypothesized the ambipolar field’s existence decades ago, and now they finally have proof.
“It’s like this conveyor belt, lifting the atmosphere up into space.”
Glyn Collinson, Heliophysics Science Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
The Space Age gained momentum back in the 1960s as the USA and USSR launched more and more satellites. When spacecraft passed over the Earth’s poles, they detected an outflow of particles from Earth’s atmosphere into space. Scientists named this the polar wind, but for decades, it was mysterious.
Scientists expect some particles from Earth to “leak” into space. Sunlight can cause this. But if that’s the case, the particles should be heated. The wind is mysterious because many particles in it are cold despite moving at supersonic speeds.
“Something had to be drawing these particles out of the atmosphere,” said lead author Collinson.
Collinson is also the Principal Investigator for NASA’s “Endurance” Sounding Rocket Mission. “The purpose of the Endurance mission was to make the first measurement of the magnitude and structure of the electric field generated by Earth’s ionosphere,” NASA writes in their mission description. Endurance launched on May 22nd, 2022, from Norway’s Svalbard Archipelago.
This image shows NASA’s Endurance rocket launching from Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, Norway. It flew for 19 minutes to an altitude of about 780 km (484 mi) above Earth’s sunlit polar cap. It carried six science instruments and could only be launched in certain conditions to be successful. Image Credit: NASA/Brian Bonsteel.
“Svalbard is the only rocket range in the world where you can fly through the polar wind and make the measurements we needed,” said Suzie Imber, a space physicist at the University of Leicester, UK, and co-author of the paper.
Svalbard is key because there are open magnetic field lines above Earth’s polar caps. These field lines provide a pathway for ions to outflow to the magnetosphere.
This figure from the research shows Endurance’s flight profile and its path over Earth. The rocket had to fly near the open magnetic field lines that exist at Svalbard’s high polar latitudes. Image Credit: Collinson et al. 2024.
After it was launched, Collinson said, “We got fabulous data all through the flight, though it will be a while before we can really dig into it to see if we achieved our science objective or not.”
Now, the data is in, and the results show that Earth has a global electric field.
Prior to its discovery, scientists hypothesized that the field was weak and that its effects could only be felt over hundreds of kilometres. Even though it was first proposed 60 years ago, scientists had to wait for technology to advance before they could measure it. In 2016, Collinson and his colleagues began inventing a new instrument that could measure the elusive field.
At about 250 km (150 mi) above the Earth’s surface, atoms break apart into negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions. Electrons are far lighter than ions, and the tiniest energetic jolt can send them into space. Ions are more than 1800 times heavier, and gravity draws them back to the surface.
If gravity were the only force at work, the two populations would separate over time and simply drift apart. But that’s not what happens.
Electrons and ions have opposite electrical charges. They’re attracted to one another and an electric field forms that keeps them together. This counteracts some of gravity’s power.
The field is called ambipolar because it’s bidirectional. That means it works in both directions. As ions sink down due to gravity, the electrical charges mean that the ions drag some of the electrons down with them. However, at the same time, electrons lift ions high into the atmosphere with them as they attempt to leave the atmosphere and escape into space.
The result of all this is that the ambipolar field extends the atmosphere’s height, meaning some of the ions escape with the polar wind.
After decades of hypothesizing and theorizing, the Endurance rocket measured a change in electric potential of only 0.55 volts. That’s extremely weak but enough to be measurable.
“A half a volt is almost nothing — it’s only about as strong as a watch battery,” Collinson said. “But that’s just the right amount to explain the polar wind.”
Hydrogen ions are the most plentiful particles in the polar wind. Endurance’s results show that these ions experience an outward force from the magnetic field that’s 10.6 times more powerful than gravity. “That’s more than enough to counter gravity — in fact, it’s enough to launch them upwards into space at supersonic speeds,” said Alex Glocer, Endurance project scientist at NASA Goddard and co-author of the paper.
Hydrogen ions are light, but even the heavier particles in the polar wind are lifted. Oxygen ions in the weak electrical field effectively weigh half as much, yet they’re boosted to greater heights, too. Overall, the ambipolar field makes the ionosphere denser at higher altitudes than it would be without the field’s lofting effect. “It’s like this conveyor belt, lifting the atmosphere up into space,” Collinson added.
“The measurements support the hypothesis that the ambipolar electric field is the primary driver of ionospheric H+ outflow and of the supersonic polar wind of light ions escaping from the polar caps,” the authors explain in their paper.
“We infer that this increases the supply of cold O+ ions to the magnetosphere by more than 3,800%,” the authors write. At that point, other mechanisms come into play. Wave-particle interactions can heat the ions, accelerating them to escape velocity.
These results raise other questions. How does this field affect Earth? Has the field affected the planet’s habitability? Do other planets have these fields?
Back in 2016, the European Space Agency’s Venus Express mission detected a 10-volt electric potential surrounding the planet. This means that positively charged particles would be pulled away from the planet’s surface. This could draw away oxygen.
Scientists think that Venus may have once had plentiful water. However, since sunlight splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, the electric field could’ve siphoned the oxygen away, eliminating the planet’s water. This is theoretical, but it begs the question of why the same thing hasn’t happened on Earth.
The ambipolar field is fundamental to Earth. Its role in the evolution of the planet’s atmosphere and biosphere is yet to be understood, but it must play a role.
“Any planet with an atmosphere should have an ambipolar field,” Collinson said. “Now that we’ve finally measured it, we can begin learning how it’s shaped our planet as well as others over time.”
The Batagay megaslump is a result of the ground thawing and collapsing as Arctic temperatures rise.
It's an extreme case of a changing Arctic landscape accelerating the climate crisis.
A giant hole in the earth is breaking open the land in Siberia, and photos from space show it's growing rapidly.
It resembles a stingray, a horseshoe crab, or a giant tadpole. It started as a sliver, barely visible in declassified satellite imagery from the 1960s.
Declassified satellite imagery from 1965 shows the very beginnings of the hole growing in Siberia.
The hole tripled in size between 1991 and 2018, according to the US Geological Survey.
Satellite images from 1999 and 2017 show how much the Batagay megaslump has grown (and how much satellite imaging has improved). NASA Earth Observatory/Jesse Allen/Landsat data from the US Geological Survey
The Batagay crater, sometimes referred to as Batagaika or the "gateway to hell," represents a much larger, often invisible problem that affects the entire planet.
What is this hole in Siberia?
The Arctic is heating up faster than the rest of Earth, and that's quickly thawing the permafrost, which is a thick layer of soil that's permanently frozen — at least, it used to be.
The Batagay crater isn't actually a crater at all. It's the world's largest "retrogressive thaw slump," a pit that forms when permafrost thaw causes the ground to cave in, creating a landslide as the earth at its edges slumps into the pit.
There are thousands of thaw slumps across the Arctic. But the size of the Batagay "crater" has earned it the title of megaslump. It's named for the nearby town of Batagay.
A drone view of the head of the Batagay megaslump.
"Permafrost is not the most, let's say, photogenic of subjects," Roger Michaelides, a geophysicist at Washington University in St. Louis, told Business Insider. "You're talking mostly about frozen dirt underground, which by definition you often can't see unless it's been exposed somehow, like in this megaslump."
That makes the Batagay pit a bit of a permafrost celebrity and an omen of what lies ahead.
The Batagay megaslump could help decode our planet's future
As permafrost thaws, all the dead plants and animals that have been frozen inside it for centuries start to decompose, belching carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.
Those are powerful heat-trapping gases, which cause global temperatures to rise even more, triggering even faster permafrost thaw.
This vicious cycle could have dire effects. Permafrost covers 15% of the land in the Northern Hemisphere and contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere.
One study estimated that permafrost thaw could emit as much planet-warming gases as a large industrial nation by 2100 if industries and countries don't aggressively rein in their own emissions today.
"There's a lot we don't know about this feedback loop and how it will play out necessarily, but the potential is there for very large changes to the climate system occurring over very, very fast geologic timescales," Michaelides said.
In short, permafrost thaw could quickly make the climate crisis much worse. But it's still a mysterious process. Studying extreme sites like the Batagay megaslump can help scientists understand permafrost thaw and see into the future.
In a study published in the journal Geomorphology in June, researchers used satellite and drone data to construct 3D models of the megaslump and calculate its expansion over time.
They found that about 14 Pyramids of Giza's worth of ice and permafrost had thawed at Batagay. The crater's volume increases by about 1 million cubic meters every year.
"These values are truly impressive," Alexander Kizyakov, the study's lead author and a scientist at Lomonosov Moscow State University, told BI in an email.
"Our results demonstrate how quickly permafrost degradation occurs," he added.
The researchers also calculated that the megaslump releases about 4,000 to 5,000 tons of carbon each year. That's about as much as the annual emissions from 1,700 to 2,100 US homes' energy use.
Michaelides said those numbers didn't surprise him, but they can help inform models of future permafrost thaw and emissions.
"I think there is a lot we can learn from Batagaika, not only in terms of understanding how Batagaika will evolve with time, but also how similar features might develop and evolve over the Arctic," Michaelides said. "Even if they're a tenth or a hundredth the size of Batagaika, the physics is fundamentally the same."
If you enjoyed this story, be sure to follow Business Insider on Microsoft Start.
University of Warwick/Mark Garlick/Wikimedia Commons - CC BY 4.0
Zwarte gaten vormen een van de meest fascinerende en complexe mysteries van het heelal. We weten dat ze bestaan, maar we kunnen ze niet zien, behalve door de invloed die ze uitoefenen op de omringende ruimte, wat hun zoektocht complexer maakt. Daarom heeft het nieuwe project Black Hole Finder besloten om alle liefhebbers van de astronomie te betrekken bij de ontdekking van nieuwe zwarte gaten in het heelal. Hoe? Door middel van een smartphone-app: laten we eens kijken hoe het werkt!
Op zoek naar zwarte gaten
Met de Black Hole Finder, ontwikkeld door het Dutch Black Hole Consortium, kunnen liefhebbers een app gebruiken om astronomen te helpen zwarte gaten in het heelal te vinden. Het doel is in werkelijkheid veel complexer, namelijk het identificeren van kilonova’s, krachtige stellaire explosies van elektromagnetische straling die ontstaan wanneer twee ongelooflijk dichte objecten met elkaar in botsing komen. We hebben het dan over botsingen tussen twee neutronensterren of bijvoorbeeld tussen een neutronenster en een zwart gat. Maar waarom zouden we kilonova’s bestuderen?
Onderzoekers gebruiken het BlackGEM-netwerk van telescopen om de nachtelijke hemel af te speuren naar deze enorme explosies. Naast het identificeren van het moment van botsing tussen een neutronenster en een zwart gat, kunnen kilonova’s leiden tot de vorming van een nieuw zwart gat met stellaire massa. Het idee is simpel: door kilonova's te detecteren, kunnen nieuwe zwarte gaten worden geïdentificeerd. Mits je onderscheid kunt maken tussen echte en fake beelden, natuurlijk.
Waar of niet waar
ESA/Hubble - CC BY 4.0
Enthousiastelingen die de Black Hole Finder-app gebruiken, kunnen helpen kilonova’s en dus potentiële nieuwe zwarte gaten te lokaliseren. De bijdrage van gebruikers is van fundamenteel belang, omdat sommige door telescopen gemaakte beelden echte explosies laten zien, terwijl andere vervormd kunnen zijn als gevolg van licht dat wordt gereflecteerd door satellieten en andere interferentie. Hoe onderscheid je echte beelden van fake? Op dit moment kunnen algoritmen voor kunstmatige intelligentie niet concurreren met menselijk ingrijpen, dus wordt het noodzakelijk om liefhebbers van de astronomie om hulp te vragen. Steven Bloemen, projectmanager bij BlackGEM, bevestigt:
Mensen zijn nog steeds veel beter in het identificeren van patronen dan onze algoritmes. Met behulp van de app kunnen burgers over de hele wereld helpen onze AI-algoritmes te trainen om onderscheid te maken tussen echte en fake bronnen en sneller de meest interessante kandidaat-fondsen te identificeren.
Het gebruik van de applicatie is zeer intuïtief: de gebruiker bekijkt drie afbeeldingen van hetzelfde deel van de hemel en moet vaststellen of dit een echte bron is of niet. Een spel van waar of niet waar, zo je wilt. Uiteraard biedt de app alle informatie om kilonova’s te herkennen, die meestal verschijnen als ronde en witte vormen, met een diameter van ongeveer 5-10 pixels.
Waar dient de Black Hole Finder voor
Zoals we in de inleiding al zeiden, is het niet eenvoudig om zwarte gaten te detecteren. Ten eerste zijn ze niet allemaal zoals Sagittarius A*, het superzware zwarte gat in het centrum van de Melkweg. Er zijn ook enkele middelzware zwarte gaten bekend, maar de meeste zwarte gaten hebben een stellaire massa en zijn dus vrij klein. Toch weten we dat ze kunnen ontstaan als gevolg van kilonova’s, explosies die veel helderder zijn dan klassieke nova’s maar veel minder helder dan supernova’s. Hoe kunnen we ze detecteren?
Er komen liefhebbers van de astronomie aan te pas, die experts kunnen helpen bij het analyseren van het hemelgewelf op zoek naar nieuwe zwarte gaten. Elke goed geïdentificeerde kilonova stelt astronomen in staat om hun onderzoek te beperken tot veel kleinere delen van de ruimte. En we weten: het vinden van een zwart gat is niet eenvoudig, maar met de hulp van iedereen is het vandaag de dag iets gemakkelijker.
Are UFOs in the Bible? Exploring the Link Between Angels and Extraterrestrials
The intersection of religious belief and extraterrestrial life has long intrigued both theologians and enthusiasts of the unexplained. This curiosity often leads to the question: could the Bible contain references to what we now describe as UFOs or extraterrestrial beings? A recent discussion, featuring U.S. Congressman Tim Burchett and theologian Dr. Paul Thigpen, delved into this very topic, exploring the possibility that some biblical accounts could be interpreted as encounters with non-human intelligence, perhaps even extraterrestrial.
Biblical References to Anomalous Phenomena
Several passages in the Bible describe events that, to a modern reader, might seem reminiscent of UFO sightings. For example, the book of Ezekiel recounts a vision in which the prophet sees a “whirlwind coming out of the north, a great cloud with a raging fire engulfing itself” (Ezekiel 1:4). Within this cloud were creatures with an extraordinary appearance, leading some to speculate whether this could be an ancient description of a UFO encounter.
VIDEO:
Rep. Burchett: Believing UFOs are in the Bible is not anti-Christian | Reality Check
Similarly, the account of Elijah being taken up into heaven in a “whirlwind” with “chariots of fire” (2 Kings 2:11) has also been cited as a possible reference to extraterrestrial technology. The imagery used in these passages—wheels within wheels, flying chariots, and bright lights—bears a striking resemblance to descriptions of unidentified flying objects in modern times.
Theological Interpretations
Congressman Burchett, a devout Christian, expressed that he has no difficulty reconciling his faith with the possibility of extraterrestrial life. He argues that the vastness of God’s creation could easily encompass other life forms beyond Earth, and that such beings might have been referenced in the Bible using the language and understanding of the time. For Burchett, the idea that Ezekiel’s vision could describe a UFO does not weaken his faith; rather, it broadens his perspective on the universe’s complexity.
Dr. Paul Thigpen, on the other hand, approaches the subject with caution. He acknowledges that the Bible does describe non-human intelligences, such as angels and demons, but he is hesitant to equate these beings with extraterrestrials as understood in contemporary UFO lore. Thigpen emphasizes that biblical references to angels and other supernatural entities should be interpreted within the context of their religious significance, not necessarily as evidence of alien encounters.
The Debate Over Angels and Aliens
The conversation between Burchett and Thigpen highlights a broader debate within both religious and UFO communities: are angels and other biblical beings simply manifestations of divine power, or could they be visitors from other worlds? The traditional Christian view holds that angels are purely spiritual beings created by God, distinct from any physical extraterrestrial life forms. These beings do not have bodies and do not exist within our space-time in the way that humans or hypothetical aliens might.
However, the overlap between descriptions of angels and modern UFO encounters has led some to speculate that biblical accounts could be ancient interpretations of alien visitations. This theory posits that the “angels” seen by biblical figures might have been beings from another planet, whose advanced technology and abilities were interpreted as divine or supernatural.
UFOs and the Vatican
The discussion also touched on the Catholic Church’s stance on extraterrestrial life. Historically, the Vatican has shown a keen interest in astronomy, and some Popes have even entertained the possibility of life beyond Earth. Pope John Paul II, when asked about aliens, responded that “they are God’s children too,” suggesting an openness to the idea that other intelligent beings could exist within God’s creation.
Additionally, there have been claims, such as those mentioned by David Grusch, a former U.S. intelligence officer, that the Vatican might have been involved in secret activities related to UFOs, including the transfer of alleged extraterrestrial technology during World War II. While these claims remain unproven, they add another layer of intrigue to the conversation about religion and extraterrestrial life.
Conclusion: A Broader Perspective on Faith and the Universe
The idea that the Bible might contain references to UFOs or extraterrestrials is a fascinating one that challenges traditional interpretations of religious texts. For some, like Congressman Burchett, this possibility enhances the awe of God’s creation, suggesting that humanity is not alone in the universe. For others, like Dr. Thigpen, it is important to maintain a distinction between spiritual beings as described in the Bible and the physical entities that might exist elsewhere in the cosmos.
Ultimately, the discussion about angels, aliens, and UFOs in the Bible invites believers and skeptics alike to explore the mysteries of faith and the universe with an open mind. Whether these biblical passages are read as metaphorical, spiritual, or literal accounts, they continue to inspire curiosity and wonder about our place in the vastness of creation.
Giant Low-Frequency Scan Searches for Aliens in 2,800 Galaxies
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has fascinated us for decades. Now a team of researchers have used the Murchison Widefield Array in Australia to scan great swathes of sky for alien signals. Unusually for a SETI project, this one focussed attention on 2,800 galaxies instead of stars within our own. They have been on the lookout for advanced civilisations that are broadcasting their existence using the power of an entire star. Alas they weren’t successful but its an exciting new way to search for alien intelligence.
Our first attempts to search for alien intelligence began back in 1960 with Project Ozma. It was led by astronomer Frank Drake and used the 85 foot radio telescope at Green Bank in West Virginia. The aim was to try and detect alien radio signals from Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti, should they have existed. Alas they found nothing but it marked the first step in a scientific approach to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Typically SETI tends to focus on electromagnetic signals such as radio waves an in particular unusual patterns that could suggest intentional communication.
Radio telescopes monitor the sky at the Allen Telescope Array in California. Finding a signal from a distant civilization is one way we could experience first contact with ET. (SETI Institute Photo)
This recent attempt to try out a new approach was led by Dr Chenoa Tremblay of the SETI Institute and Prof. Steven Tingay from the Curtin University. The approach was to utilise the magnificent field of view of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) which allows one observation to cover 2,800 galaxies. Among them, there are 1,300 galaxies that we know the distance too. The MWA in Western Australia utilises low frequencies (100MHz) to probe the distant galaxies.
By searching these galaxies for signs of alien signals we are actually looking for advanced civilisations. It’s one thing to be able to send radio signals across interstellar space, indeed we have been doing that for decades since the advent of radio communication. As radio signals propagate across space, they weaken and certainly could not traverse the immense distances between the galaxies. It’s just possible that advanced civilisations might have the technology to harness the power of their Sun and perhaps other stars in their galaxy to send signals powerful enough to travel the millions of light years between galaxies.
I quite love the idea of advanced civilisations that may have developed the technology to transmit ‘technosignatures’ or signs of alien technology across the Universe but alas the study did not find any. Queue sad emoji 🙁 It did however provide valuable insight into just how we may be able to widen our search for alien intelligence beyond the Milky Way.
The MWA uses thousands of dipole antennae that are spread across several kilometres giving it a wide 30 degree field of view. It has been designed to operate between 70 and 300 MHz allowing it to participate in studies of the early universe, mapping the cosmos, and detecting solar activity. It helped advance radio and interferometry technology facilitating the development of the Square Kilometre Array.
The Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope in remote Western Australia. Brown University.
Using MWA and other radio installations to study the properties of stars and galaxies also allows for the search for technosignatures. It’s a new approach and it highlights the importance of continuing the development of new technology to open up new ways to search for ET.
ESA Cluster Satellite to Reenter in Early September
The first of a set of groundbreaking Cluster satellites is set for a controlled reentry next week.
The European Space Agency is paving the way in controlled reentry technology. ESA recently announced that plans to terminate the first of four Cluster satellites is about to come to fruition in early September, with the reentry of Salsa.
The Reentry
Salsa is one of four dance-themed Cluster satellites. The other three are Rumba, Samba and Tango. ESA controllers used the remaining thruster fuel on the spacecraft back in January to lower the perigee of the mission down to around 100 kilometers, which will assure destructive reentry for the 550 kilogram satellite over the South Pacific on or around September 8th. The area the satellite will meet its demise is known as ‘Point Nemo’ or the Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area. The region has seen several large reentries over the years, including the Mir space station and ESA’s Automated Transfer Vehicle. The region will likely see the demise of the International Space Station sometime around 2030.
Salsa’s final reentry track. Credit: ESA
“By studying how Salsa burns up, which parts might survive, for how long and in what state, we will learn much about how to build ‘zero debris’ satellites,” says Tim Flohrer, (ESA-Space Debri Office) in a recent press release.
ESA’s Malarguee tracking station in Argentina. Credit: ESA
A Pioneering Mission
ESA designed the Cluster mission to explore space weather interactions with the Earth’s magnetic environment as the four spacecraft fly in a tetrahedral configuration through the planet’s magnetosphere. The four spacecraft fly out to a distant apogee of about 117,000 kilometers (over three times farther out versus geosynchronous orbit), and orbit the Earth once every 54 hours.
Anatomy of Cluster-Salsa’s orbital trajectory and reentry. Credit: ESA
Launched in the summer of 2000, the Cluster satellites had a 5-year nominal mission, which lasted well over two decades. The missions have since proven to be pioneers in space weather research. The mission also escaped glitches and software failures over the years, including a bug requiring a “dirty hack” in 2010. Cluster II was also a replacement for the original set of Cluster satellites, which were lost on the inaugural launch of the Ariane-5 rocket on June 4th, 1996 from the Kourou Space Center. The mission ended in an explosion 37 seconds after liftoff.
Cluster satellites in the clean room at Baikonur ahead of encapsulation and launch. Credit: ESA
Controlling Reentries
This sort of ‘targeted reentry’ for a long duration mission is one of the first of its kind for ESA. The zero-debris conclusion to the mission exceeds international standards. Furthermore, it also addresses issues surrounding the mitigation of debris in low Earth orbit. On Earth, ESA’s worldwide Estrack network will follow Salsa during its final orbits, and an airborne campaign is underway to spot the final reentry. ESA made a similar effort to image the Aeolus satellite in 2023, shortly before reentry.
Engineers will apply a similar technique to the SMILE (Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer) and Proba-3 missions. These are also set to enter a similar far-ranging orbit around the Earth. SMILE is the follow-on mission to Cluster, and is launching in late 2025. ESA will launch the Proba-3 solar observatory next month. The mission will feature a free-flying, solar eclipsing disk.
You can spot the cluster satellites including Salsa on their final days. Salsa is COSPAR ID 2000-041A/26411in the NORAD satellite catalog, and listed in Heavens-Above. The satellites reach naked eye visibility on a good perigee pass.
After the demise of Salsa, Rumba will also reenter in November of next year, followed by Tango and Samba in August 2026.
While this is the ‘Last Dance’ for Salsa, the efforts to study space weather and come to terms with space debris continue.
Follow @ESAOperations and @ESA_Cluster on Twitter for the latest updates on Salsa leading up to reentry.
Iets meer dan een jaar geleden bracht het in San Francisco gevestigde OpenAI zijn chatbot ChatGPT op de markt, wat een goudkoorts veroorzaakte voor kunstmatige intelligentie en het eeuwenoude debat over de effecten van automatisering op het welzijn van mensen weer op gang bracht.
De angst voor verdringing door machines gaat terug tot de Industriële Revolutie in de 19e eeuw, toen groepen Engelse handwevers, bekend als Luddites, begonnen met het vernietigen van de elektrische weefgetouwen die hun levensonderhoud bedreigden. De beweging, die een hoogtepunt bereikte tussen 1811 en 1817, werd uiteindelijk onderdrukt door de regeringstroepen en de leiders werden geëxecuteerd of verbannen naar Australië.
Luddieten zaten ernaast
Maar de argumenten van de Luddieten vonden een onverwachte (en enigszins ironische) voorvechter in de beroemde econoom David Ricardo, die in zijn boek On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation uit 1817 betoogde dat “de mening van de arbeidersklasse dat het gebruik van machines vaak schadelijk is voor hun belangen, niet gebaseerd is op vooroordelen en fouten, maar in overeenstemming is met de juiste principes van de politieke economie”. De Britse econoom Nassau Senior adviseerde de wevers om “uit die productietak te stappen”.
Uiteindelijk deden ze precies dat: 250.000 banen op handweefgetouwen verdwenen tussen 1820 en 1860. Maar terwijl de mechanisatie uiteindelijk de menselijke arbeiders ten goede kwam – de bevolking en het reële inkomen per hoofd van de bevolking in het Verenigd Koninkrijk verveelvoudigden in dezelfde periode – had het een nadelige invloed op de paarden, wier aantallen sterk daalden toen treinen (en later gemotoriseerde voertuigen) het door paarden getrokken vervoer vervingen.
Meer waardevolle bezigheden
Sinds de Industriële Revolutie is het overheersende pro-machine argument dat door het verhogen van de arbeidsproductiviteit, automatisering het reële inkomen verhoogt, waardoor meer mensen van een hogere levensstandaard kunnen genieten zonder dat er banen verloren gaan. Bovendien heeft de bevrijding van vervelende ondergeschikte taken ons in staat gesteld onze energie te richten op meer waardevolle bezigheden.
De hedendaagse tegenhangers van de Luddieten benadrukken daarentegen de nadelen van automatisering, vooral het potentieel om bestaansmiddelen en gemeenschappen te vernietigen. Een rechtvaardige verdeling van inkomen en macht is volgens hen cruciaal om op lange termijn de vruchten te kunnen plukken van technologische vooruitgang. Technopessimisten zoals Martin Ford en Daniel Susskind hebben beweerd dat opkomende technologieën zoals AI te weinig nieuwe banen zullen creëren, wat zal leiden tot meer armoede en “technologische werkloosheid”.
Menselijk werk uitbreiden in plaats van vervangen
De opkomst van generatieve AI en de verwachte komst van kunstmatige algemene intelligentie – een AI die in staat is om elke cognitieve taak uit te voeren die mensen kunnen uitvoeren – hebben het debat tussen techno-optimisten en techno-sceptici op scherp gezet. In de gezondheidszorg bijvoorbeeld, een schijnbaar eindeloze bron van tech-hypes, belooft AI betere diagnoses, geavanceerde telegeneeskunde, effectievere medicijnen en minder administratieve rompslomp voor artsen en verpleegkundigen, waardoor er meer tijd overblijft voor patiëntenzorg.
Dit lijkt de heersende opvatting onder mainstream experts te weerspiegelen dat generatieve AI menselijk werk zal uitbreiden in plaats van vervangen. Door routinetaken te automatiseren, belooft het mensen vrij te maken voor creatiever werk. Om zeker te zijn, zal deze transformatie levenslang leren vereisen, waardoor voortdurende educatie een voorwaarde wordt, niet alleen om deel te nemen aan de arbeidsmarkt, maar ook om toegang te krijgen tot een groeiend aanbod van online diensten.
Een superintelligentie die op hol slaat
Met de komst van generatieve AI is de bezorgdheid verschoven van door automatisering veroorzaakt banenverlies naar het vooruitzicht van een superintelligentie die op hol slaat – een angst die teruggaat tot Mary Shelley’s roman Frankenstein uit 1818; of, De moderne Prometheus. In navolging van deze gevoelens merkte voormalig Google CEO Eric Schmidt onlangs op dat, hoewel de huidige AI-modellen “onder menselijke controle” blijven, er een reëel risico bestaat dat een AI het vermogen ontwikkelt tot “recursieve zelfverbetering”, autonomie verwerft en “zijn eigen doelen begint te stellen”. Uiteindelijk, waarschuwde hij, zou een “computercluster” zich kunnen ontwikkelen tot een “echt bovenmenselijke expert” die in staat is om zelfstandig te handelen.
Nu experts en wetenschappers zich steeds meer zorgen maken over het vermogen van AI om de wereld te vernietigen, gaan er steeds meer stemmen op om de ontwikkeling van AI af te stemmen op menselijke doelen en waarden. Er zijn twee manieren om dit te bereiken. De eerste is om de beschikbaarheid en verkoop van potentieel schadelijke AI-gebaseerde producten te beperken, zoals beleidsmakers in Europa en elders hebben geprobeerd door strenge regels op te leggen aan opkomende technologieën zoals autonome auto’s en gezichtsherkenning.
Regulering komt vaak te laat
Een duidelijk probleem met deze aanpak is dat het moeilijk is om een consensus te bereiken over wat schade is in een wereld waarin moreel relativisme de norm is. Omdat het steeds onduidelijker wordt wie de “eigenaar” is van inhoud die als schadelijk wordt beschouwd, is het vrijwel onmogelijk om verkopers of providers aansprakelijk te stellen. Bovendien komen pogingen om het gebruik van technologie te reguleren vaak te laat.
De tweede manier om AI te beteugelen is om de ontwikkeling van potentieel gevaarlijke producten volledig te beperken. Maar het inperken van de vraag is ingewikkelder dan het beperken van het aanbod, vooral in moderne samenlevingen waar concurrerende krachten – zowel commercieel als geopolitiek – het vertragen van technologische innovatie buitengewoon moeilijk maken.
Onrust bij OpenAI
De recente onrust bij OpenAI is hier een goed voorbeeld van. In november ontsloeg de raad van bestuur van het bedrijf CEO Sam Altman kortstondig, naar verluidt uit bezorgdheid dat AI op een dag zou kunnen leiden tot het uitsterven van de mensheid. Hoewel Altman slechts enkele dagen later weer werd aangesteld, onderstreepte het schandaal de snelheid waarmee ogenschijnlijk nuttige technologieën existentiële risico’s kunnen worden. Nu snelle commercialisering het blijkbaar wint van voorzichtigheid en concurrentie de ontwikkeling van steeds krachtigere hulpmiddelen versnelt, lijkt een door AI veroorzaakte apocalyps steeds aannemelijker.
Neo-Luddisme
De onontkoombare conclusie is dat het reguleren van AI alleen niet genoeg is. Maar door concepten als neo-Luddisme en herverdeling in het publieke debat te introduceren, kunnen we de politieke en intellectuele woordenschat ontwikkelen die nodig is om de bedreigingen van deze opkomende technologieën te beperken.
Een neo-Luddiet zou zich bijvoorbeeld kunnen afvragen: Waarom zijn welvarende samenlevingen, die al meer dan genoeg produceren voor hun burgers om comfortabel te leven, nog steeds gefocust op het maximaliseren van de groei van het bbp? Eén antwoord zou kunnen zijn dat er geen eerlijke verdeling van rijkdom en inkomen is die ervoor zorgt dat de voordelen van productiviteits- en efficiëntiewinsten breed worden gedeeld.
Een andere verklaring is dat technologie zelf niet intrinsiek goed of slecht is; het is een middel om een doel te bereiken. En in de huidige politieke economie is “technologische innovatie” vaak een eufemisme om de rijken en machtigen in staat te stellen kapitaal om te leiden van de industrie naar de financiële sector, waardoor ze de voordelen van automatisering monopoliseren en alle anderen immiseriseren.
Robert Skidelsky, lid van het Britse Hogerhuis, is emeritus hoogleraar politieke economie aan Warwick University. Hij is de auteur van een bekroonde biografie van John Maynard Keynes en The Machine Age: Een idee, een geschiedenis, een waarschuwing (Allen Lane, 2023).
AI Repairs Three UFO Photos From 1990s Italy, Orbit, Mexico, UAP Sighting News. VIDEO!
Please hit like and subscribe, thanks all, Scott.
Sighting dates below.
1. Salerno, Italy April 9, 1992
2. Earths orbit, NASA shuttle discovery Sept 1993
3. Puebla, Mexico December 8, 1992
I am trying to go through many different sightings of the past and use ai to repair and focus the photos. Yes ai is a very controversial thing right now, because many people fear everything about it. But I am here to tell you, it's a tool to be used. It's allowing the public to see photos that are crystal clear and focused for the first time ever!
Dat China plannen heeft om de maan en haar grondstoffen te gebruiken is zeker geen mysterie. Tegelijkertijd heeft het Aziatische land de afgelopen jaren verschillende sondes naar onze satelliet gestuurd, waaronder naar de verborgen kant. Meer recent is echter het nieuws dat een team van Chinese wetenschappers enkele monsters die door de Chang'e 5-missie naar de aarde zijn teruggebracht, heeft gebruikt om water te produceren. Zou dit de eerste stap kunnen zijn naar een toekomstige menselijke aanwezigheid op de maan? Laten we het samen uitzoeken!
Chang'e 5 en de maanmonsters teruggebracht naar de aarde
Zoals de naam al doet vermoeden, is de Chang'e 5-missie zeker niet de eerste die op de maan is gearriveerd. Het bijzondere aan deze missie is dat er voor het eerst in 44 jaar monsters van de maanbodem naar de aarde zijn teruggebracht. Ondanks de daaropvolgende Chang'e 6-missie, waarbij in plaats daarvan de verborgen kant van onze satelliet werd betrokken, zijn de resultaten van Chang'e 5 simpelweg buitengewoon. Zoals te lezen is in een recente studie gepubliceerd in het tijdschrift The Innovation, hebben Chinese wetenschappers ontdekt dat de mineralen waaruit de bodem van de maan bestaat rijk zijn aan waterstof en kunnen worden gebruikt om ter plekke water te produceren. Maar hoe?
De methode waarmee je water uit eenvoudige grond kunt halen, vereist het verwarmen van de mineralen waaruit het bestaat tot extreem hoge temperaturen, om een chemische reactie van de elementen met waterstof te veroorzaken en daardoor tot de vorming van waterdamp te leiden.
Hoe je water van de Maan krijgt
Chen et al./The Innovation - 2024
Dankzij de innovatieve methode van Chinese wetenschappers kan uit elke ton maangrond ongeveer 50 liter water worden gewonnen. Het lijkt misschien niet veel, en het is ongetwijfeld een proces dat om verschillende redenen op aarde geen zin zou hebben. Op de maan verandert dit echter: 50 liter water kan voorzien in de dagelijkse behoeften van de leden van een hypothetische menselijke missie op een hypothetische maanbasis. De maanbasis vormt een concreet doel van de Chinese ruimteverkenning: het ter plekke kunnen produceren van water zou een enorm voordeel betekenen.
In feite wil China vòòr 2035 een permanent onderzoeksstation op de maan bouwen, terwijl China vòòr 2045 een ruimtestation in een baan rond de satelliet wil bouwen. Als Chang'e 5 na 44 jaar de eerste missie was die maanmonsters terugbracht, is de Chang'e 6-missie de eerste die monsters van de andere kant van de maan terugbracht. Kortom: China lijkt het serieus te nemen.
Naar een toekomstige maanbasis... en verder
Dat het mogelijk is om water rechtstreeks uit de maanbodem te halen is buitengewoon nieuws dat echter ook een aantal overwegingen met zich meebrengt. Allereerst moeten we begrijpen hoeveel energie er nodig is om de bodem te verwarmen en welke andere elementen betrokken zijn bij het proces van waterdampvorming. Ten tweede mogen we de geopolitieke implicaties niet vergeten van de belangstelling die China toont voor onze satelliet: de concurrentie om maanbronnen zal in de toekomst steeds levendiger worden. En mogelijk ook heviger.
Kortom, de resultaten van de Chinese Academie van Wetenschappen laten zien hoe het mogelijk is om steeds dichter bij het idee van een permanente aanwezigheid van de mens op de maan te komen. Aan de andere kant zijn er tientallen jaren verstreken sinds de laatste keer dat een astronaut een wandeling maakte op onze satelliet. De volgende zou wel eens een ruimtestation op de maan kunnen bewonen, op haar grond kunnen lopen... en haar water kunnen drinken.
Bijna alle culturen zijn gefascineerd door verhalen over grote overstromingen of compleet verzonken beschavingen. Een van de bekendste mythen is ongetwijfeld die over Atlantis, de legendarische stad die volgens Plato in de golven verdween en waarvan het bestaan nog steeds wordt onderzocht. Misschien is Atlantis alleen maar een fantasie, maar het is mogelijk dat juist een oude stad verhalen over verzonken beschavingen heeft geïnspireerd. Het verschil is dat het een plaats is die echt heeft bestaan en waarvan de overblijfselen ook zijn gevonden.
Het verhaal van Helike, een stad verzonken in de golven
We bevinden ons in de Peloponnesos aan het begin van de vierde eeuw voor Christus: Helike is een bloeiende stad en zetel van de Achaeïsche Liga, een alliantie van verschillende Griekse poleis. In 373 v.Chr. werd echter binnen een paar uur een hele stad onder water gezet door de golven als gevolg van een sterke aardbeving, en verdween met haar tempels, huizen en inwoners. Het lijkt een verhaal dat we al eerder hebben gehoord, en dat miljoenen mensen vanaf dat moment zullen horen, zij het onder een andere naam.
De verdwijning van Helike moet in de eerste plaats gevolgen hebben gehad voor de burgers van de Griekse poleis, waaronder verschillende schrijvers die de gebeurtenissen beschreven of zich herinnerden. Later wekten de literaire getuigenissen echter een ander soort nieuwsgierigheid: eeuwen na het verhaal van Helike vroegen veel geleerden zich af waar deze stad verdwenen zou kunnen zijn en vooral of het mogelijk is om haar terug te vinden.
Archeologische opgravingen: de herontdekking van Helike
Drekis/Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0
Om te begrijpen waar de overblijfselen van de stad Helike konden rusten, analyseerden onderzoekers de geologische veranderingen die de noordelijke Peloponnesos troffen. En na eeuwen van vergetelheid leverden de onderzoeken eindelijk enkele resultaten op: aan het begin van de 21e eeuw werden overblijfselen gevonden die verenigbaar waren met de klassieke stad, niet ver van de positie die in de bronnen wordt vermeld. Daarnaast hebben archeologen in het gebied ook een nederzetting gevonden die dateert uit de late bronstijd.
De Helike Foundation en het Helike Project houden zich al jaren bezig met de ontdekkingen, met doelstellingen variërend van onderzoek naar de oude Griekse stad en de verschijnselen die de verdwijning ervan veroorzaakten, tot de verspreiding en bescherming van de opgravingslocaties. Om deze reden is Helike opgenomen in de lijst van sites die het meeste risico lopen van het World Monuments Fund.
Is Helike Atlantis?
Ja en nee. Naast de voor de hand liggende overeenkomsten die ook door het verhaal van hun verdwijning worden gegeven, zouden Helike en Atlantis meer met elkaar verbonden kunnen zijn dan we denken, althans op narratief niveau. Naast de wetenschappelijke pogingen om het oude Helike te identificeren, mogen we de datum van de gebeurtenis niet vergeten: deze vond plaats in dezelfde periode waarin Plato zijn dialogen schreef, inclusief die waarin hij spreekt over de mythe van Atlantis.
Natuurlijk kunnen mythen uit het verleden, zoals de Minoïsche uitbarsting die leidde tot de ondergang van het eiland Santorini, hebben bijgedragen aan het verhaal van de filosoof. Maar Plato kan ook geïnspireerd zijn geraakt door het fenomeen dat de verdwijning van Helike veroorzaakte. Per slot van rekening is dat van Atlantis ook om deze reden een mythe: het lijkt op veel echte gebeurtenissen, maar kan niet tot één daarvan worden herleid.
A top UFO debunker has revealed the bizarre case that still puzzles him to this day.
Scores of people, including military experts, have recorded eerie videos appearing to show UAPs - unidentified aerial phenomena - over the years and often seek answers by posting them online.
Mick West, of Sacramento, California, uses a range of tools to help explain these mysteries - but has been stumped by one Navy video of a UFO that was leaked by The New York Times.
The footage released in 2017 had been taken by a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot two years earlier and appears to show a UFO following the jet from the USS Theodore Roosevelt after the object had been detected by radar off the East Coast.
In the infrared cockpit video, the incredible high-speed object seemingly breaks the laws of physics - with the two pilots heard debating whether or not it was a drone.
Mick West, of Sacramento, California, uses several tools to debunk random flying objects, including FlightAware, Flight Radar 24, and Invisor. But his biggest help is Sitrec that integrates flight data, video, and satellite imagery
One case that piqued West's interest is footage taken by Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot Ryan Graves. West wants to review the original video files himself to better understand their data
Combing over the footage, West, who often relies on data surrounding the video to debunk recorded events, investigated the clip and tried to work out the rotation of the camera and the glare on the lens. Still, he was left with no answers.
West is now hoping to gain access to the original radar data instead of the analysis the government released so he can recreate the phenomenon - and rule out any reasonable explanations.
As part of his approach, West uses multiple tools including FlightAware, Flight Radar 24 and Invisor, an app that gives information on video, audio, and photos such as resolutions and the date they were taken.
But his biggest resource is Sitrec - a tool he designed himself that stands for 'situation recreation' - which integrates flight data, video and satellite imagery to paint a full picture, he told Popular Mechanics.
'You have to be very careful about what you're looking at...for me, that's the very first step in investigating a case,' West, who has investigated around 1,000 UFO cases, told the outlet.
Last month, the former video game programmer spotted a white, elongated object from a plane window while he was flying to Pasadena and took a quick video of it.
'It’s not an intuitive thing, and if you don’t delve too deeply into it, [you’ll be wrong],' said West, who programmed Tony Hawk's Pro Series games
'It can be very difficult to figure out…but you have no choice,' he added (Pictured: Sitrec)
He thought was just another airplane - a conclusion he would be right about - but he found himself needing to investigate the matter personally, he told Popular Mechanics.
When he got to his hotel room, he used Photoshop to closely look at the image and downloaded the GPS routes from his flight and a few others in the area from FlightAware.com.
In order for West to find an answer, he has to look at simultaneous events and see how they all fit into the bigger picture.
His plane wasn't the only in the air, so he had to look at other flight paths, as well as weather phenomenon and satellite data.
He also looks closely at the video angle, In his case, he knew the video he took was several thousand feet above ground and the object was below him.
He used Flight Aware 24 to configure where other nearby planes were so he could 'figure out what’s actually in the air at a particular time,' he told Popular Mechanics.
West then zoomed in on his own flight and found the exact location of his plane when he took the video.
'I knew I was sitting on the right side of the plane,' he told the outlet.
The map showed him a 'likely contender' - a plane that had taken off from LA's Van Nuys Airport.
'That matches what we see in the video,' he told Popular Mechanics.
He then used Sitrec - which an unidentified organization paid him to develop and make publicly accessible - to point the camera from his plane directly down onto where the other plane was traveling.
'I set the camera to point from my plane to the other two. One of them matched exactly. It was a small Cessna,' he told the outlet. 'This confirms that this was the plane I was actually looking at.'
One Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UPA) - the term that took over for UFO in 2023 - that piqued West's interest appeared in footage the Chilean Navy caught of a black blob leaving streaks behind it in 2014, he told Popular Mechanics.
The Chilean military investigated the footage for roughly two years and boldly determined it to be aliens.
He determined the black blob seen by Chilean authorities was just a plane that had just departed from Santiago Airport, and the reason it appeared black in the footage their Navy had captured was because it was taken on a thermal camera and the plane was hotter than the surrounding area
However, West, thanks to Sitrec, came to a more reasonable conclusion and documented his investigation on YouTube.
He determined the black blob to be a plane that had just departed from Santiago Airport. He claimed the reason it appeared black in the footage captured by the Navy was because it was taken on a thermal camera and the plane was hotter than the surrounding area.
'It’s not an intuitive thing, and if you don’t delve too deeply into it, [you’ll be wrong],' West, who programmed Tony Hawk's Pro Series games, told the outlet.
As for the streaks the Navy recorded, he explained that these were just the airplane's engines leaving contrails.
West claimed that the Chilean Navy also got the flight path wrong.
'They thought they were looking at an object that was moving left to right.
'In fact, what they were looking at was this plane, just departed from Santiago Airport that had looped around to gain height over the mountains,' he said.
Using his program, he was able to successfully simulate the plane's movements by accounting for the camera angle and matched it to flight records.
West thinks his video game programming days helped condition him for the life of debunking UFOs as he spent 'an inordinate amount of time on this trivial little thing, this one intractable little bug that is just causing this problem' during his former profession.
West thinks his video game programming days helped condition him for the life of debunking UFOs as he spent 'an inordinate amount of time on this trivial little thing, this one intractable little bug that is just causing this problem' during his former profession
UFO sightings over America's nuclear arsenal appeared to shift their interest from the making of the bombs to silos and bomber bases as the Cold War arms race grew (above)
'It can be very difficult to figure out… but you have no choice,' he told Popular Mechanics.
He finds debunking claims of alien sightings has the same rigor as programming a game and tied with his fascination with conspiracy theories, it ignited his passion for investigating UAP.
However, other experts remain convinced that UFO activity is real and seemingly has some connection to nuclear sites.
The former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Lue Elizondo, agreed that there 'seems to be a lot of correlation' between UFO appearances and nuclear sites.
And independent researcher Robert Hastings, who has been working toward full government disclosure of UAP activity, said in 2010, 'Declassified US government documents and witness testimony from former or retired US military personnel confirm beyond any doubt the reality of ongoing UFO incursions at nuclear weapons sites.'
Now, new research — in the form of three studies helmed by a retired US Air Force staff sergeant, Larry Hancock, and a data analyst affiliate with Harvard's UFO-hunting Galileo Project, Ian Porritt — shows that not only has there been unusual activity around nuclear weapons and facilities, it has shifted over the years.
At first seemingly interested in the production of nuclear weapons, UFO sightings later sprang up around silos and bomber bases.
'You would see this interest at silos when they were being installed before 'the activity would drop off,' Porritt previously told the DailyMail.com.
Eerily similar to these encounters are the instances of UAPs following fighter jets that were disclosed by the UAP Task Force, including a 'giant Tic Tac' UFO witnessed by Navy veteran fighter pilot Commander David Fravor in 2004.
Fravor's fellow co-pilot Chad Underwood witnessed the 'perfectly white' wingless oblong captured by his cockpit's in-flight video.
Their only hope is to return to Earth on SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which will take off using the Falcon 9 rocket, and is supposed to get them home by February 2025.
But the latest setback threatens to push that date back even further.
A full timeline of Boeing's Starliner program, from the singing of their massive contact to the incident that left two astronauts stranded aboard the ISS.
The FAA now has to launch an investigation into what went wrong with Falcon 9, which could interfere with SpaceX's rescue mission schedule, and ultimately delay Crew Dragon's launch date significantly.
'Depending on circumstances, some mishap investigations might conclude in a matter of weeks. Other more complex investigations might take several months,' the agency's website states.
What's more, SpaceX plans to use Falcon 9 to launch the Crew Dragon spacecraft, which means the Starliner crew's return to Earth is incumbent upon the booster actually working.
But the booster's recent technical issues suggest that a successful launch in September isn't exactly guaranteed.
The worst case scenario - a lengthy FAA investigation followed by more issues with Falcon 9 - could delay Crew Dragon's launch even further.
NASA will want to be certain the rocket is flawless before allowing it to carry a manned crew, which could mean several more tests between now and that rescue mission.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to DailyMail.com's request for comment about a time frame.
NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore launched toward the ISS aboard Boeing's Starliner on June 5.
The scandal-laden Starliner - which was built and developed using over $4 billion of taxpayer money - had been plagued by helium leaks and thruster issues in the weeks leading up to launch, and even on the day of.
The spacecraft safely delivered Williams and Wilmore to the ISS, but by the time it got there, it had sprung more helium leaks and five of its 28 thrusters had failed.
Boeing's Starliner spacecraft was plagued by technical issues even before in launched on June 5. NASA ultimately deemed it unsafe to return its crew to Earth.
The means that Williams and Wilmore will remain on the ISS until February 2025 at the earliest.
The decision was humiliating for Boeing, which has struggled for years to get their Starliner program off the ground only to be bailed out at the eleventh hour by their biggest competitor.
'We have had so many embarrassments lately, we're under a microscope. This just made it, like, 100 times worse,' one employee anonymously told the New York Post.
'We hate SpaceX,' he added. 'We talk s*** about them all the time, and now they're bailing us out.'
At this point, it's unclear whether Starliner will ever be able to complete a crewed mission to the ISS.
To put that in perspective, it's already been five years since Starliner's first failed uncrewed test flight.
But it's possible that Boeing could retire Starliner before they even hit that deadline, as the company has already sunk $1.6 billion into the spacecraft's development.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 burst into flames in a landing mishap that occurred after a launch that delivered 21 Starlink Satellites to low-Earth orbit. The FAA plans to investigate the incident
The Falcon 9 booster failed after a successful launch from Cape Canaveral Florida early Wednesday morning as part of a mission to deliver 21 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit. This was the rocket's 23rd launch.
The launch went smoothly, and the booster was able to separate from the upper stage before beginning its return to Earth. But it was all downhill from there.
The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket failed to properly land on its intended target: an uncrewed drone ship named 'A Shortfall of Gravitas.'
Instead, the booster exploded into flames and then tumbled onto its side.
Although the overall mission was a success, the Federal Aviation Administration has halted any more Falcon 9 launches until it determines the cause of the mishap.
'A return to flight of the Falcon 9 booster rocket is based on the FAA determining that any system, process or procedure related to the anomaly does not affect public safety,' FAA officials said in written statement.
The launch of the SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission (pictured) has been delayed indefinitely pending an FAA investigation into a Falcon 9 landing mishap
The crew for the Polaris Dawn mission are (from left to right) billionaire Jared Isaacman, SpaceX engineers Anna Menon, and Sarah Gillis, and Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Scott Poteet
This is the second time the FAA has grounded Falcon 9 in the last two months.
The agency halted Falcon 9 launches for two weeks in July after one of the rocket's upper-stage liquid oxygen tanks leaked, preventing a batch of satellites from deploying properly and causing them to burn up in Earth's atmosphere.
The mission, funded and crewed by entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, is expected to make history by reaching higher altitudes than humans have traveled since NASA's Apollo program in the 1970s, and performing the first commercial spacewalk.
Life on board the ISS is very cramped, and astronauts Barry Wilmore (left) and Sunita Williams (right) will endure another six months on board
Friday would have been the earliest date that Polaris Dawn could launch, but the FAA's investigation has now put the mission in limbo.
As for the stranded Starliner crew, they'll just have to hope that the FAA investigation drag on, and that Falcon 9 successfully launches the Crew Dragon mission in September.
NASA officials have reported that the astronauts are 'doing fine' and keeping busy with day-to-day tasks and science experiments.
But it's only plausible that they're feeling some frustration after a mission that was supposed to last about a week transformed into an eight-month-long nightmare.
NASA’s Endurance Mission Measures Earth’s Ambipolar Electric Field for First Time
First hypothesized more than 60 years ago, the ambipolar electric field is a key driver of the polar wind, a steady outflow of charged particles into space that occurs above Earth’s poles. This electric field lifts charged particles in our upper atmosphere to greater heights than they would otherwise reach and may have shaped our planet’s evolution in ways yet to be explored.
Collinson et al. report the existence of a +0.55 ± 0.09 V electric potential drop between 250 km and 768 km from a planetary electrostatic field generated exclusively by the outward pressure of ionospheric electrons; they experimentally demonstrate that the ambipolar field of Earth controls the structure of the polar ionosphere, boosting the scale height by 271%.
Image credit: NASA.
Since the 1960s, spacecraft flying over Earth’s poles have detected a stream of particles flowing from our atmosphere into space.
Theorists predicted this outflow, which they dubbed the polar wind, spurring research to understand its causes.
Some amount of outflow from our atmosphere was expected. Intense, unfiltered sunlight should cause some particles from our air to escape into space, like steam evaporating from a pot of water. But the observed polar wind was more mysterious.
Many particles within it were cold, with no signs they had been heated — yet they were traveling at supersonic speeds.
“Something had to be drawing these particles out of the atmosphere,” said Endurance principal investigator Dr. Glyn Collinson, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
The hypothesized electric field, generated at the subatomic scale, was expected to be incredibly weak, with its effects felt only over hundreds of miles.
For decades, detecting it was beyond the limits of existing technology.
In 2016, Dr. Collinson and colleagues got to work inventing a new instrument they thought was up to the task of measuring Earth’s ambipolar field.
The team’s instruments and ideas were best suited for a suborbital rocket flight launched from the Arctic.
In a nod to the ship that carried Ernest Shackleton on his famous 1914 voyage to Antarctica, the researchers named their mission Endurance.
They set a course for Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago just a few hundred miles from the north pole and home to the northernmost rocket range in the world.
“Svalbard is the only rocket range in the world where you can fly through the polar wind and make the measurements we needed,” said Dr. Suzie Imber, a space physicist at the University of Leicester.
On May 11, 2022, Endurance launched and reached an altitude of 768.03 km (477.23 miles), splashing down 19 minutes later in the Greenland Sea.
Across the 518.2-km (322-mile) altitude range where it collected data, Endurance measured a change in electric potential of only 0.55 volts (V).
“A half a volt is almost nothing — it’s only about as strong as a watch battery. But that’s just the right amount to explain the polar wind,” Dr. Collinson said.
Hydrogen ions, the most abundant type of particle in the polar wind, experience an outward force from this field 10.6 times stronger than gravity.
“That’s more than enough to counter gravity – in fact, it’s enough to launch them upwards into space at supersonic speeds,” said Endurance project scientist Dr. Alex Glocer, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Heavier particles also get a boost. Oxygen ions at that same altitude, immersed in this half-a-volt field, weigh half as much.
In general, the scientists found that the ambipolar field increases what’s known as the scale height of the ionosphere by 271%, meaning the ionosphere remains denser to greater heights than it would be without it.
“It’s like this conveyor belt, lifting the atmosphere up into space,” Dr. Collinson said.
Endurance’s discovery has opened many new paths for exploration.
The ambipolar field, as a fundamental energy field of our planet alongside gravity and magnetism, may have continuously shaped the evolution of our atmosphere in ways we can now begin to explore.
Because it’s created by the internal dynamics of an atmosphere, similar electric fields are expected to exist on other planets, including Venus and Mars.
“Any planet with an atmosphere should have an ambipolar field. Now that we’ve finally measured it, we can begin learning how it’s shaped our planet as well as others over time,” Dr. Collinson said.
G.A. Collinson et al. 2024. Earth’s ambipolar electrostatic field and its role in ion escape to space. Nature 632, 1021-1025; doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07480-3
This article is a version of a press-release from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Jacobo Grinberg (1946-?), the Mexican scientist who explored the link between science and the paranormal, was a psychologist and consciousness researcher. He conducted experiments in telepathy and extraocular vision.
Dr. Grinberg raised the possibility that, through consciousness, the human brain could have control over the universe in which we live. In the field of physics, the Lattice is the structure in which space-time is found. For Jacobo, this concept acquired a new meaning, leading him to coin the term syntergy, a neologism combining “synthesis” and “energy.”
His theory proposes that through the process by which the human brain decodes perceptual reality, it is possible to establish links with the Lattice and thereby make changes in space-time. He postulated that we live in an informational matrix, which he called “the hologram,” where it is possible to interact with perceptual reality not just as spectators but as active participants in constructing that reality.
Jacobo Grinberg
From his brain experiments, Dr. Grinberg developed the syntergic theory, a term formed from the Spanish words síntesis (synthesis) and energía (energy).
Dr. Grinberg also explored the implications of the EPR paradox, which asserts that if quantum theory is a complete model of reality, non-local interactions should exist between particles. He aimed to prove that a quantum system in the brain creates a non-local EPR correlation among human brains. He called this phenomenon transferred potential (TP), suggesting that a brain, suitably prepared through meditation, can interact with other brains, both near and far, by directly involving consciousness without sensory transmission or local effects.
“When consciousness is free, when sensitivity is optimal, we are what the universe is. Ultimately everything is a manifestation of the brain structure, which in turn is a model of the entire universe. When we see the other, we see ourselves,” said Jacobo Grinberg.
Dr. Grinberg further proposed that his syntergic theory could explain the emergence of conscious experience, which he saw as the result of complex multidimensional interactions. The brain initiates an interaction between an energetic field (neuronal field) and space structure, thus giving rise to consciousness.
Contrary to naïve realism, which suggests that reality exists externally to the observer, Dr. Grinberg, adopting an ideological stance, proposed that perception is neuropsychologically constructed, with information existing in space as “complex patterns of energy.” Conscious experience, he believed, occurs when we synthesize this information-energy in space, thereby becoming syntergic. Neuronal changes in the brain cause micro-distortions in the framework of the space-time continuum, which then interact to create a “hypercomplex macro-distortion” of the neuronal field. The outcome of this process is perceptual experience.
Regarding vision, the neuronal and quantum fields’ components “fit together” in experience, minimizing the noise produced by their interaction through a specific, emergent interference pattern (IP). This pattern represents the structure of experience and contains the perceptual components perceived as lines and geometric forms, conceived as energetic forms of high complexity. The percepts, or images, we “objectively” see as colors and objects are ultimately products of the IP.
Dr. Grinberg’s ideas are related to the implicate order theory developed by American physicist David Bohm, in which space is conceived as a holographic “sea of potentialities” from which the universe and consciousness unfold explicitly. Here, the quantum wave/particle duality paradox is resolved, while the “principle of nonlocality”—the capacity of one particle to influence another instantaneously—is preserved.
Jacobo Grinberg and two collaborators, Leah Attie (left) and Ruth Cerezo, at the entrance of Laboratory 23 of the Faculty of Psychology at UNAM, in August 1994. Image credit: elpais
During the 1980s, Dr. Grinberg traveled extensively across Mexico to interview shamans and psychic healers, hoping to recover the “native psychology” and “original wisdom” of the Mexican people. From his case studies, he concluded that shamans have highly neurosyntergic brains, enabling them to activate experiences in multiple locations in space and manipulate reality to create immediate, astounding effects, most notably materializations.
The syntergic theory both reaffirms and challenges quantum physics by reinterpreting the concept of the Lattice. Dr. Grinberg suggested that, through consciousness, the human brain could control the universe in which we live.
He explained that a person with a highly syntergic neuronal field—meaning a brain with greater coherence links—would have the ability to modify the hologram at will, achieving feats that defy the known laws of physics, much like the shaman Pachita did in her surgeries.
This theory opens the door to investigating other phenomena, such as telepathy. Grinberg conducted various experiments in which, through meditation, he demonstrated synchrony between two brains exposed to different stimuli, producing similar results.
This theory intersects with some fundamental ideas like the law of attraction, the influence of thought on reality, and linguistic relativity, among others.
The most enigmatic aspect of this theory suggests that if consciousness allows us to influence the informational matrix, and if everything is connected through the energetic interaction of atoms and thoughts, then we might inhabit a plane that is not the total reality—essentially, a Matrix into which we have been plTaced, with a brain capable of understanding its physical laws but not its origin.
This idea gives rise to the concept of an awakening—of taking consciousness further and mastering the hologram. Under this premise, by fully understanding the matrix’s operation, we would simply disappear and reach a state of purity within the true reality.
Science often rejects new ideas because they don’t fit into what is currently understood. People like Jacobo Grinberg and Nikola Tesla, who were ahead of their time, are often criticized and disrespected because their ideas are not accepted by the scientific community. Even when there is evidence to support their work, they may still lose their reputation.
Dr. Grinberg tried to change the way we understand the connection between science and consciousness. He used the scientific method to explore this relationship. However, science should not be too proud to think it knows everything. It should not dismiss the unknown just because it doesn’t understand it.
This theory could not be verified, and like his studies on extraocular vision in children or telepathy, Dr. Grinberg’s projects remained unfinished after he disappeared at the most momentous point of his prodigious career.
Dr. Jacobo Grinberg disappeared on December 8, 1994, and all his work vanished with him. People have been trying to figure out what happened to him. Here are some ideas:
Some think he was hurt by his wife, Teresa, because of a personal problem. But then she disappeared too.
Others believe the CIA took him away to work for them. A judge found a clue that suggested Dr. Jacobo Grinberg was in North America, but the judge was suddenly removed from the case.
Dr. Jacobo Grinberg’s brother thinks he might have escaped from the world, just like in one of his own theories.
It’s strange that it’s easier to make someone disappear than to recognize their work.
Guys this is crazy cool. I was looking at an asteroid photo that was released this week and it had an alien ship that looked like nothing I have ever seen before...only visible with ai focusing.
Also I found an intestine huge structure I estimate to be 1600 meters across on the moon. This moon photo was taken by the NASA JUICE mission also from this week. I put it though ai, but even without ai focusing...its still visible! Mind-blowing detail either way and 100% proof of intelligent aliens on Earths moon.
AI Corrects Three UFO Photos, Colorado, Florida, California 1995-6, UAP Sighting News.
1. Denver, Colorado Jan 1996
2. Florida, USA 1996
3. Borrego Desert, California Jan 1995
Hey everyone, hope all is well. I ran three more UFO photos from three sightings through ai and found the sharpened images very impressive. The objects were defiantly 100% proof a an actual flying craft. Who is flying it is another issue. They could be flown by aliens, US military, drones and so on. But I don't feel any US pilot would fly such top secret craft over public locations, so I rule that out. Aliens also have ai drones flying around our planet, because why risk their lives when they can risk a drone instead?
ESO/José Francisco Salgado/Wikimedia Commons - CC BY 4.0
Een van de existentiële vragen die we ons soms stellen, betreft de mogelijkheid dat er intelligent leven in het universum is. Geen andere levensvormen, ongeacht hun complexiteit, maar buitenaardse wezens die kunnen bogen op een intelligentieniveau dat gelijk is aan het onze... of hoger. In de loop der jaren heeft de zoektocht naar buitenaardse intelligentie, of SETI, verschillende critici en voorstanders opgeleverd, maar nooit enige bevestiging. Daarom hebben twee onderzoekers onlangs besloten om een nieuwe interpretatie naar voren te brengen: hoe waarschijnlijk is het om intelligente levensvormen in het heelal te vinden?
De zoektocht naar buitenaards leven tussen Drake en Jaynes
De hedendaagse zoektocht naar buitenaardse levensvormen is onlosmakelijk verbonden met de vergelijking van Drake, die in 1961 werd geformuleerd door de astronoom Frank Drake. Het is echter meer dan een feitelijke vergelijking, het is een maatstaf voor de uitdagingen waarmee onze onderzoekers worden geconfronteerd bij het zoeken naar buitenaardse beschavingen. Aan de ene kant bevat de formule parameters zoals de mate van stervorming, systemen met bewoonbare planeten, de waarschijnlijkheid van de ontwikkeling van intelligent leven, enzovoort. Maar aan de andere kant maakt de onzekerheid van de parameters elke berekening zinloos: zoals we al zeiden, dient de vergelijking alleen als filosofische horizon voor het onderzoek.
In hun studie besloten de twee onderzoekers ook gebruik te maken van de bevindingen van een andere academische figuur, de natuurkundige Edwin Jaynes. Door de verdeling van een onbekende chemische stof in water te bestuderen, laat Jaynes zien dat het onmogelijk is om waarschijnlijkheden te formuleren bij afwezigheid van gegevens. Bijgevolg kan een gebeurtenis ofwel bijna altijd ofwel bijna nooit voorkomen, zonder middenweg. Zou dit het geheim kunnen zijn van de zoektocht naar buitenaardse intelligentie?
Oorsprong en verdwijning van... buitenaardse beschavingen
Unsplash
Volgens David Kipping en Geraint Lewis, auteurs van de nieuwe studie, is het daarom mogelijk om het experiment van Jaynes toe te passen op de zoektocht naar intelligent buitenaards leven. In de praktijk is het onmogelijk dat dit laatste meer of minder vaak voorkomt: of het komt heel vaak voor of het is extreem zeldzaam. In het eerste geval zouden we een van de vele voorbeelden in het universum zijn; in het tweede geval zouden we een van de weinige zijn: het is niet eenvoudig om te zien welke van de twee hypotheses het meest verontrustend is.
Bovendien hebben de twee onderzoekers een nieuw formalisme voorgesteld dat de vergelijking van Drake bruikbaarder zou maken en de structuur ervan zou vereenvoudigen. De enige echt bruikbare parameter zouden de geboorte- en sterftecijfers van beschavingen zijn, waarmee hun ontstaan en verdwijnen wiskundig zou kunnen worden weergegeven. Maar zelfs dan is tertium non datur: ons universum moet vol intelligent leven zijn, of bijna leeg.
Hoe te zoeken naar buitenaardse levensvormen
Welke benadering ook wordt gekozen, we komen altijd terug bij de Fermiparadox, een impasse waar astronomen heel bekend mee zijn. Volgens sommigen weten buitenaardse wezens misschien al dat we bestaan, maar kunnen ze het ons niet vertellen of zitten ze misschien zelfs gevangen in hun eigen werelden. Geconfronteerd met de mogelijkheid dat zelfs zijn oplossing niet effectief is, blijft Kipping optimistisch:
Ik denk dat mijn favoriete uitweg is dat onze Melkweg gewoon rustig is. In plaats daarvan zijn de meeste druk en vol, maar wij zijn de eersten in de Melkweg. Het lijkt onwaarschijnlijk, maar misschien is geboren worden in een druk sterrenstelsel onmogelijk omdat de bewoonbare ruimte al is opgeslokt.
Kortom, het onderzoek van Kipping en Lewis bevestigt ook hoe moeilijk het niet zozeer is om intelligente levensvormen in het universum te vinden, maar om de parameters te definiëren voor onderzoek dat tot concrete resultaten leidt. Misschien bestaan er al buitenaardse wezens, maar we kunnen niet weten of, waar en in welke mate: een fascinerende en niet noodzakelijkerwijs teleurstellende uitkomst.
Accidental Time Travelers: Unintended Journeys Through Time Slips
Time slips; a curious phenomena where individuals unexpectedly find themselves transported across time, be it minutes, days, or even years, without any intention or control over the experience. Those who experience time slips often report feeling as though they’ve been transported to a different point in time.
Imagine walking down a familiar street when suddenly everything changes. The asphalt beneath your feet transforms into cobblestone, cars vanish, replaced by horse-drawn carriages. The air fills with the scent of coal smoke and horse manure.
People in Victorian-era clothing hurry past, glancing at you suspiciously. Panic sets in as you realize you're no longer in your own time. Then, just as quickly, you're back in the present day.
You’ve just experienced a time slip, and you’re not alone.
Thousands of people worldwide have reported similar experiences, brief moments of traveling through time, witnessing scenes from the past or future, only to return to the present moment.
But what exactly are these experiences? Are they vivid hallucinations, or could time slips be real, offering us glimpses into the true nature of time and reality?
Some theories suggest that if a portal existed between our universe and a parallel one, time slips could theoretically occur. However, it’s crucial to note that there is no concrete evidence to support the idea that we live in a multiverse.
In the video below, we’ll explore a few famous time slip stories and the scientific theories that might help explain these mysterious events.
Erin Valenti was a highly accomplished 33-year-old CEO of a tech company called Tinker, which develops websites and smartphone apps. She was known for being very smart and kind (she worked as a volunteer to fight human trafficking) with a great sense of humor and a successful career. Originally from Fairport, NY, she resided with her husband in Salt Lake City, UT.
Her company, with 120 employees mainly in Pakistan, designed, developed, and scaled technology products built for iOS, Android, and the web. Tinker built over 700 products, including mobile apps, SaaS applications, tech-enabled marketplaces, and consumer websites for Facebook, Skullcandy, LiveNation, Pearson, MetroPCS, and emerging startups.
Before founding Tinker, she was Director of Product Development at Overstock.com, supervising a team of 250 engineers. Her company website linked to CTRL- labs, Thomas Reardon’s “neuroscience and behavior” center.
CTRL-labs assembled scientists and technologists:
PhDs in computational neuroscience;
Biomechanics paired with hackers and coders;
Experts in signal processing, machine learning, and human-computer interaction;
Industrial designers.
CTRL- labs published:
“The future of brain-machine interfaces is non-invasive. Instead of surgical implants, CTRL- labs uses state-of-the-art detection and machine learning to read your neurons from outside the body. The first step will be technology precisely picking up the signals from inside your body to control devices outside of it with little more than natural gestures. The next step – and we are already closer than most people realize – will be reading the intention directly from your brain.” (Source)
Valenti had no history of mental-health disorders or substance abuse. Scott Rafferty, a Utah entrepreneur, told Business Insider that Valenti spoke of quitting her million-dollar business, but never meant it. She told him she felt responsible for the welfare of more than 130 engineers and their families on the other side of the world. She also planned to finance a startup accelerator inside her company and start a clothing line for professional women. In late summer, Valenti spoke to Rafferty about wanting an executive coach. Rafferty’s coach was about to hold a retreat in California.
On October 1, 2019, Valenti flew from Salt Lake City to California to attend a three-day seminar called Create Powerful. The seminar was held in Laguna Niguel, a beach town, and was designed to help business owners grow personally and professionally.
The seminar was an intense, immersive experience that helped people connect with their personal power and overcome fears. It cost $6,500 and promised to change participants’ lives. After the seminar, Valenti flew to the Bay Area on October 3 to attend a two-day conference in Monterey for tech founders and investors.
Erin Valenti last words: We’re in the Matrix
Valenti is believed to have been last seen by Dean Jacobson, a former manager of hers at Summit Partners, in Palo Alto, on Monday, October 7, in the afternoon.
After the seminar, Valenti called her parents and said she couldn’t find her rental car, a gray Nissan Murano. Later, she found the car and started driving to the airport, but her parents noticed she sounded “manic and confused” on the phone. She talked about Thanksgiving plans, but wasn’t making sense and spoke fast and erratically.
Valenti also mentioned that she had refueled the car just 10 minutes prior, but now it was running out of gas, and she exclaimed, “I’m going to miss my flight!”
Her mother became concerned and called Valenti’s husband, Harrison Weinstein, asking him to contact her immediately.
For the next few hours, Valenti’s family took turns speaking with her on the phone, trying to calm her down and understand what was going on. However, Valenti continued to be agitated and disconnected.
At one point, she said something strange: “It’s all a game. It’s a thought experiment. We’re in the Matrix.”
This statement further concerned her family, who didn’t know what to make of it. They continued to talk to her until almost midnight, trying to help her calm down and make sense of her situation.
“Matrix” is a mathematical term used in the movie The Matrix to illustrate the code used to make up simulated reality. What is the “matrix”? It is a world created by computers, built to control and transform humans.
According to reports, Valenti asked her mother, “Are you in on it?” Her mother, a retired nurse, asked if she was drunk, had taken any drugs, or had somebody given her something. Valenti responded no. Weinstein also asked the police to conduct a welfare check.
According to the family, the police called Valenti on the phone, and she told an officer she was just joking around. The phone appeared to have died at some point, and calls went to voicemail.
On Saturday, October 12, a volunteer found Valenti’s rental car parked a few blocks from where her phone was last located – on the 6500 block of Bose Lane, a residential street near the Sam Jose airport.
Looking inside, the volunteer discovered Valenti’s body in the back seat. An investigation by San Jose police found no evidence of foul play, authorities said. There were no outward signs of trauma or physical harm.
Blood tests were negative for common prescription drugs and other substances. Her parents spoke to the media and said they believed she had suffered some kind of manic episode.
“Her thoughts were disconnected. She talked a mile a minute. She’d say ‘I’m coming home for Thanksgiving,’ then in the next she was saying she’s in the Matrix,” her mom, Whitey Valenti, said.
Valenti’s husband said she had no history of mental illness.
“There’s never any history of anything like this, no mental health diagnosis, no hospitalization, no substance use, no arrests — as clear of a record as you can get. This is incredibly unlike her. She is an extremely high-achievement, successful person,” he said.
It took months for the autopsy report. The San Jose medical examiner’s office’s autopsy report determined she died of “sudden death in the setting of an acute manic episode.” Though the report did not explain what killed her, other than she died of “natural causes.”
A manic episode, characterized by feelings of euphoria, racing thoughts, and feelings of connectedness, is typically followed by a period of depression or irritability.
Valenti had a previous diagnosis of a thyroid condition treated with medication. The autopsy report noted that her condition could have contributed to her death. Blood samples, however, were not satisfactory for analysis.
It took months for the autopsy report. The San Jose medical examiner’s office’s autopsy report determined she died of “sudden death in the setting of an acute manic episode.” Though the report did not explain what killed her, other than she died of “natural causes.”
A manic episode, characterized by feelings of euphoria, racing thoughts, and feelings of connectedness, is typically followed by a period of depression or irritability.
Valenti had a previous diagnosis of a thyroid condition treated with medication. The autopsy report noted that her condition could have contributed to her death. Blood samples, however, were not satisfactory for analysis.
A police review of Valenti’s electronic communications in the days before her scheduled return showed symptoms of a “manic episode,” according to the San Jose medical examiner’s office.
Authorities also said a review of her medical records “suggests that the etiology of her final manic episode was related to an emerging, previously undiagnosed psychiatric disorder.”
A healthy 33-year-old woman, who was a successful tech CEO with no history of mental illness, attended an intense course meant to change her life and help her manage fear.
After telling her family she was excited to return home, she suddenly experienced a mental breakdown while driving to the airport. She went missing for days and was later found dead in her car, which was parked on a street where searchers had previously looked.
There are questions about what happened—whether the course triggered her breakdown, whether brain-machine interfaces were involved, or if she died from a sudden onset of mental illness as the autopsy suggests.
Notably, why did Valenti continue to mention in her last phone call that this was a thought experiment and that we are all living in a matrix Surprisingly, there are current-day scholars who do believe that the world is simulated.
In fact, humans have been trying to create a simulated world since long ago. If it is possible that humans could eventually create a “simulated world”, then how can we be sure that we are not already living in one?
-Professor Nick Bostrom from Oxford University who proposed a Simulation Hypothesis in 2003. -NASA physicist Thomas Campbell also said he believes the world is definitely simulated and even Einstein once said: “Reality is merely an illusion.” -Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, once said: “There’s a one in a billion chance we’re in base reality.”
Why are the leading figures of society making such absurd arguments? Are they suspecting and questioning that perhaps we have never lived in a “real” world?
Consider the following story. About 2,300 years ago, Zhuangzi, a renowned Chinese philosopher, entered into a dream and became a butterfly flying freely among the flowers. Suddenly, he woke up and a terrifying question arose in his mind: How can I be sure that I have really woken up? Could I actually be a butterfly dreaming that I am a human? The dream was so “real”!
Famous past-life regressionist Dolores Cannon once said that there are Akashic records in the universe that stores all life experiences. Some can use hypnosis to connect to the Akashic database to retrieve information about their past lives. Nikola Tesla, a genius Serbian-American inventor, also believed in the existence of the “Akashic database.” He claimed to have connected with it in his dreams, to see machines that are yet to be invented. Perhaps that was why he was able to invent machines without too much experimentation. (Source)
If what the above scientists stated is true, then could it be possible that we are actually living in a simulated world? The only question is, if one day you were given a choice, would you choose to learn the truth?
Was the moon a blisteringly hot world? Our lunar neighbour was once covered with an ocean of molten rock, data from India's Chandrayaan-3 rover suggests
India's Chandrayaan-3 moon mission has revealed the moon's mineral makeup
This supports the theory that the moon was once covered in an ocean of magma
Their measurements discovered a uniform layer of ferroan anorthosite, a white rock believed to have floated to the surface of the molten rock during the moon's formation.
This supports the 'Lunar Magma Ocean' (LMO) theory which claims the whole of the moon's surface was formed from a cooling layer of magma that formed 4.5 billion years ago.
New analysis of data from Indian's Chandrayaan-3 mission has revealed the moon was once covered in an ocean of molten lava
The LMO theory is not new – it dates back to the 1970s – but the new findings now bolster the theory with evidence of molten rock at another region of the moon (its south pole).
Vikram's landing site, at about 70 degrees south, was the furthest south any landing craft had ever been.
Over 10 days, Vikram's smaller Pragyaan rover travelled over the lunar landscape, constantly recording and transmitting data back to Earth.
That data included 23 measurements from a device called the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer.
This lightweight instrument used a radioactive source to bombard the lunar surface with radiation, exciting the atoms in the ground, and measuring the energy they release.
By recording that emitted energy, researchers have been able to calculate the mineral composition of the lunar soil.
After landing in August last year at a site near the Moon's south pole (illustrated in yellow) the Vikram lander deployed a rover which collected data about the moon's mineral composition
That analysis revealed that the area around the Chandrayaan-3 landing site was relatively uniform and composed largely of ferroan anorthosite.
The researchers also found that the mineral composition at the Chandrayaan-3 site was similar to that found by NASA's Apollo 16 and the Soviet Luna-20 mission.
What is unusual about that finding is that those two landing sites are both in the moon's equatorial region, a long way away from where Chandrayaan-3 touched down.
The fact that these three distant sites all have roughly the same material composition suggests that they might have all come from the same lunar magma ocean.
As that material coalesced, the intense energies involved melted the rocks into a vast ocean of magma which covered the entire moon.
As the surface cooled over tens to hundreds of millions of years, the cooler ferroan anorthosite rose to the surface while heavier minerals like olivine and pyroxene sank deep below to form the moon's mantle.
The current lunar highlands are believed to be what remains of this ancient crust after billions of years.
The Pragyaan (pictured) found that the area around the landing site was uniform and made of ferroan anorthosite, a white rock believed to have formed the ancient moon's crust
Experts believe the moon was formed when a Mars-sized planet called Theia collided with the Earth and knocked material out into space
The data collected by Chandrayaan-3 (pictured) suggests that the moon was once covered by an ocean of lava. As it cooled the lighter ferroan anorthosite rose to the surface and formed the ancient crust
The Moon theories
Astronomers have long suspected that the moon was created when a giant protoplanet called Theia struck the newly formed Earth - a theory first put forward in the 1970s.
It says the huge collision created a vast cloud of debris, which coalesced into the moon.
However, until now, astronomers have not been able to explain how this left the moon and Earth chemically identical.
Later, two hypotheses arose that could explain why the moon is Earth's chemical clone, but they predict radically different masses for Theia.
In one scenario, two half-Earths merged to form the Earth-moon system.
But the second hypothesis suggests Theia was a small, high-velocity projectile that smacked into a large and fast-spinning young Earth.
Co-author of the paper Dr Santosh Vadawale from the Physical Research Laboratory, told the BBC: 'The theory of early evolution of the moon becomes much more robust in the light of our observation.'
Alpha particle x-ray data also provides evidence for an enormous meteor strike near the lunar south pole.
The data gathered by the rover showed that the area around the landing site was much higher in magnesium than would have been expected for pure ferroan anorthosite.
In their paper, published in Nature, the researchers argue that this material could have been blasted out of the ground by a huge impact which excavated the magnesium-rich materials deep in the mantle.
The researchers believe that magnesium in the soil was deposited by the same impact which formed the South Pole-Aitken basin over 217 miles (350 km) away. This magnesium was then further mixed into the area by impacts like the Schomberger crater (impact illustrated)
This impact could have been the same meteor strike which formed the 1,600-mile (2,500km) wide South Pole-Aitken basin over 217 miles (350 km) away from the Chandrayaan-3 landing site.
The mineral findings are consistent with the idea that magnesium-rich rocks were scattered over the site before being mixed by further meteor impacts.
These findings are also important to the future of India's space research because they provide a basis for future observations.
Previously, the Indian space agency had made observations of the lunar surface from orbit on Chandryaan-1 and 2.
However, without measurements from the ground, interpreting those observations required some scientific guess work.
Beautiful: Image provided by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) taken by the Pragyan rover shows the Vikram lander. Photo released on August 30, 2023
This new data taken directly from the lunar surface provides researchers with a 'ground truth' against which they can compare future orbital observations.
This could help the space agency narrow down their search for water which would be a huge support for any future effort to establish a future crewed base.
India plans to launch another lunar mission in 2025 or 2026 which aims to collect material and return it to Earth for analysis.
Children will be born on the moon 'in a few decades', with whole families joining Europe's lunar colony by 2050, a top space scientist has claimed.
Professor Bernard Foing, ambassador of the European Space Agency-driven 'Moon Village' scheme, made the comments.
He said that by 2030, there could be an initial lunar settlement of six to 10 pioneers - scientists, technicians and engineers - which could grow to 100 by 2040.
'In 2050, you could have a thousand and then... naturally you could envisage to have family' joining crews there, he told AFP.
Speaking at this year's European Planetary Science Congress in Riga, Latvia, Professor Foing explained how humanity's moon colonies could quickly expand.
He likened human expansion on the moon to the growth of the railways, when villages grew around train stations, followed by businesses.
Potential moon resources include basalt, a volcanic rock that could be used as a raw material for 3D-printing satellites.
These could be deployed from the moon at a fraction of the cost of a launch from high-gravity Earth.
The moon also houses helium-3, a rare isotope on our planet, that could theoretically be used to generate cleaner, safer nuclear energy for Earth.
One of the main targets for moon colonies is water, locked up in ice on the moon's poles.
Water can be separated into hydrogen and oxygen, two gases which explode when mixed - providing rocket fuel.
Pentagon Insider Reveals: Could UFOs Originate from Earth’s Oceans?
The debate over the origins of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), often referred to as UFOs, has taken a fascinating turn with insights from Luis Elizondo, a former Pentagon insider. Elizondo, who led the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), has been at the forefront of public discussions on UAPs. In recent interviews, he has proposed thought-provoking ideas about where these mysterious objects might come from, challenging the traditional view that they are extraterrestrial in origin.
Beyond Outer Space: Exploring New Possibilities
While many have speculated that UAPs are spacecraft from distant galaxies, Elizondo encourages a broader perspective. “They can be from outer space, inner space, or, frankly, the space in between,” he explained. This statement suggests that UAPs might not just be visitors from another planet. Instead, they could be natural phenomena or entities originating from environments closer to home, such as Earth’s oceans.
Elizondo highlights the possibility that UAPs could be linked to unknown forms of life or technology residing in the depths of our oceans. The ocean is one of the least explored regions of our planet, and it’s conceivable that advanced or unknown species could thrive there. This perspective aligns with recent reports of UAPs being observed near large bodies of water, raising questions about their connection to the deep sea
The USS Nimitz and USS Roosevelt Incidents
Two of the most well-known UAP encounters involving the U.S. military—the USS Nimitz in 2004 and the USS Roosevelt in 2015—offer compelling evidence of these mysterious objects’ capabilities. In both cases, Navy pilots observed and recorded UAPs that demonstrated extraordinary flight characteristics, such as rapid acceleration and abrupt changes in altitude. These objects, described as “tic-tac” shaped, were able to hover just above the ocean’s surface before rapidly ascending, further fueling speculation about their connection to Earth’s oceans.
Elizondo did not see the footage from the USS Nimitz encounter until 2009, and when similar incidents occurred with the USS Roosevelt in 2015, they caught the attention of other high-ranking officials, including Chris Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense. Mellon and others have expressed concern about the potential national security risks posed by these UAPs, particularly given their proximity to sensitive military assets.
Nuclear Connections and Military Concerns
Another intriguing aspect of UAP activity is their apparent interest in nuclear-powered facilities and weapons systems. Both the USS Nimitz and USS Roosevelt are nuclear-powered vessels, and Elizondo has noted that UAPs have often been observed near American nuclear sites. This recurring pattern suggests that UAPs might have a particular interest in nuclear technology, though the reasons for this remain unclear.
In response to these encounters, the Pentagon has explored various methods to counteract or capture UAPs. One proposal, known as Operation Interloper, involved creating a nuclear “footprint” to attract UAPs and then using electromagnetic pulses to disable them. However, this plan was ultimately shelved, leading to speculation that higher authorities may have been reluctant to pursue it, possibly due to already having knowledge about these phenomena or not wanting to provoke them.
The Search for Answers Continues
Elizondo’s insights challenge us to expand our thinking about UAPs and their possible origins. Whether they are advanced technologies from another world, natural phenomena from the depths of our oceans, or something entirely different, the mystery of UAPs remains unsolved. What is clear, however, is that these objects have captured the attention of the highest levels of the U.S. government and military, and the search for answers is far from over.
As investigations continue, Elizondo’s call to consider all possibilities reminds us that the truth about UAPs might be more complex—and closer to home—than we ever imagined.
According to findings in a recent study, UFO witnesses may not be prone to misperceptions or related cognitive factors but instead may possess specific personality traits that increase their likelihood of encountering such phenomena.
Clinical Psychologist Dr. Daniel Stubbings from Cardiff Metropolitan University and his team found there are numerous factors that contribute to an individual thinking they witnessed what the U.S. Department of Defense now calls unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).
Their study, published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, examines the big five personality traits: extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, along with schizotypy traits (behaviors that resemble schizophrenia), to help determine if UAP experiencers could be distinguished from those who had not reported seeing a UAP.
The Big Five Personality Traits: What Are They?
In the 1970s, two research teams—one led by Paul Costa and Robert R. McCrae of the National Institutes of Health and the other by Warren Norman and Lewis Goldberg of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Oregon—found that most human character traits can be explained by five dimensions. Surveys of thousands of individuals uncovered these mostly distinct traits:
Neuroticism: Emotional stability; individuals with high scores are characterized by anxiety, inhibition, moodiness, and lower self-assurance.
Extroversion: Encompasses cheerfulness, initiative, and communicativeness.
Openness: Fond of innovation and displays of creativity.
Agreeableness: Dictates how they interact with others. Other traits include being friendly, empathetic, and warm.
Conscientiousness: Gauges a person’s level of organization. Individuals with high scores are motivated, disciplined, and trustworthy.
The Findings
Dr. Stubbings’ experiment involved 206 participants, including 103 who said they had witnessed or self-reported seeing a UAP. The team analyzed personality traits to see how participants naturally grouped together.
The study consisted of three groups. Group one had average traits, whereas the second group, designated the Neurotic/Schizotypy group, was high on neuroticism and schizotypy traits. The last controlled group, labelled O-ACE, was found to have high openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion but low neuroticism and schizotypy traits.
“These were the groups that ‘emerged’ out of the data analysis,” Dr. Stubbings told The Debrief. “The latent profile analysis demonstrated these three patterns of personality profiles. Prior research looked at correlation and regression (predictive patterns) but not a latent (underlying) profile.”
“This was a new finding,” Stubbings told The Debrief.
The study concluded that the third group, O-ACE, was more likely to see UAPs. Over the years, stigma and stereotypes have helped create narratives that people who see UAPs are more than likely emotionally reactive; in other words, they may display neurotic behavior and are prone to perceptual and cognitive abnormalities.
However, the recent data does not appear to support this narrative. Instead, Dr. Stubbings and his coauthors state in their paper that the “descriptive UAP accounts by the general public were similar to the descriptions provided by military witnesses.”
Stubbings, when asked why people with high conscientiousness see UFOs, said it is difficult to answer such a question based on the current data in-hand.
“Our data indicates that there is a small statistical relationship, but further research should explore why that relationship exists,” Stubings told The Debrief. “But my guess is that people who are high in conscientiousness might be more willing to admit to themselves that they have seen something and believe it is the right thing to do to admit it.”
However, Stubbings notes that conscientiousness alone is probably not everything in this equation, but instead, combinations of other variables—specifically low scores in Neuroticism and higher scores in Openness, also contribute.
“We need further research to explore the nuances of these personality factors in the emergence of both belief and experience.”
Dr. Stubbings also noted that “only 28 percent of participants reported their sightings anywhere, and 14 percent used a UFO reporting organization, which suggests that events are vastly underreported.” His paper also suggested that stigma and a lack of proper reporting avenues were the main obstacles impacting their willingness to report their sightings.
Dr. Stubbings initiated his research by referencing an older academic paper on UAPs published in the Applied Cognitive Psychology Journal in 2011, which found that certain personality factors were predictors of an individual’s belief in UFOs.
“This is relevant to the UFO topic more broadly because what people perceive and recall tends to be in line with their beliefs,” Stubbings told The Debrief. “If beliefs can be predicted by personality factors, then it supports the notion that it is a particular kind of person who is more prone to belief in UAPs, and in turn, they end up seeing and recalling what they believe to be true.”
“In other words, people see UAP not because they are there but because of the conviction of their beliefs, which are influenced by their personality dispositions.
“So the idea was born to change the dependent variable of ‘belief’ to ‘have you had a sighting.’ Those who believe in UFOs/UAP might not have the same characteristics [as] those that report to have seen what they believe to be a UAP.”
Fundamentally, Stubbings says that in addition to understanding the kinds of personality traits and psychological drivers that may contribute to a person’s likelihood of observing and reporting UAP, scientists need to be engaging in dialogue about the assessment, diagnosis, formulation, and treatment of mental health distress in individuals who claim to have observed UAP or even had direct contact with purported NHI.
“This topic is one of the most fascinating areas,” Stubbings told The Debrief, “and I believe other scientists from around the world need to help address this mystery.”
Stubbings and his colleagues Sophie Ali and Alexander Wong’s new paper, “Who Sees UFOs? The Relationship Between Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Sightings And Personality Factors,” appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
FAA imposes flight restrictions around US Air Force Plant 42, home to classified aerospace development projects.
Reports of UFO sightings prompt concerns over espionage and drone interference in military installations.
Drones have become an increasing threat to aviation safety in recent years.
A series of unidentified flying object (UFO) reports around a highly classified US Air Force base in California have coincided with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposing temporary flight restrictions in the area. United States Air Force Plant 42 - home to advanced military aerospace development projects - has experienced a surge in suspected drone incursions within the past few months.
FAA flight restrictions around Plant 42
Residents of Palmdale, California have reported seeing several unidentified objects in the skies over the past few days, prompting action by the FAA. However, the larger story is that Plant 42 - an offshoot of Edwards Air Force Base (AFB) housing top-secret defense projects from the likes of Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman - has reportedly seen an uptick in "uncrewed aerial systems" (UAS) activities in recent months.
Photo: TipTopMap | Shutterstock
As detailed in a report by The War Zone, Mary Kozaitis, Chief of Media Operations for the 412th Test Wing at Edwards Air Force Base, said the FAA restrictions were put in place "because of the increase in UAS activity." Other US bases have experienced suspected drone activity too, including a notable situation at Langley AFB in December, raising concerns over espionage.
According to Kozaitis,
"We have observed multiple UAS [uncrewed aerial systems] activities over Plant 42 during the last few months. The number of UASs fluctuated and they ranged in size and configuration."
The facility is home to Lockheed Martin's 'Skunk Works', or Advanced Development Programs (ADP) division, as well as other highly advanced aerospace projects, including the B-21 Raider stealth bomber program.
The sixth-generation bomber could be operational within four years.
Videos of alleged UFO sightings in Palmdale began showing up on social media on August 17th, although some clips have since been revealed as hoaxes. Nonetheless, the number of unexplained drone incidents that have been occurring around US military installations is a cause for concern.
US Navy ships have also reportedly experienced drone swarms, raising the likelihood that all of this is state espionage activity. The government has generally sought to downplay any incidents and has remained predictably quiet about the recent Palmdale sightings.
Drone challenges
Drones have become something of a nuisance for airports since affordable commercial drones hit the market. There have been several instances of drone interference at major global airports, including a notable situation over the 2018 Christmas holidays at London Gatwick (LGW) that forced hundreds of flight cancelations. Dublin Airport has also suffered from repeated drone incursions, eventually looking to specialist anti-drone technology as a solution.
Photo: S.Galindo | Shutterstock
Wayward drones pose a threat to aircraft as they are landing or attempting to take-off, and there have been many near misses over the years. In one particularly close call, an Emirates Airbus A380 suffered damage to its right wing after striking a suspected drone while landing in Nice.
One of NASA’s core mission objectives, though not explicitly stated in its charter, is to educate Americans about space exploration, especially students. As part of that mission, NASA hosts a number of challenges every year where teams of students compete to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems. The agency recently announced the next round of one of its standard yearly challenges—the Human Lander Challenge.
The Human Lander Challenge occurs every year, and objectives vary based on the specific problem related to human landers NASA is trying to solve. This year, the focal problem is cryogenic fluid storage.
Currently, no technology exists to store cryogenic fluid in space for long periods, but any lander mission would need to store cryogenic fuel for months. Typically, cryogenics would boil away in that time frame, but large amounts will be required to fuel landers or orbiting stations. Particular problems could focus on low-leakage components, large-scale insulation, or propellant transfer technologies.
Recruitment vide for the Human Lander Challenge. Credit – Human Lander Challenge YouTube Channel
To address that problem, NASA is turning to teams of undergraduate or graduate students at some of the top universities in the world. Since this competition repeats annually, some universities have a pedigree of competing in and winning the challenge. This year, the top three teams were from the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, and the University of Colorado-Boulder, all of which would potential field teams to compete this year.
Interested teams will compete in two rounds. The first round of judging will take place in March 2025, and twelve teams will be notified of their invitation to the final round in April. That final round will take place at a forum held in Huntsville, Alabama, in late June next year.
Between now and then, though, teams will able to submit a notice of intent, get their questions answered by NASA experts, and have to submit a proposal. The finalists will receive a cash award to continue their work, involving a full technical paper and slide deck to be presented at the forum.
Fraser discusses the options for the eventual Artemis lander.
Details about the challenge are posted on its website. It’s being run through the agency’s Human Landing System Program directorate and managed by the National Institute of Aerospace. If you’re looking for inspiration, the challenge team has also posted a motivational video about the opportunities the challenge presents.
Any technology planned for a detailed assessment would need to be about 3-5 years from maturity, which would align well with the Artemis mission’s timelines. However, it remains to be seen if any solutions will be adopted into the mission architecture. If they are, some students will say they’ve participated in the most challenging human space endeavor in almost 60 years—that’s a pretty good resume builder, if nothing else.
NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test astronauts (from top) Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams pose on June 13, 2024 for a portrait inside the vestibule between the forward port on the International Space Station’s Harmony module and Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. Credit: NASA
NASA Decides to Play it Safe. Wilmore and Williams are Coming Home on a Crew Dragon in February
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will remain on board the International Space Station until February, returning to Earth on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. NASA announced its decision over the weekend, citing concerns about the safety of the Boeing Starliner capsule due to helium leaks and thruster issues. The troublesome Starliner is slated to undock from the ISS without a crew in early September and attempt to return on autopilot, landing in the New Mexico desert.
NASA said this allows them and Boeing to continue gathering test data on Starliner during its uncrewed flight home, while also not accepting more risk than necessary for the crew.
“Decisions like this are never easy, but I want to commend our NASA and Boeing teams for their thorough analysis, transparent discussions, and focus on safety during the Crew Flight Test,” Ken Bowersox, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate said in a NASA press release. “We’ve learned a lot about the spacecraft during its journey to the station and its docked operations. We also will continue to gather more data about Starliner during the uncrewed return and improve the system for future flights to the space station.”
Boeing’s CTS-100 Starliner taking off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on June 5th, 2024. Credit: NASA
Wilmore, 61, and Williams, 58, flew to the ISS in June on Starliner for the long-awaited Boeing Crew Flight Test. The two astronauts are not strangers to long-duration missions, as they have both served on ISS expeditions and they will now officially join the Expedition 71/72 crew on board the space station. Their ride home is scheduled to launch in late September with two astronauts instead of the usual four to make room for Wilmore and Williams to return home with the two Crew-9 members in February 2025.
“This has not been an easy decision, but it is absolutely the right one,” Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator said at the briefing on Saturday.
The decision is especially disappointing for Boeing, as the company has been plagued with problems with its airplanes and was counting on Starliner’s first crewed trip to revive the troubled spacecraft program, which has suffered years of delays due to issues with Starliner. The company had asserted Starliner was safe based on all the recent thruster tests both in space and on the ground.
Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule docked to the Harmony module’s forward port at the International Space Station on July 6, 2024. Photo credit: NASA
While Boeing did not participate in Saturday’s news conference, they released a statement saying, “Boeing continues to focus, first and foremost, on the safety of the crew and spacecraft.” The company said it is preparing the spacecraft for a safe and successful return.
NASA and Boeing identified the helium leaks during the flight to the ISS, and the thruster issues after the spacecraft experienced issues with its reaction control thrusters as Starliner approached the space station on June 6.
“Since then, engineering teams have completed a significant amount of work, including reviewing a collection of data, conducting flight and ground testing, hosting independent reviews with agency propulsion experts, and developing various return contingency plans,” NASA said in their press release. “The uncertainty and lack of expert concurrence does not meet the agency’s safety and performance requirements for human spaceflight, thus prompting NASA leadership to move the astronauts to the Crew-9 mission.”
The seven Expedition 71 crew members gather with the two Crew Flight Test members for a team portrait aboard the space station. In the front from left are, Suni Williams, Oleg Kononenko, and Butch Wilmore. Second row from left are, Alexander Grebenkin, Tracy C. Dyson, and Mike Barratt. In the back are, Nikolai Chub, Jeanette Epps, and Matthew Dominick. Photo credit: NASA
The fact that Starliner will return home without a crew is not an issue, as is designed to operate autonomously and previously completed two uncrewed flights. This mission is the second time the Starliner has flown to the ISS and the third flight test overall. During the first uncrewed test flight (OFT-1), which took place back in December 2019, the Starliner launched successfully but failed to make it to the ISS because of software issues. After making 61 corrective actions recommended by NASA, another attempt was made (OFT-2) on May 22nd, 2022. That flight successfully docked to the ISS, staying there for four days before undocking and landing in the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
This first crewed flight of Starliner was supposed to validate the spacecraft as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP), with the hope of it working alongside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon to make regular deliveries of cargo and crew to the ISS. The launched was delayed when parachute and other issues cropped up, including a helium leak in the capsule’s propellant system that scrubbed a launch attempt in May. The leak eventually was deemed to be isolated and small enough to pose no concern. But more leaks occurred following liftoff, and five thrusters also failed.
NASA and Boeing will work together to adjust end-of-mission planning and Starliner’s systems to set up for the uncrewed return in the coming weeks. Starliner must return to Earth before the Crew-9 mission launches to ensure a docking port is available on station.
“Starliner is a very capable spacecraft and, ultimately, this comes down to needing a higher level of certainty to perform a crewed return,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. “The NASA and Boeing teams have completed a tremendous amount of testing and analysis, and this flight test is providing critical information on Starliner’s performance in space. Our efforts will help prepare for the uncrewed return and will greatly benefit future corrective actions for the spacecraft.”
The ESA's Juice spacecraft is on a long journey to the Jovian system. It's the first spacecraft to perform an Earth-lunar flyby for a gravity assist. Image Credit: ESA
After a Boost from Earth and the Moon, Juice is On its Way to Venus and Beyond
The first spacecraft to use gravity assist was NASA’s Mariner 10 in 1974. It used a gravity assist from Venus to reach Mercury. Now, the gravity assist maneuver is a crucial part of modern space travel.
The latest spacecraft to use gravity assist is the ESA’s JUICE spacecraft.
The European Space Agency (ESA) launched its JUICE spacecraft on April 14, 2023. Its eventual destination is the Jovian system and its icy moons, Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede. But it’s a long journey, and the spacecraft took a shortcut by travelling close to Earth and the Moon and using their gravity to gain momentum and change trajectory.
It’s the first spacecraft ever to use the Earth and the Moon for a gravitational slingshot, and it captured some images to share with us.
JUICE stands for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, and it’s on a mission to study three moons with suspected oceans buried under layers of ice. It’s got a long way to go, and on long-duration missions, economical use of propellant is critical. This Earth-lunar slingshot maneuver is all about saving propellant.
“The gravity assist flyby was flawless, everything went without a hitch, and we were thrilled to see Juice coming back so close to Earth,” says Ignacio Tanco, Spacecraft Operations Manager for the mission.
At its closest approach to Earth, JUICE passed overhead of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean at only 6840 km (4250 miles) altitude. It was a risky maneuver but one that saved the mission between 100 and 150 kg of propellant.
This lunar-Earth flyby isn’t JUICE’s only gravity-assist maneuver. Next August, it will slingshot past Venus, and on September 26th and January 2029, it will slingshot past Earth. All these gravity-assist maneuvers will give JUICE momentum for its journey to Jupiter. JUICE will reach Jupiter in 2031, and because of all of these maneuvers it will have more propellant left when it gets there.
JUICE has completed its first gravity-assist maneuver and, in one year, will perform another one with Venus. Credit: ESA. Acknowledgements: Work performed by ATG under contract to ESA. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
“Thanks to very precise navigation by ESA’s Flight Dynamics team, we managed to use only a tiny fraction of the propellant reserved for this flyby. This will add to the margins we keep for a rainy day, or to extend the science mission once we get to Jupiter,” said Ignacio Tanco, Spacecraft Operations Manager for the JUICE mission.
Modern orbiters bristle with science instruments, antennae, and cameras. JUICE is no exception. Among all its instruments and science cameras, it carries two monitoring cameras called JMCs, or JUICE Monitoring Cameras. They’re 1024×1024 pixel cameras with different fields of view. Their job is to monitor the spacecraft’s booms and antennae, and their job was especially critical when they were deployed after launch.
The ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer has two Juice Monitoring Cameras, or JMCs, to provide snapshots with different fields of view. Their main job is to monitor components of the spacecraft, but they captured images of Earth and the Moon during the recent flyby. Image Credit: ESA (acknowledgement: work performed by ATG under contract to ESA) LICENCE: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
During the flyby, JUICE used its JMCs to capture images of the Earth and the Moon.
JUICE Monitoring Camera 2 captured this image of the Moon as it flew past it on August 10th. “A closer look reveals a casual ‘photobomber’ – Earth shows itself as a dark circle outlined by a light crescent at the top centre of the image, peeking out from behind the spacecraft structure (look just above the fuzzy blue blob, which itself is a ghost image caused by the reflection of sunlight),” the ESA writes. CREDIT ESA/Juice/JMC. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Simeon Schmauß & Mark McCaughrean. LICENCE: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
It also used eight of its ten instruments to collect scientific data from Earth and all ten for the Moon.
“The timing and location of this double flyby allows us to thoroughly study the behaviour of Juice’s instruments,” explains Claire Vallat, Juice Operations Scientist.
JMC 1 captured this image of the Moon during the lunar flyby. CREDIT: ESA/Juice/JMC. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Simeon Schmauß & Mark McCaughrean. LICENCE: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
JUICE’s main science camera is JANUS, a high-resolution optical camera. Its role is to capture detailed images of the surface of Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. The JUICE team used JANUS to capture more than 400 preliminary views of the Earth and the Moon.
“After more than 12 years of work to propose, build and verify the instrument, this is the first opportunity to see first-hand data similar to those we will acquire in the Jupiter system starting in 2031,” says Pasquale Palumbo, a researcher at INAF in Rome and principal investigator of the team that designed, tested and calibrated the Janus camera.
The Moon’s pockmarked surface as revealed by JANUS. Image Credit:
“Even though the flyby was planned exclusively to facilitate the interplanetary journey to Jupiter, all the instruments on board the probe took advantage of the passage near the Moon and Earth to acquire data, test operations and processing techniques with the advantage of already knowing what we were observing,” said Palumbo.
Earth was imaged at dawn on August 20, 2024, by the JANUS optical camera aboard JUICE. The image shows the island of Hawai’i (the dark spot on the left), the largest island in the Hawaiian archipelago in the central Pacific of the United States. The view is very low, after a short while the Earth left the field of view of JANUS. Credits: JANUS team (INAF, ASI, DLR, CSIC-IAA, OpenUniversity, CISAS-Università di Padova and other international partners)
These early-mission images are whetting our appetite for when the real fun starts in seven years. JUICE will reach the Jovian system in July 2031 and will do 35 flybys of the gas giant’s icy moons. Then, in December 2034, it will enter orbit around Ganymede.
There is growing evidence that Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto have warm, salty oceans buried under thick layers of ice. These are prime targets in our search for life. But, maddeningly, we don’t know for sure if they could support life or even if the oceans are real.
Hopefully, JUICE can tell us. But it can’t do that without these risky, early-mission maneuvers.
The second country with the most UFO sightings and alien encounters after the US is Brazil. Very few of us know about the “Operation Saucer” also known as Operação Prato carried out by the Brazilian Air Force under the command of Colonel Uyrangê Hollanda to investigate the series of UFO sightings that happened in the mid-1970s that included attacks by light rays. Before the beginning of all these, a mysterious woman arrived at Ilha do Meio, situated in the Brazilian State of Pará.
Researcher Vitorio Peret recalled that in 1975, a woman named Elizabeth Quimine Berger arrived in Urumajó, now Augusto Corrêa. Her intention was to purchase lands on the Island of Meio, located 200 km from the city. She was a white blonde with blue eyes. The woman claimed to be a divorcee and a fashion designer by profession. Interestingly, according to locals, she was very short, only 132 cm. She was born in Switzerland, had an English passport, and was a resident of Paris.
Researcher Vitorio Peret was involved in Operation Saucer when the Brazilian Army learned facts related to extraterrestrials in the 70s
There was one boatman named João Olaya, who could carry travelers across the island. She got acquainted with him and asked him to take her to the island where she offered the locals to sell their lands to her in exchange for good cash. At first, the locals had no intention to sell their properties to some strange foreign woman. But later, she offered them a huge amount of money and bought plots on the island. Soon, she purchased all other properties near to her previous purchases. Although she became the owner of many lands, the mysterious woman used to spend very little time there as she was mostly out of the island.
Ilha do Meio via Google maps
In some time, the local fishermen and other people started spotting strange lights over the island, and this sparked a rumor that the woman was an extraterrestrial. Some fishermen reported seeing her taking a group of white people with blond hair (around 40-50) to the island. She also used to buy large quantities of fish (around 400 kg of fish) every month from the local fishermen.
Illustration of Ilha do Meio report sightings of UFOs
According to the reports, the locals saw a white ball of lights that looked like “small moons” that landed on the island. What’s more, at the time when the UFO sightings began in the area, Berger was reportedly seen going out in the middle of the night. Some boatman who had access to traveling to the island once followed her and saw her walking on the water without any clothes. The woman became popular among the locals after such details. Some of them even complained to the police about it.
She was questioned by the police three times but was always released as they had never found any strong evidence against her related to the strange light phenomenon. Colonel Uyrangê Hollanda became aware of the strange resident and suspected that she had been feeding guerrillas, as they said that she regularly was seen with dozens of men.
Photographs of bright lights in the sky, taken by officials during Operation Saucer
Only when she was on the island, strange cylindrical lights and objects, looking like probes, appeared and evolved at night. The colonel searched her place and was surprised. The house had no windows, no doors, no dishes, no furniture. Just a bed and two chairs, Peret said.
Peret recalled that an American arrived on the island in 1975 when there were already reports of the phenomena that affected the North and Northeast regions of Brazil. Some people were hit by beams of light, including that caused burns. This American claimed to be a commercial pilot who joined NASA and appeared on Mosqueiro Island amid evidence of extraterrestrial activities in the area.
“His neighbors on the island reported that he had very modern equipment for the time and in relation to what was in the region, such as a structure for radio communication that did not even exist in Belém, and even a notebook, something unthinkable for the time. his was the fastest in the region and he never bought anything on the island. Not even a loaf. Twice a week, he went out on a speedboat and came back with groceries,” said Peret.
Peret was suspicious of the NASA interference in Operation Saucer because when the room of that man was searched, his walls were full of formulas, and images of space and rockets were found on the site where his house was. He died on the island in 1982.
Meanwhile, when Berger was arrested the third time, she was escorted by four policemen but vanished soon after she asked to go to the bathroom. It is shocking that she could disappear from the bathroom which had only one door and a small window.
According to Ufologist Moacyr de Mendonça de Uchôa, she was seen dressed as a nurse in Los Angeles 1985/1986 Earthquakes, helping the wounded. Interpol tried to track her but failed. Later, she was seen in South Korea. Later, the police found out that her passport fake, and Elisabeth Queminet Berger was a Swiss woman who died in 1937.
It is one of the unsolved mysteries that still astonishes people. There is a theory that she was either an extraterrestrial or a time traveler who traveled to Earth for some business but had to go due to too much interference by the Brazilian officials.
American scientist Robert Lanza explained why death does not exist: he believes that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe and that death is just an illusion created by the linear perception of time. He said Dreams Are More Real Than Anyone Thought!
Robert Lanza is a renowned American scientist and author who has made significant contributions to various fields, including Biology and theoretical physics He has received prestigious recognitions, including TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World”, Prospect magazine’s “Top 50 World Thinkers.”
Lanza has achieved groundbreaking accomplishments, such as: Cloning the world’s first human embryo, Cloning the first endangered species, and Publishing the first reports on the use of pluripotent stem cells in humans. He is a leading figure in the scientific community, known for his innovative work and influential ideas.
A new scientific theory called biocentrism challenges our understanding of death. In quantum physics, certain events can’t be predicted with certainty, but rather have a range of possible outcomes with different probabilities. The “many-worlds” interpretation suggests that each possible outcome corresponds to a separate universe in the multiverse.
Biocentrism builds upon this idea, proposing that there are an infinite number of universes, and every possible event or outcome occurs in some universe. This means that every possibility, no matter how small, actually happens in some universe or other. This theory has profound implications for our understanding of death, suggesting that it may not be the terminal event we think it is. Instead, death could be a transition to another universe or reality, where another version of ourselves continues to exist.
Death does not exist in any real sense in these scenarios. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them.
Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling – the ‘Who am I?’- is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn’t go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from one world to the other?
Scientists conducted experiments that showed that they could change what had happened in the past. Particles acted based on a later decision made by the observer. This suggests that our choices can influence past events. The connections between different events go beyond our usual understanding of time and space. The energy used is like a projector showing different results based on the observer’s choice.
According to Biocentrism, space and time are not the hard objects we think. Wave your hand through the air – if you take everything away, what’s left? Nothing. The same thing applies for time. You can’t see anything through the bone that surrounds your brain. Everything you see and experience right now is a whirl of information occurring in your mind. Space and time are simply the tools for putting everything together.
Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world. In the end, even Einstein admitted, “Now Besso” (an old friend) “has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.
That means nothing. People like us…know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Immortality doesn’t mean a perpetual existence in time without end, but rather resides outside of time altogether.
A new vision of reality
What would it mean to fully embrace biocentrism and the perspective on reality that “Observer” advances? More than just arcane physics, biocentrism has deep metaphysical implications. (Source)
At the most fundamental level, biocentrism provides a picture of a living, conscious universe, rather than a mechanical, clockwork cosmos. The empty void of outer space is re-envisioned as teeming with life and mind.
Consciousness becomes universal and interconnected through space and time. As Dr. Lanza describes, this promotes a sense of oneness and diminishes feelings of separation and loneliness. Death also loses its finality — while bodies perish, consciousness persists.
Biocentrism opens up intriguing possibilities like backward time travel by unshackling us from the typical limitations of spacetime. If time is merely a construct of the mind, maneuvering through it must not be constrained to one direction.
Above all, biocentrism aligns science and spirituality to allow both to co-exist on equal footing. “Observer” and its fictional world show that science can be a bridge to profound meaning, rather than a rigid materialist dogma.
Reexamining reality through the lens of biocentrism leads to a paradigm shift in our understanding of existence. Although counterintuitive, the theory rests on solid science from fields like quantum mechanics and biology.
As “Observer” playfully imagines, manipulating the workings of consciousness could allow us to access entirely new dimensions. While the book’s futuristic flourishes are fiction, the message is clear — we must be open to radical new perspectives.
Dreams Are More Real Than Anyone Thought
The secrets dreams can unlock ultimately derive from the basic fact that reality is a process that involves us―a conscious observer. We assume the everyday world is “out there” in a more real or independent sense than is the world of our dreams, that we play a lesser role in its appearance. Yet recent studies show that day-to-day reality is every bit as observer-dependent as dreams are. (Source)
Dr. Lanza explains Dreams are far more than the spontaneous, random firing of neurons that some insist they are. They must likewise be far more than the activation of random memories already contained in the brain’s neurocircuitry.
True, dreams often contain a mix of emotions and things we have previously experienced, but in dreams, there are often people, faces, and interactions that the dreamer has never experienced before. A dream is an instantaneous, nonstop narrative that often seems as real as real life itself.
How could this tapestry of enormously complex interactions and scenarios be the result of nothing but random electrical discharges?
In dreams, we’re not just watching an “external world” and passively imprinting memories in our neural circuitry. How is it possible for the brain to do this?
How are all the components of the experience fabricated from scratch?
While dreaming, we’re not observing events and perceiving stimuli. We’re in bed, asleep—yet our minds are able to flawlessly create new people and settings and have them all interact effortlessly in four dimensions. We’re witnessing an awesome occurrence: the ability of the mind to turn pure information into a dynamic multidimensional reality. You’re actually creating space and time, not just operating within it like a character in a video game.
While it’s easier to appreciate the astounding nature of this process when it comes to dreams, it’s the same process that applies to our nondream lives. According to biocentrism, we’re always not just observing but creating reality.
During dreams, however, the brain has fewer limitations since it needn’t obey sensory inputs that themselves are limited by physical laws, and thus the mind can generate experiences unlike the consensus world we’re aware of during the day.
Observers define the structure of reality
New research by theoretical physicist Dmitriy Podolskiy, in collaboration with the author and Andrei Barvinsky, a leading expert in quantum gravity and quantum cosmology, has revealed something remarkable. The presence of extended networks of observers defines the structure of physical reality and spacetime itself. Source
In dreams, we leave the consensus universe and experience an alternate cognitive model of reality, very different from the one shared by other observers while awake. In dreams, the fine structure of the wave function of the universe around us is delocalized and largely unstable. This instability explains why you often have more power while dreaming; the values of observables representing the basis of reality are more fluid. The new research also suggests that the presence or absence of observers influences the very dimensionality of the universe.
Biocentrism says space and time are tools of the mind, and dreams seem to further support this idea. If space and time were truly external and physical, as commonly believed, how could the brain create something indistinguishable from them within a dream? We think our experiences at night are just dreams and not real. But dreams and what we perceive as reality are essentially of the same nature. By following the implications of quantum mechanics without bias, we arrive at the unification of everyday reality and dreams. Persistent puzzles about the nature of dreams, reality, and our lives all fade away.
AI Corrects Three UFO Photos From 1990s In Russia, Mexico, USA, UAP Sighting News.
Date of sightings: 1st, Mexico City, Mexico Aug 6, 1996 Date of sighting: 2nd, Washington State, USA Nov 21, 1999 Date of sighting: 3rd, Moscow, Russia 1989
Hey all, I used ai to sharpen the detail of three famous UFO sightings, and it was very interesting. The detail is just fantastic and it really cleans out the fuzziness and blur most the time. Take a look at the video below and tell me your thoughts.
It's been 25 years since Matt Groening's classic cartoon Futurama first aired, offering a hilarious portrayal of Earth in the 31st century.
In the cult sci-fi series, New York delivery boy Fry is cryogenically frozen on New Year's Eve 1999 and wakes up 1,000 years later to a very different reality.
As Fry discovers, the world is full of technological wonders, from self aware robots to high-speed transportation tubes and celebrities preserved in jars.
Although many are still the stuff of fantasy, the last quarter of a century has seen a level of technological invention that the show's producers surely didn't anticipate.
As a new series airs on Disney+, MailOnline takes a look at Futurama gadgetry that's now a realty, from sex robots to chip implants and even suicide booths.
From real-life sex robots to chip implants and even suicide booths, Futurama-inspired technology has become real since the show first aired in 1999
In 'Futurama', Fry and Bender meet queuing for a 'suicide booth' (pictured)
SUICIDE BOOTHS
In the very first episode of Futurama, Fry meets Bender, an alcoholic metalworking robot, while they're queuing up to enter a 'suicide booth' in New New York City.
For 25 cents, the kiosk offers one of two death options – 'quick and painless' and 'slow and horrible', which involves getting stabbed with various sharp implements.
When Futurama debuted in 1999, the concept of a suicide booth was clearly satire, but a quarter of a century later a real version actually exists.
The Sarco Pod, developed by Australian euthanasia advocate Dr Philip Nitschke, looks like a cross between a one-man spaceship and a high-tech coffin.
An early version of the Sarco Pod, which can be operated internally and works by reducing oxygen levels. No one has yet used it - yet
The device reportedly cost more than $700,000 (£540,000) to develop, but will cost each user as little as $20 (£15).
In July, the pod was due to be used for the first time, in Switzerland, where assisted suicide has been legal since 1942 unless it's done for 'selfish' reasons by the assister.
But plans stalled after prosecutors warned anyone assisting someone to use the pod could face prison, accusing Nitschke of 'inducement and aiding and abetting suicide for selfish reasons'.
An earlier suicide device called the Thanatron that delivered a killer dose of drugs intravenously, invented by controversial pathologist Jack Kevorkian, was first used in 1990.
But the Sarco Pod is said to be the first booth that people can pay to enter and choose to end their lives.
SEX ROBOTS
For many, Futurama introduced the concept of robosexuality – the sexual attraction between people and robots.
In one episode, Bender has a steamy relationship with human Amy, while in another episode Fry hooks up with a robot modelled on actress Lucy Liu.
While humanoids in the real world do not quite offer the capabilities as those seen in Futurama, 'sex bots' have filled the market in the last decade.
Much more technologically sophisticated than traditional sex dolls, these lifelike devices pack remarkable features (aside from synthetic genitalia).
In the 2001 episode 'I Dated a Robot', Fry hooks up with a robot modelled on actress Lucy Liu
Roxxxy, a life-size robotic girlfriend complete with artificial intelligence and flesh-like synthetic skin, was introduced at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in 2010
In 2017, Canadian robotics firm called Realbotix released Harmony 3.0, a £12,000 sex robot with a self-lubricating vagina that can be taken out and washed.
The following year it unveiled a male equivalent called Henry with an impressive six pack that can woo ladies with jokes and romantic phrases.
Other models include Roxxxy who has synthetic skin and AI abilities that let it learn the owner's likes and dislikes.
Industry experts anticipate sex robots eventually becoming so sophisticated that they're indistinguishable from real lovers.
LANGUAGE TRANSLATORS
In Futurama, Fry's distant relative and madcap scientist Professor Farnsworth comes up with elaborate inventions that often tread the line between pointless and ingenious.
One of these is the 'Universal Translator', a bright green device equipped with a microphone that's designed to change audio of any one language into another.
Unfortunately, due to a technical malfunction it only translates into 'an incomprehensible dead language' (French), but more adept real life versions are now taking the tech world by storm.
Pictured, Professor Farnsworth's 'Universal Translator' designed to translate audio of any language into another. But due to a technical malfunction it only translates into 'an incomprehensible dead language' (French)
Pixel Fold's Live Translate interpreter mode uses both the inner and outer screens simultaneously for face-to-face conversations in different languages
Hong Kong firm Timekettle offers a $700 device called X1 that uses AI to 'hear' one spoken language and translate it into another
Google's Pixel phones now include a tool called Live Translate, which turns a spoken language into the text of another, presented on the device's screen.
Hong Kong firm Timekettle offers a $700 pocket-sized device called X1 that uses AI to 'hear' one spoken language and translate it into one of around 40 others.
Similarly, Chinese company Vormor offers a high-tech 'pen' that not only translates voices but unfamiliar text thanks to an inbuilt scanner.
Perfect for real-time communications between two people who don't speak the same language, these little devices could soon become more ubiquitous in offices, restaurants and airports in the years to come.
DELIVERY SHIPS
He's an eccentric boss delivering cargo beyond planet Earth in an elaborate spaceship.
And if you're not sure if we're talking about Futurama's Professor Farnsworth or SpaceX's Elon Musk, you could be forgiven.
The iconic green ship owned by Professor Farnsworth's firm Planet Express delivers packages around the galaxy
Elon Musk's company SpaceX has developed a spacecraft called Starship designed to transport crew and cargo to Earth's orbit, the moon and Mars. Pictured, a Starship prototype in Texas, August 2021
In the show, Professor Farnsworth's company Planet Express delivers packages around the galaxy in an iconic green rocket ship.
Similarly, Musk's firm SpaceX is responsible for the most powerful rocket ever built on Earth – the Starship.
The multi-billion-dollar, stainless-steel, 165-foot vessel has been designed to transport crew and cargo to Earth's orbit and the moon.
It's due to land four astronauts on the moon as part of NASA's Artemis 3 mission in 2026 – the first manned trip to the lunar surface since 1972.
Although the ambitious ship is still in its testing phases, Musk hopes Starship will eventually take humans to Mars – truly making us a 'multiplanetary species' worthy of Futurama.
CHIP IMPLANTS
As Fry finds out in the first episode, citizens are implanted with a small chip with a nasty-looking handheld puncture gun to assign them a permanent career.
As one-eyed mutant Leela warns, it is against the law to refuse the chip implant or have it removed – punishable with being 'fired out of a cannon into the sun'.
In Futurama, citizens are implanted with a small chip with a nasty-looking handheld puncture gun to assign them a permanent career. It is against the law to not have these career chip implanted, or to have it removed, and the punishment for such an act is to be 'fired out of a cannon, into the sun'. In the 2020s, implantable chips are all the rage among 'biohackers'
Arnie Szoke, 40, paid £350 to have a safety-pin sized chip placed into his hand by surgeons
In the 2020s, implantable chips are all the rage among a growing global community known as the 'biohackers' – although don't worry, you won't be penalized for not having one.
Similar to the procedure on Futurama, biohackers tend to feel a sharp pain when they get their device inserted under the skin, similar to a body piercing.
But some amateur hackers are performing implant operations without proper medical assistance, leading to complications such as nerve damage.
FLYING CARS
In New New York, commuters travel in giant network of suction tubes, taking them from A to B in a matter of seconds.
Unfortunately, it may be several more centuries before this incredible conveyance system arrives in the world's major cities.
But engineers are making great strides with another form of 31st century transport – the flying car.
Pictured, the 'AirCar' craft, which can transform from a road vehicle into a plane in under three minutes and is officially certified to fly after passing safety tests in Slovakia
California firm Alef Aeronautics has a vertical take-off and landing vehicle that can take off from conventional roads
In Futurama the Beta Romeo flying vehicle (pictured) can go from hovering above the ground to flying in space
Investors around the world are pumping millions of dollars into flying taxi projects, which are going through various stages of testing.
Alef Aeronautics based in California has built an electric car with a mesh-covered body that conceals eight propellers.
These propellers, which replace the traditional car motors, allow it to take off straight up into the air from a conventional road, without the need for any runway space.
Meanwhile, the 'AirCar' craft, which can transform from a road vehicle into a plane in under three minutes, is officially certified to fly after passing safety tests in Slovakia.
In just a few years the vehicles could make use of the vast untapped potential of airspace while completing journeys at a fraction of the time.
Of course, many 31st technologies portrayed in the show remain in the realm of fiction – at least for now.
Futurama depicts the heads of many modern-day celebrities kept alive preserved in liquid, such as Leonard Nimoy and Pamela Anderson.
In Futurama, heads in jars are kept alive by a unique form of 'powdered crystaline opal' that according to Professor Farnsworth has 'unique temporal properties'
New New Yorkers travel in giant network of suction tubes, taking them from A to B in a matter of seconds (pictured)
But will a liquid that can keep people alive without the rest of their bodies – not to mention for 1,000 years – ever exist?
Dr Alexandra Morton-Hayward, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Oxford, said 'anything is possible' with such a timeframe.
'I imagine you'd need a synthetic, oxygenated liquid that mimics our cerebrospinal fluid, which is clear and colourless, so at least you'd have a crystal-clear view of your poor disembodied mate,' she told MailOnline.
'Without a gut for digestion, it'd also be important that the head be able to absorb all necessary nutrients from this fluid – perhaps with dissolvable, fish food-style pellets.'
Fed up of being stuck in traffic jams? Soon you could FLY right over them! £235,000 flying car can take off at any time to skip the queue
Unlike most of its rivals, Alef Aeronautics' Model A can actually be driven around like a normal car on the streets.
But it is also packed with propellors in the bonnet and boot that allow it to take off at any time to skip the queue.
The lightweight two-seater - which is aiming to be in production by 2025 - has a road range of 200 miles and a flying range of 110 miles.
Chief executive Jim Dukhovny said he wanted to bring sci-fi to life and build an 'affordable' flying car, with the cost likely to be closer to £25,000 when built at scale.
Onderzoek naar nieuwe energiebronnen is actiever dan ooit, maar het gaat niet alleen om het opgeven van fossiele brandstoffen of het ontwikkelen van duurzame energie. Hoewel het grote doel is om stabiele en effectieve kernfusie te bereiken, gaan niet alle ontwikkelingen op dezelfde manier. Een groep onderzoekers aan de Lehigh University heeft bijvoorbeeld een verband ontdekt tussen kernfusie... en mayonaise, naar verluidt een belangrijk “ingrediënt” in het onderzoek. Laten we eens kijken hoe dit mogelijk is.
Mayonaise en kernfusie
Als praten over een “ingrediënt” zeker een metaforisch middel is, is mayonaise ongetwijfeld een nuttige stof voor onderzoek naar kernfusie. Dit preparaat kan namelijk gebruikt worden om de complexe verschijnselen te bestuderen die optreden tijdens kernfusie, juist vanwege de visco-elastische eigenschappen. Anders gezegd: mayonaise kan het gedrag van plasma onder bepaalde drukomstandigheden simuleren. Ja, maar in welke zin?
In de regel kan mayonaise worden beschouwd als een vaste substantie die, wanneer het wordt blootgesteld aan een drukgradiënt, van toestand verandert van vast naar vloeibaar, op een vergelijkbare manier als de overgang van plasma in fusiereactoren. Als gevolg hiervan hebben twee wetenschappelijke onderzoeken op mayonaise gebaseerde modellen benut om de fysica van kernfusie te bestuderen zonder hun toevlucht te hoeven nemen tot de extreme omstandigheden ervan. En ze behaalden een aantal behoorlijk interessante resultaten.
Mayonaise als model voor kernfusie
EUROfusione/Wikimedia Commons - CC BY 4.0
Een eerste onderzoek, gepubliceerd in het tijdschrift Physical Review E in 2019, uitgevoerd door onderzoekers van Lehigh University, was gericht op het begrijpen van de fysica achter kernfusie. In feite praten we meestal over traagheidsfusie, dat wil zeggen waarbij bij de kernreacties capsules betrokken zijn die gevuld zijn met waterstof. Deze worden verwarmd en gecomprimeerd om de vorming van plasma en daarmee de opwekking van grote hoeveelheden energie op gang te brengen. Er is echter een probleem: traagheidsopsluitingsfusie genereert hydrodynamische instabiliteiten die de voortgang van de reactie kunnen beïnvloeden. Wat te doen?
De studie richt zich op het analyseren van hoe het gebruik van mayonaise het mogelijk maakt het gedrag van plasma te modelleren, onder de juiste drukomstandigheden. Kortom, nog voordat de stroming onstabiel wordt, zijn er verschillende overgangsfasen waar te nemen waarin de mayonaise nog steeds stabiel is.
Eindelijk een stabiele kernfusie?
Inzicht in de overgangsfasen van eerst mayonaise en dan plasma zou het echt mogelijk kunnen maken om instabiliteiten tijdens kernfusie te voorspellen en te beheersen. Op het spel staat, zoals we weten, de mogelijkheid om schone energie in enorme hoeveelheden te produceren. Daarom heeft het team van onderzoekers een nieuwe studie gepubliceerd in het tijdschrift Physical Review E, waarin ze zich verdiepen in de studie van instabiliteiten tijdens reacties, met name Rayleigh-Taylor instabiliteiten.
Terwijl ze de mayonaise bestuderen, hebben wetenschappers ontdekt hoe ze het herstel van het materiaal kunnen maximaliseren en de instabiliteit volledig kunnen onderdrukken. Dit is een noodzakelijke vooruitgang in het onderzoek naar kernfusie, hoewel mayonaise iets heel anders is als plasma. Kortom, het is misschien nog te vroeg om te praten over echte kernfusie, een energiebron die vandaag de dag even nuttig als noodzakelijk is. Toch hebben de twee onderzoeken van het team van Lehigh University aangetoond hoe het mogelijk is om het resultaat in kleine stappen te bereiken... en met een beetje mayonaise.
NASA, ESA, A. del Pino Molina (CEFCA), K. Gilbert and R. van der Marel (STScI), A. Cole (University of Tasmania);
Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
Leo A lacks galactic glamor. NASA’s newly-published image of thisdwarf galaxy is missing the Milky Way’s pizzazz, and Andromeda’s visual riches. But that’s what makes Leo A special.
Astronomers found Leo A beyond our galaxy, and past a few more, at the edge of our cosmic neighborhood. To see it, the Hubble Space Telescope peered 2.6 million light-years away. That’s a relatively close cosmic distance for galaxies. But it’s still extraordinary that Hubble saw Leo A, because this galaxy is small and dim.
This “speckling of stars,” the European Space Agency wrote in 2016, forms a single entity. “The relatively open distribution of stars in this diminutive galaxy allows light from distant background galaxies to shine through,” NASA Goddard Space Flight Center officials wrote in Thursday’s image description.
The sparsely-populated sphere in this Hubble Space Telescope image is dwarf galaxy Leo A.
This image comes from data Hubble took during four observation programs. Three of these looked at star formation and its history, in relatively nearby dwarf galaxies, including Leo A.
Although sparsely populated, Leo A’s stars have an order. They make a spherical shape in space. A pattern also emerged when astronomers peered at their ages.
The recent Hubble observations have revealed that Leo A’s younger stars are located in the middle, and they are older the farther they are from the dwarf galaxy’s center. This could offer clues about how galaxies evolve.
Perhaps stars formed from “the outside-in,” NASA wrote. Or, perhaps, older stars migrated towards the edges of Leo A.
But older is a relative term. According to NASA, “around 90 percent of the stars in Leo A are less than eight billion years old — young in cosmic terms!” Astronomers are puzzled about why this small galaxy, one of the most isolated galaxies in our local group of galaxies, didn’t form stars on a “usual” timescale.
“Instead,” NASA says, Leo A “waited until it was good and ready.”
If an emergency happens on the International Space Station (ISS) sometime in the next six weeks, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams may have to flee without the added safety of in-flight spacesuits.
At a media teleconference NASA held on August 14, agency officials said the spacesuits that Williams and Wilmore wore inside the Boeing Starliner are not compatible with other spacecraft.
This complicates NASA’s decision on whether the astronauts should fly home aboard Starliner or on a SpaceX vehicle. Starliner encountered technical problems shortly after it brought Wilmore and Williams into low-Earth orbit almost three months ago. If teams deem Starliner unfit to carry them back, they’d likely come home on a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
The Dragon of the Crew-8 mission is in space now, but it is the contingency plan for Wilmore and Williams if Starliner isn’t suitable to carry them home, NASA officials said. To complicate matters, there aren't any spare SpaceX suits. Those arrive no earlier than September 24, when the Dragon of Crew-9 launches towards the ISS with two empty seats and two extra spacesuits.
If Starliner flies home uncrewed, and their Dragon Crew-9 rescue vessel hasn’t yet reached the station with its specific spacesuits in tow, Wilmore and Williams would have no choice but to enter the Crew-8 Dragon without spacesuits in an emergency situation.
That is, unless NASA decides Starliner will return with its crew after all. The space agency is expected to make a final decision about Starliner coming back to Earth empty, or with Wilmore and Williams inside, by the end of this month.
Why do spacesuits differ?
Onboard the orbiting laboratory, a spacesuit is not necessary. Regular clothing or a uniform suffices.
Spacesuits used during transit, sometimes called intravehicular spacesuits, are tailor-designed for the spacecraft the astronauts are riding. These indoor spacesuits provide an extra layer of protection. They’re an additional buffer from the potentially hazardous launch or reentry environments around them.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images News/Getty Images
When astronauts make repairs outside the station, they wear extravehicular spacesuits to remain alive and tethered to the station during their spacewalk.
Another type of spacesuit is used when launching up towards the station, aborting a flight or landing back to Earth. These are sometimes referred to as intravehicular spacesuits — and they’re tailor-designed for the spacecraft the astronauts are riding. These indoor spacesuits provide an extra layer of protection. They’re an additional buffer from the potentially hazardous launch or reentry environments around them.
Why would Starliner undock without Wilmore and Williams?
Starliner suffered helium leaks and thruster anomalies not long after launching on June 5. Since the technical dilemmas began, the aerospace giant and the space agency continue to pore over data from a slew of tests to determine if Starliner will return to Earth with its test pilots onboard.
Although designed originally as an eight-day mission, their trip has now entered its 12th week.
UFO mystery may be result of advanced 'stealth civilization' living on Earth among us, say Harvard scientists - as they reveal where their secret bases could be located
Skeptics have long questioned why UFOs, if they are alien craft, would visit Earth so often.
But two Harvard scientists suspect the beings may have been here all along.
In a new research paper, they estimate there is a one in 10 chance the true solution to the UFO mystery could be 'cryptoterrestrial' — meaning they belong to an advanced species hiding on Earth.
'While this notion may sound unlikely on first hearing, many observers are persuaded that it is at least conceivable,' the team wrote in their new study, 'not least because whole swathes of our planet remain virtually unexplored and uncharted.'
With 80 percent of our oceans unmapped, and still revealing ancient mysteries like Yonaguni Jima, the 'Japanese Atlantis,' not to mention unexplored caves and the dark side of the moon, they argue there's plenty of space for a 'stealth' civilization.
The researchers described, as one example of a potentially hiding advanced species, a massive submerged stone structure discovered by a diver off the coast of Yonaguni Jima in Japan that some marine geologists argue are might be the remnants of a 'Japanese Atlantis'
'If another intelligent species had inhabited Earth (or Mars) long before Homo sapiens, it is possible that we could have no idea,' the trio notes in their article, which is set to appear in the journal Philosophy and Cosmology this June.
The work is a collaboration between scientists who have independently tried to make sure that all viable theories are considered for the UFO mystery, which has seen a major effort effort for government declassification in recent months.
Congress, the Pentagon and others in government now more commonly refer to UFOs as UAP for 'unidentified aerial (or anomalous) phenomena.'
Multiple regions on Earth and near Earth were cited in the new study as worthwhile candidates for investigating the chances of a 'cryptoterrestrial' species' secret base.
One region, dubbed the 'Alaskan Triangle,' is a remote and sparsely populated area between the cities of Anchorage, Juneau and Utqiagvik that the authors described as 'a prominent 'hotspot' for UAP [UFOs], as well as other oddities.'
The triangle, they noted, has been ground zero for over 20,000 unexplained disappearances since the 1970s, above and beyond its penchant for UFO sightings.
Luis Guerra, a resident in the central Mexico city of Atlixco, photographed this image of an apparent UFO above the Popocatépetl volcano in Mexico. Sightings near this and other volcanos have fueled speculation that the UFOs might come from a hidden underground base
More concretely, the researchers pointed to a series of intriguing archeological finds that suggest the existence of ancient civilizations that would not only predate any known advances species, but may still exist in hiding.
They described a massive submerged stone structure discovered by a diver off the coast of Yonaguni Jima in Japan that some marine geologists argue are might be the remnants of a 5000-year-old pyramid from a Japanese Atlantis.
Habitable regions underground also remain to be explored, some with the right conditions to support life.
'The internal structure of Earth is still mostly a mystery,' the team wrote.
'For instance, it was recently found that the mantle transition zone (255 to 410 miles underground) acts as a large reservoir of water.'
They speculated that it is entirely possible that hundreds of miles below humanity 'another hominid species, or even a branch of Homo sapiens, could have adapted to live underground,' although it would likely scarcely resemble us.
Stunning photos taken by Luis Guerra, a resident in the central Mexico city of Atlixco, last year, have fueled similar speculation of a hidden UFO base underneath the country's Popocatépetl volcano, which has become a UFO hot spot.
Other major candidates, the researchers put forward, include long-term bases deep underwater in ocean trenches or on the dark side of the moon, whether built by an ancient advanced terrestrial race or our long-term extraterrestrial co-inhabitants.
Other major candidates, the researchers put forward, include long-term bases deep underwater in ocean trenches or on the dark side of the moon, whether built by an ancient advanced terrestrial race or our long-term extraterrestrial co-inhabitants
While researchers working with Nasa's LROC moon-mapping mission have debunked the theory that this lunar image captured a 3.5-mile (5.6km) 'alien base' spire, much of the dark side of the moon remains unexplored and may yet hold such a discovery
While researchers working with Nasa's LROC moon-mapping mission have debunked the theory that one captivating lunar image depicts a 3.5-mile 'alien tower,' much of the dark side of the moon remains unexplored and may yet hold such a discovery.
'Of course,' the researchers noted, 'the limits of our knowledge provides no particular argument for the CTH [the 'cryptoterrestrial hypothesis'].'
'Crucially,' they added, 'it means we must have [...] humility and realize neither can we dismiss it just because it contradicts the standard narrative of history.'
The new research follows prior exploratory work by the authors working separately.
The study's co-author Dr Michael Masters, a professor of biological anthropology at Montana Technological University, had previously written a book arguing that the beings piloting UFOs might be 'extratempestrials' or time travelers.
'The phenomenon may be our own distant descendants coming back through time to study us in their own evolutionary past,' Dr Masters told KBZK News 7 in Bozeman.
Using his evolutionary biology experience as an anthropologist, Dr Masters made the case that the so-called 'grey' aliens from UFO abduction lore resemble what time-travelling future humans might evolve to look like in a more high tech society.
His coauthor, psychologist Tim Lomas with Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health, had just recently laid out the full case for the more traditional 'extraterrestrial hypothesis,' in another article for the same journal, Philosophy and Cosmology, earlier this year.
Brendan Case, the associate director for research at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science, joined them in their call for scientists to pursue the 'cryptoterrestrial' UFO hypothesis.
'The hope is that we can begin a new dialogue and get past some of this stigma,' Dr Masters said. 'And not have to defend this as science, because it is very scientific.'
The wide open spaces of Montana have been named the top spot where you are most likely to have a close encounter, as half of locals claim to have seen a UFO.
Half (exactly 50 percent) of the residents of this western state — often called 'Big Sky Country' — also reported that they 'believe in UFOs,' a new study claims.
The wide open spaces of Montana have been named the top state where you are most likely to have a close encounter, as half of locals claim to have seen a UFO. Half (50 percent) of the residents of the western state also reported that they 'believe in UFOs,' the new study found
Delaware took second place, with 80 percent of locals admitting to believing in UFOs, but zero reported they had actually seen strange craft or odd lights in the sky.
Other chart-toppers included the state of Massachusetts, as data collected from Google searches shows that the New England state is the most UFO-obsessed in America, with 13,750 monthly Google queries related to the topic (or 19.64 searches per 10,000 people). But New York and New Jersey were not far behind.
The Google search terms incorporated in this analysis included 'UFO sighting,' 'Are UFOs real' and 'UFO video,' among others.
New York's 37,260 monthly UFO-related search queries divided into 19.04 per 10,000 residents, showing that this seemingly high number needed to be adjusted for population density.
New Jersey's 16,820 UFO searches came to 18.1 per 10,000 people, ranking it third.
Despite stereotypes of repeated 'alien abduction' cases in rural America, South Dakota, Arkansas and Louisiana were all ranked at the bottom for search term interest in the phenomena.
South Dakota came in dead last in UFO interest, with only 850 monthly searches, or 9.25 per 10,000 residents.
The findings are sure to be a surprise to residents of Nevada, home to the legendary classified US Air Force base and UFO mainstay Area 51: their state did not even crack the Top 10 in this new study. Above, an alien or an extraterrestrial man
(artist's depiction)
Arkansas placed second with 2,870 UFO Google searches, or 9.36 per 10,000 people in state; followed by Louisiana with 4,300 searches or 9.4 per 10,000 residents.
Collectively, one full quarter of all Americans (25 percent) admitted to believing in UFOs, according to survey data.
The number was intriguingly higher than those who were actually willing to admit that they have seen one: only 7 percent self-reported that they had personally witnessed a UFO in the study's surveys.
The total UFO sightings, according to data from the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), as used in the new study, was 132,850 last year.
The new study incorporated a range of metrics to determine which state gave locals and visitors the highest chance of seeing a UFO: including UFO sightings via NUFORC, data on light pollution levels, and survey data from 2,057 people on topics related to UFO encounters across each US state.
The project was sponsored by JackpotCity Casino for reasons that have not yet been fully disclosed.
But the adjustments based on light pollution, statewide population density, and survey data significantly altered the findings when compared to NUFORC's raw UFO sighting figures.
California, for example, would have otherwise topped the list with a staggering 16,354 UFO sightings in total reported to NUFORC.
But the state's high light pollution (57.37) and meager 7 percent of citizens who reported having seen a UFO themselves in the study's survey data weighed down the Golden State's ultimate ranking.
Nevertheless, California's skies remain a magnet for mysterious objects and nearly a quarter, about 24 percent, of its people want to 'believe in UFOs.'
Revealed: These 10 states are most likely to spot aliens in 2024
Source:UFO sightings reported to NUFORC, light pollution data at numbeo.com, and a March 2024 JPC survey
AI Corrects Six Billy Meier UFO Earliest Photos 1970s, Do You Believe Him? UAP Sighting News. Video!
Now I have lived over 5 decades and I can honestly say that I see the publics opinions of UFO sway with that of TV how hosts opinion rather than decide for themselves. I decided to take some of the earliest photos of Billy Meier of Switzerland and see for myself using AI to detect anomalies and focus everything. All went well until the last of the photos, when I ai detected something strange, a white line above a UFO, not that of an antenna, because the UFO was tilted and any center antenna would also be tilted, this was as if something were holding onto the UFO from above. You watch and decide for yourself. But in my opinion, most the earlier photos are real, but due to social pressure, Billy may have resorted to faking later sightings for personal gain.
Atlas is Boston Dynamics' humanoid robot, and is described by the firm as 'the world's most dynamic robot.'
The robot is fully electric and features an advanced control system and state-of-the-art hardware.
This gives it the power and balance to demonstrate advanced athletics and agility.
'We use Atlas to explore the potential of the humanoid form factor, leveraging the robot’s whole body to move with grace, speed, and dexterity,' Boston Dynamics explains on its website.
'Atlas demonstrates our efforts to develop the next generation of robots with the mobility, perception, and intelligence needed to be commonplace in our lives.'
In the new video, Atlas plants its feet wide apart, before squatting down and placing its hands on the floor. It jumps its feet back, before performing eight impressive push-ups
The movements are impressively human-like, and have been praised by hundreds of fans in the comments
Atlas the most human-like robot in Boston Dynamic's line-up.
It was first unveiled to the public on 11 July 11 2013.
According to the company, Atlas is a 'high mobility, humanoid robot designed to negotiate outdoor, rough terrain'.
Atlas measures 1.5m (4.9ft) tall and weighs 75kg (11.8st).
The humanoid walks on two legs, leaving its arms free to lift, carry, and manipulate objects in its environment.
Atlas is able to hold its balance when it is jostled or pushed by an external force. Should it fall over, the humanoid robot is capable of getting up again on its own
Stereo vision, range sensing and other sensors allow Atlas to walk across rough terrain and keep its balance.
'In extremely challenging terrain, Atlas is strong and coordinated enough to climb using hands and feet, to pick its way through congested spaces,' Boston Dynamics claims.
Atlas is able to hold its balance when it is jostled or pushed.
If the humanoid robot should fall over, it can get up on its own.
Atlas is designed to help emergency services in search and rescue operations.
The robot will be used to shut-off valves, opening doors and operate powered equipment in environments where human rescuers could not survive.
The US Department of Defence said it has no interest in using Atlas in warfare.
NASA Has More Disappointing News for Its Stranded Astronauts
Story by Jeffrey Kluger
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams wave as they prepare to depart the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at the Kennedy Space Center on June 5, 2024.
The two NASA astronauts stuck aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, won’t be coming home anytime soon. During a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center on Saturday, Aug. 24, NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced that the space agency was giving up on the idea of bringing Wilmore and Williams home aboard their balky Boeing Starliner spacecraft—which has been experiencing thruster problems since its launch on June 5. Instead, the Starliner will be flown home uncrewed, and Wilmore and Williams will hitch a ride back to Earth aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, which will launch to the ISS in September for a five-month station stay, returning in February. This extends what was supposed to be an eight-day ISS rotation for Wilmore and Williams to a whopping eight months.
“NASA has worked very hard with Boeing to reach this decision,” Nelson said. “The decision is a result of a commitment to safety.”
The ruling rested on what NASA calls a flight readiness review (FRR). As agency brass explained at an Aug. 14 news conference, FRR’s are typically held before launch, when officials gather for a final go or no-go on the planned mission.
“We bring in representatives from all of the related centers, the technical authorities, the NASA engineering, and safety center flight operations,” explained Ken Bowersox, a former astronaut and an associate administrator for NASA’s space operations mission directorate. “We listen to the status of the mission, go through some special topics, and then we poll everybody at the end on whether or not they think we're ready to undertake the mission.”
On one occasion, that panel’s decision led to disaster. The FRR for the final mission of the space shuttle Challenger was held on Jan. 15, 1986, and the ship was cleared to launch. Thirteen days later, on Jan. 28, that liftoff took place, ending in a fuel tank explosion and the death of all seven crew members just 73 seconds after the ship left the pad. That tragedy, followed by the breakup of the shuttle Columbia and a similar loss of all hands on Feb. 1, 2003, left NASA much more risk-averse than it had been before.
The Starliner spacecraft on NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test is pictured docked to the Harmony module’s forward port as the International Space Station orbited 262 miles above Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. ( )
This view from a window on the space station cupola overlooks a portion of the International Space and shows the partially obscured Starliner spacecraft from Boeing docked to the Harmony module’s forward port. ( )
A view of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft from the International Space Station as the vehicle comes in for docking on June 6, 2024. ( )
NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test will take astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station. ( )
Related video:
NASA Starliner to return without astronauts (FOX News)
“We did not have the governance structure that we have today with technical authorities,” said Russ DeLoach, chief of NASA safety and mission assurance, during the earlier press conference. “So at that time, the program managers pretty much had near-unilateral decision making. And so if there were views that maybe a path we were taking was not correct, there was really no strong additional authority to step in and say, ‘Wait a minute.’”
That additional authority exists today, in the form of FRRs that take place mid-mission—though they often go by a different name: a mission risk acceptance forum. Whatever they’re called, the official panels are intended to bring the scrutiny of an FRR to bear at any point between the time a crew leaves the ground and the time they return to Earth. For the past several weeks, NASA has been under the gun to make such a decision about the hobbled Starliner—and to do it fast. The spacecraft’s batteries have a limited lifespan, and if the ship was not deemed fit to carry the crew home, it would have to fly back empty soon.
The FRR that resulted in the decision not to bring Wilmore and Williams home on the Boeing Starliner spacecraft was held on Aug. 23, and Nelson was very much in the loop. If there are dissenting opinions during the review, the decision goes first to Jim Free, NASA associate administrator. After him, Nelson could step in, and clearly he did.
Ahead of the decision being finalized, it was still possible that NASA could surprise the public—not to mention Wilmore and Williams—and announce that the stranded astronauts would be flying their dodgy Starliner home. But that was never likely. NASA’s institutional sorrow runs deep—back far before the Challenger and Columbia disasters, to the Jan. 27, 1967, launch pad fire that claimed the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, when they were conducting a dress rehearsal for the launch of their Apollo 1 spacecraft. Shortly after that tragedy, legendary flight director Gene Kranz gathered the grieving NASA staffers together for a grim but bracing post-mortem.
“From this day forward, flight control will be known by two words: Tough and competent,” Kranz said, chalking the words on a blackboard. “Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write ‘tough and competent’ on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room, these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.”
That price still stands. NASA could have decided to spare Boeing the embarrassment of flying their Starliner home empty, and Wilmore and Williams the ordeal of spending six more months in space, but that’s not the route the agency chose. Astronaut lives are on the line. A chastened NASA chose not to risk them again.
By eye, it’s impossible to pick out the exact boundaries of the superclusters, which are among the largest structures in the universe. But that’s because they are not defined by their edges, but by the common motion of their components.
The Milky Way galaxy was long thought to be a member of the Virgo supercluster, a complex, twisting branch containing over 100 individual galaxy groups and clusters stretching for more than a hundred million light-years. Astronomers arrived at that definition through some of the earliest galaxy surveys that attempted to map the nearby portions of the universe.
Those early surveys were not entirely sophisticated. Astronomers could spot the galaxies scattered around, and also dense clumps of galaxies known as clusters. Ever since the 1950’s astronomers debated if there were higher-order structures in the pattern of galaxies, wondering if “super-galaxies” (or superclusters) existed.
Once astronomers began to map deep into the universe, however, the cosmic web could not be ignored. While some galaxies found their homes in the clusters, most inhabited long, thin filaments and broad walls. This cosmic web was defined by the voids, the vast regions of almost-nothing that dominate the volume of the universe.
The largest portions of the cosmic web are the superclusters. But unlike the clusters, they are not gravitationally bound. That means that the member galaxies in a supercluster have not yet finished their building project. The superclusters are still in the process of forming. This fact makes it difficult to pick out exactly what a supercluster is.
Recently astronomers have turned to dynamical definitions of a supercluster. This means that they don’t just consider the position in space of a particular galaxy, but also its movement. Since superclusters are in the process of continual construction, this method looks at what galaxies are trying to build.
This method allows astronomers to distinguish one supercluster from another, and that’s how we’ve recognized that the Virgo supercluster is just one individual branch of a much larger structure known as Laniakea, which contains an astounding 100,000 galaxies. And that is our home in the universe.
Chinese Researchers Devise New Strategy for Producing Water on the Moon
In the coming years, China and Roscosmos plan to create the International Lunar Research PStation (ILRSP), a permanent base in the Moon’s southern polar region. Construction of the base will begin with the delivery of the first surface elements by 2030 and is expected to last until about 2040. This base will rival NASA’s Artemis Program, which will include the creation of theLunar Gatewayin orbit around the Moon and the various surface elements that make up theArtemis Base Camp. In addition to the cost of building these facilities, there are many considerable challenges that need to be addressed first.
Crews operating on the lunar surface for extended periods will require regular shipments of supplies. Unlike the International Space Station, which can be resupplied in a matter of hours, sending resupply spacecraft to the Moon will take about three days. As a result, NASA, China, and other space agencies are developing methods to harvest resources directly from the lunar environment – a process known as In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU). In a recent paper, a research team with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) announced a new method for producing massive amounts of water through a reaction between lunar regolith and endogenous hydrogen.
Ever since the Apollo missions brought samples of lunar rocks and soil back to Earth for analysis, scientists have known that there is abundant water on the Moon. These findings were confirmed by several subsequent robotic sample-return missions, including China’s Chang’e-5 mission. However, much of this water consists of hydroxyl (OH) created through the interaction of solar wind (ionized hydrogen) and elemental oxygen in the regolith. There is also plenty of water in the form of ice that can be found in permanent shadowed regions (PSRs), such as the craters that cover the South Pole-Aitken Basin.
Unfortunately, lunar regolith contains very little hydroxyl that can be converted into water, ranging from 0.0001% to 0.02%. Moreover, the icy patches found in cratered regions are mixed with regolith, forming layers that extend beneath the surface. As such, extraction is a challenge regardless of where the water is coming from. After they examined the samples returned by the Chang’e-5 mission, the team led by Wang determined that the highest concentrations of water were contained in ilmenite (FeTiO3), a titanium-iron oxide mineral found in lunar regolith.
According to the research team, this is due to “its unique lattice structure with sub-nanometer tunnels.” The team then conducted a series of in-situ heating experiments that revealed how hydrogen in lunar minerals could be used to produce water on the Moon. According to their study, the process consists of heating lunar regolith to temperatures exceeding 1,200 K (~930° C; 1700° F) with concave mirrors. This led to the formation of iron crystals and water bubbles in the material, the latter being released as water vapor. The chemical process is expressed mathematically as:
FeO/Fe2O3 + H –> Fe + H2O.
The resulting water vapor is then reclaimed at a rate of 51-76 mg of water for every gram of lunar soil. That works out to 50 liters (13.2 gallons) of water for every ton of processed regolith, enough to sustain 50 people daily. As the team noted in their paper, “[t]his amount is ~10,000 times the naturally occurring hydroxyl (OH) and H2O on the Moon.” In addition to drinking water, this process could provide the necessary irrigation water for growing crops, another important task for future lunar settlements to lessen their dependence on Earth.
A map showing the permanently shadowed regions (blue) that cover about 3 percent of the Moon’s south pole. Credit: NASA Goddard/LRO
This same process could be used to chemically separate hydrogen and oxygen gas from regolith, which could then be fashioned into propellant – liquid hydrogen (LH2) and liquid oxygen (LOX) – or used as fuel and for maintaining supplies of breathable oxygen. “Our findings suggest that the hydrogen retained in [lunar regolith] is a significant resource for obtaining H2O on the Moon, which is helpful for establishing scientific research stations on the Moon,” they conclude.
Another benefit is that the process is driven almost entirely by focused sunlight, while solar arrays can provide the additional power that drives the retention process. The one limiting factor is that this process will only be possible during a lunar day in the southern polar region (where China, NASA, and the ESA plan to build their bases). This means that the facility could run for two weeks straight, followed by a two-week lull.
However, this can be mitigated by stationing processing facilities away from the polar regions or possibly creating a network of solar mirrors or satellites that can direct light toward the southern polar region. In any case, this method presents a potential means of harvesting water on the Moon that is cost-effective compared to heating regolith in industrial furnaces and could be paired with ice extraction and processing to ensure future settlements have plenty of water.
Unveiling UFO Secrets: Lue Elizondo’s Revelations in Ross Coulthart Interview
In recent years, the topic of UFOs, now referred to as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), has shifted from the fringes of science fiction to the forefront of public discourse. One key figure at the center of this conversation is Luis “Lue” Elizondo, a former Pentagon insider who led investigations into UAPs. His revelations have stirred significant interest and concern, particularly about what the U.S. government might know—and what it may be hiding—about these mysterious objects.
In an interview with Ross Coulthart, Elizondo delved into his experiences, shedding light on his journey from a senior intelligence officer to one of the most important voices in the modern UFO movement. His story is not just about unidentified flying objects; it’s about government secrecy, personal sacrifice, and the potential implications for humanity.
The Road to UAP Investigations
Elizondo’s journey into the world of UAPs began unexpectedly. In 2009, while working as an intelligence operations specialist for the Department of Defense, he was introduced to the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program (AWSAP), which investigated advanced weaponry and technologies. It was here that Elizondo first encountered the topic of UAPs. A senior colleague bluntly asked him about his thoughts on UFOs, a subject that had never piqued his interest before. However, this conversation marked the beginning of his deep dive into the mysterious and often unsettling world of UAP investigations.
Soon, Elizondo joined the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), where he encountered cases that challenged his understanding of reality. One such instance involved reports from the Brazilian Air Force, where townspeople in Calores claimed they were being harmed by UAPs. These accounts, once dismissed as folklore, were substantiated by military investigations, convincing Elizondo that there was more to the UAP phenomenon than mere legend.
UAPs: More Than Just Myths
Elizondo’s investigations led him to some of the most famous UFO cases in history, including the 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico. According to Elizondo, what happened in Roswell was not just a crash of an unknown craft but a significant event where non-human technology was recovered. While such claims may sound outlandish, Elizondo insists that they are rooted in reality.
Moreover, his research suggested that UAPs might not be as benign as some hope. Military personnel who encountered these phenomena reported being injured or traumatized, raising concerns about the true nature and intent of these unidentified objects. The Veterans Administration has even granted disability benefits to service members who suffered injuries during UAP encounters, further validating the seriousness of these incidents.
The Government’s Role and the Secrecy Surrounding UAPs
One of the most controversial aspects of Elizondo’s work is his claim that the U.S. government has been actively involved in recovering and studying UAPs for decades. He alleges that military programs have not only retrieved alien technology but have also encountered non-human entities. However, these claims have been met with stiff resistance from within the government.
Elizondo recounts facing significant obstacles during his time at the Pentagon. He believes that powerful forces within the government, possibly driven by religious beliefs or geopolitical concerns, have deliberately stymied efforts to investigate UAPs. This resistance culminated in threats against him and others involved in UAP research, leading Elizondo to make the difficult decision to resign and go public with his findings.
Public Disclosure and Its Challenges
In 2017, Elizondo took the bold step of resigning from his Pentagon position and sharing his knowledge with the world. His revelations, coupled with the release of now-famous UAP videos from the USS Nimitz and USS Roosevelt, sparked a media frenzy and reignited public interest in UFOs. These videos, which showed objects performing maneuvers beyond the capabilities of known technology, have become central to the ongoing UAP debate.
Despite the increased attention, Elizondo and others who have come forward with similar claims have faced intense scrutiny and efforts to discredit them. The Pentagon has publicly denied Elizondo’s role in AATIP and questioned the authenticity of his claims. Yet, he remains undeterred, believing that the truth will eventually prevail.
The Future of UAP Research
Elizondo’s efforts have not been in vain. His work has contributed to a shift in how UAPs are perceived, both within the government and by the public. In 2022, legislation was passed to create a UAP office within the Department of Defense, now known as the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). This office is tasked with investigating UAP encounters and reporting its findings to Congress, marking a significant step towards transparency.
While Elizondo acknowledges that full disclosure is a gradual process, he remains hopeful. He believes that the next generation will play a crucial role in uncovering the truth about UAPs and their implications for humanity. For now, he encourages citizens to stay engaged, ask questions, and hold their leaders accountable.
Lue Elizondo’s journey from a Pentagon insider to a public advocate for UAP disclosure is a testament to his dedication to uncovering the truth. His experiences highlight the complexities of the UAP phenomenon and the challenges of investigating it within a framework of government secrecy and skepticism. As the conversation around UAPs continues to evolve, Elizondo’s voice remains a critical one, urging both caution and curiosity as humanity grapples with the possibility that we are not alone in the universe.
Panicked locals in two cities north of Los Angeles,California, piled onto Amazon's Ring neighbors app to report UFOs that 'zig zagged' and hovered over the weekend.
Their reports of a 'bright light' that looked like 'a shooting star' but acted more like a 'hovercraft' sparked shockwaves across social media — alongside the emergence of eerie cell phone videos that purported to capture some of these six alleged craft.
But a wide community of experts, including UFO researchers with Harvard's Galileo Project, told DailyMail.com that the videos were most likely 'an intentional hoax.'
The videos appeared to show drone swarms used in an LED light show thousands of miles away from California, based on landmarks and other visual cues, they said.
And some of these UFO videos were paired with old and unrelated audio tracks passed off as the videos' own.
Above, a clip from one of two videos purporting to be from the August 16, 2024 UFO sightings reported in California's Palmdale-Lancaster area, in the high desert north of LA
'The patterns of longitudinal lights are well-organized. This could be drone swarms.'
However, he admitted: 'The quality of the video doesn’t give us much to work with.'
Further assessments, by Tedesco and others, only added to those suspicions, suggesting the videos weren't related to the initial UFO reports north of LA at all.
The social media frenzy first started online the morning of Saturday, August 17, apparently spurred by reports posted to Amazon's Ring neighbors app Friday night.
'I was intrigued by the first neighbor who posted that he saw a UFO from his yard,' wrote one resident of the Palmdale-Lancaster area, in the high desert north of LA.
'So, my mom and I went out to ours to see if we'd see anything,' the user continued.
'They were too far [for] me to confidently say they were flying saucers, but [...] we counted six after being out there for 10 minutes.'
All told, at least five witnesses spotted one or all of the reportedly half dozen UFOs.
Records from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) related to mysterious and potentially hostile drone incursions over a top secret Pentagon airfield nearby, as well as public NASA data, may offer the best hope of explaining these Ring reports.
But the videos that were posted claiming to capture the same airborne enigmas are another story, one DailyMail.com's experts could answer more concretely.
In this video, a woman can be heard saying 'Oh, my God. It's landing!' as she appears to film the red-and-blue light UFO gliding slowly toward a marina dock below. Experts told DailyMail.com that the footage was likely taken from Hawaii - not California
Above, one of three user-generated posts to the Amazon Ring neighbors app about the UFOs
Soon piggy-backing off these text-only Amazon Ring app accounts, short UFO videos emerged of a blinking string of red and blue lights hovering allegedly over these same desert neighborhoods.
One 23-second video opens on a quiet, suburban street at night and then zooms in on the 'UFO' pulsing above the neighborhood.
A male voice exclaims in palpable fear off-camera: 'Oh, what is that? Mom! Mom, you see this?' A woman's voice can next be heard replying: 'Holy s***! What the hell is that?' The video then ends abruptly.
In a second clip, a woman can be heard saying 'Oh, my God. It's landing!' as she appears to film similar red-and-blue lights off of a UFO as the craft glides slowly toward a marina dock.
'Nearly as I can tell, the Palmdale footage is an intentional hoax using footage from a drone show in Hawaii,' Roe advised, 'and an audio track used in several other vids.'
A year earlier, in fact, the same audio between a concerned boy and his mother was posted to Reddit paired with footage of a large, wet sea slug writhing in a still pool.
One 23-second video allegedly from Palmdale last weekend (screencaptures above) uses audio from unrelated video that is, at least, over a year old
Above, one of three user-generated posts to the Amazon Ring neighbors app about the UFOs
Above, one of three user-generated posts to the Amazon Ring neighbors app about the UFOs
But a deeper analysis by Tedesco, the electrical engineer, and his avionics specialist brother who also works with Harvard's Galileo Project confirmed Roe's assessment.
'I took one of the video frames from the [23-second] video as a still image,' as Tedesco explained to DailyMail.com.
'There seem to be multiples of the object in a rectangular pattern, possibly nine drones,' Tedesco added. 'However, due to the quality of the video, I'm not certain.'
Tedesco's brother, aerospace avionics specialist Gerald Tedesco, who collaborates with him on their UFO field laboratory, agreed the drone explanation was most likely.
The behavior of these UFO lights also matched patterns pre-programmed into commercial drone swarms — according to Preston Ward, who serves as chief pilot and general counsel for the Texas-based drone light show company Sky Elements.
'To me it looks like the 6 drone test pattern,' Ward told DailyMail.com, 'distributed when someone first purchases drone show software.'
'The landing sequence is, for sure, drones using standard parameters,' the seasoned drone pilot opined.
Ward's colleague, Kyle Pivnick, added that one of the videos' visible landmarks did not match the alleged location of the sighting: 'Palmdale and Lancaster both are very land-locked and the video looks like it is at a marina.'
The footage appeared to have originated near the 2024 Pokémon World Championships in Honolulu, Hawaii — which capped off three nights of the international event with drone light shows according to local ABC affiliate KITV.
Footage uploaded to social media by the Hilton Hawaiian appears to show a similar marina adjacent to the coastal launch point for these Pokémon Worlds drone light shows — drones creating matching those red and blue LED light formations.
Above, an image of the Pokemon Worlds drone show posted by the Hilton Hawaiian last week
Above, another image of the 2024 Pokémon World Championships drone light show in Honolulu, Hawaii - captured by a local surf shop
Above, another image of the 2024 Pokémon World Championships drone light show in Honolulu, Hawaii - this one depicting Pikachu, a popular 'electric' type pokémon - captured on video by a local surf shop
Compounding the likelihood that these videos were simple online disinformation, the UFOs depicted do not resemble the written accounts of the UFOs posted by residents of the Palmdale-Lancaster area to the Ring neighbors app.
Another of these witnesses, who 'saw a bright light up in the sky' while walking their dog, described their sighting as one solid object.
'At first I was like omg what a cool plane that [US defense contractor] Northrop assembled, but to my dismay it was a hovercraft,' the Ring user wrote. 'I saw [a] UFO.'
Another self-reported witness said they saw a UFO that looked at first like 'a shooting star falling east,' while out in their backyard with their daughter. But the single bright object, not a collection of lights, 'stopped very abruptly and zig zagged going north.'
'Checking to see if anyone else saw it,' they continued, 'or are we both going crazy.'
The Tedesco brothers told DailyMail.com that the UFO field research that they conduct with their Nightcrawler team employs a suite of sensors that resolve whether or not a UFO sighting is actually a drone.
Their Galileo-partnered mobile lab has 'a sensitive acoustic microphone with a parabolic dish' to pull noise data off odd distant lights or apparent objects in the sky.
'If the objects were prosaic, we would get a specific sound and frequency profile for quadcopter propellers,' Gerald, the avionics expert told DailyMail.com, referencing a common, commercial drone model.
'The same could be said about the rotor blades of a helicopter, prop-driven planes or turbofan jet engines.'
'Additionally, doing a radar sweep of the sky would allow us to get a cross-sectional profile of the craft, gather distance, elevation, speed and possibly relative size and shape of the object,' Gerald added.
Despite the Tedesco brothers' high doubts about the videos that have claimed to be from the Palmdale-Lancaster sightings last weekend, the pair have not written off this 'UFO flap' entirely.
'I'm not saying it can't be something else, other than man-made drones,' Gerald Tedesco added. 'But with the limitations in parametric data to support other possibilities [...] the likelihood of drones becomes the simplest explanation.'
Above, NASA's experimentaal x-59 supersonic jet tested out of Lockheed Martin's Skunkworks, a classified facility run by the Pentagon contractor near Palmdale, California
Above, a recent notice from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) banning drones in the Palmdale area, near its airport, due to incursion on top secret military airspace
The suspect videos aside, the unexplained citizen UFO reports out of the high desert north of LA might have to do with a recent spate of rumored drone incursions on the US Air Force's top secret aerospace testing facility Plant 42 in the area.
The Palmdale Regional Airport shares its runways with Plant 42, which is home to Lockheed Martin Skunkworks' advanced projects division.
The FAA has recently issued warnings and a ban on drone flights nearby, due to a series of incursions on this airspace that may have been flights by ordinary US citizens or espionage.
'We have observed multiple UAS [uncrewed aerial systems] activities over Plant 42 during the last few months,' Edwards Air Force Base spokesperson Mary Kozaitis told defense news site The War Zone on Monday.
'The number of UASs fluctuated and they ranged in size and configuration,' according to Kozaitis. 'FAA was made aware of the incursions and Edwards continues to monitor the air space to ensure the safety of base personnel, facilities, and assets.'
'As a reminder to drone enthusiasts,' the Air Force official added, ;overflight of Plant 42 is strictly prohibited and may result in criminal prosecution, fines, and loss of operator privileges.'
Reporters for The War Zone also noted that no local police reports appear to have been filed to confirm the UFO sightings reported on the Ring neighbors app.
Above, A skywatchers page run by the US space agency, and designed to help civilians spot the International Space Station (ISS) as it passes overhead, showed the station would be above Palmdale, California during the time of these UFO sightings
Above, a photograph of NASA's International Space Station (ISS) in orbit
But some of the sightings purporting to catch a glimpse of UFOs during last weekend's 'flap' are likely to have had an even more conventional explanation.
Glimmers of sunlight reflecting off NASA's International Space Station (ISS) were expected to be visible on the ground for minutes at a time in the early morning all across the past weekend and beyond.
A skywatchers page run by the US space agency, and designed to help civilians spot the ISS as it passes overhead, reported that sightings would feasible above Palmdale from Wednesday August 14, 2024 through Thursday August 29, 2024.
This page, NASA's 'Spot the Station' website, noted that visibility of the ISS from the ground around Palmdale-Lancaster was set to be one of its longest early on Saturday morning — shining in the sky for six minutes beginning at 5:35am local time.
A top UFOdebunker has revealed the bizarre case that still puzzles him to this day.
Scores of people, including military experts, have recorded eerie videos appearing to show UAPs - unidentified aerial phenomena - over the years and often seek answers by posting them online.
Mick West, of Sacramento, California, uses a range of tools to help explain these mysteries - but has been stumped by one Navy video of a UFO that was leaked by The New York Times.
The footage released in 2017 had been taken by a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot two years earlier and appears to show a UFO following the jet from the USS Theodore Roosevelt after the object had been detected by radar off the East Coast.
In the infrared cockpit video, the incredible high-speed object seemingly breaks the laws of physics - with the two pilots heard debating whether or not it was a drone.
Mick West, of Sacramento, California, uses several tools to debunk random flying objects, including FlightAware, Flight Radar 24, and Invisor. But his biggest help is Sitrec that integrates flight data, video, and satellite imagery
One case that piqued West's interest is footage taken by Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot Ryan Graves. West wants to review the original video files himself to better understand their data
Combing over the footage, West, who often relies on data surrounding the video to debunk recorded events, investigated the clip and tried to work out the rotation of the camera and the glare on the lens. Still, he was left with no answers.
West is now hoping to gain access to the original radar data instead of the analysis the government released so he can recreate the phenomenon - and rule out any reasonable explanations.
As part of his approach, West uses multiple tools including FlightAware, Flight Radar 24 and Invisor, an app that gives information on video, audio, and photos such as resolutions and the date they were taken.
But his biggest resource is Sitrec - a tool he designed himself that stands for 'situation recreation' - which integrates flight data, video and satellite imagery to paint a full picture, he told Popular Mechanics.
'You have to be very careful about what you're looking at...for me, that's the very first step in investigating a case,' West, who has investigated around 1,000 UFO cases, told the outlet.
Last month, the former video game programmer spotted a white, elongated object from a plane window while he was flying to Pasadena and took a quick video of it.
'It’s not an intuitive thing, and if you don’t delve too deeply into it, [you’ll be wrong],' said West, who programmed Tony Hawk's Pro Series games
'It can be very difficult to figure out…but you have no choice,' he added (Pictured: Sitrec)
He thought was just another airplane - a conclusion he would be right about - but he found himself needing to investigate the matter personally, he told Popular Mechanics.
When he got to his hotel room, he used Photoshop to closely look at the image and downloaded the GPS routes from his flight and a few others in the area from FlightAware.com.
In order for West to find an answer, he has to look at simultaneous events and see how they all fit into the bigger picture.
His plane wasn't the only in the air, so he had to look at other flight paths, as well as weather phenomenon and satellite data.
He also looks closely at the video angle, In his case, he knew the video he took was several thousand feet above ground and the object was below him.
He used Flight Aware 24 to configure where other nearby planes were so he could 'figure out what’s actually in the air at a particular time,' he told Popular Mechanics.
West then zoomed in on his own flight and found the exact location of his plane when he took the video.
'I knew I was sitting on the right side of the plane,' he told the outlet.
The map showed him a 'likely contender' - a plane that had taken off from LA's Van Nuys Airport.
'That matches what we see in the video,' he told Popular Mechanics.
He then used Sitrec - which an unidentified organization paid him to develop and make publicly accessible - to point the camera from his plane directly down onto where the other plane was traveling.
'I set the camera to point from my plane to the other two. One of them matched exactly. It was a small Cessna,' he told the outlet. 'This confirms that this was the plane I was actually looking at.'
One Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UPA) - the term that took over for UFO in 2023 - that piqued West's interest appeared in footage the Chilean Navy caught of a black blob leaving streaks behind it in 2014, he told Popular Mechanics.
The Chilean military investigated the footage for roughly two years and boldly determined it to be aliens.
He determined the black blob seen by Chilean authorities was just a plane that had just departed from Santiago Airport, and the reason it appeared black in the footage their Navy had captured was because it was taken on a thermal camera and the plane was hotter than the surrounding area
However, West, thanks to Sitrec, came to a more reasonable conclusion and documented his investigation on YouTube.
He determined the black blob to be a plane that had just departed from Santiago Airport. He claimed the reason it appeared black in the footage captured by the Navy was because it was taken on a thermal camera and the plane was hotter than the surrounding area.
'It’s not an intuitive thing, and if you don’t delve too deeply into it, [you’ll be wrong],' West, who programmed Tony Hawk's Pro Series games, told the outlet.
As for the streaks the Navy recorded, he explained that these were just the airplane's engines leaving contrails.
West claimed that the Chilean Navy also got the flight path wrong.
'They thought they were looking at an object that was moving left to right.
'In fact, what they were looking at was this plane, just departed from Santiago Airport that had looped around to gain height over the mountains,' he said.
Using his program, he was able to successfully simulate the plane's movements by accounting for the camera angle and matched it to flight records.
West thinks his video game programming days helped condition him for the life of debunking UFOs as he spent 'an inordinate amount of time on this trivial little thing, this one intractable little bug that is just causing this problem' during his former profession.
West thinks his video game programming days helped condition him for the life of debunking UFOs as he spent 'an inordinate amount of time on this trivial little thing, this one intractable little bug that is just causing this problem' during his former profession
UFO sightings over America's nuclear arsenal appeared to shift their interest from the making of the bombs to silos and bomber bases as the Cold War arms race grew (above)
'It can be very difficult to figure out… but you have no choice,' he told Popular Mechanics.
He finds debunking claims of alien sightings has the same rigor as programming a game and tied with his fascination with conspiracy theories, it ignited his passion for investigating UAP.
However, other experts remain convinced that UFO activity is real and seemingly has some connection to nuclear sites.
The former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Lue Elizondo, agreed that there 'seems to be a lot of correlation' between UFO appearances and nuclear sites.
And independent researcher Robert Hastings, who has been working toward full government disclosure of UAP activity, said in 2010, 'Declassified US government documents and witness testimony from former or retired US military personnel confirm beyond any doubt the reality of ongoing UFO incursions at nuclear weapons sites.'
Now, new research — in the form of three studies helmed by a retired US Air Force staff sergeant, Larry Hancock, and a data analyst affiliate with Harvard's UFO-hunting Galileo Project, Ian Porritt — shows that not only has there been unusual activity around nuclear weapons and facilities, it has shifted over the years.
At first seemingly interested in the production of nuclear weapons, UFO sightings later sprang up around silos and bomber bases.
'You would see this interest at silos when they were being installed before 'the activity would drop off,' Porritt previously told the DailyMail.com.
Eerily similar to these encounters are the instances of UAPs following fighter jets that were disclosed by the UAP Task Force, including a 'giant Tic Tac' UFO witnessed by Navy veteran fighter pilot Commander David Fravor in 2004.
Fravor's fellow co-pilot Chad Underwood witnessed the 'perfectly white' wingless oblong captured by his cockpit's in-flight video.
'There was no denying it': Retired fighter pilot and mother-of-three who saw Tic-Tac UFOs in 2004 says Navy crew kept quiet due to fears of being labeled 'kooky'
Alex Dietrich, 41, was on patrol near San Diego in 2004 when she saw a Tic Tac-shaped UFO appear flying at pace and erratically
When her Navy commander went into for a closer look, the object began mimicking its movements and then disappeared
The mother of three and former Lt. Cmdr. says she feels a 'duty and obligation' to speak out about what she saw
She says other pilots were fearful of speaking about UFOs as they would be dismissed for being 'kooky'
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is to release its report about unidentified aerial phenomena sightings by military personnel next month
A former fighter pilot who saw Tic Tac-shaped UFOs in 2004 says her Navy colleagues stayed quiet for fear of being labeled 'kooky'.
Mother-of-three Alex Dietrich, 41, says she feels a 'duty' to speak up about her close encounter with unidentified aerial phenomena because she sees it as a vital matter of national security.
Dietrich appeared on a recent 60 Minutes special on unexplained aerial phenomena and also speaks regularly to House and Senate enquiries into UFOs, and says military pilots fear the stigma of being associated with UFOs.
'I do feel a duty and obligation,' the former Lt. Cmdr. told the Washington Post when asked why she was open to talking about her experiences, unlike many of her former colleagues.
'I was in a taxpayer-funded aircraft, doing my job as a military officer,' she told the Post.
'Citizens have questions. It's not classified. If I can share or help give a reasonable response, I will.'
The Director of National Intelligence and other agencies is due to release a highly-anticipated report on UFOs to Congress next month.
Former fighter pilot Alex Dietrich, 41, was on patrol near San Diego in 2004 when she saw a Tic Tac-shaped UFO appear flying at pace and erratically
When her Navy commander Dave Fravor went into for a closer look, the object began mimicking its movements and then disappeared
Dietrich was one of six Super Hornet pilots who saw the object, but says many fear being labeled 'kooky' for speaking out about what they saw
Last April, the infamous 'Tic Tac' incident was one of three videos released by the Pentagon which showed footage of 'unexplained aerial phenomena' taken by US Navy pilots.
At least six pilots, including Dietrich, encountered the mysterious object as it flew at speed over the Pacific near Mexico on November 14, 2004. The way it moved has led to speculation that it was a UFO and it has become a key piece of evidence for those who believe in extraterrestrials.
Recalling that day, Dietrich says she had recently got her stripes as a fighter pilot and was on a regular training flight in her Super Hornet with the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group when she noticed an unfamiliar object flying at speed and erratically.
A video of the encounter, verified by the Pentagon as authentic, showed the astonished reactions of the pilots as they watch the objects fly at great speed and with sudden changes in direction.
Her commanding officer Dave Fravor told Dietrich to stay back while he went closer to investigate. The object began to mimic his movements, and then flew off and disappeared.
These unidentified vehicles were reported to have descended 80,000 feet in less than a second.
Seconds later, he said, it reappeared on the the USS Princeton's radar 60 miles away.
Dietrich tweeted recently: 'Some days your boss asks you to swab the deck. Some days he asks you to keep high cover while he spars with a UFO.'
While recounting the incident to 60 Minutes, Dietrich said other fighter pilots had struggled with how much to reveal to the public about what they had seen.
'Over beers we've said, 'Hey man, if I saw this solo, I don't know that I would have come back and said anything,'' Dietrich said during the interview.
'Because it sounds so crazy when I say it.'
Now a tutor George Washington University and the US Naval Academy, Dietrich told 60 Minutes: 'I felt the vulnerability of not having anything to defend ourselves. And then I felt confused when it disappeared.'
Dietrich told the Washington Post that people had got in contact over the years with her wanting to know more about what she had seen.
'I just was an eyewitness to something in the course of my normal duties . . . that somehow makes me a portal.'
Dietrich says she had recently got her stripes as a fighter pilot and was on a regular training flight in her Super Hornet with the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group when she noticed an unfamiliar object flying at speed and erratically on November 14 2004
'Over beers we've said, 'Hey man, if I saw this solo, I don't know that I would have come back and said anything,'' Dietrich said during the interview. 'Because it sounds so crazy when I say it'
'Some days your boss asks you to swab the deck. Some days he asks you to keep high cover while he spars with a UFO' she tweeted recently
Why are people suddenly interested, Dietrich wondered in a tweet after the 60 Minutes special aired
The mother of three now teaches at the US Naval Academy and George Washington University
In an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo, Sean Cahil - a retired US Navy Chief Master-at-Arms on the USS Princeton (pictured) - spoke about the sighting of a UFO that has become known as the 'Tic-Tac', because of its shape
Marco Rubio says many lawmakers in Congress 'giggle' when the topic of UFOs comes up, but that the national security threat needed to be taken seriously
Ahead of next month's blockbuster intelligence report to Congress on military sightings of UFOs, retired Navy officers have been warning of the dire threat the mystery objects could pose.
'The technology that we witnessed with the Tic Tac was something we would not have been able to defend our forces against at the time,' Sean Cahil - a retired US Navy Chief Master-at-Arms - told CNN's Chris Cuomo of one recently-released video.
'What we saw in the Tic Tac is the five observables. [These] indicate a technology that outstrips our arsenal by at least 100 to 1000 years at the moment.'
Footage released recently week confirmed as real by the Pentagon appeared to show a UFO buzz a United States stealth ship near San Diego before diving under the water.
Commenting on the video, an ex-navy officer said that the technology on display is 100 to 1000 years ahead of that possessed by the United States.
'What we're seeing are a number of distinct and different things,' he said.
'Sometimes we're seeing a 50-foot object that can travel at hypersonic speeds and seemingly go into orbit or come down from altitudes of potentially above 100,000 feet.'
He added that the social stigma around reporting such events has for a long time kept witnesses of such phenomena quiet.
The Department of Defense's watchdog is also expected to examine how the Pentagon has handled UFO reports, with a source telling CNN earlier this month that there will be more enquiries announced in the near future.
The Pentagon released three short videos from infrared cameras In April 2020 that appeared to show flying objects moving quickly, after the veracity of the videos had been acknowledged in September 2019 ahead of their official release.
It came as Senator Marco Rubio warned that UFOs pose a serious threat to national security and can no longer be laughed off by lawmakers.
'Some of my colleagues are very interested in this topic and some kinda, you know, giggle when you bring it up. But I don't think we can allow the stigma to keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question.'
Rubio said the possibility that drones or aircraft from a rival military power - or from another civilization - were entering US airspace without permission should be getting more attention and resources.
'I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously,' Rubio told 60 Minutes.
'Tic Tac' UFO: US Navy pilot made visual contact with the object on November 14, 2004
At least six Super Hornet pilots made visual or instrument contact with the UFO on November 14, 2004.
The encounters, which are documented in numerous interviews with first-hand witnesses, remain a mystery, and the object's incredible speed and movements have led to speculation that it was extraterrestrial in origin.
The original FLIR video from the USS Nimitz encounters leaked online as early as 2007.
Witnesses say that clips of the video had been circulated widely on the Navy's intranet - used to communicate between ships in the carrier group - and an unknown sailor in the group likely first leaked it.
The USS Nimitz, a US Navy aircraft carrier, was at the center of a bizarre UFO sighting saga in 2004.
The clip became one of the most-touted pieces of evidence in the UFO community when the Pentagon confirmed its authenticity in 2017.
In January, Chad Underwood, the former Navy aviator who shot the famous leaked video clip, broke his silence in an interview with New York Magazine.
He said the oblong, wingless 'Tic Tac' shaped object was spotted off the coast of Mexico over the Pacific.
He also revealed that for about two weeks, the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Princeton, part of Carrier Strike Group 11, had been tracking mysterious aircraft intermittently on an advanced AN/SPY-1B passive radar.
The radar contacts were so inexplicable that the system was even shut down and restarted to to check for bugs - but operators continued to track the unknown aircraft.
Then on November 14, Commander David Fravor says he was flying in an F/A-18F Super Hornet when he made visual contact with the object, which seemed to dive below the water, resurface, and speed out of sight when he tried to approach it.
As Fravor landed on the deck of the Nimitz, Underwood was just gearing up to take off on his own training run.
Fravor told Underwood about the bizarre encounter, and urged Underwood to keep his eyes open.
He recalls how he suddenly saw a blip on his radar before tracking it on his FLIR camera.
'The thing that stood out to me the most was how erratic it was behaving,' Underwood told the magazine.
'And what I mean by 'erratic' is that its changes in altitude, air speed, and aspect were just unlike things that I've ever encountered before flying against other air targets.'
Underwood said the object wasn't obeying the laws of physics and dropped from 50,000 feet altitude to 100 feet in seconds, which he says, 'isn't possible'. He added that he saw no signs of an engine heat plume or any sign of propulsion.
The pilot refuses to speculate as to whether the object is an alien spacecraft or not, however.
'That's not my job. But I saw something. And it was also seen, via eyeballs, by both my commanding officer, Dave Fravor, and the Marine Corps Hornet squadron commanding officer who was out there as well.'
Two Navy officers told DailyMail.com that masses of high-quality radar, sonar and other data of the strange craft were sent to a Naval base on shore – as they accuse the government of a cover up after the Pentagon claimed the data is nowhere to be found.
A source who investigated the incident for the Department of Defense told DailyMail.com that they were briefed about sonar data from a nearby submarine that tracked the UFOs moving at more than 460 mph underwater during the shocking November 2004 encounter.
Ahead of the 20th anniversary of the storied 'Nimitz Incident', their revelations add a new, intriguing dimension to the most prominent UFO case in recent history.
On November 14 2004, Top Gun fighter pilot David Fravor was flying a training exercise off the coast of San Diego when he was re-routed to investigate a strange object spotted on radar by warships protecting his aircraft carrier the USS Nimitz.
Witnesses to an infamous 2004 Tic-Tac UFO incident have given shocking new information about the infamous incident to DailyMail.com. They include Kevin Day who was Senior Chief Operations Specialist aboard the USS Princeton at the time
Sean Cahill was a Chief Master-At-Arms on the Princeton, and from its deck he says he saw lights in the sky matching the movements of the objects Day saw on his radar
What he found was a roughly 40ft white object with no windows or wings, shaped like a Tic-Tac, flitting about above the sea that was roiling below it, disturbed by something large submerged beneath the surface.
Commander Fravor told Congress last year that as he circled the object, it turned to mirror his movements, then shot off past him at thousands of miles per hour, somehow stopping a second later at a secret pre-designated rendezvous point 60 miles away, that only he and a handful of Navy staff on his ship were given ahead of their training exercise.
Kevin Day was Senior Chief Operations Specialist aboard the USS Princeton at the time, in charge of monitoring the skies with radar to protect the Nimitz.
He told DailyMail.com that in the 10 days prior to the incident, he saw similar objects on his radar, behaving inexplicably.
F-18 pilot Lieutenant Chad Underwood
Day said groups of about 10 objects were repeatedly detected 80,000ft above them, where the Earth's atmosphere becomes space, dropping down to 20,000ft in less than a second, then following the ships by flying through the air at a relatively leisurely 115mph, before zooming off towards Guadalupe Island off the coast of Mexico where they seemed to disappear under the sea.
'They originated from sub-earth orbit. They came in groups of five to 10 at a time. If you added up all the groups, it was about 100 contacts,' Day said.
'The very first group had 10 objects. They sat right around 80,000ft or so, off the east coast of Catalina Island. They just sat there for a time.
'Then they would drop down as a group, instantly, down to between 20,000 and 28,000ft off the coast of Catalina Island, about 10 miles east of it.
'The really weird thing was, a single object would leave that group and travel very slowly right over the top of us, at between 20-28,000ft at about 100 knots, which was really slow.
'It would just track above us, and then the next one would depart, and the next one,' he added. 'All the groups did that.
'All 100 of them, to the best of my knowledge, disappeared in the same spot in the sky. And that spot was about 60 miles north of an island off the coast of Mexico called Guadalupe Island.
'Everyone was looking at me like, what is this? And I didn't have good answers.
'We agreed just to track and report. Of course we made our intentions known to the admiral on the Nimitz.'
The 'Tic-Tac' UFOs disappeared from sight about 60 miles north of Guadalupe Island off the coast of Mexico, according to witnesses who spoke with DailyMail.com
A screenshot from the video of a Navy pilot tracking the space craft over the Pacific. US military personnel in California believe they saw UFOs off the coast on November 14, 2004
The story has become one of the strongest examples of other-worldly craft routinely encountered by the military in US airspace.
But the story gets stranger from there.
DailyMail.com can reveal that unknown objects were also allegedly recorded zooming around underwater during the incident.
A senior sonar officer on board the USS Princeton at the time told comrades that while Day was seeing objects dropping from space and Fravor was dogfighting with the 'Tic-Tac', his team were picking up sonar returns for objects in the water.
This shocking revelation marks a new element to the infamous story, 20 years after it occurred.
Sean Cahill was a Chief Master-At-Arms on the Princeton at the time of the sighting
Sean Cahill was a Chief Master-At-Arms on the Princeton, and from its deck he says he saw lights in the sky matching the movements of the objects Day saw on his radar.
He says a senior sonar officer on the Princeton later told him about the underwater data.
'I was shopping at the local Navy commissary about a mile from my house. I bumped into a former shipmate who worked in the sonar department and was active during the exercise.
'He said that they were practically all around us. He goes, 'Man, we were tracking things underwater, just as much as they were tracking them in the air during that exercise.'
The top sonar tech, who asked not to be named, did not dispute the story when contacted by DailyMail.com, but declined to elaborate.
A source who worked as a senior official in defense intelligence told DailyMail.com that they investigated the incident several years later, and were briefed on sonar data recorded by a US submarine in the area of the Nimitz carrier strike group.
The source said that the sub's sonar caught the UFOs traveling at more than 400 knots, or 460 mph, through the water in the vicinity of the ships.
Day said that the ships in the group built a three-dimensional picture from combining their sophisticated radar and sonar, and that all the data was combined and sent to a Naval base in San Diego.
'We shared all the combat information, put it on a data link and sent it back to the beach. So anybody who was interested in these things, they could see our data,' he said.
'There's underwater stations called SOSUS. And we also have towed array. So we have those three sonar devices going off for each ship. All the ships are feeding the composite picture. So we have a really good three-dimensional picture underneath the water.'
Sean Cahill was a Chief Master-At-Arms on the Princeton at the time of the TIc-Tac UFO sighting, and from its deck he says he saw lights in the sky matching the movements of the objects Day saw on his radar
Warships guarding the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz as well as a submarine in the area spotted a sttrange object on radar in the Pacific in November 2004
Cahill has spoken openly about the 2004 UFO sighting before – including during a 2001 appearance on Fox News
He said these records would routinely be kept for decades.
But the Pentagon official charged with investigating UFO incidents claimed that he couldn't find any data on the Nimitz incident.
'My opinion is that one is going to remain unresolved because there is no data. There is no radar data,' Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the recently-retired head of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), said in a March 2024 interview.
'I think the Tic-Tac is so far back in time, there's no data. We went and looked for all of it.
I asked around for it.'
The seminal case was also glossed over in a historical report released by AARO, the Pentagon's UFO investigation office, on March 6 2024.
Cahill and Day say Kirkpatrick is wrong, and could even be deliberately trying to hide the truth.
'Those things are available for decades of the most mundane events that happened and everyday operations, they should be there for all these all the vessels that were there. But they're all missing,' said Cahill.
'It seems like purposeful obfuscation to me. It seems like a dereliction of duty for them not to investigate what is the most famous, well-documented case of UAP activity that we have, with the most amount of witnesses, the most amount of assets placed on it. And it's public now.
'They completely ignored it.'
'I think he should give all his money back that he took in salary,' Day said.
They said Kirkpatrick should have also had access to high fidelity radar and satellite data from the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) that could have picked up the Tic-Tac and other UFOs tracked by the warships in November 2004.
Others on the ship at the time say that tapes with data of the incident were erased and taken by mysterious visitors in flight suits.
Petty Officer Gary Voorhis told engineering news site Popular Mechanics in 2019: 'These two guys show up on a helicopter, which wasn't uncommon, but shortly after they arrived, maybe 20 minutes, I was told by my chain of command to turn over all the data recordings for the AEGIS [radar] system.
'They even told me to erase everything that's in the shop—even the blank tapes.'
The men were spotted returning with 'a bunch of bags', another witness on the ship, Leading Petty Officer Ryan Weigelt, told Popular Mechanics.
Reports of objects moving rapidly and in inexplicable ways underwater – as they allegedly were around the Nimitz in 2004 – are less well-known frontier in the UFO topic.
But they are increasingly coming under scrutiny, and now even have their own name: Unidentified Submerged Objects, or USOs.
Retired Navy Commander David Fravor testifies before a House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing about UFOs in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC in 2023
UFO expert and author Richard Dolan is set to release a book on the topic this year called The History of USOs: The True Story of Anomalous Craft in Earth's Bodies of Water.
It documents more than 600 cases, including extraordinary incidents of objects picked up by submarine radar moving faster than torpedoes and executing impossible right-angle turns, hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean.
'For every one of these USO stories, there's probably close to 100 you don't know. It's often sheer luck that they come out,' Dolan told DailyMail.com.
'One of the shocking things that I've seen in my last two years of USO research, is the number of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers encountering objects that were actually able to disable them for certain periods of time. I have at least 10.
'If you're the US Navy, I can't think of anything more important to you than your fleet of aircraft carriers,' he added. 'Anything that's going to shut down those aircraft carriers is going to be of supreme importance.
'Ronald Moultrie [former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security] spoke to the Senate a couple of years ago, saying we're confident that if we encounter these UAP we can identify and, if necessary, mitigate them.
'That's such a joke on every level. We know full well that this is a major problem, and they're not mitigating anything.'
Since retiring from government, former Rear Admiral and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration administrator Tim Gallaudet has revealed that he was briefed on similar incidents of submarines picking up UFOs on sonar moving at rapid speeds underwater.
In a statement to DailyMail.com, Gallaudet cautioned that he has not spoken with any of the sonar operators involved in the 2004 tic tac incident, but added that in general: ‘We have to investigate undersea and transmedium UAP in the same way we do other UAP to get a more complete understanding of the phenomenon.’
Super-Earths and Sub-Neptunes Contain Much More Water than Previously Thought
Water is an important component of exoplanets, with its distribution, that is, whether at the surface or deep inside, fundamentally influencing the planetary properties. According to new research, for Earth-size planets and planets more massive than 6 times the mass of Earth, the majority of water resides deep in the cores of planets.
The majority of water can be stored deep within the exoplanet’s core and mantle, and not at the surface.
Image credit: Sci.News.
“Most of the exoplanets known today are located close to their star,” said ETH Zurich’s Professor Caroline Dorn.
“This means they primarily comprise hot worlds of oceans of molten magma that have not yet cooled to form a solid mantle of silicate bedrock like the Earth.”
“Water dissolves very well in these magma oceans — unlike, for instance, carbon dioxide, which quickly outgasses and rises into the atmosphere.”
“The iron core is located beneath the molten mantle of silicates. So how is the water distributed between the silicates and the iron?”
“The iron core takes time to develop. A large share of the iron is initially contained in the hot magma soup in the form of droplets.”
“The water sequestered in this soup combines with these iron droplets and sinks with them to the core. The iron droplets behave like a lift that is conveyed downwards by the water.”
Until now this behavior had only been known to be the case for moderate pressures of the sort that also prevail in the Earth.
It was not known what happens in the case of larger planets with higher pressure interior conditions.
“This is one of the key results of our study,” Professor Dorn said.
“The larger the planet and the greater its mass, the more the water tends to go with the iron droplets and become integrated in the core.”
“Under certain circumstances, iron can absorb up to 70 times more water than silicates.”
“However, owing to the enormous pressure at the core, the water no longer takes the form of water molecules but is present in hydrogen and oxygen.”
This study was triggered by investigations of the Earth’s water content, which yielded a surprising result four years ago: the oceans on the Earth’s surface only contain a small fraction of our planet’s overall water.
The content of more than 80 of the Earth’s oceans could be hidden in its interior.
This is shown by simulations calculating how water behaves under conditions of the kind that prevailed when the Earth was young. Experiments and seismological measurements are accordingly compatible.
The new findings concerning the distribution of water in planets have dramatic consequences for the interpretation of astronomical observation data.
Using their telescopes in space and on the Earth, astronomers can under certain conditions measure the weight and size of an exoplanet.
They use these calculations to draw up mass-radius diagrams that permit conclusions to be drawn about the planet’s composition.
“If in doing so — as has been the case so far — the solubility and distribution of water are ignored, the volume of water can be dramatically underestimated by up to ten times,” Professor Dorn said.
“Planets are much more water-abundant than previously assumed.”
Water distribution is also important if we wish to understand how planets form and develop. The water that has sunk to the core remains trapped there forever.
However, the water dissolved in the magma ocean of the mantle can degas and rise to the surface during mantle cooling.
“So if we find water in a planet’s atmosphere, there is probably a great deal more in its interior,” Professor Dorn said.
Water is one of the preconditions for life to develop. There has long been speculation about the potential habitability of water-rich super-Earths.
Then calculations suggested that too much water could be hostile to life. The argument was that in these water worlds a layer of exotic high-pressure ice would prevent the exchange of vital substances at the interface between the ocean and the planet’s mantle.
The current study reaches a different conclusion: planets with deep water layers are likely to be a rare occurrence as most of the water on super-Earths is not located on the surface, as has been assumed until now, but is trapped within the core.
This leads the astronomers to assume that even planets with a relatively high water content could have the potential to develop Earth-like habitable conditions.
“Their study thus casts a new light on the potential existence of water-abundant worlds that could support life,” the authors said.
The study was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
H. Luo et al. The interior as the dominant water reservoir in super-Earths and sub-Neptunes. Nat Astron, published online August 20, 2024; doi: 10.1038/s41550-024-02347-z
Cretaceous Amber Fossils Shed New Light on Evolutionary Origin of Tardigrades
Tardigrades are a diverse group of microscopic invertebrates widely known for their extreme survival capabilities. Molecular clocks suggest that tardigrades diverged from other panarthropods (arthropods, tardigrades, velvet worms and lobopodians) before the Cambrian period, but their fossil record is extremely sparse. Now, paleontologists have described a new species of tardigrade and redescribed a previously known species, Beorn leggi, both from Canadian Cretaceous-aged amber.
Artistic reconstruction of Beorn leggi (top) and Aerobius dactylus (bottom) in a hypothetical fossilization environment.
Image credit: Franz Anthony.
First discovered in 1773, tardigrades are a diverse group of microscopic invertebrates that are best known for their ability to survive extreme conditions.
Also known as water bears or moss piglets, these creatures can live for up to 60 years, and grow to a maximum size of 0.5 mm, best seen under a microscope.
They are able to survive for up to 30 years without food or water, for a few minutes at temperatures as low as minus 272 degrees Celsius or as high as 150 degrees Celsius, and minus 20 degrees Celsius for decades.
Tardigrades withstand pressures from virtually 0 atm in space up to 1,200 atm at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, and are also resistant to radiation levels up to 5,000-6,200 Gy.
They survive by entering a state of suspended animation called biostasis, using proteins that form gels inside of cells and slow down life processes.
“Tardigrades are microscopic invertebrates characterized by a compact body plan with four pairs of typically claw-bearing lobopodous legs that are closely related to onychophorans and euarthropods as members of Panarthropoda,” said Harvard University Ph.D. candidate Marc Mapalo and colleagues.
“Tardigrades are popularly known for the cryptobiotic ability of some species that allow them to survive extreme conditions, such as space vacuum, ionizing radiation, and low subzero temperatures, as well as their worldwide distribution in marine, freshwater, and terrestrial habitats.”
“Despite their ubiquitous nature in the present-day biosphere, tardigrades have a notoriously scarce fossil record, which limits the study of their macroevolution including the origin of their body plan, and the timing of their terrestrialization and acquisition of cryptobiotic capabilities.”
“Currently, there are only four known crown-group tardigrade fossils, all of which are preserved as amber inclusions, but only two of them have well-established taxonomic positions relative to extant tardigrades.”
Aerobius dactylus.
Image credit: Mapalo et al., doi: 10.1038/s42003-024-06643-2.
In their study, the authors looked at a piece of amber found in Canada in the 1960s that contains the known fossil tardigrade Beorn leggi and another presumed tardigrade that couldn’t be substantively described at the time.
Using confocal laser microscopy, a method usually employed for studying cell biology, they were able to examine the tiny structures of the fossil tardigrades in stunning detail.
The study provides not only a definitive classification of Beorn leggi in the tardigrade family tree, but the identification of a new species: Aerobius dactylus.
“Both of them are found in the same piece of amber that dates to the Cretaceous period, which means that these water bears lived alongside dinosaurs,” said Dr. Javier Ortega-Hernández, also from Harvard University.
“The images of Beorn leggi show seven well-preserved claws, with the claws that curve toward the body being smaller than those curving away from it, a pattern found in modern-day tardigrades.”
“The second, previously unidentified specimen, had claws of similar length on each of its first three pairs of legs, but longer outer claws on its fourth set of legs.”
Both species serve as critical calibration points for what’s called molecular clock analysis, which help scientists estimate the timing of key evolutionary events.
For example, the latest findings suggest that modern tardigrades likely diverged during the Cambrian period over 500 million years ago.
The study also sheds light on the origin of the remarkable ability of tardigrades to survive extreme conditions by entering a state of stasis.
“The study estimates that this survival mechanism likely evolved during the mid to Late Paleozoic, which may have played a crucial role in helping tardigrades endure the end-Permian mass extinction, one of the most severe extinction events in Earth’s history,” Dr. Ortega-Hernández said.
The results appear in the journal Communications Biology.
M.A. Mapalo et al. 2024. Cretaceous amber inclusions illuminate the evolutionary origin of tardigrades. Commun Biol 7, 953; doi: 10.1038/s42003-024-06643-2
AI Focused UFO Behind Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, Jan 2016, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Jan 2016 Location of sighting:behind Nellis AFB, Nevada, USA
Guys, I decided to use ai to focus this old sighting from 2016 and wow it blew my mind! The detail is amazing, but I have to admit, I have never seen anything like it. This is different, it's unique unlike anything ever. And it's flying slowly over top secret USAF land that is dangerous to enter.
AI Focused Sunken Shipwreck Off Wisteria Island, Florida Keys, UFO Sighting News. 4K HD.
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