The asteroid Apophis will pass by Earth in 2029 at a distance closer than some communications satellites—and this flyby is pushing private companies to take on some of the responsibility for planetary defense. A California-based startup has announced the first commercial mission to the asteroid in deep space, which is set to accompany Apophis before and after its close approach to Earth.

Illustration of asteroid Apophis passing by Earth in 2029 at a distance of approximately 32,000 km. Source: ESA Science Office / Earth added in Canva Pro via Space.com

What is the Apophis EX mission?

The startup ExLabs presented the Apophis EX project at the 41st Space Foundation Space Symposium, held in Colorado Springs from April 13–16, 2026. 

The plan is for the spacecraft to intercept Apophis as it approaches Earth, collect scientific data on its dynamics and physical characteristics, and then track it after it passes by. Specifically, this data is intended to be used to refine collision risk models and develop strategies for avoiding hazardous objects.

Why planetary protection needs business

James Orsulak, co-founder of ExLabs and president of the Planetary Protection Foundation, speaks candidly about the limitations of government funding. “NASA’s planetary defense budget is less than one percent of the total space agency. That’s not enough to ever do anything,” he said. 

Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who also participated in the symposium, supported the idea that the government should become one of the customers of the commercial market, rather than the sole player. Competition among private suppliers lowers costs and accelerates innovation.

What are our options?

During a panel discussion, Edward Lu—a former NASA astronaut, director of the Asteroid Institute, and co-founder of the B612 Foundation—emphasized that there was no single best technology for deflecting asteroids. On the table are gravitational tugs, ion beams, kinetic impacts, nuclear explosions, and other approaches. 

The choice of method depends on the specific situation, and all of these approaches require practical application, not just theoretical calculations. “High flight frequency ensures safety, reliability, and cost savings. We are approaching the point where we will be able to build a spacecraft in a year. This is entirely feasible,” said Lu.

Apophis Live

The mission’s organizers want to turn the 2029 flyby into an event of global significance—literally. ExLabs is in talks to broadcast the event in IMAX format and live. 

According to him, the audience could exceed that of the Super Bowl. Apophis, by the way, will be visible to the naked eye—a rare occurrence for an object of that size.

We previously wrote about the Chinese mission to Apophis.

• According to Space.com 

• Posted in News, Science

{ https://universemagazine.com/en/articles-en/ }

The bright band that stretches across the night sky on a clear night is neither a cloud nor a nebula. There are billions of stars. And all of them, together with our Sun, are part of a single gigantic structure – the Milky Way galaxy. We live inside it. And that is precisely what makes studying it so challenging and so fascinating.

A model image of the Milky Way viewed from above the disk – the spiral arms and the central bulge are visible. Source: ESA / Gaia / DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar — esa.int

Imagine you were asked to describe the city where you live, but you were not allowed to leave your apartment or look out the window. This is exactly the situation astronomers found themselves in when they first began seriously studying the Milky Way. We are inside the Galaxy, approximately 26,000 light-years from its center, and we have no telescope that could be positioned beyond its boundaries. Everything we know about the structure of our cosmic home is the result of observations from within, mathematical models, and, ultimately, the detective work of several generations of scientists.

How did we even realize that we live in a galaxy?

For a long time, people did not know that the band in the sky was made up of billions of individual stars. Galileo Galilei took the first step in 1610 when he pointed his telescope at the Milky Way and saw countless stars that are invisible to the naked eye. But it is one thing to see the stars, and quite another to understand how they are arranged in space.

The Milky Way above the horizon of Cerro Paranal in Chile, home to the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Source: ESO

In 1785, British astronomers William Herschel and his sister Caroline attempted to map the Milky Way by counting stars. They pointed their telescope at more than 600 different sections of the sky and counted how many stars were visible in each direction. The logic was simple: where there were more stars, the Milky Way must be wider. The result was the first quantitative map of the Milky Way – and according to it, the entire galaxy was supposed to be only about 6,000 light-years in diameter, whereas its actual size exceeds 100,000. And we found ourselves almost at its center. Herschel simply did not know that there was dust between the stars that absorbs light and prevents us from seeing distant objects. That is precisely why the number of visible stars in all directions was roughly the same – hence the illusion that we are at the center.

William Herschel’s Map of the Milky Way (1785). This was the first attempt to graphically depict the shape of our galaxy based on a count of stars, with the Sun located near the center of the model.
Source: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London

A true breakthrough occurred at the beginning of the 20th century. American astronomer Harlow Shapley turned his attention to globular clusters – huge groups of tens and hundreds of thousands of stars that are visible much farther away than individual stars. He measured the distances to 93 such clusters and discovered something unexpected: they are all distributed unevenly and concentrated on one side of the sky – in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. If the clusters surround the center of the Galaxy, then that is where it must be. But the Sun is not there at all. Shapley showed that we are far from the center of our own galactic home.

Radio telescopes helped to finally reveal the structure of the Milky Way. Unlike visible light, radio waves pass through interstellar dust. In the 1950s, astronomers began mapping the Galaxy using the radio emissions of neutral hydrogen, and it was in this way that its spiral structure was first reliably confirmed in 1953.

An image of the center of the Milky Way captured by the MeerKAT radio telescope. Radio waves allow us to see through dense dust clouds, revealing unique magnetic filaments and turbulent processes around the galaxy’s core. Source: SARAO

Construction: bar, disc, and arms

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy with a bar. At its center lies not just a cluster of stars, but an elongated bar that stretches for tens of thousands of light-years, with spiral arms extending from its ends. This structure is found in about two-thirds of spiral galaxies. The presence of a bar in the Milky Way was confirmed by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope in 2005, revealing that it is larger than previously thought.

A disk extends around the bar – a flat, rotating structure where most of the Galaxy’s stars and gas are concentrated. The disk has a diameter of about 100,000 light-years, while its thickness in the region of the spiral arms is only about 1,000 light-years. Astronomers distinguish between the thin disk, where young stars and active star formation are concentrated, and the thick disk, which contains older stars.

The spiral arms rotate along with the Galaxy, but they are not rigid structures. They are more like density waves: regions of concentrated gas and dust where new stars are actively forming, shining very brightly, albeit for a short time. That is why the arms are so bright. There are also a large number of stars between the arms, but they are older and dimmer, so they do not create such a distinct pattern.

A modern model of the Milky Way’s structure, based on data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. The image shows the main arms, the central bar, and the Sun’s location in the Orion Arm. Source: NASA / JPL-Caltech. Source: Wikipedia

The Milky Way disk is not perfectly flat – at its periphery, it exhibits a distinct S-shaped warp, resembling a warped vinyl record. Astronomers have been aware of this phenomenon since the 1950s. Data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia mission has revealed that this warp is not static – it slowly rotates, completing one full rotation every 600-700 million years. The most likely cause is the gravitational influence of a smaller galaxy colliding with ours. One of the candidates is believed to be the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy.

But even now, our picture of our own galactic home remains incomplete. The disk plane, filled with dust and gas, blocks our view in visible light – this region is called the zone of avoidance. It covers about 20% of the visible sky, effectively shielding everything beyond it from optical telescopes. What exactly lies there – individual galaxies or colossal structures such as the Great Attractor – can only be determined through radio and infrared observations. The complete picture of this part of the cosmos remains fragmented to this day.

Our galactic address

But before we delve into how the Galaxy is structured, it is worth understanding exactly where we are located within it. To be precise, our address in the Universe is roughly as follows: the Orion Arm, the Milky Way, the Local Group, the Virgo Supercluster, and the Laniakea Supercluster.

Begin with the closer one. The Sun is located in the Orion Arm – a relatively small spiral arm between two larger arms: the Perseus Arm (on the outer edge) and the Sagittarius-Carina Arm (closer to the center). We are about 26,000 light-years from the center of the Galaxy – roughly half the radius of the visible disk. Neither the center nor the periphery.

This is significant not only in an abstract sense. Astronomers identify what is known as the galactic habitable zone – a region at a certain distance from the center where conditions are considered most favorable for the existence of planets rich in complex carbon-based compounds. Too close to the core means intense radiation and a high density of stars with frequent dangerous events. Too far away means a lack of heavy elements necessary for the formation of rocky planets. The Sun is located roughly within this zone.

The galactic habitable zone in the Milky Way. Source: NASA / JPL-Caltech

Our Sun does not stand still – it orbits the center of the Milky Way at a speed of about 828,000 km/h. Despite this speed, a single full orbit takes approximately 230 million years. Astronomers have even given this cycle a name – the galactic year. Over the course of Earth’s existence, our solar system has only managed to circle the center of the Galaxy about 20 times. When our star last completed this cycle, the first dinosaurs had just appeared on Earth, and the supercontinent Pangea had begun to break apart.

The motion of the Solar System within the Milky Way. Our Sun completes one full orbit around the galactic center in approximately 225-250 million years. Source: NASA / JPL-Caltech

The Heart of the Galaxy: Sagittarius A*

Hidden at the very center of the Milky Way is an object that cannot be seen directly – a thick cloud of gas and dust, opaque to visible light, stands between us and it. But astronomers have determined what lies there by other means.

A new view of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, showing the structure of the magnetic fields around its “shadow.” Source: EHT Collaboration, via eso.org

Since the 1990s, telescopes have been tracking the movements of stars in the immediate vicinity of the galactic center. We call them S-stars, and they move extremely fast. One of them, S2, completes a full orbit in 16 years, accelerating at its closest point to nearly 3% of the speed of light. Another, S4714, reached 8% of the speed of light at its closest approach to Sagittarius A* – at a distance comparable to that between the Sun and Saturn. It was these observations that convinced the scientific community: a supermassive compact object is located at the center of the Galaxy. For this discovery, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Calculations have shown that to keep S-stars on such trajectories, there must be an object at the center with a mass of about 4 million solar masses, compressed into a very small volume. This is Sagittarius A*– a supermassive black hole. In May 2022, the international Event Horizon Telescope collaboration published the first direct image: a ring of light surrounding a dark shadow – the shadow of the black hole itself.

The center of the Galaxy is an extremely dynamic place. In addition to Sagittarius A*, it contains dense molecular clouds, clusters of young massive stars, and, according to researchers, black holes formed from individual massive stars. A detailed picture of this region is still being refined.

Halos and absorption lines

The Milky Way is not just a disk with spiral arms. Encircling this entire structure is a galactic halo – a sparse spherical region containing old, isolated stars and globular clusters – that extends far beyond the visible disk.

An artist’s illustration depicting the external structure of the Milky Way: from the central bulge to the stellar streams in the halo. The image is based on scientific data from NASA/ESA

It is within the halo that traces of the galaxy’s past have been preserved. The Gaia mission helped reveal that approximately 10 billion years ago, the Milky Way absorbed a smaller galaxy, which researchers have named Gaia-Enceladus. Traces of this merger – the characteristic motion of large groups of stars within the halo – can still be detected in observational data. This is not the only such absorption in the history of the Galaxy, as it gradually accumulated its mass by incorporating smaller neighbors.

The Milky Way also contains about 150 known globular clusters – dense spherical groups of hundreds of thousands of old stars orbiting the Galaxy in elongated orbits. It is these clusters that have been key to understanding the true size of the Milky Way – astronomer Harlow Shapley used their distribution to determine the location of the Galaxy’s center.

Today, several satellite galaxies orbit the Milky Way. The most prominent of these are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which are visible to the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere. These are small structures gravitationally bound to us. The Sagittarius Dwarf System is also part of this family, and, according to research, has crossed our disk several times, leaving behind stellar streams – long chains of stars stretched out by gravity. Gaia has detected over a hundred such structures – silent witnesses to billions of years of accretion.

Age and place, among others

The Milky Way is one of the oldest members of the Local Group. The oldest stars in it are about 13.6 billion years old – almost as old as the universe itself. Yet its formation is still not complete.

In terms of size, the Milky Way is a large galaxy containing, according to various estimates, between 100 and 400 billion stars. We are the second-largest member of the Local Group – a gravitationally bound family of more than fifty predominantly dwarf galaxies. The largest galaxy in this group is Andromeda, and it is steadily approaching us. Our group is part of the Virgo Supercluster, which in turn is part of an even larger structure – the Laniakea Supercluster, with a diameter of about 500 million light-years.

Layout and composition of the Local Group of galaxies. Source: NASA / Andrew Z. Colvin.
English version: uk.wikipedia.org

The Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way are approaching each other at a speed of about 110 km/s, or 396,000 km/h. Every hour, they cover a distance nearly equal to the distance from Earth to the Moon. It was long believed that a collision was almost inevitable and would occur in about 4-4.5 billion years. However, a 2025 study combining data from the Hubble and Gaia telescopes showed that the probability of a direct collision within this timeframe is only about 2%. In roughly half of the computer simulations, the two giants fly past each other and may only gradually merge under the influence of gravity. The future of our galactic home remains an open question.

An artist’s illustration of the early stages of interaction between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy. The image is based on scientific models from NASA/ESA

The invisible skeleton

Astronomers have long noticed something strange: stars at the edges of the Milky Way move just as fast as those much closer to the center. According to Newton’s law of universal gravitation and Kepler’s laws, velocity should decrease as the distance from the center of mass increases.

In planetary systems, it makes perfect sense: the farther a planet is from its central star, the slower it moves. This is exactly how Neptune moves compared to Mercury. For a galaxy where most of the visible mass is concentrated at the center, the same rule should apply – stars at the edges should rotate more slowly than those closer to the core.

But they aren’t slowing down. In the 1970s, American astronomer Vera Rubin, along with her colleague Kent Ford, measured the velocities of stars in spiral galaxies and discovered something unexpected: stars on the outskirts were moving at the same speed as those in the center. The graph of these speeds should have dropped toward the edges, but it remained flat. Rubin checked dozens of galaxies. The pattern repeated itself. “What you see in a spiral galaxy,” she said, “is not what you get.”

There is one explanation: in addition to visible matter, galaxies contain a vast amount of invisible mass – dark matter. It neither emits nor reflects light, but it has mass and, therefore, gravity. It is dark matter that keeps the stars from flying apart and produces the flat rotation curve that Rubin discovered.

An artist’s rendering of a dark matter halo forming a structure (“skeleton”) around the Milky Way

According to current estimates, dark matter accounts for about 85% of a galaxy’s total mass. It forms a gigantic invisible halo around the visible disk – a dark matter halo – which, according to calculations, can extend for nearly 2 million light-years. This is approximately 20 times larger than the diameter of the visible disk.

Exactly what dark matter is remains unknown. No one has yet managed to directly detect any of the particles that make it up. This is one of the biggest unresolved questions in modern physics.

The map is not yet complete

In 2025, the Gaia satellite completed its active phase of surveying the sky. Over the course of eleven years of operation, it recorded more than three trillion measurements of approximately two billion stars – the most accurate three-dimensional map of the Milky Way ever created. The next major data release, Gaia DR4, is expected in 2026.

A view of the entire sky from the Gaia mission, showing the brightness and color of stars. Credit: ESA / Gaia / DPAC. Acknowledgment: A. Moitinho. License: CC BY-SA IGO 3.0, available at esa.int

And yet, even now, the picture is far from complete. The exact number of spiral arms, the detailed structure of the central region, and the full distribution of dark matter – all of these are still being refined. As one of the mission’s scientific visualizers noted: “Distant parts of the Milky Way remain educated guesses based on incomplete data.”

The Milky Way has been studied from the inside for several hundred years. Each new generation of instruments reveals details that their predecessors could not see. The next release of Gaia data will change some of what we currently believe to be known.

• Posted in Articles

{ https://universemagazine.com/en/articles-en/ }

Until around a decade ago, it was believed that all the factors that govern such processes were known. That changed in recent years, as an apparent discrepancy surfaced: the real-world sea level observations appeared to be outpacing what known factors by themselves could explain. So what could be driving the anomaly?

Now, an answer to this lingering mystery may finally be at hand, according to new research that appeared in the journal Earth’s Future, which identifies what could be the lynchpin in this mystery: warming that is occurring deep within the ocean.

Heat from Deep Below

The new research, led by Anny Cazenave of the Laboratory of Space Geophysical and Oceanographic Studies in France, and undertaken by an international team of colleagues, revealed that heat absorption in ocean layers at depths greater than 2,000 meters plays a significant role in rising sea levels.

Incorporating this deep ocean warming into current models, the previously unexplained aspects of recent global sea level rise that scientists have observed since 2016 can largely be accounted for, the researchers say.

According to new estimates, deep ocean heating likely contributes to nearly 0.4 millimeters of sea level rise that occurred annually between 2005 and 2022, which amounts to almost ten percent of the total increase recorded during that period.

That may seem like a small amount, but in the broader context of sea level changes scientists have observed, it is significant enough that the imbalance was initially deemed an anomaly, and a concerning one.

However, understanding the role of this newly recognized factor presented a challenge, since the majority of direct measurements of ocean conditions appear to arise from the global network of more than 4,000 Argo floats, which are instruments that measure factors including salinity, pressure, and temperature as they make their way through the uppermost 2000 meters of the Earth’s oceans.

Through their movement, the Argo floats capture data that is transferred to satellites, offering a game-changing ability for scientists to collect information about our oceans, including their heat content. However, due to the depths at which they operate, these devices do not collect data from some of the ocean’s deepest waters.

This is significant, as the ocean’s deepest volumes lie in the regions where the scientific capabilities of Argo floats cannot reach.

A New Approach to Gathering Deep Ocean Data

To overcome this, Cazenave and the research team employed reanalysis, a method that combines existing observations with advanced computer models to estimate conditions under circumstances that cannot be directly measured, such as those occurring within the deepest regions of the ocean.

This approach was employed with a new reanalysis system called CIGAR, which reconstructed temperature changes in the deep ocean and integrated the results with existing data compiled in various other datasets. Among these were satellite data that included information on ocean mass obtained by the GRACE satellite program, as well as glacier and ice sheet mass loss, and changes in land water storage.

With the combined data, Cazenave and her international collaborators successfully generated a more complete image of the broader forces that are currently driving sea level rise.

Deep Ocean Climate Mysteries

A significant finding from the new research involves the deep ocean climate system, the dynamics of which remain somewhat mysterious. Although upper layers of Earth’s oceans are well-known reservoirs for heat, the team’s new work reveals that the same can be said of deeper ocean waters, which also absorb large amounts of energy.

Fundamentally, this heat absorption contributes to the greater expansion of the ocean and, of key importance to the new research, also the anomalous sea level rise observed in recent years.

Along with the new light it sheds on this phenomenon, the team’s discovery also raises some new questions, including what the broader causes are that drive the warming observed in the deep ocean. One possibility is that natural climate variability could be at play, although anthropogenic factors could also be responsible, if not a combination of both.

Future research using advanced climate models will aim to better understand these processes, and ultimately, the team’s new work highlights the complexity of our planet’s climate, as well as the importance of studying the processes that often require the most challenging measurement.

The team’s study, “Evidence of Increased Deep Ocean Warming From a Sea Level Budget Approach,” was published in Earth’s Future.

• Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/science/ }

This Man Claims His CIA‑Funded Father Discovered “The Nine” – A Group of Cosmic Entities Guiding Earth and Overseeing the Universe

Andy talks about how his father worked with different psychics and healers before Uri Geller. One example is the Brazilian healer Zé Arigó, whose sudden death ended that line of research and pushed Puharich to look for a new subject. Later, he heard about Uri Geller in Israel and went there, either on his own curiosity or possibly on a mission connected to the CIA, depending on which story you believe.

In Israel, he watched Uri’s shows, ran simple tests in a hotel room, and became convinced that at least some of Uri’s abilities were real. He then brought Uri to the United States to be tested under strict lab conditions at Stanford, where cameras and controls tried to rule out cheating. This is where Uri’s international career as a psychic “superstar” began, although Puharich himself cared more about science than show business.

According to them, researchers like New York Times bestselling author Annie Jacobsen suggested that Israeli scientists and officials were more open to spiritual and mystical ideas linked to psychic research, while American institutions were more closed and materialistic. In Israel, Puharich felt he could explore channeling, “The Nine,” and more “far out” ideas with open‑minded people like Itzhak Bentov, who was almost an Israeli version of Puharich. Bentov was both a scientist and an intelligence asset, part of a group of Israeli scientists in the 1960s closely tied to intelligence services.

Greg said these beings are described more like divine spirits or cosmic minds than classic aliens in spaceships, because they are never described as having a body, a planet, or a star system, such as “we come from Zeta Reticuli.” Instead, they present themselves as a kind of council of minds that can be contacted through trance and channeling.

The story begins in 1953, when an Indian doctor named Dr. Dhundiraj G. Vinod walked into Andrija Puharich’s lab and showed psychic abilities to convince Puharich he was genuine. He then went into a trance and started channeling a collective entity that called itself “The Nine,” speaking as if they were “nine principles of nature” or forces that govern reality.

This was the first time The Nine appeared in Puharich’s work, and this happened while he was already doing psychic research with funding and interest from the U.S. military and intelligence circles.

Many years later, in the early 1970s, The Nine “came back through other people. Uri Geller, in the 1970s, claimed he had contact with The Nine or with a related controlling entity called Spectra, and said he had channeled The Nine, though the filmmaker is not sure whether that part is true. Then a powerful medium named Phyllis Schlemmer began to channel The Nine very clearly and often, giving long messages about Earth’s history and the role of alien civilizations and higher beings in guiding humanity.

Puharich was convinced these channels were real and built a whole project around them. He helped create a group sometimes known as “Lab Nine,” bringing together Phyllis and others, organizing meditations, trips, and group trance sessions to strengthen the connection with The Nine. From these sessions came the material that later appeared in the book “Briefing for the Landing on Planet Earth,” which describes The Nine as extraterrestrial or extra‑dimensional intelligences managing Earth as part of a larger cosmic program.

In the interview, they explain that The Nine are said to be “above” all the other entities that sometimes come through channels. There are many smaller spirits or beings mentioned in the material, but the Nine are described as the top level, the head controllers who oversee the universe, watch what happens on this planet, and “make sure” some events do or do not happen according to a bigger plan. They communicate only through special psychics in trance, and in this story, they have used just a few main human channels over the decades: first,t Dr. Vinod in the 1950s, then apparently Uri Geller in the early 1970s, and then Phyllis Schlemmer in the late 1970s

The “nine forces of nature” idea comes from how The Nine first described themselves through Dr. Vinod, calling themselves the nine principles or forces behind nature. Later channeling, especially through Phyllis, added more detail: they talked about the early history of Earth, how alien or higher civilizations influenced human development, and how new knowledge and “higher physics” could be given through special people.

Read also:

• Former US Congressman Claims Man in Uniform Revealed Secret Alien-Human Hybrid Program to Create Galaxy-Communicating Race
• Something Dark Is Going On: US Congressman Claims Suspicious Pattern of Deaths Among Those Linked to UFO and Advanced Aerospace Technology
• This Woman Claims to Have Touched a Non-Physical Being Hand Formed from Ectoplasm During a Séance

Puharich believed that equations and technical information coming through some of these channels were pieces of a new, higher science from another world, and he hoped to collect enough of it to build a new understanding of the universe.

The intelligence agencies were tightly woven around Puharich’s work, which makes the whole thing feel like a spooky intelligence–occult mix. The filmmaker shows that in the 1950s,s Puharich’s psychic lab was funded by the U.S. Army and visited by people linked to the CIA, and there are actual letters between Puharich and the office of CIA director Allen Dulles. Later in life, after his house burned down when he was warned not to publish certain information, Puharich himself became convinced the CIA was trying to shut him up, and he developed a deep hatred and fear of them.

Because of this overlap, researchers and conspiracy writers now ask why, in a lab financed by the military and intelligence, a psychic suddenly starts to contact a group of universe‑controlling entities while very rich and powerful people sit in on the sessions.

They also point out that Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, attended some nine sessions at Puharich’s place and even tried channeling them, which later fed claims that parts of Star Trek, like “Deep Space Nine,” were inspired by these beings.

This mix of cosmic beings, occult channeling, high‑level guests, and intelligence funding gives rise to the conspiracy that agencies might secretly fear or at least take very seriously what The Nine represent, or might try to use the myth of The Nine for psychological experiments and spiritual manipulation.

For years, Andy remained skeptical, even as he heard his father’s stories and met Uri Gelle,r who was living in their house. Two things shifted him: first reading the book “Briefing for the Landing on Planet Earth,” which describes his father’s later work with Phyllis and Sir John Whitmore (a British aristocrat, and key collaborator with Andrija Puharich in channeling “The Nine”)and presents The Nine as real extraterrestrial or extra‑dimensional entities in contact with his father; and second, his own UFO sighting in 1985 at his father’s North Carolina house, when a predicted craft appeared as a silent, multicolored array of lights moving slowly over the treetops. That experience made him feel the whole story, including his father’s contact with The Nine, had real weight.

Andy and Greg stress how unresolved the whole topic remains. As they sit today, after going through tapes, documents, and archives, they still cannot say what The Nine really were: genuine cosmic intelligences, an intelligence‑community manipulation, a group psychodrama, or some mix of these. They find it strange that no one now seems to be openly channeling The Nine in the same way, and that their story is tightly tied to that one period, with those few people around Puharich. For them, The Nine remain both a mystical “council of intelligences” overseeing the universe and a deep rabbit hole of Cold War psychic research, spies, and high‑society spiritual experiments that have never been fully explained.

{ https://howandwhys.com/ }

Loeb to Newsmax: UFO Releases May Come in Waves

By Solange Reyner 

Astrophysicist Avi Loeb said President Donald Trump's pledge to release government information on unidentified flying objects will likely occur in phases, beginning with the publication of additional video evidence, while raising the possibility of major scientific and national security implications.

Speaking on Newsmax's "Saturday Agenda," Loeb said, "there probably will be several waves of release," with "the first one" likely to involve "videos, video files."

He noted that previous footage made public has often been "blurry" and "not very informative," adding, "my hope is that we will see something more consequential, interesting, intriguing."

Trump has promised to expand public access to information on unidentified aerial phenomena, an issue that has gained increased attention in Washington in recent years.

Loeb said the importance of any new material will depend on whether it can be explained by known technologies. "If we see objects in the sky that we cannot fully understand, the members of the Pentagon intelligence agencies cannot figure out," he said, "there are two possibilities.

"Either adversarial nations are using technologies that we are not aware of, or maybe we're dealing with something beyond this Earth, or non-human made objects."

Loeb to Newsmax: UFO Releases May Come in Waves

He said either outcome would be significant, calling it "a learning experience" with implications for both national security and scientific advancement.

"At the very minimum, it's important for national security if it's produced by humans," he said, but added that even a single confirmed case of non-human technology would be transformative.

"If we happen to find even one out of a million objects that was not produced by humans and is technological, it would be the biggest discovery of human history," Loeb said, adding that Trump "will go down in history as the person who allowed the scientific community to learn that."

Loeb also pointed to the potential for such discoveries to unlock new technological possibilities, suggesting there may be methods of propulsion or maneuvering beyond current capabilities.

However, he cautioned that the most sensitive data may not be immediately released.

"There must be some data from satellites and other sources that we cannot release because it was obtained by classified sensors," he said, noting concerns about exposing U.S. capabilities to adversaries.

"It's unclear whether the most intriguing data will be released in the first wave," Loeb said, but added, "if there is something there, we should all know about it."

{ https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/ }

Mysterious deaths of UFO researchers stretch back decades as chilling pattern emerges

• MORE: Mysterious UFO spotted near America's secretive military testing site

By ROB WAUGH

The recent probe into a collection of missing scientists has reignited the debate over a decades-old string of deaths among those researching UFOs. 

There have been at least 11 deaths and disappearances among prominent scientists, nuclear officials and experts linked to UFOs, such as retired Major General William Neil McCasland, since 2022.

Federal investigators have been looking into the cases, with FBI Director Kash Patel saying that the bureau is 'spearheading the effort' to uncover any possible links between cases.

However, UFO researcher Timothy Hood and others have alleged that there was a much older series of deaths, including mysterious 'suicides,' stretching back to the late 1940s - also known as the dawn of the UFO era.

Conspiracy theorists have suggested that hundreds of deaths could be linked to exotic research, including staged plane crashes and incidents made to look as if researchers took their own lives.

Nigel Watson, author of Portraits of Alien Encounters Revisited, told the Daily Mail that many of these suspicious events took place shortly after early civilian researchers and even military officers investigated witness reports of UFO sightings.

To this point, the US government has maintained that there has never been any evidence of UFOs or extraterrestrials, dismissing many incidents as explainable phenomena such as weather balloons or bird sightings.

However, many of the incidents researched by Hood and written about by Watson involved physical encounters with strange aircraft - including one incident which sent deadly debris raining down from the sky.

Kenneth Arnold (Pictured) was one of several people who spotted flying saucers over the US in 1947

One of the most notorious cases allegedly took place at the start of the 'flying saucer' era in 1947.

Harold A Dahl, along with his son Charles and two crewmen, was in a tugboat off Maury Island in Puget Sound between Washington State's Seattle and Tacoma.

The men said they saw six golden and silver doughnut-shaped objects flying above them, with one 'wobbling' before releasing a rain of thin metallic strips and black lumps.

One struck the boy's arm, burning him, while others killed their dog. Dahl's boss, Fred Lee Crisman, visited the site and recovered some of the debris.

Dahl was then confronted by a dark-suited man driving a black sedan, who drove him to a diner in Tacoma and warned him to keep silent about the entire incident.

Kenneth Arnold, who had spotted flying saucers just days earlier, asked for help from Air Force Intelligence.

On July 31, 1947, Captain William Davidson and Lieutenant Frank M Brown were dispatched to Tacoma, but found no evidence of a rain of molten lead, and thought the sample fragments were slag from a smelting plant.

Davidson and Brown died when their B-25 crashed on their way back to base. Many of the samples and photographs associated with the case have vanished.

In 1947, a group of doughnut-shaped objects allegedly dropped burning debris down on Harold Dahl and his son. The incident ended up killing their dog (Stock Image)

Watson said: 'As they were returning to their base at Hamilton Field, California, the port engine of their B-25 aircraft caught fire and they were killed when [they] crashed near Kelso, Washington State.'

'An anonymous caller to the local newspaper, named the victims before the crash was made public and claimed the aircraft was shot down by a 20mm cannon because it was carrying fragments of a flying saucer,' the author continued.

'Two men and a dog had been killed, and Kenneth Arnold was nearly added to the list. When he took off from Tacoma, his engine failed, and he had to make a crash landing. On checking his aircraft, he found that his fuel valve had been switched off. Paul Lance, a reporter for the Tacoma Times, who covered this story, died suddenly two weeks later of meningitis.'

Watson said that many ufologists have suspected the case was an elaborate hoax that got out of hand, and may have been instigated by US intelligence agencies to discredit Kenneth Arnold's original sighting.

To further stoke the conspiracy fires, Crisman was later investigated in a case related to the assassination of President Kennedy.

A district attorney writing in a press release said: 'Mr. Crisman has been engaged in undercover activity for a part of the industrial warfare complex for years.'

Other UFO researchers have died under extremely mysterious circumstances, with relatives refusing to accept the 'official explanation.'

New York-based UFO researcher Jennifer Stevens said she was contacted by two boys in February 1968 who claimed to have seen a 'glowing fireball' over the Mohawk River.

Crisman was later investigated in a case related to the John F Kennedy assassination after allegedly recovering UFO debris

The boys' friend thought he saw a white-suited humanoid in the bushes, highlighting a series of similar sightings in that area at the time.

Another 16-year-old boy's body was found nearby after leaving a note with his grandparents to say he was going for a walk.

Watson wrote: 'The coroner's verdict was death from exposure, but Stevens was convinced that his death was connected to UFO activity in the area.'

'She noted that the boy's tracks in the snow indicated he had been running at first, then it seemed as if something had dragged him from above.'

After the sighting, Stevens' husband, Peter, was accosted by a man who allegedly said: 'People who look for UFOs should be very careful.'

The 'saturnine' man contacted Mr Stevens in a store in downtown Schenectady and reportedly claimed: 'There have been people watching the sky every night down by the river in Scotia.'

Max Spiers (Pictured) claimed to have survived a secret government 'super soldier' program

Shortly afterwards, Peter Stevens, a healthy man in his 30s, died suddenly, and Jennifer Stevens 'retired' from UFO investigations.

Watson said: 'Many of these cases could be coincidences or people trying to make something out of nothing. There are certainly some strange incidents.'

In 1971, researcher Otto Binder claimed that 137 UFO investigators had died in mysterious circumstances during the 1960s. 

These strange incidents include multiple reported 'suicides' among the UFO community, which have been met with suspicion over the decades.

UFO researcher Philip Schneider claimed that he was being followed by 'government vans' and attempts had been made to run him off the road.

In January 1996, a friend broke into Schneider's apartment in Wilsonville, Oregon, where his dead body had been rotting for several days.

Initially, it was presumed he had died from a stroke, but then rubber tubing was reportedly found wrapped and knotted around his neck.

Watson revealed that the 'official verdict was suicide but his former wife, Cynthia, and several friends could not accept this.'

In 1996, UFO researcher Philip Schneider claimed that he was being followed by 'government vans' and attempts had been made to run him off the road

'He was found with his legs under his bed and his head resting on the seat of his wheelchair - an unusual position for a suicide - and there was blood nearby that did not seem to be Schneider's. His lecture material and UFO writings were missing from the apartment, yet valuables had gone untouched.'

Watson said that many of the cases were murkier than they seem, with UFO experts claiming that deaths which have been ruled accidents or suicides were in fact murders.

There is also a hotspot in South America, where 'UFO deaths' may actually have been related to military operations.

Other deaths seized on by conspiracy theorists have turned out to have natural explanations.

In 2016, conspiracy theorist and UFO hunter Max Spiers feared he would be murdered and told his mother to 'investigate' if anything happened to him shortly before his death.

Spiers, who claimed to have survived a secret government 'super soldier' program, was found dead at the house of friend Monika Duval in Poland, allegedly after 'vomiting black fluid.'

Conspiracy fans were convinced Spiers was killed to silence him, with his own cryptic writings about conspiracies stirring the pot.

However, an inquest found he died from taking a combination of powerful prescription drugs, including Oxycodone and Xanax, while suffering from pneumonia.

Local police were heavily criticized for their initial investigation, which allowed rumors about the incident to flourish.

Coroner Christopher Sutton-Mattocks said: 'Max was a conspiracy theorist and a well-known one at that.'

'If there was anything that was bound to excite the interest of other conspiracy theorists, it was the wholly incompetent initial investigation into his death.'

In fact, officials determined that Spiers fell asleep on Duval's sofa after taking about 10 tablets of a Turkish form of Xanax, after reportedly purchasing a pharmacy's 'entire stock' while on holiday.

A post-mortem examination also found deadly levels of oxycodone, an opioid, in his system.

Watson said: 'Many of these stories sound outlandish and many of these deaths do have credible explanations.'

'So they don't go much beyond the UFO community and they only get reported as individual incidents, when you collect the information together, there are a surprising number of ufologists who have died in strange ways and circumstances since the 1950s.'

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Three key forces driving UFO disclosure as Trump prepares file release

By ROB WAUGH FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

The long-awaited moment of UFO disclosure may finally be approaching,  and one veteran lobbyist believes three powerful forces are driving it forward.

President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that 'it is going to be interesting' when the UFOs are released 'in the near future.'

Stephen Bassett, one of America's longest-serving UFO disclosure advocates, told the Daily Mail that mounting pressure from the public, political turmoil and growing fears of global conflict are pushing the United States toward what he believes could be a historic revelation.

According to Bassett, those forces have converged at a moment of rising international tension that he fears could spiral into catastrophic conflict.

Nearly 80 years after the first flying saucer reports stunned the world, he believes the momentum behind disclosure is now impossible to ignore.

Public fascination with UFOs has surged into the mainstream, while political crises and global instability have intensified scrutiny of government secrecy.

Bassett argued that these combined pressures are creating conditions unlike anything seen before in modern history.

If disclosure happens, he believes it could become what he described as the most significant revelation in human history.   

Donald Trump has promised to release UFO files, saying, 'This process is well under way, and we found many very interesting documents, I must say.'

Trump reignited the debate about UFO disclosure earlier this year when he announced plans to release classified files tied to alien life and unidentified aerial phenomena.

In February, Trump wrote on Truth Social:'Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).'

For Bassett, those statements represented the culmination of nearly three decades of advocacy aimed at forcing the federal government to acknowledge what he believes is long-standing evidence of extraterrestrial contact.

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The first of the three forces driving disclosure, he said, is growing public pressure.

Over the past decade, UFOs have moved from fringe fascination to mainstream conversation, fueled by viral footage, government briefings and a surge of media coverage.

More than 10,000 articles about UFOs have been published in mainstream media outlets over the past nine years, Bassett noted, describing the shift as evidence that public awareness has reached unprecedented levels.

'Not only is it credible, but it's also massive, and we are now in a position 80 years on where enough has been put in place, enough of a platform has been built that the President could step out tomorrow on that platform and confirm the non-human presence that we have the tech, we have the bodies, we have the craft,' said Bassett.

'And I don't think anybody would be particularly shocked.'

One of America's longest-serving UFO disclosure advocates, told the Daily Mail that mounting pressure from the public, political turmoil and growing fears of global conflict are pushing the United States toward what he believes could be a historic revelation (stock)

Such an announcement, he believes, would surpass nearly every other historical moment in significance.

Revealing the truth about UFOs would be 'the single most important act of any head of state in the history of the human race,' according to B

The second force, Bassett argued, involves political turmoil and scandals that dominate the public conversation.

Republican representative Thomas Massie described the push to release UFO files in starkly different terms, calling it 'the ultimate weapon of mass distraction.'

'The Epstein files aren't going away... even for aliens,' Massie shared in a statement.

Bassett, however, insisted that disclosure momentum has been building across administrations for decades, regardless of shifting political controversies.

Multiple presidents were aware of extraterrestrial activity but chose not to publicly acknowledge it.

Jimmy Carter reported seeing a UFO in 1969, and as a candidate, he promised to release all US information on UFOs, but once in office, he refused, citing potential defense implications. 

Former President Jimmy Carter, he claimed, was tempted to reveal the truth but was ultimately prevented from doing so.

Then came former President Barack Obama, who said that when he took office, he asked about the existence of aliens and was told there was no evidence of extraterrestrial contact, later clarifying on a podcast that unidentified aerial phenomena are real but that he had not seen proof of a government cover-up. 

Trump himself, according to Bassett, may not have initially been drawn to the UFO issue, but growing pressure from within government has made it increasingly difficult to ignore.

The third and most alarming force, Bassett believes, is rising global instability and the growing threat of nuclear conflict.

He argued that humanity's long history with nuclear weapons may be closely tied to the extraterrestrial phenomenon itself.

Bassett said: 'It's not a coincidence that the engagement of this planet by these non-humans and their technology, which may have happened in the past various times, literally explodes after the bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

'They have hovered over bases and turned off ICBMs on a number of occasions in the US and in Russia. The evidence for that is finally coming.'

'I have concluded, not casually, that that is at the centre of the engagement right now. We've been heading for another nuclear weapons use that will probably trigger an absolute cataclysm.

The growing risk of nuclear weapons use, he said, appears to be at the center of what he views as current activity, warning that another detonation could trigger catastrophic consequences. 

That looming possibility, he argued, is closely tied to what he believes is motivating extraterrestrial involvement, with disclosure seen as a crucial step toward potential open contact and, ultimately, eliminating nuclear weapons before civilization suffers irreversible damage. 

Bassett believes these forces are converging at a uniquely dangerous moment in history, creating what he views as the perfect conditions for disclosure.

The push toward transparency, he suggested, may not be driven solely by human forces.

'It will be the greatest paradigm shift in world view, in human history. It is not an accident that, as we approach disclosure, which I believe the extraterrestrials have been leaning towards for some time,' Bassett said.

'In other words, they're not opposing it. They've been kind of helping to advance it under their own agenda.'

The potential impact of disclosure, he believes, would unfold gradually but with enormous consequences.

To illustrate the scale of change, Bassett compared the revelation to a ripple spreading across water, growing larger and more powerful over time.

'This is the equivalent of dropping a pebble into that pond, and the waves that start are small, not large, but as they get further and further from the impact point, they get larger and larger and larger until they're almost synonymic proportion at some point down the line, that is how disclosure is going to impact the world,' he said.

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The Serpo Mission: Inside One of the Most Controversial UFO Conspiracy Stories Ever Told

Few alleged UFO narratives have generated as much fascination, skepticism, and debate as the story of Project Serpo, sometimes referred to as Project Crystal Knight. Presented by former Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent Richard Doty, this extraordinary account claims that the United States secretly participated in an interstellar exchange program with extraterrestrial beings from the Zeta Reticuli star system.

According to the story, the origins of Project Serpo trace back to the infamous 1947 Roswell incident. Doty describes not one but two alleged UFO crashes near Corona, New Mexico. In this version, U.S. military forces recovered advanced alien craft technology and, more significantly, a surviving extraterrestrial biological entity, nicknamed “Ebe.”

The Roswell Survivor and Alleged Contact

Doty claims the surviving alien was transported to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where communication was eventually established. Through Ebe, U.S. intelligence reportedly gained access to advanced technologies, including an extraordinary faster-than-light communication system capable of sending signals to Ebe’s home planet in roughly nine months rather than decades.

This planet was allegedly designated “Serpo,” a name Doty claims stood for “Secret Extraterrestrial Remote Planet Operations.” Communication stations were supposedly built in New Mexico, Australia, Peru, and Chile to maintain contact with Serpo’s civilization.

While these assertions remain unsupported by mainstream evidence, they form the backbone of one of modern ufology’s most controversial legends.

The Human-Alien Exchange Program

Perhaps the most remarkable claim is that, during the 1960s, the U.S. government organized a highly classified mission in which carefully selected American military personnel traveled to Serpo aboard alien spacecraft.

The mission allegedly involved:

• A team of specially trained astronauts
• 42 months of secret preparation
• Identity erasure through intelligence “sheep dipping”
• A projected 10-year stay on Serpo
• Approximately 90,000 pounds of supplies and equipment

In exchange, extraterrestrial visitors were reportedly sent to Earth as diplomatic representatives.

According to anonymous intelligence insiders, the astronauts spent over a decade on Serpo, documenting alien society, biology, culture, and technology. Mission logs allegedly included 1,800 pages of notes and more than 600 cassette recordings detailing their experiences.

The Missing Tapes and Classified Logs

One of the story’s most intriguing aspects is the alleged existence of detailed mission evidence.

Doty references:

• Hundreds of recorded audio tapes
• Extensive written mission logs
• Interviews with supposed surviving crew members
• Testimony from retired Defense Intelligence Agency officials

These materials were reportedly circulated through UFO researcher Victor Martinez’s website in the mid-2000s before disappearing. The original tapes are said to have vanished, possibly recovered by intelligence agencies.

The absence of verifiable physical evidence remains one of the strongest arguments against the story’s credibility.

Fact, Fiction, or Cold War Disinformation?

Even Doty acknowledges the possibility that Project Serpo may have been an elaborate disinformation campaign designed during the Cold War.

If true, the objective may have been psychological warfare:

• Convincing the Soviet Union that the U.S. possessed extraterrestrial alliances
• Suggesting access to advanced propulsion or weapons systems
• Deterring potential aggression through technological intimidation

This theory aligns with known intelligence strategies used throughout the Cold War, when deception operations were routinely employed to manipulate adversaries.

Scientific Challenges

A major weakness in the Serpo narrative lies in the scientific inconsistencies.

Doty himself questions:

• Faster-than-light travel feasibility
• Different reported physics on Serpo
• Biological survivability during prolonged interstellar travel
• Lack of reproducible technological proof

Given that Serpo is allegedly located within the Milky Way, conventional scientific understanding suggests the laws of physics should remain constant, raising serious doubts about many claims.

Why the Serpo Story Endures

Despite its questionable evidence, Project Serpo continues to captivate UFO enthusiasts because it combines:

• Roswell mythology
• Government secrecy
• Alien diplomacy
• Space exploration
• Cold War intrigue

Its blend of intelligence insiders, anonymous leaks, and missing classified materials makes it one of the most enduring conspiracy theories in UFO culture.

The Serpo Mission remains suspended between extraordinary possibility and elaborate deception. Supporters see it as hidden proof of human contact with extraterrestrial civilizations, while critics view it as a carefully constructed intelligence myth.

Without definitive evidence, Project Serpo remains what it has always been: one of the most provocative and controversial stories in UFO history.

Whether it represents suppressed truth or strategic fiction, the legend of Serpo continues to fuel speculation about humanity’s place in the cosmos.

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NASA Documents Show Renewed Internal Planning on How to Announce Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life

Supporting materials included in the release show that NASA’s work on extraterrestrial discovery communications extends back several years. A presentation titled “Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life Communications Protocol Development,” dated July 29, 2020, outlines foundational considerations for such a scenario.

That document emphasizes that any discovery could vary significantly in nature:

“Factors about the detection/discovery may occur along a spectrum: Location: near (in our Solar System) far (exoplanets) Organism: microbial humanoid Biosignature: chemical/molecular ‘traditional’ fossil”

It also highlights the dual challenge of scientific validation and public communication, stating:

“Differences in socioeconomics, race, gender, education level, culture, faith, etc.”

“Ensure all have accurate information and support to make meaning of it”

“Cultivate a culture of celebration vs. fear”

The opening line of this section places immediate emphasis on how unevenly a discovery of extraterrestrial life could be received across society. By explicitly listing “differences in socioeconomics, race, gender, education level, culture, faith, etc.,” the document acknowledges that public interpretation would not be uniform, but shaped by deeply rooted social and cultural frameworks. The guidance that follows reinforces NASA’s role not simply as a source of scientific data, but as a communicator responsible for ensuring that “all have accurate information and support to make meaning of it,” coupled with an intentional effort to “cultivate a culture of celebration vs. fear.”

Taken together, this section reflects a deliberate focus on managing societal reaction as much as conveying scientific findings, with the underlying premise that public response itself would be a critical component of any confirmed discovery.

Defined Role for NASA in a Discovery Scenario

The documents outline how NASA views its role in the event of such a discovery, emphasizing information dissemination and public engagement.

According to the presentation:

“The provision of accurate scientific information in an equitable way”

“Access to scientific expertise”

“Encouragement of healthy conversation and dialogue”

The agency also describes itself as playing a broader societal role:

“Facilitators in a co-creative, meaning-making process across diverse communities”

Redactions Limit Visibility Into Final Protocol