The Bermuda Triangle

Also known as the Devil’s Triangle, the Bermuda Triangle is believed to be the devil’s lair as most of the unusual disappearances in the triangle had no records of human error, equipment failures or natural disasters

The term “Bermuda Triangle” was initially coined by writer Vincent Gaddis in 1964 in the men’s pulp magazine Argosy. Gaddis was also the one who proposed that Atlantis was real and that it was somehow connected to the triangle.

Let’s have a look at some of the most famous incidents:

1. Accounts of weird activity in the area were already being recorded way back during the days of exploration and early travel. In fact, Christopher Columbus wrote about a large fireball dropping from the sky and into the ocean during one of his journeys in the region in 1492. Columbus claimed what he saw caused his compass to malfunction.

2. One of the most famous Bermuda Triangle mystery would have to be the story of the Mary Celeste. Also known as the Ghost Ship, it was found in full sail on December 4, 1872 without a single passenger on board

3. A large French ship sailing from Hamburg to Havana was discovered intact with all of its cargo, but nobody on board, except for a canary, a cat and some fowl. Whatever happened to the crew remains a mystery…

4. On one of its trips, the large American ship Ellen Austin, came across another vessel sailing in the Bermuda Triangle with no one on board. Some of its crew transferred to the other vessel to try and salvage it, but it never actualized due to a storm. On another trip, the Ellen Austin came across once again with the ship and sent some of its crew to scavenge it. No one was on board and few days later, it disappeared again

5. The Deering was found aground off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina in 1921 with its entire crew missing. The ships log and navigation equipment were gone, the crew’s personal effects and lifeboats had also disappeared, leaving investigators completely baffled.

6. The disappearance of the USS Cyclops and its 306 man crew back in 1910 is one of the Bermuda Triangle’s most mysterious incidents. Its disappearance is the single largest loss of life in U.S Naval history not directly related to combat.

7. Newlyweds Frank and Romina Leone went finishing off the coast of Boynton Beach, Florida in their new boat on June 18, 2003. When the couple failed to turn up for work the next day, family and friends began to worry. U.S coastguards were sent out to search the waters of Miami, but neither their boat or bodies were ever found.

8. On January 30, 1948, the Star Tiger left Santa Maria, Azores with 25 passengers on board. It was meant to arrive in Bermuda at 5 a.m, but at some point just before its arrival, the radio operator lost contact with the pilot. Hours later, the plane has disappeared out of sight. A fleet of 26 aircraft were sent out to search of the Star Tiger, which was never found.

9. During the same year as the Star Tiger’s mysterious disappearance, a Douglas Dakota DC-3 flight took off from Puerto Rico, heading for Miami, Florida. Twenty minutes before landing, the flight disappeared from radars and was never to be seen or heard of again. Two more cases very similar cases have occurred since.

10. On October 30, 1954, Flight 441 took off with 42 passengers making their way to Lajes in the Azores Islands. The plane was about 400 miles off the coast line when contact was lost. Flight 441 never arrived at its destination and disappeared without a trace.

11. Five ill fated avenger bomber planes disappeared without a trace on December 5, 1945 while on a training mission. Frequent communication had taken place between the trainees and their flight leader, Charles Taylor during the mission. To make the situation even weirder, the five rescue craft sent after them also disappeared.

12. While flying over the Bermuda Triangle in 1970, American pilot Bruce Gernon experiencing something that he can’t quite logically explain. As he was flying, he flew through mysterious donut shaped hole that formed into a swirling cloud tunnel. At the end of the tunnel the pilot witnessed what he could only describe as an electronic fog, which caused his aeronautical instruments to malfunction. Had he just gone through some sort of time portal?

13. Cary Gordon Trantham was flying home after spending time with her daughter in Florida when she experienced something very strange. While flying over the open water at night, she suddenly flew through a thick bed of fog, which left her flying in pitch darkness. She claims not to have been able to navigate herself as her plane’s instruments went haywire. Lucky escape!

14. On March 12, 2009, passengers aboard a flight spotted strange lights in the skies over what looked like a vortex in the sea. The unexplained sighting was even photographed by naval cameras who claimed the object floated above water for an hour before disappearing.

15. On November 3, 1978, Irving Rivers’ Eastern Caribbean Airways plane disappeared from radars just moments after controllers at the airport in Saint Thomas cleared it for landing. The plane was less than two miles from the airport when it disappeared.

16. It was on January 30, 1948 when Tudor Star Tiger left Santa Maria, Azores with 25 passengers on board. The plane was supposed to arrive in Bermuda at 5 a.m., but it never came. Hours after its supposed arrival, a fleet of 26 aircraft searched for days for the lost aircraft, but never found a single trace of the Star Tiger.

17. A couple of UFOs were spotted on the horizons of the Bermuda Triangle back in 2014 by passengers aboard a cruise ship. The UFOs were described as being bright orange, with lights that gradually dimmed and disappeared after a few moments

18. The Witchcraft was a luxury cabin boat owned by hotel mogul, Dan Burack. On December 22, 1967, Burack and a friend set out about a mile out of the Miami Coastline to view the Christmas lights when the coast guard received a distress call from him. When the coast guard arrived at the site, no boat was to be found.

19. Joshua Slocum was dubbed as the very first man to sail solo around the world in 1895. Although he was considered as one of the best sailors of his time, Joshua Slocum apparently disappeared from the face of the earth in 1909 after allegedly passing through the Devil’s Triangle. He sailed with his old fishing boat called “The Spray.”

UIP Summary: 

This is only a small list of the mysterious disappearances and the governments must know what really is going on in the Bermuda Triangle! Not many people have survived this strange phenomenon, but the few that have tell the same story which makes me believe that there is definitely a portal in that part of the world.

I truly hope this is the case, as it would be wonderful to know that all of these people who disappeared are actually living a happy life in some other dimensions

Yaz, Mwv

{ http://www.ufointernationalproject.com/ }

17-11-2016 om 18:36 geschreven door peter  

Death Dive! Comet Plunges into the Sun at Mind-Blowing Speed (Must See Video)

(Before It's News)

Death Dive! Comet Plunges into the Sun at Mind-Blowing Speed

ESA and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, saw a bright comet plunge toward the sun on Nov. 16-17, 2016, at nearly 1.3 million miles per hour. 

Like most sungrazing comets, this comet was torn apart and vaporized by the intense forces near the sun.

The disk of the sun is represented by the dark circle in the video clips.

From Nemesis Maturity

{ http://beforeitsnews.com/ }

17-11-2016 om 18:18 geschreven door peter  

Greetings, Earthlings! 8 Ways Aliens Could Contact Us

Credit: NASA/NOAA/GOES Project

INTRO:  Beyond Earth

From a few subtle radio signals to alien monsters bombing the White House, science fiction is replete with depictions of aliens making contact with mere mortals.

While some of those depictions are far-fetched, it turns out that scientists have spent countless hours thinking about just how extraterrestrial civilizations could contact humans. Some of their ideas are nearly as fantastical as Hollywood's wildest tales.

From alien megastructures to miniature robots, here are some of the more radical ways "little green men" are likely to contact humans. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens]

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

1. Mega construction

Of course, signs of intelligent life don't have to be tiny objects — they could also be really, really big ones. Some scientists have argued that alien megastructures could be like a giant "come here" sign pointing other civilizations to their presence, Grinspoon said. In fact, scientists recently kept their eye on the star KIC 8462852, which dimmed and brightened mysteriously over the past several years. Some have argued that the star is surrounded by an alien megastructure that is occasionally blocking light from the star — though other explanations include a swarm of exoplanets or a planet-forming disc.

In December 2015, scientists reported a complete lack of communication from the region.

"We found no evidence of an advanced civilization beaming intentional laser signals toward Earth," study co-author Douglas Vakoch, president of METI International in San Francisco, said in a statement.

Credit: LLNL/NIF/NASA/E. Kowaluk (LLE)

2. Laser pulses

Repetitive laser pulses could also be a sign of an alien race trying to get in contact with us, because, in theory, lasers could send signals or messages across vast distances, Grinspoon said. To find those laser pulses, researchers have zeroed in on extremely bright flashes of light, which are less likely to be caused by natural phenomena. 

So far, however, they've found no sign of alien signals.

Credit: NASA/ JPL-Caltech

3. Robot probes

Alien signals may not be traveling in electromagnetic waves at all. Instead, signs of intelligent life may be very small objects that advanced civilizations send out to explore the universe.

"Most of the solar system is still unexplored, so for all we know, there could be alien probes orbiting on the asteroid belt or somewhere on the surface of Mars," Grinspoon said. "They could be quite miniature. Who knows what alien technology is capable of — they could be the size of golf balls."

Finding these objects could rely on the same technology scientists could use to sample those regions, Grinspoon said.

Credit: SETI Institute

4. Radio waves

In a 1959 paper in the journal Nature, physicists Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi argued that scientists should scour radio waves for signs of extraterrestrial life. That's because radio waves travel relatively undisturbed through the universe, not being absorbed or re-emitted by celestial objects. Thus, the duo reasoned, any extraterrestrialshoping for their message to be relayed across long distances would logically resort to this medium, said David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist at the Planetary Science Institute.

For decades, that's been the predominant way to search for aliens. For instance, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has scoured telescope data for signal-like radio waves.

Of course, the whole search rests on the assumption that aliens are thinking just like us, which may not be the case.

"Aliens don't necessarily read Nature magazine," Grinspoon told Live Science.

Credit: Bibi Saint-Pol (Wikimedia)

5. Radiating away

Of course, not all aliens will be on a mission to find other creatures in the big, lonely universe. Some may be more like hermits, hoping to hide their existence. If that's the case, they'd make no attempts to broadcast their existence.

However, theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson has argued that even celestial hermit kingdoms might develop technology to siphon energy from a nearby star using an orbiting object known as a Dyson sphere.

"It doesn't have to be a sphere at all," Dyson previously told Live Science, "just any place where aliens happen to be generating a lot of energy."

These Dyson spheres would then throw off waste heat, an inescapable byproduct of harnessing star power, in the form of infrared radiation. Already, researchers at the Allen Telescope Array and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer(WISE) space telescope are scouring the skies for signs of such waste radiation.

Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin

6. Star dance

Others have proposed that highly advanced civilizations could be advanced astro-engineers, moving stars into bizarre or highly geometric alignments that are unlikely to occur by chance, Grinspoon said.

"They could construct something that would be visible from a huge distance across the galaxy, or even from another galaxy, that would be obviously artificial," Grinspoon said. "Nobody's seen anything like that."

Others might actually harness star power to create messages. For instance, if aliens could spin small and extremely dense stars called neutron stars in just the right way, they could make these stars emit light as a kind of flashing beacon, Grinspoon said.

In fact, when neutron stars were discovered, scientists thought they might be messages from "little green men." (That discovery earned astronomer Antony Hewish the Nobel Prize in physics; his graduate student Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who first discovered the star, was passed up for the high honor.) [Nobel Would-Bes: 6 Scientists Who Were Passed Up for the Prize]

Credit: Mark Garlick/University of Warwick

7. Needle in a haystack

Even if aliens are trying to make contact, there's no guarantee we'd receive their messages. The universe is 91 billion light-years across, and messages could come from anywhere.

To narrow the search, some argue that aliens are likelier to send messages our way if they know we're here. A study published in February 2016 in the preprint journal arXivfound that there are 82 stars we know of in Earth's transit zone, or an area of the sky that has a direct line of sight to Earth.

"Along this line, there is a very small band— a strip of less than a degree from where extrasolar observers would see the Earth transiting the sun," said study co-author René Heller, an astrobiologist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany.

Heller and his colleague Ralph Pudritz at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, predicted that there may be up to 100,000 stars within this zone of the sky — some of which could have planets teeming with life orbiting them.

One advantage of this approach is that the tiny slice of the sky is relatively easy to search.

"You could just skim or scan the whole Earth transit zone over the course of maybe a few dozen nights or so, depending on how large the field of view of your radio telescope is," Heller told Live Science.

If these hidden exoplanets harbor life, they'd also be in the same galactic neighborhood — just a few hundred light-years away at most.

Credit: Dreamstime

8. Part of space exploration

The search for intelligent life-forms may not need dedicated megaprojects, Grinspoon said.

"We're going to send spacecraft out to these places to explore," Grinspoon said, referring to spots like the asteroid belt. "So while we explore the solar system, we should at least be aware of the possibility of finding something really anomalous that would be artificial."

Either way, if there are smart creatures in the universe, odds are, they know exactly what to do to make contact.

"Mathematically, it's pretty easy to show, and logically, it makes sense that they would be much more advanced," Grinspoon said. "We're such babies as a civilization; anybody that is outside trying to contact us probably has a much longer relationship with science and technology."

So, if aliens are trying to contact us, it's probably our fault that we're missing their signals, Grinspoon said.

17-11-2016 om 18:05 geschreven door peter  

17-11-2016 om 17:00 geschreven door peter  

Electronic E.T.: Intelligent Aliens Are Likely Machines

Any intelligent aliens that humans manage to contact probably won't look much like you or me, or the squid-like creatures in the new film "Arrival."

If an extraterrestrial species becomes advanced enough to send signals Earthlings can pick up, it will likely shed its traditional biological trappings and become a form of machine intelligence in rather short order, said veteran alien hunter Seth Shostak.

To make his case, Shostak pointed to the path that humanity appears to be on. The human species invented the radio around 1900 and the computer in 1945, and it's already manufacturing relatively cheap devices with greater computing power than the human brain. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Alien Life]

The development of true, strong artificial intelligence (AI) is therefore not too far off, experts have said. The famous futurist Ray Kurzweil, for example, has pegged 2045 as the year this world-changing "singularity" will hit.

"But maybe it takes to 2100, or 2150, or 2250. It doesn't matter," Shostak said in September during a presentation at the Dent:Space conference in San Francisco. "The point is, any society that invents radio, so we can hear them, within a few centuries, they've invented their successors. And I think that's important, because the successors are machines."

AI will interface with people's bodies for a while, but eventually humans will abandon the wetware and go fully digital, Shostak predicted.

 

"It'll be like — you build a four-cylinder engine. You put it in a horse to get a faster horse. And pretty soon you say, 'Look, let's get rid of the horse part and just build a Maserati,'" said Shostak, an astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Mountain View, California. "So that's probably what's going to happen."

Humans' machine selves will get smarter and more capable incredibly quickly, he added. Humanity's present intelligence is the result of 4 billion years of Darwinian evolution, which uses random variation as its raw material and is not directed toward any particular goal. But the evolution of machine intelligence will be engineered and efficient, Shostak said.

"Once you invent a thinking machine, you say, 'Invent something better than you are,' and you build that. 'Design something better than you are,' and you build that, and so forth," he said.

This idea has serious implications for the search for intelligent alien life. Unlike Earth organisms, super-advanced extraterrestrial machines would not require water or other chemicals to survive, so they would not be tied to their ancestors' home worlds tightly at all, Shostak said. And journeying tremendous distances would not be a big deal to these machines, provided they could access enough energy and raw materials to keep repairing themselves over the millennia, he said.

"We continue to look in the directions of star systems that we think have habitable words, that have planets where biology could cook up and eventually turn into something clever like you guys," he told the Dent:Space audience. "But I don't think it's going to be that way."

Shostak said he isn't counseling his fellow SETI astronomers to stop investigating potentially Earth-like planets such as Proxima b, a recently discovered world that lies just 4.2 light-years away. (And simple life-forms could still inhabit such worlds even if their most intelligent inhabitants went digital and departed long ago, Shostak said.) But it may be a good idea to expand the search to regions of space that would seemingly be attractive to digital life-forms, he said — for example, places with lots of available energy, such as the centers of galaxies.

"That may be where the really clever beings are," Shostak said.

"Maybe what we ought to do is look at places on the sky that connect two places where there is a lot of energy," in an attempt to intercept communications between alien machines, Shostak added.

"This is my message to you: We're looking for analogues of ourselves, but I don't know that that's the majority of the intelligence in the universe," Shostak concluded. "I'm willing to bet it's not."

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us@Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

EDITOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS

• The Serious Search for Intelligent Life: 4 Key Questions
• SETI: All About the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Infographic)
• 5 Bold Claims of Alien Life

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17-11-2016 om 16:53 geschreven door peter  

Mapping the Milky Way: 3D Image of the Galaxy

See a Virtual Milky Way Map from Europe's Gaia Spacecraft

The European Gaia space observatory is hard at work mapping our Milky Way Galaxy in unprecedented detail. Case in point: this virtual Milky Way map unveiled by Gaia mission scientists at the European Space Agency.

ESA launched the Gaia spacecraft in 2013 to make the most precise 3D map of stars in the Milky Way, as well as a map of its neighbors' stars – the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Earlier this year, ESA scientists unveiled Gaia's first billion-star map of the Milky Way. On Thursday (Nov. 10), the space agency also released this new virtual map based on data from the spacecraft. [Gaia's Milky Way Mapping Mission in Pictures]

"These engineering data have been accumulated over 18 months and combined to create a 'map' of the observed star densities, from which a beautiful and ghostly virtual image of our magnificent Milky Way galaxy can be discerned, showing the attendant globular clusters and Magellanic clouds," ESA officials wrote in an image description. "Where there are more stars, as in the Galactic center, the map is brighter; where there are fewer, the map is darker. The map includes brightness data corresponding to several million stars," they wrote in the same description.

The $1 billion (740 million euros) Gaia spacecraft is designed to create a high-resolution map of 1 billion stars in the Milky Way over the course of a five-year mission. The spacecraft is making its observations from a gravitationally stable point, called the sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, or L2, about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth.

You can find out more about the Gaia mission in our mission video here.

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

EDITOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS

• Most Powerful Camera To Fly In Space To Snap 3D Milky Way Map | Video
• Our Milky Way Galaxy's Core Revealed (Photos)
• How the Gaia Galaxy-Mapping Satellite Works (Infographic)

{ http://www.space.com/ }

17-11-2016 om 16:38 geschreven door peter  

Faraway Star Is Roundest Natural Object Ever Seen

A star 5,000 light-years from Earth is the closest thing to a perfect sphere that has ever been observed in nature, a new study reports.

Stars, planets and other round celestial bodies bulge slightly at their equators due to centrifugal force. Generally speaking, the faster these objects spin, the greater the force, and the larger the bulge. 

For example, the sun rotates once every 27 days, and an imaginary line drawn through its center at the equator is about 12 miles (20 kilometers) longer than a similar line drawn from pole to pole. The equatorial diameter of Earth, which completes a rotation every 24 hours, is 26 miles (42 km) longer than the polar diameter, even though Earth is much smaller than the sun. [Solar Quiz: How Well Do You Know the Sun?]

But the distant star, known as Kepler 11145123, has Earth, the sun and every other object that's ever been measured beat in terms of roundness, study team members said.

The researchers studied Kepler 11145123's natural oscillations, as observed by NASA's Kepler space telescope over a period of 51 months, from 2009 through 2013. (Kepler was designed to detect exoplanets by noting the tiny brightness dips that are caused when they cross their stars' faces, so the spacecraft is very sensitive to light fluctuations.)

The team, led by Laurent Gizon from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and the University of Göttingen in Germany, then used this information to determine the star's size. This technique is known as asteroseismology, because it allows astronomers to probe stellar interiors in much the same way that geologists use earthquakes to study our planet's insides. 

The researchers found that Kepler 11145123's equatorial and polar diameters differ by a mere 3.7 miles (6 km), even though the star is 1.86 million miles (3 million km) in diameter — about twice as wide as the sun. 

"This makes Kepler 11145123 the roundest natural object ever measured, even more round than the sun," Gizon said in a statement.

Why is the star so round? It rotates about three times more slowly than the sun, but that's probably not the whole story. Magnetic fields can also help flatten stars, so part of the answer may lie in Kepler 11145123's magnetic environment, astronomers said.

There's no guarantee that Kepler 11145123 will keep its roundness record forever. Gizon and his colleagues plan to study other stars using their asteroseismological techniques, which they said have delivered unprecedented precision and may therefore open up new lines of inquiry.

"It will be particularly interesting to see how faster rotation and a stronger magnetic field can change a star’s shape," Gizon said. "An important theoretical field in astrophysics has now become observational."

The new study was published today (Nov. 16) in the journal Science Advances.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

EDITOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS

• NASA's Planet-Hunting Kepler Telescope Explained (Infographic)
• Stunning Photos of Our Milky Way Galaxy (Gallery)
• How to Tell Star Types Apart (Infographic)

{ http://www.space.com/ }

17-11-2016 om 16:23 geschreven door peter  

Pluto's Wandering Heart Hints at Subsurface Ocean

Pluto's famous heart-shaped feature caused the dwarf planet to roll over the eons, and this reorientation probably wouldn't have been possible without a subsurface ocean, new research suggests.

The left lobe of Pluto's "heart" is a 600-mile-wide (1,000 kilometers) plain called Sputnik Planitia (formerly known as Sputnik Planum), which astronomers think is an enormous impact crater. This basin has been filling with nitrogen ice over the years and now contains huge amounts of the stuff. Indeed, observations by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which flew by Pluto last year, suggest that Sputnik Planitia's ice may be up to 6 miles (10 km) thick.

Sputnik Planitia is aligned nicely with Pluto's "tidal axis" — the line along which the gravitational pull from the dwarf planet's largest moon, Charon, is the strongest. And that's probably no coincidence, according to two new studies, both of which were published online today (Nov. 16) in the journal Nature. [Pluto Has Ocean Beneath Its Surface? Scientists Think So (Video)]

In the first study, James Keane, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, and his colleagues modeled what happened as nitrogen ice accumulated in Sputnik Planitia. The results were dramatic.

"Once enough ice has piled up, maybe a hundred meters thick, it starts to overwhelm the planet's shape, which dictates the planet's orientation," Keane said in a statement. "And if you have an excess of mass in one spot on the planet, it wants to go to the equator. Eventually, over millions of years, it will drag the whole planet over."

This tumble brought Sputnik Planitia to the southeast, until the plain faced directly away from Charon as it does today. The team's models predicted this very orientation: In this spot, near the tidal axis, the additional mass causes the least wobble in Pluto's spin, the researchers said. (Pluto and Charon are tidally locked, meaning the two bodies always show the same face to each other, just as Earth's moon always shows just one side to Earth.) 

Pluto's reorientation would have stressed the dwarf planet's crust, leading to a network of faults and fractures on the surface, Keane and his colleagues report. And New Horizons spotted just such a network, whose characteristics match those predicted by the team's models, they said.

Those models assume that Pluto harbors a subsurface ocean of liquid water — a notion bolstered by the second study, which was led by Francis Nimmo, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Nimmo and his team determined that the odds of Sputnik Planitia occurring in its present location, so close to the tidal axis, purely by chance were just 5 percent. So they, too, believe that a substantial reorientation has taken place.

The researchers suggested that the impact that created the basin weakened the crust overlying a buried ocean, causing some of the water to rise close to the surface. This action, along with the deposition of nitrogen ice in Sputnik Planitia, would have created enough of a "positive mass anomaly" to roll the dwarf planet, Nimmo and his colleagues wrote. 

It's hard to imagine Pluto reorienting in this way if it didn't have an ocean, Nimmo said. For example, the team's calculations suggest that Sputnik Planitia's ice layer would have to be 25 miles (40 km) thick if no ocean existed.

"Our view is that 40 kilometers' thickness of nitrogen ice is not that likely," Nimmo told Space.com. "So if you want to have another source of dense material down there, then water seemed like a very natural explanation, because water is a lot denser than ice." ['Land' on Pluto's Icy Plains in This Amazing New NASA Video]

The team also considered the possibility that rock migrated in to make up the extra mass, but that explanation doesn't seem likely, either, Nimmo said.

"The rock is so far down there, and it's also pretty strong," he said. "So it's hard to figure out how that rock would get moved around in the way that you would need."

Other research groups also have suggested that Pluto may harbor a subsurface ocean, using other lines of evidence. One such argument points to the dwarf planet's surface fractures, which may be the result of this ocean gradually freezing over time — a prospect also raised by Keane and his colleagues in their paper. (Water expands as it freezes, which would lead to stresses in overlying rock or ice.) In addition, Nimmo said, Pluto doesn't have an equatorial bulge — and bodies with oceans can't maintain such a bulge.

"All these lines of argument are pointing in the same direction," Nimmo said.

If Pluto does have an ocean, how has it managed to avoid freezing up entirely over the past 4.5 billion years? Pluto is big enough that it may have retained a substantial amount of internal heat, Nimmo said. And the dwarf planet's water may contain significant amounts of ammonia or other substances that act as an antifreeze, he added.

Astronomers think subsurface oceans exist on the Saturn moons Enceladusand Titan; the Jovian satellites Europa, Ganymede and Callisto; and a number of other solar system bodies. Indeed, such buried water may be abundant in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of frigid objects beyond Neptune's orbit, Nimmo said.

"My guess is that, on big Kuiper Belt objects, these kinds of oceans are pretty common," Nimmo said. "One of the lessons of the last 20 years is that oceans pop up in all kinds of unexpected places." 

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

EDITOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS

• Below Pluto's 'Heart' A Slushy Ocean May Churn | Video
• Destination Pluto: NASA's New Horizons Mission in Pictures
• Ride Along on New Horizons Probe's Epic Pluto Flyby (Video)
• Pluto: A Dwarf Planet Oddity (Infographic)

{ http://www.space.com/ }

17-11-2016 om 16:05 geschreven door peter  

Stephen Hawking: Humanity Only Has 1,000 Years Left on Earth

 

Getty

IN BRIEF

Because of systemic issues like habitat destruction, antibiotic resistance, increasing weapons ammunitions, and overpopulation, humanity's time on Earth may be rather limited. According to Hawking, our only hope may be alien worlds.

A PROBLEMATIC PLANET

Physicist Stephen Hawking has warned humanity that we probably only have about 1,000 years left on Earth, and the only thing that could save us from certain extinction is setting up colonies elsewhere in the Solar System.

“[W]e must … continue to go into space for the future of humanity,” Hawking said in a lecture at the University of Cambridge this week. “I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet.”

The fate of humanity appears to have been weighing heavily on Hawking of late – he’s also recently cautioned that artificial intelligence (AI) will be “either the best, or the worst, thing ever to happen to humanity”.

Stephen Hawking via Getty

Given that humans are prone to making the same mistakes over and over again – even though we’re obsessed with our own history and should know better – Hawking suspects that “powerful autonomous weapons” could have serious consequences for humanity.

As Heather Saul from The Independent reports,Hawking has estimated that self-sustaining human colonies on Mars are not going to be a viable option for another 100 years or so, which means we need to be “very careful” in the coming decades.

Without even taking into account the potentially devastating effects of climate change, global pandemics brought on by antibiotic resistance, and nuclear capabilities of warring nations, we could soon be sparring with the kinds of enemies we’re not even close to knowing how to deal with.

Late last year, Hawking added his name to a coalition of more than 20,000 researchers and experts, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Noam Chomsky, calling for a ban on anyone developing autonomous weapons that can fire on targets without human intervention.

As the founders of OpenAI, Musk’s new research initiative dedicated to the ethics of artificial intelligence, said last year, our robots are perfectly submissive now, but what happens when we remove one too many restrictions?

What happens when you make them so perfect, they’re just like humans, but better, just like we’ve always wanted?

“AI systems today have impressive but narrow capabilities,” the founders said.

“It seems that we’ll keep whittling away at their constraints, and in the extreme case they will reach human performance on virtually every intellectual task. It’s hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, and it’s equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly.”

And that’s not even the half of it.

Imagine we’re dealing with unruly robots that are so much smarter and so much stronger than us, and suddenly, we get the announcement – aliens have picked up on the signals we’ve been blasting out into the Universe and made contract.

Great news, right? Well, think about it for a minute. In the coming decades, Earth and humanity isn’t going to look so crash-hot.

We’ll be struggling to mitigate the effects of climate change, which means we’ll be running out of land to grow crops, our coasts will be disappearing, and anything edible in the sea is probably being cooked by the rapidly rising temperatures.

If the aliens are aggressive, they’ll see a weakened enemy with a habitable planet that’s ripe for the taking. And even if they’re non-aggressive, we humans certainly are, so we’ll probably try to get a share of what they’ve got, and oops: alien wars.

As Hawking says in his new online film, Stephen Hawking’s Favourite Places, “I am more convinced than ever that we are not alone,” but if the aliens are finding us, “they will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria”.

Clearly, we need a back-up plan, which is why Hawking’s 1,000-year deadline to destruction comes with a caveat – we might be able to survive our mistakes if we have somewhere else in the Solar System to jettison ourselves to.

BUT WE’RE NOT FINISHED JUST YET

That all might sound pretty dire, but Hawking says we still have a whole lot to feel optimistic about, describing 2016 as a “glorious time to be alive and doing research into theoretical physics”.

While John Oliver might disagree that there’s anything good about 2016 at all, Hawking says we need to “Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet.”

“Try to make sense of what you see, wonder about what makes the Universe exist. Be curious,” he told students at the Cambridge lecture. “However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.”

{ http://futurism.com/ }

17-11-2016 om 15:38 geschreven door peter  

17-11-2016 om 15:21 geschreven door peter  

 TIEN MEEST MYSTERIEUZE FOTO'S OOIT

Ik kwam bij toeval de volgende video tegen.

Het is een verzameling van tien foto's uit de geschiedenis van de fotografie, die vreemd en mysterieus zijn.

Ik vind het wel een leuke verzameling.

{ http://www.mysterieplanet.nl/index.php }

17-11-2016 om 14:49 geschreven door peter  

PRACHTIGE UFO BOVEN TENNESSEE, USA

Soms kom je best wel heel bijzonder ufo opnames tegen en de volgende hoort wat mij betreft in die categorie.

De foto hieronder is genomen door een man uit de plaats Arrington in Tennessee op 9 november 2016. Hij reed die dag op de weg en zag plotseling iets in de lucht. Eerst dacht hij dat het een luchtschip was, maar toen hij dichterbij kwam besefte hij dat dit absoluut geen luchtschip was.

Het was volgens de man erg groot en vloog heel langzaam vanuit het noorden naar het zuiden. Toen hij bij een plek kwam waar hij kon stoppen stonden er nog een paar auto’s en direct na hem stopte weer een auto.

De man beschrijft de ufo als er groot en solide en het enige licht dat de man kon ontdekken was een soort gloeiend wit licht bovenin. Er waren geen andere lichten bekennen zoals je die zou verwachten op een vliegtuig. Op een gegeven moment verdween het object achter de bomen en lieten een paar stomverbaasde mensen achter die nog nooit zoiets hadden gezien.

{ http://www.mysterieplanet.nl/index.php }

17-11-2016 om 14:46 geschreven door peter  

Alien Skull And Body Found In Cave In Peru, Nov 2016, Video, UFO Sighting News

Date of discovery: unknown

Location of discovery: cave in Peru

 

The details are a little vague, but Brian Foerester of Youtube investigated some small bodies found in the back of a caver in Peru. The bodies look thousands of years old and they resemble an alien with a height of about 1-2 feet tall. Much like the blueish grey alien body in the old (real) KGB leaked video of a UFO crash back in the 1968. This is a short alien. So they are small, does that make them existing impossible? The shortest human in the world was 21 and a half inches. Did he exist? Of course he did, and of course intelligent aliens can too. Great video by UFOvni2012.

Scott C. Waring

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

17-11-2016 om 14:37 geschreven door peter  

Two Unidentified Flying Objects Recorded On Video Passing Across The Supermoon

There was an increased interest in the moon recently as it came closer to Earth. However, one man claimed he noticed more than the supermoon when viewing it in Surprise, Arizona on Saturday evening.

According to YouTube username Rondomon, two strange objects passed by the moon on November 12.

The cameraman claimed he caught two UFOs while taking video of the supermoon with NexStar 6se telescope.

He said that he zoomed in the supermoon and walked away, but this was the time UFOs started their flyby. He described the UFOs to have distortion surrounding them, which he speculated to be a bending light.

The device he was using was a Sony handy cam with 5x optical zoom, 38x telescope magnification, maxview 40 lens, and manual focus at .9m.

Many UFO enthusiasts called the UFOs odd. They described them as solid because the light of the moon can’t be seen through them.

In the video comment section, some viewers agreed that the mysterious objects are UFOs. One viewer even claimed that she also saw a UFO passed by the supermoon on November 13 in Phoenix, Arizona. She reportedly saw it with her naked eye and it lo

oked like the UFO in the video posted on YouTube. Her boyfriend reportedly described it as if it was a little black ant crawling on the moon. The girl depicted the sighting as so strange but very real.

YouTube username Jugganaut7 thinks that they are just leaves blowing in the wind, but admits calling them UFOs is in the context of UFO definition.

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

17-11-2016 om 14:31 geschreven door peter  

Amazing UFO sighting above Tijuana, Mexico 15-Nov-2016

Here’s one really interesting daytime footage of a linked bright orbs hovering above Tijuana in Mexico. This was filmed on 15th November 2016.

Similar sighting was recorded over Japan a few years ago. You can watch both sightings in the video below.

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

17-11-2016 om 14:23 geschreven door peter  

Fast UFO caught on tape over Manchester, UK 15-Nov-2016

Here’s a new video of a very fast object flying across the night sky above Manchester in United Kingdom. This was taken on 15h November 2016.

Witness report: 

Looking out of the window I seen an Orb fly from south to north twisting going from red to white. 
first noticed it in the back garden.I thought at first it was a plane but it went across the sky way to fast.I felt excited. I ran upstairs where my CCTV was and checked it. video added had to edit it down to an acceptable size

Author (source: MUFON)

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

17-11-2016 om 14:20 geschreven door peter  

Multiple lights filmed over Jacksonville, Florida 15-Nov-2016

Here’s a new footage of a bright unidentified flying objects in the night sky above Jacksonville in Florida. This was filmed yesterday (15th November 2016).

Witness report: 

Five lights. Moving up and down. Above horizon. Bright but completely silent. Vanished quickly.
I saw and videod what looked like a group of five bright lights above the horizon. Have two videos of the event. They were moving around in no straight pattern, and they were gone in a minute and a half. Very bright much brighter than a star. Too fast and high for helicopters and too quiet for a jet. Kust very curious what it was.

Author (source: MUFON)

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

17-11-2016 om 14:16 geschreven door peter  

Multiple lights filmed over Jacksonville, Florida 15-Nov-2016

Here’s a new footage of a bright unidentified flying objects in the night sky above Jacksonville in Florida. This was filmed yesterday (15th November 2016).

Witness report: 

Five lights. Moving up and down. Above horizon. Bright but completely silent. Vanished quickly.
I saw and videod what looked like a group of five bright lights above the horizon. Have two videos of the event. They were moving around in no straight pattern, and they were gone in a minute and a half. Very bright much brighter than a star. Too fast and high for helicopters and too quiet for a jet. Kust very curious what it was.

Author (source: MUFON)

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

17-11-2016 om 14:13 geschreven door peter  

UFO Spotted In A Country With Many Ancient Sites

Residents of Lima, Peru were left stunned after seeing and filming a mysterious burning UFO moving across the sky above the capital city. The orange unidentified flying object flew through the slightly darkened sky.

The video that made the rounds online lasts a full minute showing the strange lights in the air. According to Peruvian media, observers left mystified. Interestingly, residents in other areas of the South American country also spotted the same UFO, including those who live in the highlands to the southeast of Lima, as well as near the Amazon rainforest.

One explanation is that the light could be from Google’s Project Loon, a high-altitude balloon used to provide Internet access to people in remote areas.

Google’s balloons float in the stratosphere and do have lights.

Other people believe that Peru is a favorite destination of aliens because of the country’s ancient sites, such as the Machu Picchu citadel in the Andes Mountains.

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

17-11-2016 om 14:09 geschreven door peter  

The X-Files and UFO History: Reel vs. Real

The X-Files took believers seriously. We look at how the series mined UFO myths and played off our fears and suspicions.

Anyone driving across a barren interstate freeway at night has likely looked up into the sky and wondered about the possibility of witnessing the unexpected. For people who have held beliefs in extra-terrestrials or alien craft, the entire history of the UFO phenomenon is an obsession that goes beyond mere fascination. 

Books, movies, and television help alien seekers conceptualize what an encounter could potentially look like. Perhaps no show has flown as close to the sun with depicting real-life accounts of the UFO phenomenon than The X-Files, the seminal sci-fi series from Fox and Chris Carter. 

When Carter’s series made its return to Fox for a revival in 2016, it honed in on a new extra-terrestrial threat for the digital age. Ever since they successfully blurred the line between fiction and real world events when the pilot debuted in 1993, The X-Files has depicted triangle-shaped crafts, or disc shaped crafts of various sizes, or even more recently in the new episodes, ARV’s - Alien Reproduction Vehicle’s. But the series drew from real world belief in the phenomenon, as well as the belief in global conspiracies. 

The Basis for The X-Files

Chris Carter’s pre-pilot research revealed something startling. He read a Roper Organization survey stated that three percent of the U.S. population believes they have been abducted by aliens. When Carter would later direct the “Duane Barry” episode, a fill-in crew member revealed his brother-in-law believed he had been abducted. Carter’s persistent mantra in the early years was that the show had to be “scientifically plausible.” This meant that a lot of the research was pulled from real UFOlogy archives. 

One key plot element in the series has been the Roswell incident, which the Deep Throat character first mentioned in season one’s final episode “The Erlenmeyer Flask,” when he comments that “Roswell was a smokescreen.” It was a comment that would be mirrored by the old man in “My Struggle I” from the new event series.

SEE RELATED 

Where Next for The X-Files?

X-Files Season 11: Everything We Know So Far

The Roswell incident from 1947 in New Mexico has remained the holy-grail source for the subject, touching on most of people’s concerns. As The X-Files heavily played up in the first episode of season 10, “My Struggle,” they showed the military retrieving wreckage from an unidentified craft, and using intimidation, misdirection, deniability, or direct threats to hide from the public secret military technology, or the existence of extra-terrestrials. What is known about the incident is that an event took place in July of 1947. The public might not have known about it had it not been for a military press release on Tuesday, July 8^th that confirmed a disc-shaped object that “landed” on a Ranch, just outside of Roswell Army Air Field.

"Are They Really A Hoax?"

The Roswell story caused a sensation for hours in the press before a second story was released that the wreckage of a weather balloon was recovered. Major Jesse A. Marcel was the head of 509^th Bomb group intelligence office at the time of the incident. But the story of a landing wouldn’t jive with one of the eyewitness accounts of a foreman named William Brazel, who was working for rancher J.B. Foster at the time. 

William and his son Vernon claimed to have come across an area strewn with unfamiliar material that was part of some collected wreckage. In a matter of days, Major Marcel and Captain Sheridan Cavitt of the Counter-Intelligence Corps contacted them and took the materials. In spite of residential eye witness accounts by the Wilmonts, the flying saucer story was debunked by the Roswell Dispatch by July 9^th. Interest in the story was revived by the late ‘70s, but most of the eyewitnesses had passed away by then. 

Many UFO believers regard the incident as a key moment, pointing fingers at segments of the military, whom they say created smokescreens to cover up alien technology, or secret military aircrafts. Original witnesses had offered conflicting stories; some had described a crashed disc, with two hundred yards in diameter that formed a long, thin strip some three quarters of a mile long, between two hundred to three hundred feet wide, and at one end was a deep gouge in the ground, ten feet wide, and five hundred feet long. That account would have indicated a significant amount of debris. 

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Some of the wreckage recovered had “I-beams” which Marcel’s son described as having hieroglyphic-type characters. These first accounts would describe something fairly mundane, and likely a crashed experimental craft in development near Roswell Army Air Field, or a shot down foreign craft. 

The mythology of Roswell became evident here. There were no initial reports of an intact craft or alien bodies recovered. In 1974, TV researcher Robert Carr put out comments about a craft, and frozen alien bodies being held in Wright-Patterson AFB, related to a crash in 1948 that was later debunked. 

Despite the falsehood, it triggered interest in the UFO research community, and the Roswell case started to be taken seriously. Other figures have elaborated the story with greater claims, such as Frank J. Kaufman, Glenn Dennis, Jim Ragsdale, “Pappy” Henderson, Mr. Rowe, and Major Edwin Easley. Several figures even claiming there were two crash sites, which has only complicated the narrative about what was found. 

Some theories suggest that a Japanese Balloon bomb from World War II was recovered, or a V-2 rocket that veered off course, as part of the MOGUL project, a project developed with sensitive instruments and high altitude balloons to monitor soviet nuclear test activity. 

Roswell’s Rumble is Chris Carter’s Treasure

What The X-Files did do well was add fragments from the known history to create an unsettling agenda in the series’ mythology. Carter and Co. borrowed much of the tone of the 1960s ABC sci-fi series The Invaders, which starred Roy Thinnes, a future X-Files acting alumnus who played the character of Jeremiah Smith.

In The Invaders, Thinnes played David Vincent, a man who witnesses a flying saucer land with alien beings intent on taking over the Earth. Over the course of the series, Vincent manages to gather a small circle of people who believe him, and eventually the invaders change their plans.

The series had an obvious parallel to the plight of the X-Files iconic villain. “We had a perfect conspiracy with an alien race,” The Cigarette Smoking Man ominously intoned in The X-Files season six episode, "One Son"; “Aliens who were coming to reclaim the planet and destroy all human life. Our job was to secretly prepare the way for their invasion. To create for them a race of human-alien hybrids. They were good plans, right plans. Kept secret for over fifty years, ever since the crash at Roswell.” 

Some of the events in the series that speak of a clandestine meeting between the Colonists and the Syndicate in 1973 revealed in “One Son” mirror a rumored alleged clandestine meeting in February 1954 at Muroc, now Edwards, air force base, with on-going contact between Extra-Terrestrials and eminent people, including Dwight D. Eisenhower. 

Related: Everything We Know About The X-Files Season 11

Which has also lead to the argument with some UFOologists that recovered technology from Roswell was “reversed-engineered,” and lead to developments like the current laser, transistors, microchips, Velcro, and microwave ovens. It has also been argued that such "reverse-engineering" gave the United States leverage with such contact. Deep Throat certainly suggested the Military use of “reverse-engineering” in season one’s second episode. 

In The X-Files season five episode “Redux,” Michael Kritschgau offered up an counter explanation regarding Roswell as a cover, a red herring for other agendas. 

“The Military saw a good thing in ’47 when the Roswell story broke. The more we denied it, the more people believed it was true. Aliens had landed – a made-to-order cover story for generals looking to develop the national war chest.” 

Kritschgau further noted that such official investigations as Grudge, Twinkle, Project Blue Book, and Majestic 12 fed into the belief in UFOs, Kritschgau also noted that the first supersonic flight was in 1947, after which, every experimental flight was considered a U.F.O. All of these points are part of the historical lore.

The new X-Files episode, “My Struggle” depicted a version of the Roswell Crash, while also citing several other events, including the Kenneth Arnoldsightings from June 24, 1947, near Mount Rainier, Washington.Other events noted were the Maury Island sighing from June 21, 1947 near Tacoma, Washington, as well as the 1952 UFO flap over Washington D.C.  

The Arnold sighting is notable. A pilot was commanding his own light aircraft to Pendleton Oregon from a job at Chehalis Air Service, Washington State, when he found himself near a location where an aircraft had vanished. At an altitude of 9,200 feet (2,760 m), he saw a bright flash, which he described as a “screwy formation… a chain of nine peculiar-looking aircraft” flying north to south at approximately 9,000 feet (2,790 m) elevation and going in a definite direction at an angle of 170 degrees. 

The objects approached Mount Rainier at a very high speed, some of them changing or dipping direction. He realized they were moving much too fast to be a flock of birds. Upon landing in Yakima, Arnold described what he had witnessed to his fellow pilots. He would later describe them as half-moon-shaped oval in front and convex in the rear. At first, the news of his sighting was treated as a hoax, but Arnold’s impeccable record and integrity prompted people to take him more seriously. Arnold had assumed it was some sort of secret weapon or Soviet aircraft invading US airspace, an idea that was reinforced in private by a former USAF officer, that it was some rocket-powered jet, skeptics have suggested he witnessed a flock of pelicans, but this ignores the little known fact that Arnold had another sighting in the same area five days later at La Grande Airfield, Oregon.

Another key sighting that was visually referenced in the “My Struggle” teaser was the Maury Island incident. Harold A. Dahl, a harbor patrolman at Tacoma, was on his boat with his fifteen-year-old son, his dog, and two crewman on the 21st at around 2 p.m. when they saw five doughnut-shaped objects with rows of portholes circling around a sixth object. They estimated it was about 2,000 feet (600 m) above the water at the Puget Sound. They estimated that the objects were about 100 feet wide with a 25-foot hole in the middle. 

While landing on the beach of Maury Island, Dahl took several photographs. One of the ships appeared to be trying to repair the other ship. There was a thunderous explosion, and the entire object emitted dark, almost molten, rock-like material and sheets of an extremely light metallic substance. Being directly under the shower, Dahl’s dog was killed, his son’s arm was injured, and the boat was damaged. After the UFOs headed out to sea, Dahl tried to get help via his radio, but it was dead. Dahl and others collected sample evidence and took it back to Tacoma to his boss, Fred Crissman. Soon, Kenneth Arnold was investigating the incident, and within days had his own encounter.

Lastly, there was the incident in Washington from 1952. As the nuclear age developed through the ‘50s, the ratio of UFO activity seemed to increase. In June of 1952, there were reports of UFOs over the skies of the east coast of the United States. Starting in Quantico, Virginia, there were various accounts of witnesses from Pan American Airline and National Airline crews spotting crafts through July, seen on radar at the Air Route Traffic Control. At Washington’s National Airport, the sightings near the capital reached such a degree that B-52s and F-94s were dispatched to intercept but to no avail. 

These cases would evolve and become more complicated, and many themes were cited and explored on The X-Files. UFO abductions, the alien-human hybrid hypothesis as first cited in “The Erlenmeyer Flask,” UFO cults cited in episodes like “Red Museum,” or Ancient Astronaut Theory first cited in “Biogenesis,” or animal experimentation as cited in “Fearful Symmetry.”

Such real life incidents fed into the story arc’s of The X-Files, and often acted as a starting off point for the writers imagination. What is also to be noted is the point that writers would attend conventions about the UFO phenomenon in the early years, which would lead to the invention of characters like The Lone Gunmen, or other UFO investigators, there’s even accounts of the series writers enjoying cooperation from some government agencies. This cross pollination helped to shape the science and speculation that detailed the series.

Chris Carter and The X-Files took subjects that had been discussed in whispers and brought them into the mainstream, hence the popularity of Ancient Aliens for the History channel, or NASA’s Unexplained Files for the Discovery channel. Indeed, The truth is often stranger than fiction.

Den of Geek’s X-Files correspondent Matt Allair is a writer, freelance filmmaker, musician, and the webmaster of The X-Files Lexicon. He lives in San Francisco, CA.

{ http://www.denofgeek.com/ }

17-11-2016 om 01:08 geschreven door peter