Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 11 MONTHS.
ON 06/05/2024 MORE THAN 1.972.210
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
01-11-2019
Here's How NASA Might Bring Home Pieces of Mars (In a Darth Vader Helmet)
Here's How NASA Might Bring Home Pieces of Mars (In a Darth Vader Helmet)
WASHINGTON — Scientists studying Mars have wanted pieces of the Red Planet here on Earth for decades, and they are finally getting their shot at designing a mission to acquire such souvenirs.
The Apollo program's legacy of carefully collected moon rocks here on Earth reshaped the science of the moon and Earth alike. A Mars sample-return mission could offer the same sort of potential, but the Red Planet is a more daunting target than the moon. More daunting but well worth the effort, Brian Muirhead, who is leading the effort to develop a Mars sample-return mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a presentation here at the 70th International Astronautical Congress.
"It's the consensus of science community today," Muirhead said, "that if we're going to answer the hardest questions about Mars — like, for example, whether life showed up on Mars — we're going to need to bring material from Mars to our terrestrial laboratories."
Arranging a mission to bring the samples back is a challenge, one that NASA intends to tackle in a partnership with the European Space Agency. "This process is remarkably interrelated, everything is connected to everything else in some way," Muirhead said. There are a host of spacecraft components: NASA's Mars 2020 rover to select the samples, a "fetch rover" to pick up those samples, a rocket to launch them off the Red Planet, a capsule to bring them back to Earth.
Mars 2020 will depart next summer and head toward Jezero crater for a February 2021 landing. It will be conducting its own investigations and stashing away intriguing rocks for its successor to bring home.
That mission could launch in 2026, Muirhead said. The mission's early days would be fairly typical for any Red Planet mission. One of the first key challenges of the mission is for spacecraft engineers to land much more weight on Mars than previous missions have done. That will stretch out the anxiety-inducing landing process that haunts Mars spacecraft personnel, as the vehicle risks crashing into the surface.
"Once at Mars, we're going to do entry, descent and landing, our famous seven minutes of terror," Muirhead said. "We're going to make that probably about eight or nine minutes of terror." But he said the team has found a way to deliver significantly more bulk to the surface safely than the techniques that NASA will use to land the Mars 2020 mission.
Once that spacecraft lands, it will deploy the fetch rover, which will drive out to collect the sample containers Mars 2020 has so carefully prepared. The fetch rover will be smaller than that machine and Curiosity — more like the size of Spirit and Opportunity, Muirhead said.
The fetch rover is inspired by the Rosalind Franklin rover that the European Space Agency is sending to Mars on a similar timeline to Mars 2020, but it will end up looking very different from its older sibling. "ExoMars is a serious science rover; this is a speedster," Muirhead said. "That's a fast-moving, highly autonomous rover," he said of its planned travel stats.
Next on the task list is to pack up the samples for the long journey to Earth. Scientists are designing a return capsule that can safely carry as many as 30 rock samples and two air samples. "All of that fits into Darth Vader's helmet," Muirhead said, referring to the shape of the container, which will then itself be packed into a capsule for the long voyage. At around this point of the mission, the sample container will be sealed and sterilized to make sure no loose Martian material sneaks free on Earth.
While plenty of spacecraft have journeyed out to the Red Planet, none have ever retraced their steps. "To fly to Mars, that one-way trip is fairly traditional," Muirhead said. "It's the return trip that's particularly challenging." The vehicle will rely on electric propulsion to make its way to Earth, where it will eject the sample assembly in 2031.
The team doesn't want to use parachutes, which Muirhead called "notoriously tricky"; instead, the capsule will navigate its own way through Earth's atmosphere. That means the vehicle will need to carefully slow down enough not to splatter on the surface, but not slow down so much that atmospheric friction burns it.
At the end of his presentation, Muirhead tackled several questions from the audience quibbling with specific aspects of the mission design under discussion. One audience member expressed dismay that the return capability would not test the sorts of vehicles that could bring humans home. Another thought the mission could be cheaper if it ignored the risk of letting Martian material loose in Earth's biosphere.
In both cases, Muirhead emphasized that a Mars sample-return mission would be about the scientific secrets held in those samples. "This mission is about bringing samples back," he said with regards to planetary protection. "From an architecture point of view and from ensuring the integrity of the science samples, I'm not sure there's a much simpler solution than the one we're considering."
What kicked off a rapid cooling on Earth 12,800 years ago? Some geologists believe a fragmented comet or asteroid collided with Earth and caused the change. Read more from a scientist whose fieldwork at a South Carolina lake adds to the growing pile of evidence.
Artist’s concept of an impending collision from space.
What kicked off the Earth’s rapid cooling 12,800 years ago?
In the space of just a couple of years, average temperatures abruptly dropped, resulting in temperatures as much as 14 degrees Fahrenheit (8 C) cooler in some regions of the Northern Hemisphere. If a drop like that happened today, it would mean the average temperature of Miami Beach would quickly change to that of current Montreal, Canada. Layers of ice in Greenland show that this cool period in the Northern Hemisphere lasted about 1,400 years.
This climate event, called the Younger Dryas by scientists, marked the beginning of a decline in ice-age megafauna, such as mammoth and mastodon, eventually leading to extinction of more than 35 genera of animals across North America. Although disputed, some research suggests that Younger Dryas environmental changes led to a population decline among the Native Americans known for their distinctive Clovis spear points.
Conventional geologic wisdom blames the Younger Dryas on the failure of glacial ice dams holding back huge lakes in central North America and the sudden, massive blast of freshwater they released into the north Atlantic. This freshwater influx shut down ocean circulation and ended up cooling the climate.
Some geologists, however, subscribe to what is called the impact hypothesis: the idea that a fragmented comet or asteroid collided with the Earth 12,800 years ago and caused this abrupt climate event. Along with disrupting the glacial ice-sheet and shutting down ocean currents, this hypothesis holds that the extraterrestrial impact also triggered an “impact winter” by setting off massive wildfires that blocked sunlight with their smoke.
The evidence is mounting that the cause of the Younger Dryas’ cooling climate came from outer space. My own recent fieldwork at a South Carolina lake that has been around for at least 20,000 years adds to the growing pile of evidence.
The muck that’s been accumulating at the bottom of this lake for 20,000 years is like a climate time capsule.
Image via Christopher R. Moore.
What would an Earth impact leave behind?
Around the globe, scientists analyzing ocean, lake, terrestrial and ice core records have identified large peaks in particles associated with burning, such as charcoal and soot, right at the time the Younger Dryas kicked in. These would be natural results of the cataclysmic wildfires you would expect to see in the wake of Earth taking an extraterrestrial hit. As much as 10% of global forests and grasslands may have burned at this time.
Looking for more clues, researchers have pored through the widely distributed Younger Dryas Boundary stratigraphic layer. That’s a distinctive layer of sediments laid down over a given period of time by processes like large floods or movement of sediment by wind or water. If you imagine the surface of the Earth as like a cake, the Younger Dryas Boundary is the layer that was frosted onto its surface 12,800 years ago, subsequently covered by other layers over the millennia.
In the last few years, scientists have found a variety of exotic impact-related materials in the Younger Dryas Boundary layer all over the globe.
White Pond has been part of this landscape for 20,000 years or more.
Image via Christopher R. Moore.
A view of 12,800 years ago from White Pond
In the southeastern United States, there are no ice cores to turn to in the quest for ancient climate data. Instead, geologists and archaeologists like me can look to natural lakes. They accumulate sediments over time, preserving layer by layer a record of past climate and environmental conditions.
White Pond is one such natural lake, situated in southern Kershaw County, South Carolina. It covers nearly 26 hectares (64 acres) and is generally shallow, less than 2 meters (6 feet) even at its deepest portions. Within the lake itself, peat and organic-rich mud and silt deposits upwards of 6 meters (20 feet) thick have accumulated at least since the peak of the last ice age more than 20,000 years ago.
Collecting sediment cores from White Pond in 2016.
Image via Christopher R. Moore.
So in 2016, my colleagues and I extracted sediment from the bottom of White Pond. Using 4-meter-long (13-feet-long) tubes, we were able to preserve the order and integrity of the many sediment layers that have accumulated over the eons.
The long sediment cores are cut in half in order to extract samples for analysis.
Image via Christopher R. Moore.
Based on preserved seeds and wood charcoal that we radiocarbon dated, my team determined there was about a 10-centimeter (4-inch) thick layer that dated to the Younger Dryas Boundary, from between 12,835 and 12,735 years ago. That is where we concentrated our hunt for evidence of an extraterrestrial impact.
We were particularly looking for platinum. This dense metal is present in the Earth’s crust only at very low concentrations but is common in comets and asteroids. Previous research had identified a large “platinum anomaly” – widespread elevated levels of platinum, consistent with a global extraterrestrial impact source in Younger Dryas layers from Greenland ice cores as well as across North and South America.
Most recently, the Younger Dryas platinum anomaly has been found in South Africa. This discovery significantly extends the geographic range of the anomaly and adds support to the idea that the Younger Dryas impact was indeed a global event.
Volcanic eruptions are another possible source of platinum, but Younger Dryas Boundary sites with elevated platinum do not have other markers of large-scale volcanism.
More evidence of an extraterrestrial impact
In the White Pond samples, we did indeed find high levels of platinum. The sediments also had an unusual ratio of platinum to palladium.
Both of these rare earth elements occur naturally in very small quantities. The fact that there was so much more platinum than palladium suggests that the extra platinum came from an outside source, such as atmospheric fallout in the aftermath of an extraterrestrial impact.
My team also found a large increase in soot, indicative of large-scale regional wildfires. Additionally, the amount of fungal spores that are usually associated with the dung of large herbivores decreased in this layer compared to previous time periods, suggesting a sudden decline in ice-age megafauna in the region at this time.
Photomicrograph of Sporormiella – fungal spores associated with the dung of megaherbivores – from White Pond.
Image via Angelina G. Perrotti.
While my colleagues and I can show that the platinum and soot anomalies and fungal spore decline all happened at the same time, we cannot prove a cause.
The data from White Pond are, however, consistent with the growing body of evidence that a comet or asteroid collision caused continent-scale environmental calamity 12,800 years ago, via vast burning and a brief impact winter. The climate change associated with the Younger Dryas, megafaunal extinctions and temporary declines or shifts in early Clovis hunter-gatherer populations in North America at this time may have their origins in space.
View larger. | A White Pond sediment core is like a timeline of the stratigraphic layers. What researchers found in each layer provides hints of climate and environment at that time. Image via Shutterstock.com/Allen West/NASA/Sedwick C (2008) PLoS Biol 6(4): e99/Martin Pate/Southeast Archaeological Center.
Christopher R. Moore, Archaeologist and Special Projects Director at the Savannah River Archaeological Research Program and South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina
Attention cat people. There's a burgeoning theory around the internet that begs reckoning. It's not the theory that parasites in cat poop are turning you into crazy cat ladies, though that's certainly cause for alarm. It's much worse than that. Domestic
Are Cats Spies Sent by Aliens? A Deep Examination of One of the Internet's Best Conspiracy Theories
Recent polling shows Americans love their conspiracy theories. They also love cats. This was bound to happen.
Attention cat people. There's a burgeoning theory around the internet that begs reckoning. It's not the theory that parasites in cat poop are turning you into crazy cat ladies, though that's certainly cause for alarm. It's much worse than that.
Domestic house cats, it seems, may be alien sentinels—sent to spy on us and report their findings back to the mother ship. Or, as some theorists have put it, they're like alien camcorders tracking our every move.
Well, maybe. We humans love our conspiracy theories, and there's a decent chance this is just another among them. As a poll published just yesterday reveals, 51 percent of Americans believe the JFK assassination was a conspiracy; 15 percent believe "the government or the media adds mind-controlling technology to TV broadcast signals"; and 4 percent believe reptilian shapeshifters control the government.
It's impossible to know just how pervasive cats-as-alien spies theory is without an adequate polling apparatus (if you have one, please get in touch). One guesses it's fairly low. Then again, 4 percent is much higher than one might have expected for the lizard people theory, and, according to the same poll, some 29 percent of Americans believe aliens exist and 14 percent believe in Bigfoot, so who knows?
As with most conspiracy theories, the cats-as-alien-spies theory is surprisingly well-developed—and based on a few kernels of truth and genuine ambiguity. How much? Motherboard decided to take a look at some of the supporting premises, one-by-one. A user who goes by the moniker "RedSpider" summarizes the prevailing wisdom in a handy list on the British tech message board, Digital Kaos. I've appropriated his/her list here (lightly edited for style and clarity), with the original points bolded.
Examine the evidence and decide for yourself:
1. There is no documentation before ancient Egypt that mentions the existence of cats. And in ancient Egypt, they were worshipped as gifts from the gods.
As with several of these premises, these propositions are mostly true, but also somewhat disputable. To find out more about the fossil record, I emailed Ryan Haupt, a paleontologist at the University of Wyoming who, as he described it for a previous interview, "studies the lives of modern mammals to better understand what their extinct relatives were doing in the past." He said Egypt was "the best guess" for the origin of the domestic cat species, but noted that "cat skeletons have been found at older sites."
Exporting domestic cats was illegal in ancient Egypt, according to Wild Cats of the World, a book by Mel and Fiona Sunquist, which may explain why they don't appear definitively in the records of other civilizations until thousands of years later than early cat records in Egypt. What older feline skeletons have been found elsewhere don't provide clear "evidence as to whether they were domesticated or not," Haupt said, adding, however, that they "probably" weren't.
"Looking at just skeletons it's basically impossible to say when cats stopped being wild and started being domesticated." Haupt said.
As for cat worship, the picture is a bit more complicated than the conspiracy theorist asserts. Cats were, indeed, revered by the ancient Egyptians, the Sunquists write. Cats were beloved as pets; they were mourned like family members when they died; they were embalmed and buried with varying degrees of pomp according to its owner's wealth; cat cemeteries were plotted along the banks of the Nile; the penalty for killing a cat was death. But cats weren't simply viewed as gifts from the gods. Some of the Egyptian gods were cats, like Bastet, the goddess of joy and love. One ancient Egyptian papyrus depicts Ra, the sun god, as a knife-wielding cat with spots.
2. Science is baffled by a cat's purr, and cannot determine how the sound is produced. (Feedback, much?)
I'm not entirely sure what "Feedback much?" means, unless it means that a cat's purr is some kind of transmission feedback, similar to a cell phone's when held near a speaker. But the broader assertion is, again, partly true.
For this, I started with a bit of internet research. That science doesn't know why cats purr is often taken for granted around the internet, but that only tells part of the story. It's true that cats possess no special organ for purring. But science does know a thing or two. As noted in a WebMD article:
A rhythmic, repetitive neural oscillator [in the brain] sends messages to the laryngeal muscles, causing them to twitch at the rate of 25 to 150 vibrations per second (Hz). This causes a sudden separation of the vocal cords, during both inhalation and exhalation - the unique feline vibrato. "Opera singing for cats," is what animal behaviorist Karen L. Overall, VMD, PhD calls it. But the purr is usually so low-pitched that we tend to feel it as much as hear it.
I contacted Dr. Ken Simpson, of Monon Animal Hospital, my vet back in my hometown of Indianapolis to ask what the latest veterinary science said. (Full disclosure, he's also my uncle.) He said the "physiology remains a slight enigma," but noted that vets have learned a few fascinating things about purring over the years.
"To me, purring is a method of communication that may be derived when the laryngeal folds are dilated with blood due to excitement from stimulation," he wrote to me. "As air flows through the folds, a vibration occurs which creates the sound heard. I have also heard that diaphragm movement against over-inflated lung tissue contributes sounds to the purr. In my experience, cats with asthma and hyperinflated lungs have a slightly louder purr."
There's evidence the behavior is learned, he noted. He described a deaf cat, for example, who never purred. Another cat patient of his had meningitis as a kitten and was learning-impaired as a result; that cat never purred either. Case studies like that lend themselves to the notion that cat purring does indeed, originate in the brain, and Simpson said he saw "no reason to doubt" the "neural oscillation" theory.
Still there's a certain point where the knowledge plateaus: What, exactly, is the neural oscillator? Why, exactly, does neural oscillation exist? And why, in behavioral terms, do cats purr? Those questions remain a bit of a mystery. Alien bio-technology? Transmission signals? It's doubtful, considering some wild cats, like cheetahs, purr as well.
3. If you hold a cat's ears back and describe what you see, it is a perfect match to the classic "grey alien," with its almond-shaped eyes, small mouth, and small nose.
Obviously true. See below. Next premise.
LEFT TO RIGHT, IMAGES VIA FLICKR AND WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
4. A cat can see exponentially better than you. Making it appear that it must be more advanced evolutionarily speaking. How?
The extrapolated version of this, as I've gathered from other cat-as-alien-spy internet detritus, says that cats stare at us with those big eyes because they are, in fact, alien cameras, recording and beaming our actions back to the grey aliens that put them here. I can't find any evidence of anything but standard neuronal circuitry in a cat's brain, but one never knows. We humans have recently managed to build a computer out of living cells, so who knows what alien technology may be hidden in the feline brain?
Leaving that aside, the idea of a cat's eyes being "exponentially better" and that translating into evidence of irrationally advanced evolution is, of course, absurd.
Cats eyes have more "rods" in them than "cones"—the former are responsible for providing black-and-white images, which makes them crucial for night vision; the latter add color and help us discern details. Cats, thus, have better night vision, but they only "see better" depending on your definition. I like seeing in color, so if you suddenly gave me cat's eyes, I wouldn't describe my vision as "better" at all.
A cat's eyes do have a second advantage with regard to night vision. As this New York Times article explains:
Cats also have elliptical pupils that open and close faster and can become larger than our round ones. In addition, cats and some other nocturnal animals have a mirrorlike membrane, the tapetum, on the back of their eyes, which reflects the light passing through the rods back through them in the opposite direction. This "double exposure" allows cats to see well in near darkness.
But suppose we were to grant that cats had "better" vision because they can see better in some ways. That would mean, yes, that its eyes (but not the whole cat) were "more advanced evolutionarily speaking." But dogs smell better than we do. So do bees and mice, for that matter. Cheetahs run faster, birds fly better and elephants kick more ass generally. Are they aliens, too? Doubtful. If any species presents a real anomaly, it's us, with our enormous brains, which are three times bigger than nature typically grants its animals proportionally. I would like to go on the record here to state that if anything is related to aliens, it's probably us.
5. Ever watch a cat wake from a deep sleep and run out of the room in an instant? Transmissions from the mothership coming in, and they must be alone.
We've all seen this happen and I can't find an answer. Evidence of alien collaboration? Put it in the "maybe" column.
6. All things that come out of cats are totally unnatural. (Not of this earth.)
This, too, is absurd. Hairballs are disgusting but totally natural considering cats are hair and all they do is lie around and lick themselves all day. As for their urine and excrement, I don't see how it's any different than any other mammal's, other than its smelling particularly foul.
7. Cats survive situations that any earthbound animal would surely perish in. How can a cat fall out of a four-story building backwards, and land on its feet? (Anti-gravity properties.)
This is partly true. Cats are great hunters, and would probably outlive us humans in the wild if we and our cats were suddenly stranded on an uncharted desert isle or in a post-apocalyptic situation. But so would a lot of wild animals. The landing-on-feet scenario notwithstanding (more on that below), it's hard to conceive of a natural situation in which cats will always survive better than "any earthbound animal."
But that landing-on-its-feet thing is no joke. It's nuts. Folks at the Smarter Every Day YouTube channel offer some great slow-motion footage of a few cat-drops using a high-speed camera. As the host explains, the flipping cat problem was a mystery since time immemorial. Today physicists know a lot more about it, and the physics observed in flipping cats has helped teach scientists how to operate space telescopes.
As series host Destin Sandlin, a mechanical engineer and rocket tester, notes, on the surface a cat appears to violate the physical law of conservation of angular momentum. "I've studied freefalling bodies—my own, in fact—in several different environments, and once I get my angular rotation started in one direction, I can't stop it," he says.
But when the cat's freefall is slowed down, it's clear the cat does not violate the law. It's just extremely, extremely agile. In physics terms it's complicated, but it has everything to do with the way the cat arches its back, extends and retracts its legs, and, in doing so, rotates its body along two separate rotational axes.
So while the theory of anti-gravity properties is certainly appealing, it doesn't, shall we say, carry weight.
8. If you die, your cats will eat you. Not really a link between cats and Aliens, but still pretty creepy.
By all accounts this is true. In 2010, for example, about a dozen cats were found eating the corpse of a northwestern Pennsylvania man who was found dead there with his mother.
But as Chris Gayomali notes for The Week, cats aren't the only pets that eat their owners after they die. Some pets kill their owners then eat them. Gayomali's article includes examples of pet pigs, pythons, a pet hippo, lizards and others, including a pair of Nebraskan pugs who survived on their owner's body for two weeks after he killed himself.
Now may be a good time for a bit more journalistic disclosure by saying that I am, in fact, a dog person. I would happily believe that cats are the only pets that eat their owners if so compelled. But it simply isn't true. Brian Palmer notes in this Slate article that history is rife with examples of dogs eating dead humans, even the corpses of their owners. (Apparently, Palmer notes, there is even a theory among some scholars that Jesus' body was eaten by dogs and that "his acolytes fabricated the story of a reverential entombment as a sort of coping mechanism.")
Our conspiracy theory friends are correct that this is creepy, indeed. But it's hardly evidence that cats are alien drones.
Aztec breakthrough: Archaeologists discover shock tunnel world hidden beneath Mexico City ARCHAEOLOGISTS have discovered a secret Aztec tunnel world nestled below the busy streets of Mexico’s capital city. By JOEL DAY
Aztec breakthrough: Archaeologists discover shock tunnel world hidden beneath Mexico City
ARCHAEOLOGISTS have discovered a secret Aztec tunnel world nestled below the busy streets of Mexico’s capital city.
The ancient water tunnel is thought to have been built by Emperor Montezuma I in the 15th century. Inscriptions, carvings and paintings inside, as well as the tunnel itself, are thought to be linked to the Empire’s god of water and fertility, Tlaloc.
Announcing the discovery, the Mexican Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) revealed they had found the densely decorated tunnel in the city of Ecatepec de Morelos within the central state of Mexico.
Several carvings out of rock were found inside, as well as chunks of statue thought to have unbounded archaeological value.
According to local media, researchers found 11 carved images on the wall of the tunnel, which measured 27.5ft long, as well as the remains of a wooden gate.
The images inside the tunnel have been linked to Tlaloc, one of several gods the polytheistic Aztecs worshipped.
The tunnel was found underneath Mexico City
(Image: GETTY)
The tunnel is the latest find in a series of excavations since 2004
(Image: CEN/INAH)
Tlaloc was associated as a beneficent giver of life and sustenance.
Despite this benevolent aspect, Aztecs learned to fear Tlaloc as it became apparent that the deity could send hail, thunder and lightening, and for its ability to manipulate water.
Raul Garcia Chavez, project coordinator of the excavation, told local media that his team had been working on the site for more than 10 years - since 2004.
It was then that they launched a conservation project around la Calzada de San Cristobal, the site where infrastructure was built in he 17th century by indigenous peoples, as reported by the monk of the time, Juan de Torquemada.
The water tunnel is the latest find of the project, with previous findings having preceded the current tunnel with different passages - including an area that was once the prospective site for a new bus route.
Ancient archaeological finds keep popping up over the globe, with finds in Egypt usually covered more than anywhere else.
Researchers were recently baffled on finding a coffin among an enormous burial site which was inscribed with “nonsense hieroglyphics”.
The find, just south of Cairo, proved something of an enigma for Dr Kamil Kuraszkiewicz, a top European archaeologist, who failed to translate the drawings.
Ancient rock carvings can be found throughout Mexico; a reminder of its tribal past
(Image: GETTY)
Many artefacts are stored in Mexico's national museum
(Image: GETTY)
This led Dr Kuraszkiewicz to conclude that the hieroglyphs were in fact a poor copy, likely done by an illiterate “scribe” attempting to lift what they had seen on other coffins.
Burial sites are usually made up of noblemen and people of whose status was untouchable.
Thus, inscriptions are more often than not near perfect, with flawless design and patterns, and easily decipherable code.
Mr Kuraszkiewicz labelled the inscriptions as “clumsy” and likely written by an illiterate worker.
Egypt has a rich pre-history
(Image: Express Newspapers)
In total, 36 mummies were found at Saqqare, Egypt’s famous “city of the dead”.
The giant cemetery is home to thousands of ancient corpses and is the site of the Djoser pyramid.
At 4,700 years old, the pyramid is regarded as the first pyramid ever built.
The coffins found in the new site, thought to be between 2,000 and 2,600 years old, were in extremely bad condition.
The bodies inside were only given a simple wrapping and embalming, suggesting the dead were of working or middle class families, rather than the elite.
However, this discovery was not entirely in vain, as it for the first time proved people of lower social standing to have mimicked their rich and famous counterparts.
The hieroglyphs were poor imitations of the real thing
3D Ribcage Indicates Neanderthals Looked Nothing Like We Thought
3D Ribcage Indicates Neanderthals Looked Nothing Like We Thought
An international team of scientists has completed the first 3D virtual reconstruction of the ribcage of the most complete Neanderthal skeleton unearthed to date, potentially shedding new light on how this ancient human moved and breathed.
The team, which included researchers from universities in Spain, Israel, and the United States, including the University of Washington, focused on the thorax - the area of the body containing the rib cage and upper spine, which forms a cavity to house the heart and lungs. Using CT scans of fossils from an approximately 60,000-year-old male skeleton known as Kebara 2, researchers were able to create a 3D model of the chest - one that is different from the longstanding image of the barrel-chested, hunched-over "caveman." The conclusions point to what may have been an upright individual with greater lung capacity and a straighter spine than today's modern human.
The study is published Oct. 30 in Nature Communications .
"The shape of the thorax is key to understanding how Neanderthals moved in their environment because it informs us about their breathing and balance," said Asier Gomez-Olivencia, an Ikerbasque Fellow at the University of the Basque Country and the study's lead author.
And how Neanderthals moved would have had a direct impact on their ability to survive on the resources available to them, said Patricia Kramer, professor in the UW Department of Anthropology and corresponding author on the paper.
"Neanderthals are closely related to us with complex cultural adaptations much like those of modern humans, but their physical form is different from us in important ways," she said. "Understanding their adaptations allows us to understand our own evolutionary path better."
Our Upright Ancestor?
Neanderthals are a type of human that emerged about 400,000 years ago, living mostly from what is today Western Europe to Central Asia. They were hunter-gatherers who, in some areas, lived in caves and who weathered several glacial periods before going extinct about 40,000 years ago. Studies in recent years have suggested that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens interbred , because evidence of Neanderthal DNA has turned up in many populations .
Over the past 150 years, Neanderthal remains have been found at many sites in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. This team worked with a skeleton labeled Kebara 2, also known as "Moshe," which was found in Kebara Cave in Northern Israel's Carmel mountain range in 1983. Though the cranium is missing, the remains of the young adult male are considered one of the most complete Neanderthal skeletons ever found. Two different forms of dating of the surrounding soil, thermoluminescence and electron spin resonance, put the age at somewhere between 59,000 and 64,000 years.
the same research team created a virtual reconstruction of the Kebara 2 spine, the first step in updating theories of Neanderthal biomechanics. The team's paper, published in the book "Human Paleontology and Prehistory," reaffirmed the likelihood of upright posture but pointed to a straighter spine than that of modern humans.
This image from the virtual reconstruction shows how the ribs attach to the spine in an inward direction, forcing an even more upright posture than in modern humans.
Source: Gomez-Olivencia, et al.
For this model of the thorax, researchers used both direct observations of the Kebara 2 skeleton, currently housed at Tel Aviv University, and medical CT scans of vertebrae, ribs and pelvic bones, along with 3D software designed for scientific use. "This was meticulous work," said Alon Barash, a lecturer at Bar Ilan University in Israel. "We had to CT scan each vertebra and all of the ribs fragments individually and then reassemble them in 3D."
They then used a technique called morphometric analysis to compare the images of Neanderthal bones with medical scans of bones from present-day adult men.
"In the reconstruction process, it was necessary to virtually 'cut' and realign some of the parts that showed deformation, and mirror-image some of those that were not so well-preserved in order to get a complete thorax," said Gomez-Olivencia.
The reconstruction of the thorax, coupled with the team's earlier finding, shows ribs that connect to the spine in an inward direction, forcing the chest cavity outward and allowing the spine to tilt slightly back, with little of the lumbar curve that is part of the modern human skeletal structure. "The differences between a Neanderthal and modern human thorax are striking," said Markus Bastir, senior research scientist at the Laboratory of Virtual Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History in Spain.
"The Neanderthal spine is located more inside the thorax, which provides more stability," said Gomez-Olivencia. "Also, the thorax is wider in its lower part." This shape of the rib cage suggests a larger diaphragm and thus, greater lung capacity.
"The wide lower thorax of Neanderthals and the horizontal orientation of the ribs suggest that Neanderthals relied more on their diaphragm for breathing," said senior author Ella Been of Ono Academic College. "Modern humans, on the other hand, rely both on the diaphragm and on the expansion of the rib cage for breathing. Here we see how new technologies in the study of fossil remains is providing new information to understand extinct species."
What that means for how Kebara 2 lived is ripe for further research, Kramer said. How did Neanderthals breathe, and for what physical demands might they have needed powerful lungs? What does that tell us about how they moved, and the environment in which they lived? Did any of these physical traits make them more or less adaptive to climate change?
Reconstructing the thorax was an exercise in starting from scratch, deliberately trying to avoid being influenced by past theories of how Neanderthals looked or lived, Kramer said.
"Thinking through all the permutations of the different fragments, it was like a jigsaw without all the pieces. What do the pieces tell us?" she said. "People have told you it should be a certain way, but you want to make sure you're not over-reconstructing, or reconstructing it the way you think it should be. You're trying to maintain a neutral approach."
Other authors of the study were Daniel Garcia-Martinez of the National Museum of Natural History and Mikel Arlegi, of the University of the Basque Country.
Top image: Neanderthal man with spear in hand. Source : ginettigino / via Fotolia
The article, originally titled ‘ Neanderthal ribcage reconstructed, offering new clues to ancient human anatomy ’ was first published on Science Daily .
Source:
University of Washington. "Neanderthal ribcage reconstructed, offering new clues to ancient human anatomy." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 30 October 2018.
Archaeologists Say They’ve Solved Mystery of How Pyramids were Built After Unearthing 4,500-Year-Old Ramp
Archaeologists Say They’ve Solved Mystery of How Pyramids were Built After Unearthing 4,500-Year-Old Ramp
Has the riddle of how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids finally been solved? A multi-national team of experts say yes, after they unearthed an ancient ramp, which they say was used to haul giant blocks into place.
Despite centuries of research into the pyramids of Giza, there has still been no definitive explanation as to how the ancient Egyptians cut, transported, and assembled millions of limestone and granite blocks, each weighing an average of 2.3 metric tons. “For the construction of the pyramids, there is no single theory that is 100% proven or checked; They are all theories and hypotheses,” said Hany Helal, Vice President of the Heritage Innovation Preservation institute. But many have speculated that ramps played a very important role in the construction of pyramids such as the three world-famous pyramids at Giza.
This 4,500-year-old ramp was discovered at Hatnub, an ancient quarry in the Eastern Desert of Egypt. Two staircases with numerous postholes are located next to the ramp. An alabaster block would have been placed on a sled, which was tied by ropes to the wooden poles.
A combined team of archaeologists from the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology based in Cairo and the University of Liverpool from the UK were excavating at the Hatnub alabaster quarry, which is near Luxor. It was here, according to Science Alert , that they found a ‘4,500-year-old ramp’ that was apparently used to move blocks of alabaster cut from the steep slopes of the quarry. This type of stone was used in the construction of tombs and for paving the floors of pyramids and temples.
The archaeologists believe that they have discovered the Egyptian system for moving the large building blocks based on their investigations in the quarry. This system involved the construction of a large ramp, which was lined by flights of stairs on each side where large wooden posts were fixed. The co-director of the excavation told Live Science that the archaeologists believe that a ‘sled carried a stone block’ and was tied to the wooden posts on the stairs. By pulling on the ropes, workmen could maneuver the stone down the ramp. The system, using wooden poles, ropes, and gravity, allowed huge blocks to be taken out of the quarry.
Fox News reports that ‘this kind of system has never been discovered anywhere else" . The Anglo-French team, with the support of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, investigated the tool marks and linked them to some inscriptions found in the quarry. The archaeologists believe that the ramp dates back to the reign of the Pharaoh Khufu (died 2566 BC) who constructed the Great Pyramid at Giza .
Looking up at the Great Pyramid of Giza from the base of the southeast corner.
Can Researchers Finally Agree How the Pyramids Were Built?
The team believes that they have finally shown how the Egyptians moved massive stones. This is because they presume that the method for moving alabaster was similar to that used to move other stone blocks. The main stone used in the construction of the pyramids was limestone, and according to Live Science , the ‘ramp system could contain some vital clues’ as to how the Egyptians moved stone and how they were able to place huge blocks on the side of the pyramid.
This was not the only important find at the alabaster quarry. During their excavation, the experts found a large number of inscriptions marking the visits of Pharaohs to the quarry, indicating its importance in royal building projects. The team has also uncovered four stone slabs (stele) with some inscriptions that are illegible. They also found some of the huts that once sheltered the quarry workers. There are conservation efforts being undertaken to protect the inscriptions and the structures.
During their excavation, the experts found a large number of inscriptions marking the visits of Pharaohs to the quarry, indicating its importance in royal building projects.
The Secretary-General of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities says the discovery is one of the first to show how the Pharaohs’ workmen moved heavy blocks. It also confirms the importance of ramps in the construction of the pyramids. Most significant of all, it provides evidence on the advanced engineering skills and knowledge of ancient Egypt some 4,500 years ago, when most of the world was still in the Stone Age.
Top image: How were the pyramids built? The discovery of a quarry ramp may finally provide a consensus on this debate.
Mythical 'lost city of Gods' discovered in dense Cambodian jungle
Mythical 'lost city of Gods' discovered in dense Cambodian jungle
A lost city that experts have spent years searching for has been uncovered in a jungle in Cambodia
By Rachel O'DonoghueAssistant News Editor
A city that experts have spent years searching for has been uncovered in a jungle in Cambodia.
The ancient city of Mahendraparvata, which means Mountain of Indra (King of Gods), was thriving well over a thousand years ago and is thought to have been the first capital city of the Khmer Empire.
But efforts to locate the remains of the mysterious city have been unsuccessful, with scientists even disagreeing on where they should be looking for it.
Until now.
Scientists used new technology to find the city in the jungle(Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
The team used state-of-the-art Lidar laser scanning techniques to pinpoint the location of the city, which dates back to the 9th Century and is located to the north-east of the city of Angkor.
Discussing the amazing find, archaeologist Jean-Baptiste Chevance, of the Archaeology and Development Foundation in the UK, wrote in a paper: "The mountainous region of Phnom Kulen has, to date, received strikingly little attention.
"It is almost entirely missing from archaeological maps, except as a scatter of points denoting the remains of some brick temples."
He added: "The Ancient Khmer modified the landscape, shaping features on a very large scale – ponds, reservoirs, canals, roads, temples, rice fields, etc.
"However, the dense forest often covering the areas of interest is a main constraint to investigating them."
The team said it was not inhabited for very long despite how vast it was(Image: Getty Images/500px)
The laser technology the team used meant they were able to look past hundreds of years of dirt and vegetation that now covers the remains of the city.
They could then see a huge urban network that spanned 50km-squared across the jungle.
"Numerous other elements of the anthropogenic landscape connect to this broader network, suggesting the elaboration of an overall urban plan," the team explained.
"Dams, reservoir walls and the enclosure walls of temples, neighbourhoods and even the royal palace abut or coincide with the embanked linear features."
But despite its size, the city was not inhabited for very long, with people migrating to terrains that were easier to live in.
Damian Evans, of the French School of the Far East, told the New Scientist: "The city may not have lasted for centuries, or perhaps even decades.
"But the cultural and religious significance of the place has lasted right up until the present day."
The interstellar comet 2I/Borisov which is currently visiting our solar system is harbouring water that came from another star system, a study has found.
The findings suggest that water-rich comets are not unique to the Solar System and that other star systems likely formed through similar processes.
By extension, the universe is likely to contain other water-harbouring, Earth-like worlds which have the potential to support extraterrestrial life.
On October 10, experts announced that they had found that 2I/Borisov had come from a twin star system dubbed 'Kruger 60' that lies 13 light years away.
Borisov — named after the Crimean astronomer who discovered it — will pass within around 177,000 miles (285,000 kilometres) of the Earth in early December this year.
It is trailing behind it a 100,000 mile-long tail of dust, which is released as the comet melts in the Sun's glare.
After this, it will head back out towards interstellar space, passing Jupiter around the middle of 2020.
2I/Borisov is the second-known visitor from outside our solar system — joining the cigar-shaped asteroid 1I/'Oumuamua, which was detected on October 19, 2017.
Scroll down for video
The interstellar comet 2I/Borisov, pictured, which is currently visiting our solar system is harbouring water that came from another star system, a study has found
WHAT IS 2I/BORISOV?
2I/Borisov is a comet that came from outside the solar system.
It is believed to have a core that is around 0.9–4.1 miles (1.4–6.6 kilometres) in diameter.
The comet was spotted by amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov from Crimea's MARGOT observatory on August 30, 2019.
It will make its closest pass to the Sun on December 8, 2019 — but will not get close to any of the planets in the solar system.
2I/Borisov will leave the solar system in the direction of the constellation of Telescopium.
According to Polish researchers, it likely originated from the binary red dwarf star system Kruger 60.
The comet is only the second interstellar visit to have been spotted.
The first was the cigar-shaped asteroid 1I/'Oumuamua, which was detected on October 19, 2017.
Astronomer Adam McKay of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and colleagues used the Astrophysical Research Consortium Telescope in New Mexico to analyse 2I/Borisov using so-called spectroscopic observations.
When light from our sun hits the comet, some is absorbed and some is reflected — depending on the elements and compounds in the cosmic body.
By studying the spectra of the light received from 2I/Borisov's gas trail, scientists can thus determine the composition of the materials that make up the comet.
McKay and colleagues found an absorption line in the spectra taken from the comet that is consistent with water — with the strength of such suggesting that water is coming off of 2I/Borisov at a rate of around 113 septillion litres of water per second.
'Comets have a primitive volatile composition that is thought to reflect the conditions present in their formation region in the protosolar disc,' the researchers wrote in their paper.
'This makes studies of cometary volatiles powerful for understanding the physical and chemical processes occurring during planet formation.'
'Comet 2I/Borisov provides an opportunity to sample the volatile composition of a comet that is unambiguously from outside our own Solar System, providing constraints on the physics and chemistry of other protostellar discs,' they added.
Comets seen in our solar system are typically also water-rich — with experts believing that much of the Earth's water was deposited on our planet by comets.
Modelling the size of the active water-releasing area on the comet, the researchers predict an area of around 0.65 square miles (1.7 square kilometres) — a proportion of 2I/Borisov's whole that is on par with the make-up of comets in the solar system.
The latest findings suggest that water-rich comets are not unique to the Solar System and that other star systems likely formed through similar processes
Other spectroscopic analyses have also found that Borisov is releasing diatomic carbon and cyanide — substances that are also common in comets orbiting the Sun.
Put together, the findings suggest that comets from elsewhere in the universe are likely very similar to those we have seen in our own cosmic neighbourhood — suggesting that the conditions that formed our Solar System are not unique.
Furthermore, this raises the likelihood of their being other, water-harbouring, Earth-like planets — which could potentially also have supported the development of life.
A pre-print of the article, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, can be read on the arXiv repository.
2I/Borisov is the second-known visitor from outside our solar system — joining the cigar-shaped asteroid 1I/'Oumuamua, which was detected on October 19, 2017
On October 10, experts announced that they had found that 2I/Borisov had come from a twin star system dubbed 'Kruger 60', pictured in an artist's impression, that lies 13 light years away
WHAT IS 'OUMUAMUA AND WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT IT?
A cigar-shaped asteroid named 'Oumuamua sailed past Earth at 97,200mph (156,428km/h) in October.
It was first spotted by a telescope in Hawaii on 19 October, and was observed 34 separate times in the following week.
It is named after the Hawaiian term for 'scout' or 'messenger' and passed the Earth at about 85 times the distance to the moon.
It was the first interstellar object seen in the solar system, and it baffled astronomers.
Initially, it was thought the object could be a comet.
However, it displays none of the classic behaviour expected of comets, such as a dusty, water-ice particle tail.
The asteroid is up to one-quarter mile (400 meters) long and highly-elongated - perhaps 10 times as long as it is wide.
That aspect ratio is greater than that of any asteroid or asteroid observed in our solar system to date.
But the asteroid's slightly red hue — specifically pale pink — and varying brightness are remarkably similar to objects in our own solar system.
Around the size of the Gherkin skyscraper in London, some astronomers were convinced it was piloted by aliens due to the vast distance the object traveled without being destroyed – and the closeness of its journey past the Earth.
Alien hunters at SETI – the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence based at Berkeley University, California said there was a possibility the rock was ‘an alien artefact’.
But scientists from Queen’s University Belfast took a good look at the object and said it appears to be an asteroid, or ‘planetesimal’ as originally thought.
Researchers believe the cigar-shaped asteroid had a 'violent past', after looking at the light bouncing off its surface.
They aren't exactly sure when the violent collision took place, but they believe the lonely asteroid's tumbling will continue for at least a billion years.
Een gigantisch stedelijk netwerk in niemandsland: mythische 'verloren stad van Goden' ontdekt in Cambodjaanse jungle
Een gigantisch stedelijk netwerk in niemandsland: mythische ‘verloren stad van Goden’ ontdekt in Cambodjaanse jungle
Een stad waar experts al jaren naar zochten, is nu ontdekt in de jungle van Cambodja. Dat schrijft de Daily Star.
De oude stad Mahendraparvata, wat Koning van Goden betekent, was zo’n duizend jaar geleden nog bewoond en kan naar verluidt worden gezien als de eerste hoofdstad van het Khmer-rijk.
Tot voor kort speurden wetenschappers tevergeefs naar de resten van de mysterieuze stad.
Opvallend weinig aandacht
Wetenschappers gebruikten geavanceerde scantechnieken om de exacte locatie te achterhalen van de stad, die dateert van de negende eeuw en gelegen is ten noordoosten van Angkor.
“De bergachtige regio Phnom Kulen heeft tot dusver opvallend weinig aandacht gekregen,” merkte archeoloog Jean-Baptiste Chevance van de Britse Archaeology and Development Foundation op.
“[De regio] is op vrijwel geen enkele archeologische kaart terug te vinden,” vervolgde hij.
Dichte bebossing
De oude Khmer bouwden op grote schaal tempels, maar de interessante plekken zijn door de dichte bebossing lastig te vinden, aldus Chevance.
Dankzij lasertechnologie kon het team dwars door de vegetatie heen kijken en de resten van de stad opsporen.
Gigantisch stedelijk netwerk
Ze zagen een gigantisch stedelijk netwerk in de jungle dat zich uitstrekt over ruim 50 vierkante kilometer.
De onderzoekers wisten dammen, muren, tempels en zelfs een koninklijk paleis te onderscheiden.
Poor ‘Oumuamua. The first known interstellar visitor was the belle of the cosmic ball for a few years – admired for its cigar shape, envied for its long travels, alluring with its mysterious looks that led even the most skeptical to wonder if it might possibly be a spaceship. Today, it’s “Ouma who?” The new star of the stellar show is Borisov – the second known interstellar comet, whose name is easier to remember, large size is hard to ignore and early arrival makes it the center of astronomers’ attention. While Borisov has already garnered “it’s a spaceship” speculation, conventional scientists are hailing it for a better and much more revolutionary reason – Borisov has shown evidence it’s carrying alien water from another solar system! Break out the bubbly or your last can of alien beer from storming Area 51 and let’s toast!
This is a time-lapse sequence compressing Hubble Space Telescope observations of comet 2I/Borisov, spanning a seven-hour period.
Credits: NASA, ESA and J. DePasquale (STScI)
“Using a simple sublimation model, we find an H2O active area of 1.7 km2, which for current constraints on the nucleus size could imply active fractions from as low as 1% to > 100% (implying a hyperactive nucleus), though these active fractions are highly model dependent. More measurements are needed as Borisov approaches perihelion to fully understand its composition and activity.”
Blah, blah, blah … H2O! The discoverers of water on Borisov have already generated a paper on the subject. Adam McKay and a team of scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center used an instrument at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico to study light reflected by Borisov. Studying the vapor spewing off the comet, the instrument detected hydrogen and oxygen – the results of sunlight breaking down water (H2O). The measurements show Borisov is producing up to 19 kilograms of water per second. That’s 42 pounds per second. Even pro wrestlers don’t sweat that much. Alan Fitzsimmons at Queen’s University Belfast, told New Scientist he’s hopeful.
“This would be the first package of water from another planetary system.”
This illustration shows the path of Comet 2I/Borisov through our solar system.
NASA / ESA / J. Olmsted & F. Summers (STScI)
Or maybe not. The oxygen detected could also be coming from a breakdown of carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide, although so far it looks like the result of water vapor. McKay and most members of the scientific community would rather it be water. That would mean other solar systems have the potential for life forms similar to Earth’s. Or perhaps it lends credence to panspermia and the theory that life travelled through space rather than sprouted on individual planets.
“Are we special as a planetary system or are a lot of planetary systems like ours? That has implications for the origin of life, and how common life is throughout the universe.”
Sorry, ‘Oumuamua. We’re infatuated with Borisov now.
ET Bases Found On Earths Moon, NASA Source, UFO Sighting News.
ET Bases Found On Earths Moon, NASA Source, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: Oct 30, 2019 Location of discovery: Earths moon
I found these amazing structures in a NASA photo today. The structure in the screenshot above seems to have been made in six parts and put together in this location. I also show a few other interesting craters that have some black structures within them. I feel its odd that so many structures are at the center of craters...so perhaps a lot of the craters are created by aliens for putting the structures into. Take a look at the video I made and tell my your thoughts. Scott C. Waring
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Fastwalkers flying at an incredible speed through the sky over Alaska and Argentina
Fastwalkers flying at an incredible speed through the sky over Alaska and Argentina
At two separate locations, drones have captured Fastwalkers flying at an incredible speed through the sky respectively over Alaska on October 19, 2019 and Argentina on October 12, 2019.
The Alaska fastwalker flies just above the top of the trees. The video shows the original footage in slow motion as well as in different colors.
The fastwalker captured in Ayacucho, Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina passes at full speed in front of the drone, a Dji Phantom. The video recorded at a resolution of 4K at 30 frames per second shows the fastwalker in the original speed as well as in slow motion and enlarged.
Decades-old questions about the potential existence of fantastical anti-gravity propulsion technologies have resurfaced following the Navy’s own disclosure of encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena and our own original reporting on a series of bizarre patents assigned to the U.S. Navy that seem to defy our current understanding of physics and aerospace propulsion. While the discussion continues over whether any such technologies are feasible, the truth is that the theoretical concepts behind them are anything but new. In fact, the U.S. military and the federal government have been formally researching these radical concepts since the 1950s, and according to our own research, those efforts have continued on to this very day.
In our dive into what seems like something of a bottomless rabbit hole of government studies into this exotic scientific realm, we have collected a body of research, news reports, and firsthand accounts. These establish the fact that the types of "anti-gravity", propellantless propulsion, and mass reduction technologies described in the Navy’s recent "UFO" patents are at least based on more than 60 years of peer-reviewed research conducted and published by the likes of the American Institute of Physics, NASA, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the Air Force Research Laboratory.
While we can't say that any of this research led to actually being able to harness "anti-gravity" or extremely advanced next-generation propulsion technologies to any useful extent, the most advanced laboratories under control of both the armed forces and the academic world have certainly been trying their best to get there for the better part of a century. Also, keep in mind that all of this information comes from unclassified sources, and there is definitely more of it than just what is represented here. We can only wonder how much work has been done in the classified realm on what was once openly considered the next massive revolution in aerospace technology.
The Martin Company's Early Foray Into Anti-Gravity
In terms of the Air Force’s early anti-gravity research, one intriguing first-hand account comes from Dr. Louis Witten, who was a professor of physics at the University of Cincinnati from 1968 to 1991. Throughout his career, Witten conducted research into gravitation, quantum gravity, and general relativity. The last one of these is the theory first put forward by Albert Einstein that proposes that gravity is essentially a warp or curve in the geometry of space-time caused by mass.
During a roundtable discussion titled “Recollections of the Relativistic Astrophysics Revolution” held at the 27th Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics in 2013, Witten recounted his own work on what he somewhat puzzlingly refers to as "the discovery of anti-gravity."
In his portion of the roundtable, Witten recalls being recruited by George S. Trimble, then serving as Vice President for Aviation and Advanced Propulsion Systems at the Glenn L. Martin Company, which evolved first into Martin-Marietta and eventually merged with Lockheed in 1995 to form Lockheed Martin. The project for which Witten was recruited would come to be known as the Research Institute for Advanced Studies (RIAS) and was officially founded in 1955 by George Bunker, president of Martin, with the goal of advancing aerospace science and development.
"The vice president [Trimble] had the wonderful idea which was to develop anti-gravity," Witten says, noting he immediately balked at the proposal. "When he tried the idea in public, you can imagine the greeting he received from scientists. So he said to himself 'those poor bastards, I'll show them.'" Despite his skepticism, Witten ended up accepting Trimble's offer to join the powerful Martin executive's pet project.
Throughout his short speech given at the roundtable, Witten says that even though he faced ridicule within the scientific community for his research, there was no shortage of people who would tell him they knew how to achieve anti-gravity:
“Some of them were very simple ideas. The simple ideas are always hard to combat. Suppose somebody comes to you and says 'I have a rock of bismuth that demonstrates anti-gravity.' What do you do?
There was a Vice President of the Martin Company who brought that up, he said 'I read about a guy in Indiana who says a rock of bismuth…' I said 'It’s nonsense.' He said ‘How do you know it’s nonsense? How do you know there’s no isotope of bismuth that shows anti-gravity?' What do you say to that?”
Witten's speech begins around the 1:49:10 mark:
Witten’s ends his speech by pointing out that despite the constant barrage of nonsense claims to investigate, "the power of a Vice President of a big company is so great that the reason there was a laboratory at Wright Field [today known Areas A and C of Wright Patterson Air Force Base] was to find out what we were doing and to help us do it and I got a contract from Wright Field to do it - to do gravity. Which I did, very happily."
It’s unknown what, if anything, ever came of Witten’s research or the program's other related research. While we haven’t found a record of him at Wright Patterson to confirm his account, Witten did in fact publish several theoretical articles concerning general relativity throughout that period including “Invariants of General Relativity and the Classification of Spaces”, “Geometry of Gravitation and Electromagnetism”, and “Conformal Invariance in Physics”, all of which list Witten as an employee of the Research Institute for Advanced Studies established by Martin.
The anti-gravity work Witten claims to have conducted at RIAS on behalf of Martin is corroborated by a series of three articles written by aviation journalist Ansel Talbert and published in the New York Herald Tribune on November 20, 21, and 22, 1956. Talbert served as the aviation correspondent for the Herald Tribune from 1953 until the paper shut down in 1966, after which he wrote for various aviation magazines and trade publications.
NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE
The front page of the November 20, 1955 issue of the New York Herald Tribune.
The articles outline several research institutes that were focused on unlocking the secrets of gravity in the 1950s, including several major universities and private laboratories. A key part of much of the research conducted at these facilities involved relatively down-to-earth topics like electromagnetism, rotating masses at high speeds, and various methods of attempting to reduce an aircraft’s mass.
Ansel Talbert was offered a firsthand glimpse into the research conducted at many of the laboratories set up in the 1950s to research gravity and attempts to combat it. His series of articles exploring the subject mention the anti-gravity interests and research of some of the biggest names in aviation: William P. Lear, Lawrence D. Bell, Dr. Igor I. Sikorsky, Martin's Vice President Trimble, and even frozen foods magnate Clarence Birdseye. "Mr. Birdseye gave the world its first packaged quick-frozen foods and laid the foundation for today's frozen food industry," Talbert wrote, "more recently he has become interested in gravitational studies."
NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE
Lawrence Bell of Bell Aircraft with Lt. Col Frank J. Everest, Maj. Charles Yeager, and Maj. Arthur Murray. According to Talbert's articles, Bell believed that is was possible "to cancel out gravity instead of fighting it."
Talbert’s series offers a fascinating glimpse into the many anti-gravity research efforts which were underway in the mid-1950s, but like all accounts of anti-gravity or breakthrough propulsion research, none of the subjects Talbert interviewed offered any suggestion that conclusive working anti-gravity technologies ever came from these endeavors.
Still, Talbert points out that some of the brightest minds in aerospace engineering and physics were devoted to studying gravity at the time, studies which led to important breakthroughs in general relativity:
The current efforts to understand gravity and universal gravitation both at the sub-atomic level and at the level of the universe have the positive backing today of many of America's outstanding physicists.
These include Dr. Edward Teller of the University of California, who received prime credit for developing the hydrogen bomb; Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; Dr. Freeman J. Dyson, theoretical physicist at the Institute, and Dr. John A. Wheeler, professor of physics at Princeton University who made important contributions to America's first nuclear fission project.
It must be stressed that scientists in this group approach the problem only from the standpoint of pure research. They refuse to predict exactly in what directions the search will lead or whether it will be successful beyond broadening human knowledge generally.
One of the biggest takeaways from Talbert’s series is the optimism shared by many of those involved with the project, as well as the stigma surrounding such an endeavor, even back then:
Grover Loening, who was the first graduate in aeronautics in an American university and the first engineer hired by the Wright Brothers, holds similar views. Over a period of forty years, Mr. Loening has had a distinguished career as an aircraft designer and builder and recently was decorated by the United States Air Force for his work as a special scientific consultant. "I firmly believe that before long man will acquire the ability to build an electromagnetic contra-gravity mechanism that works," he says. "Much the same line of reasoning that enabled scientists to split up atomic structures also will enable them to learn the nature of gravitational attraction and ways to counter it."
Right now there is considerable difference of opinion among those working to discover the secret of gravity and universal gravitation as to exactly how long the project will take. George S. Trimble, a brilliant young scientist who is head of the new advanced design division of Martin Aircraft in Baltimore and a member of the sub-committee on high-speed aerodynamics of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, believes that it could be done relatively quickly if sufficient resources and momentum were put behind the program.
"I think we could do the job in about the time that it actually required to build the first atom bomb if enough trained scientific brainpower simultaneously began thinking about and working towards a solution," he said. "Actually, the biggest deterrent to scientific progress is a refusal of some people, including scientists, to believe that things which seem amazing can really happen... I know that if Washington decides that it is vital to our national survival to go where we want and do what we want without having to worry about gravity, we'd find the answer rapidly."
Transcribed full text versions of Talbert’s articles "Conquest of Gravity Aim of Top Scientists in U.S.," "Space-Ship Marvel Seen If Gravity is Outwitted," and "New Air Dream - Planes Flying Outside Gravity" can be found online here, while digital versions of the articles as they appeared in the New York Herald Tribune can be found through the Herald Tribune archives available through the ProQuest database or the New York Public Library system.
NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE
An op-ed sent to the New York Herald Tribune in response to Talbert’s series.
The Aerospace Research Laboratories At Wright Patterson Air Force Base
George Trimble, Clarence Birdseye, and Lawrence Bell weren’t the only ones interested in researching anti-gravity. Talbert's series reported that nearly every major aerospace company at the time was involved in some way with researching "the gravity problem": Convair, Lear, Sikorsky, Sperry-Rand Corp., General Dynamics, and Avro Canada. Just as Dr. Louis Witten mentioned off-hand in the closing seconds of his speech at the 27th Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics, the United States Air Force also established its own gravity research project at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.
The project was initially known as the General Physics Laboratory of the Aeronautical Research Laboratories (ARL), but its name was changed to Aerospace Research Laboratories at some point. To head the project, the Air Force hired physicist Joshua N. Goldberg who had recently received his PhD from Syracuse University. According to Goldberg’s Curriculum Vitae, he served as a research physicist at Wright Patterson’s Aerospace Research Laboratories from 1956 to 1962, as well as teaching graduate-level classical mechanics at the Ohio State University Extension at Wright Patterson.
Viewpoints differ on the nature of the research conducted at Wright-Patterson under this program. Some have posited that it had to do with actually trying to develop anti-gravity propulsion, while others say its goals were far more mundane.
Nevertheless, the research supported by the Air Force led to what some science historians have called the “Golden Age of Relativity,” a title disputed by others, such as German physicist Hubert Goenner, who argues that “to a great extent what was named the ‘Golden age of relativity’ in the United States, may have been nothing but a feature of a general trend in physics after the ‘Sputnik’-shock.” It’s often claimed that the institute at Wright Patterson and other associated Air Force-funded laboratories were set up merely to investigate reports of Russian anti-gravity research to see if America's adversaries had achieved what the United States had not been able to.
The anti-gravity research conducted at Wright Patterson concluded in the early 1970s with the passage of the Mansfield Amendments. The first of these, passed in 1970, limited “military funding of research that lacked a direct or apparent relationship to a specific military function.”
According to an Office of Technology Assessment report delivered to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1991, these Mansfield Amendments for some years somewhat slowed the rate of U.S. military research into the types of lofty, abstract topics studied at Wright Patterson throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Following those Amendments, the Department of Defense’s research strategy shifted more towards the proposal-grant model seen at university and private laboratories today.
That is not to say that the U.S. military’s research into gravitation ended with the Mansfield Amendments or was limited solely to Goldberg’s group at Wright Patterson. There is a wealth of research in the public realm that shows the Air Force’s research into these concepts continued long after the scientists at that base moved on to long careers in academia.
In 1972, an ad hoc group with Franklin Mead, then Senior Aerospace Engineer with the Air Force Aerospace Research Laboratories, serving as editor had published a technical report titled “Advanced Propulsion Concepts - Project Outgrowth” for the Air Force Rocket Propulsion Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base. The document discusses various advanced propulsion concepts ranging from traditional rocket propulsion to “anti-gravity propulsion,” to which an entire chapter is dedicated.
Two main approaches are outlined in Project Outgrowth: those using gravitational absorption, and those based on unified field theory which unites electromagnetism and gravitation. While the document notes that these approaches would “require some major breakthroughs in materials,” it points out that “no new or radical change in fundamental physics” would be required to make these breakthroughs a reality. In other words, Mead and the rest of the study group believed that these types of breakthrough propulsion concepts may be possible once materials sciences caught up with concepts developed in theoretical physics.
USAF
Throughout the expansive Project Outgrowth document, Mead and the other scientists also explored field propulsion, defined as those concepts which use “electric and/or magnetic fields to accelerate an ionized working fluid, or react directly with the environment by electric or magnetic effects.” While a range of theoretical field propulsion approaches were analyzed, they concluded that “it would be impossible within the time constraints of this study to evaluate the field propulsion area completely,” noting however that “more radical concepts may be found in the open literature by those interested in pursuing them.”
Still, the document contains quite a few curiosities. One chapter, titled “Electrostatic Effects,” describes the use of electric generators to charge giant metallic spheres buried in the ground six miles apart in symmetrical arrangements. Another sphere would be placed on top of the ground in the center of this arrangement of spheres, which would then be shot up to 620 miles into space when the other spheres are charged with an intense electrical current, according to the document. It is also claimed that vehicles flying in space with charged skins could be used to cause the spheres to change directions instantly without any loss of velocity or use of propellant.
USAF
As fascinating as this experiment sounds, there is nothing in the document to suggest the Air Force actually sent metal spheres flying into the sky, and the document points out that “analysis of this concept completely ignores the effect of the immense electric fields of the surrounding environment,” noting that ambient ions accumulating around the spheres would nullify the repulsion effect. "Handling and producing charged objects of the magnitude assumed for the analysis may be well beyond the reach of technology for decades to come“ and "all of the ideas discussed lack theoretical and technical merit,” the study group concluded.
USAF
The same document outlines theoretical approaches at using superconductors to achieve electromagnetic spacecraft propulsion, noting that the applications of high energy electromagnetic fields range far beyond propulsion:
The greatest advantage of this concept is that the system is initially charged on earth with a tremendous amount of massless energy which is stored in a low-loss propulsion system. [...] Similar to other low-thrust vehicles, this system is capable of accelerating to very high velocities when operating over great distances for substantial periods of time. [...] This system could be used to decelerate vehicles approaching the Earth at high speed. Militarily, this concept could, with its high magnetic field, destroy, deflect, or severely damage incoming high-speed projectiles.
USAF
The Project Outgrowth document concludes by arguing that while many of these concepts are still out of the grasp of the USAF, advances in materials and engineering could make what in 1972 seemed like fantasy a reality in the decades to come:
Obviously, advancements in certain areas of technology could make a number of concepts suddenly very attractive. Improvements in high energy lasers by several orders of magnitude of energy output or new concepts involving long-distance energy transfer would make both laser propulsion and infinite Isp ramjet very attractive. The development of higher current density superconductors, metallic hydrogen, or even room temperature superconductors would make many of the magnetic concepts more attractive. [...]
Radical departures from time-honored, well-proved approaches are either discarded or lack visualization. Possibly, not until man truly becomes a creature of space will the restrictions imposed on his imagination be removed and radically new propulsion concepts devised. We are just beginning to understand the true nature of space and to attempt to utilize this environment for our propulsion needs.
The same concepts explored in the Project Outgrowth document were later examined by subsequent Air Force-funded studies. In 1988, the New York-based Veritay Technology, Inc. submitted the document “21st Century Propulsion Concept” to the Air Force Astronautics Laboratory (AFAL) at Edwards Air Force Base. The document looks at the Biefield-Brown effect, a controversial theory that claims that electrical fields can produce propulsive forces sometimes referred to as ionic wind. The AFAL was able to generate minuscule measures of propulsion with the concept, but concluded that “ion propulsion effects are negligible.”
A similar report from 1989 titled “Electric Propulsion Study” also complied for the Astronautics Laboratory at Edwards outlines a variety of theories and experiments that explore the interactions between gravitational, electrical, and electromagnetic fields. Concepts like ionic wind, the Mach effect, and various applications of high energy electromagnetic fields are discussed.
One brief chapter explores the concept of inertial mass variation using a rotating cylinder filled with mercury. The Air Force concluded that the experiment showed little promise and that “no AFAL action is suggested at this time” but that “should an experiment by external agencies be done with positive results, then this area should be reconsidered.”
Ultimately, the document concludes that while much of the research it cites is still in its infancy, inertial mass reduction techniques may offer the most promising results with further study:
It is recommended that policies and plans take into consideration long time studies in the area of gravity and inertia. These areas deserve more emphasis. This is likely to be more important than any single experimental program. Since chemical propulsion is reaching its theoretical limits and nuclear propulsion has political difficulties, it is more likely that gravitational and electromagnetic studies will lead to future breakthroughs than any nuclear force studies (with the possible exception of more recent low temperature fusion work).
The Air Force continues to look into ways of defying gravity without the use of propellants and some technical reports maintain that this will soon be possible. According to the 2006 study “Advanced Technology and Breakthrough Physics for 2025 and 2050 Military Aerospace Vehicles” which was published by the American Institute of Physics, some scientists claim that next-generation propulsion may be achieved sometime within the next three decades.
The study was compiled at the request of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and examines the technological breakthroughs that researchers believed could be developed and implemented by 2025 and 2050.
AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS
The conceptual "2050 vehicle" featuring hypothetical inertial mass reduction technology which is theorized to extract energy from the quantum vacuum.
While most of the report centers around compact fusion reactors and the developments of new high temperature composite materials, the section on the “2050 Vehicle” predicts that the jet propulsion and power systems of this hypothetical aircraft will come in the form of propellant-less field propulsion based on the principle of inducing mass fluctuations using high-frequency electromagnetic fields:
One example of propellant-less field propulsion [...] proposes the use of high voltage and high frequency electromagnetic (em) field pulsations to induce mass fluctuations within the electronic and ionic structure of dielectric materials - to cause a favorable “gravinertial” field coupling with nearby and distant matter that results in unidirectional force.
Of course, as we now know, the USAF isn’t the sole branch of the military openly looking into next-generation hypothetical vehicles based on concepts of electromagnetic fields and inertial mass variation. Based on the recent announcement declaring a partnership with TTSA, we know even the U.S. Army is also exploring similar concepts for next-generation ground vehicles that exploit the same principles the USAF has explored for decades: mass manipulation, electromagnetic metamaterial waveguides, and quantum physics.
Civilian Research Into Gravitation, Electromagnetism, And Propulsion
The military isn’t the only sector that has for decades conducted research that has explored the boundaries of aerospace propulsion and general relativity. In 1996, NASA funded an endeavor known as the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics (BPP) Program which invited some of the brightest minds in physics and aerospace engineering to propose radical new ideas to propel spaceflight into a new paradigm.
In a paper outlining the BPP program presented at the Second Symposium on Realistic Near-Term Advanced Scientific Space Missions in 1998, its director, Marc Miller, offered an overview of NASA’s aims for the project, noting that “it is known from observed phenomena and from the established physics of General Relativity that gravity, electromagnetism, and spacetime are inter-related phenomena” and that “these ideas have led to questioning if gravitational or inertial forces can be created or modified using electromagnetism.”
Many of the ideas Miller and the NASA BPP program describes were developed or are better understood thanks to the research funded by Wright Patterson, including Hermann Bondi’s concept of negative mass (Bondi’s group at Kings College, London received funding from the U.S. Air Force) and Joshua Goldberg’s theory of gravitational radiation.
In an attempt to achieve breakthrough propulsion based on these concepts, NASA’s project identified three major barriers that stood in the way of their main goal of achieving interstellar travel:
(1) MASS: Discover new propulsion methods that eliminate or dramatically reduce the need for propellant. This implies discovering fundamentally new ways to create motion, presumably by manipulating inertia, gravity, or by any other interactions between matter, fields, and spacetime.
(2) SPEED: Discover how to attain the ultimate achievable transit speeds to dramatically reduce travel times. This implies discovering a means to move a vehicle at or near the actual maximum speed limit for motion through space or through the motion of spacetime itself (if possible, this means circumventing the light speed limit).
(3)ENERGY: Discover fundamentally new modes of on board energy generation to power these propulsion devices. This third goal is included since the first two breakthroughs could require breakthroughs in energy generation, and since the physics underlying the propulsion goals is closely linked to energy physics.
In 1997, NASA’s Lewis Research Center, now known as the John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field, held a conference on these breakthrough propulsion concepts, the proceedings of which are worth a read and contain titles such as “Inertial Mass as a Reaction of the Vacuum to Accelerated Motion”, “Force Field Propulsion”, and “The Zero-Point Field and the NASA Challenge to Create the Space Drive”.
From what little we know or think we know about Salvatore Cezar Pais, the elusive inventor of the Navy’s intriguing if not puzzling anti-gravity ‘UFO’ patents that we’ve explored in our previous reporting, he was working on his PhD dissertation at Case Western Reserve University while serving as a NASA Graduate Student Research Fellow at NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field at the time of the conference.
There’s no concrete evidence that Pais attended the workshop, but according to the document’s foreword, 12 students were in attendance. The table of contents for the conference proceedings lists a total of 449 pages, the last of which is a list of workshop participants. However, the versions available online stop at page 389. We are currently pursuing a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the missing pages.
Confirming Pais' presence at the conference would be significant because many of the exact same revolutionary concepts that NASA was exploring in terms of unlocking new forms of propulsion and space travel are the same types of concepts found throughout the patents for his "hybrid aerospace-underwater craft" and "high energy electromagnetic field generator." Many of the participants at NASA's workshop are also cited throughout Pais' patents and publications. Placing Pais at the conference would add to the body of evidence which suggests the technologies in the Navy's patents may have been in the works for the past 20 years, at least as far as the inventor is concerned. In reality though, as we've laid out here, many of the concepts in Pais' patents are similar to those which were researched at Wright-Patterson and other facilities in the 1950s and are still being explored today.
Aside from NASA, academic and independent laboratories have been researching the same principles and approaches the Air Force and other military laboratories have been looking into for decades. One of the most commonly researched areas is in hypothetically reducing an aircraft’s mass using electromagnetism, preferably to zero, and several Lockheed Martin researchers have been involved with quite a few theoretical studies into altering inertial mass (see Haisch, Rueda, and Puthoff, 1998; Rueda and Haisch, 1998; Haisch and Rueda, 1999; and Woodward, Mahood, and March 2001).
A large body of peer-reviewed research into mass reduction involves using advanced superconducting materials such as yttrium barium copper oxide, or YBCO (see Podkletnov and Nieminen, 1992; Li et al, 1997; and Podkletnov and Modanese, 2001). Some of these studies, many of them more than 20 years old, reported observing mass reductions of up to two percent. Of course, just because scientists report a peer-reviewed result doesn’t mean their data can’t be challenged or have been impacted by spurious factors.
Other attempts to overcome and harness gravity focus on the use of electromagnetic fields. In the 2007 publication “The Connection between Inertial Forces and the Vector Potential”, researchers found a connection between electric and magnetic fields, writing that there is a “possibility to manipulate inertial mass" and potentially "some mechanisms for possible applications to electromagnetic propulsion and the development of advanced space propulsion physics.”
In 2010, an Air Force-funded study at the University of Florida leveraged these principles to design and test a "Wingless Electromagnetic Air Vehicle (WEAV)" which is claimed to employ "no moving parts and assures near-instantaneous response time." The study writes that this vehicle is designed to support the Air Force Research Laboratory's strategy to “deliver precision effects: ubiquitous, swarming sensors and shooters” by 2015-2030.
The study was able to produce a disc that "was able to hover a few millimeters above the surface for a sustained duration (about three minutes)" and noted that "prototypes of varying radius were also successfully 'flown', demonstrating that WEAV is scalable."
AIR FORCE OFFICE OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
Many other approaches have focused on the unique properties of novel materials. The 2007 publication “Direct Experimental Evidence of Electromagnetic Inertia Manipulation Thrusting" reports “new experimental results suggesting that ‘propellantless’ propulsion without conventional external assistance has been achieved by means of electromagnetic inertia manipulation” using piezoelectric materials, compounds that change shape when subjected to an electrical charge.
In fact, several researchers have reported significant results in mass manipulation using a specific piezoelectric compound, lead zirconate titanate (PZT), which is found throughout several of the Navy’s recent patents. One physicist in particular, Dr. James Woodward of California State Fullerton, has found repeated success in altering the mass of small test samples of PZT.
While the levels of mass reduction Woodward has observed are tiny, so are the samples and energy levels he has used. Still, in one study published with aerospace engineer Paul T. March, then at Lockheed Martin, the authors note that “very large mass fluctuation effects should be producible with only relatively modest power levels,” but are beyond the scope and scale of their study.
Even so, Woodward’s results have been so promising that at least two Air Force studies, the 1989 technical report “Electric Propulsion Study” and the 2017 paper “Movement and Maneuver in Deep Space: A Framework to Leverage Advanced Propulsion”, call attention to his research in particular and note that his approach seems most promising.
However, the 2017 Air Force paper notes that “obvious institutional and funding barriers stand in the way” and that “materials science and engineering work would be required to produce new piezoelectric materials and compensate for natural resonance, mechanical fatigue, and thermal effects.”
Perhaps for that reason and for likely many more, various branches of the Armed Forces have for years been actively researching metamaterials that can propagate high energy electromagnetic fields. Navy budget documents show that between 2011 and 2016, the Navy’s In-House Laboratory Independent Research program conducted research into the “dispersion and control of electromagnetic (EM) waves in the microwave (RF) region, using fabricated metamaterial structures”.
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
Starting in 2017, the Navy combined several program elements under one title, changing the way individual projects are reported in their budget and thus making it more difficult to know whether this metamaterial research continues today.
Scratching The Surface While Not Knowing What Lies Beneath It
The research cited here is only a brief look at a handful of the numerous studies the Air Force, other branches of the military, and various academic laboratories have conducted into "anti-gravity" and various propellantless propulsion methods, and only those that are available to the public. Anyone familiar with military research and development knows that there is a vast trove of projects, associated data, and technologies the public has yet to be shown and may never be shown.
There have been hints of those secret technologies for years offered by insiders of some of America's most high-level aerospace research and development outfits. For instance, Ben Rich, the second director of Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, told Popular Science in 1994 the following:
“We have some new things. We are not stagnating. What we are doing is updating ourselves, without advertising. There are some new programs, and there are certain things, some of them 20 or 30 years old, that are still breakthroughs and appropriate to keep quiet about [because] other people don’t have them yet.”
With this in mind, it is possible that there are certain technologies in existence that once were, but may no longer be the things of science fiction.
Regardless, when it comes to harnessing exotic methods of overcoming gravity, the U.S. military’s interest in doing so has continued since the 1950s, and civilian laboratories have been hot on their heels.
We're still pursuing answers to the enigma surrounding the recent Navy patents, but to say they have come out of the blue and have no scientific basis whatsoever seems to be not entirely accurate based on the decades of research we've presented here. The same principles and many of the same names cited in Salvatore Pais' patents filed for the US Navy between 2015 and 2018 appear throughout numerous NASA studies, the peer-reviewed publications of the scientific community, and the long history of U.S. government-funded research into general relativity and breakthrough propulsion science.
We have to stress once again that this doesn't mean that actually realizing these concepts and putting them to use is possible at this time, or even ever in the future, for that matter. But it does show that there has been an incredibly long and detailed history of interest by the U.S. military and the scientific community in this exotic field that has resulted in significant amounts of research that spans nearly seven decades. All this occurred in spite of the fact that scientists realized as far back as the 1950s that the topic was largely taboo and often scoffed at by the larger scientific community.
Once again, what exists behind the curtain of the classified realm is the big wildcard here. With so much research present in the unclassified environment, one can only guess as to just how far the military and their industry partners have actually gone in an effort to obtain the 'Holy Grail' of aerospace engineering. For some, that speculative answer may be not very far at all. For others, it may be quite the contrary. The fact is we just don't know. But at least we do know that the topic, in general, isn't quite as alien as it may seem.
Whatever is out there, it’s probably not much like us at all.
It astonishes me how much we seem to know about aliens. They build technology-driven civilisations and pilot spaceships across the galaxy. They create energy-harvesting structures around their stars. They beam interstellar greetings to us. We cannot be sure that, when our own broadcasts reach them in some future era, they will breathlessly await the arrival of the next episode of Glee–but it seems a fair bet.
How do we know all this? Not by science’s usual method of finding out stuff, which is by observing. We know it because it stands to reason. Because we’ve seen it at the movies. Because it’s what we would do. Which is to say: when we start speculating about what advanced extraterrestrials are like, we are really just talking about ourselves.
The impulse to cast life on other worlds in our own image goes back all the way to the 17th century.
The impulse to cast life on other worlds in our own image goes back all the way to the proto-science fiction of the 17th century, such as the novel The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Worlds of the Moon and Sun (1657) by the French writer Cyrano de Bergerac. Cyrano pictured a lunar landscape inhabited by gigantic man-animals who somehow managed to create a very European courtly society where they debated Aristotle and Christian theology. So it has been, mostly, ever since. The galactic empires of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels (1942-1993) and the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises are peopled by creatures modeled on robustly late-20th-century humans in psychology and motive, no matter how much fur or how many forehead ridges they possess.
Such self-reflexive assumptions about alien civilizations leapt from the movie screen to the science journals last September when the astronomer Tabetha Boyajian of Yale University and her coworkers, using the Kepler space telescope, reported that the light coming from a star called KIC 8462852 exhibits intense, rapid brightness fluctuations that can’t easily be explained by any known natural process. Boyajian suggested that a circling horde of comets might be blocking the star’s light, but Jason Wright, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, and his colleagues added a provocative, albeit unlikely, alternative: the flickering of KIC 8462852 could be the passing shadow of a gigantic structure built by alien engineers.
The concept of such a star-circling structure was proposed in the 1960s by the British-born physicist Freeman Dyson. He argued that any civilization with sufficient technical capability would construct a vast solar array in space to feed its enormous energy demand. Wright’s comment about a possible real-life “Dyson sphere” around KIC 8462852 was made with all due caution, but you can’t speculate quietly about the detection of aliens. Soon, the idea was shouted from headlines worldwide. Further raising the volume, other researchers began listening for messages coming from KIC 8462852. Those searches focused on radio waves and laser pulses, just like the signals we use, highlighting the abiding narcissism of the effort.
For as long as scientists have looked for alien life, they have conceived them in our own image. The quest arguably began with a 1959 Naturepaper by the physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, who argued that “near some star rather like the Sun there are civilizations with scientific interests and with technical possibilities much greater than those now available to us.” The two scientists further posited that such aliens would have “established a channel of communication that would one day become known to us.” Such alien signals would most likely take the form of shortwave radio, which is ubiquitous through the Universe, and would contain an obviously artificial message such as “a sequence of small prime numbers of pulses, or simple arithmetical sums.”
If all complex life in the universe originated through a Darwinian evolution, isn’t it reasonable to imagine that it will be curious and expansionist?
Nothing in this suggestion was unreasonable, but it’s self-evidently the result of two smart scientists asking: “What would we do?” Cocconi and Morrison’s proposal to look for familiar types of signals, coming from familiar types of technology, has heavily conditioned the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) ever since. Today, the Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb thinks it might be good to look for spectroscopic signatures of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmospheres of alien planets, apparently in the conviction that aliens have fridges like ours (or perhaps they’re just crazy about hairspray). Other scientists have proposed finding aliens by looking for their light-polluting cities; their starship Enterprise-style antimatter drives; or the radiation flashes from extraterrestrial nuclear war. It all sounds dreadfully… human.
The obvious defense is that, if you’re going to bother with SETI at all, you have to start somewhere. That we have the urge to search for life elsewhere probably owes something to our natural instincts to explore our environment and to propagate our kind. If–and this does seem rather likely–all complex life in the universe originated through a competitive Darwinian evolutionary process, isn’t it reasonable to imagine that it will have evolved to be curious and expansionist? Then again, not all human societies seem intent on spreading beyond the village, and whether Darwinian selection will continue to be the predominant shaping force on humanity over the next millennium (never mind a million years) is anyone’s guess.
The problem with basing SETI on projections of our own impulses and inventions is that it constrains our thinking along a very narrow path. Those curbs were going up even before Morrison and Cocconi laid the foundations of SETI. In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was musing with some colleagues about the existence of intelligent aliens who explore the cosmos. If other beings are capable of travel between the stars, surely they’d have spotted us and come to take a look by now, he reasoned, so ‘Where is everybody?’ Fermi’s ‘paradox’ is still cited as an argument for why intelligent life must be rare in the Universe. Among the possible resolutions offered by the SETI Institute, whose name advertises its goals, is: “Aliens have done cost-benefit analyses that show interstellar travel to be too costly or too dangerous.” Maybe “the Galaxy is urbanized [but] we’re in a dullsville suburb.” Or perhaps Earth is being preserved in isolation as “an exhibit for alien tourists or sociologists.”
It’s funny–I almost feel I know these aliens.
Do these failures of imagination mean that we should shut up about what alien civilizations might or might not do? Not at all. I reckon that speculating in this fashion is one of the perks our species has earned for having made a modicum of sense out of this perplexing cosmos. But how can we move beyond solipsism and tired Hollywood tropes?
One tip is not to be too distracted by science fiction. Some of it is fabulous, but let’s not forget that it’s storytelling, which means that it needs characters and plots with which we can identify. And so those classics, from Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) and Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953) to the elaborate futures of Kim Stanley Robinson and Iain M Banks, have overlords and dictators, heroes and heroines, spaceship fleets and empires. The Dyson sphere was itself prefigured in, and explicitly inspired by, Olaf Stapledon’s novel Star Maker (1937). When we apply human-centric narratives to SETI, we need to remind ourselves that we’re merely looking into a distorted mirror. Such a warning could prod us to be more daring and imaginative in thinking about alien life, as well as to ponder whether there might be a more rigorous way to explore the range of possibilities.
Maybe super-advanced beings will relinquish the physical world, dwelling in the nooks and crannies of extra dimensions
Dig a little, and it’s possible to find more creative ideas about how intelligent aliens might exist yet not be detectable to us. Maybe super-advanced beings will relinquish the physical world, dwelling in the nooks and crannies of extra dimensions. Maybe they will disintegrate into a disembodied swarm intelligence, like the Black Cloud in the 1957 sci-fi novel of that name by English astronomer Fred Hoyle – a rare example of a scientist being truly inventive in fiction. Maybe the life of a hyper-intelligent alien will look to us incomprehensibly boring or complicated.
Or perhaps they will revert to a simpler lifestyle, like the small-brained, seal-like descendants of humans that lounge on rocks in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Galápagos (1985). They still find farts amusing, though, so even they aren’t so very different from us.
The hand might look like an X-ray from the doctor's office, but it is actually a cloud of material ejected from a star that exploded. NASA's NuSTAR spacecraft has imaged the structure in high-energy X-rays for the first time, shown in blue. Lower-energy X-ray light previously detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is shown in green and red.
Witches, ghosts and ghouls don't just haunt the Earth on Halloween night — such spooky figures exist throughout the universe, too. Here are some of the most spine-chilling space photos to scare your pants off this Halloween. HERE: This glowing, green zombie-like hand reaches through the depths of space to grab a bright-red cloud of light. Is this a giant space zombie grabbing some dinner? Not quite — NASA calls this nebula the "Hand of God." It is actually a pulsar wind nebula, produced by the dense remnant of a star that exploded in a supernova.
2. Screaming Skull
A. Fabian (IoA Cambridge) et al., NASA
Yikes! This ghastly face in space appears to be screaming while suffering through a miserable, fiery death. But no real skulls were harmed in the making of this photo. It's actually an X-ray image of cluster of galaxies known as the Perseus Cluster.
3. Space Ghosts
Adam Block, NOAO, AURA, NSF
Ghastly figures appear to be fighting to escape from this cloud of interstellar gas and dust called SH2-136. The illuminated dark nebula is about 1,200 light-years away, towards the constellation Cepheus.
4. Halloween Skull in Space
NAIC-Arecibo/NSF
How did this skull wind up in space? A radar image of asteroid 2015 TB145, which NASA says is likely a dead comet, was captured using the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico on Oct. 30, 2015. The skull-shaped asteroid flew by Earth last Halloween (Oct. 31).
5. Zombie Pac-Man Nebula
Gemini South GMOS/Travis Rector/U. of Alaska Anchorage
An ominous-looking nebula named NGC 246 lurks in the constellation Cetus about 1,600 light-years away from Earth. It is nicknamed the "Skull Nebula," but some astronomers call it the "Pac-Man Nebula." It appears to be taking a bite out of space.
6. Witch Head Nebula
NASA/JPL-Caltech
A witch appears to be cackling out into space in this eerie image from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The infrared portrait shows the Witch Head nebula, named after its resemblance to the profile of a wicked witch.
7. Eye of Sauron is Watching You
NASA, ESA, P. Kalas, J. Graham, E. Chiang, E. Kite (University of California, Berkeley), M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and K. Stapelfeldt and J. Krist (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
This evil eye-shaped nebula, formally named Fomalhaut, strikes an eerie resemblance to the fearful Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings series. In the books, Tolkien described the eye as being "rimmed with fire... watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened up on a pit, a window into nothing."
8. The Face on Mars
NASA
Though we have yet to find any aliens on Mars, NASA did discover this creepy human face on the Red Planet. The original "Face on Mars" image was taken by NASA's Viking 1 orbiter, in grey scale, on July, 25 1976. NASA assures that the face is simply a peculiar pile of rocks — but that doesn't make it any less spooky!
9. Ghost Head Nebula
Mohammad Heydari-Malayeri (Observatoire de Paris) et al., ESA, NASA
The Ghost Head Nebula's two flaming-hot eyes peer at us all the way from the Magellanic cloud, located about 170,000 light-years away from Earth. Its glowing eyes are star-forming regions with hot blobs of hydrogen and oxygen.
10. Black Widow Nebula
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Wisc.
This giant, red space spider is the biggest black widow we've ever seen! But don't worry — it won't bite. It's actually just a nebula, or a cloud of interstellar gas and dust.
11. Zombie Star Explodes Back to Life
NASA/CXC/Chinese Academy of Sciences/F. Lu et al
This zombie star named Tycho was once a white dwarf, or the remnants of an exploding supernova. The dead star gobbled up too much mass from another nearby star and exploded again in what's called a Type Ia supernova.
12. Extreme Pumpkin Stars
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
NASA has discovered 18 strange stars that spin so fast that their spherical shape is squashed into the shape of a pumpkin. These rapidly-spinning stars blast X-rays into space at rates of up to thousands of times as much as our sun.
Het is zover: legerveteranen en wetenschappers gaan UFO’s opsporen voor de kust van Californië. Dit is het doel
Het is zover: legerveteranen en wetenschappers gaan UFO’s opsporen voor de kust van Californië. Dit is het doel
Een aantal legerveteranen, wetenschappers en ondernemers gaan zich inzetten in het opsporen van onbekende vliegende objecten oftewel UFO’s.
Ze hebben zich aangesloten bij een ngo die UAP eXpeditions gaat heten.
De organisatie wordt geleid door Kevin Day, een gepensioneerde marineofficier en radarbeheerder die gestationeerd was op één van de schepen die betrokken waren bij een inmiddels beroemde UFO-waarneming waarbij onder meer een object in de vorm van een Tic Tac werd gesignaleerd.
Vandaag de dag
Day volgde de objecten op de radar aan boord van de USS Princeton en denkt dat ze zelfs vandaag de dag nog in het gebied rondvliegen.
De groep gaat onder meer getrainde waarnemers en wetenschappers inzetten en daarnaast wordt gebruikgemaakt van de nieuwste experimentele technologieën.
Denk daarbij aan geavanceerde camera’s die worden gebruikt om de objecten te volgen en vast te leggen.
Zoveel mogelijk
Het doel is om er zoveel mogelijk over te weten te komen.
Ook dr. Kevin Knuth, voorheen werkzaam voor het Ames Research Center van de NASA, heeft zich aangesloten bij de organisatie.
Twee fases
Hij liet weten dat het project zal bestaan uit twee fases. Eerst wordt er met behulp van satellieten gespeurd naar onbekende objecten in de regio.
Vervolgens worden de objecten vanaf een groot schip voor de kust van Californië gevolgd en bestudeerd, aldus Knuth.
If you’ve discovered four galaxy clusters being merged together into one giant galaxy that may be the largest of all time, who would you call to verify that claim? Is there a Guinness Book of Universe Records? There should be, because discoveries like this one may become more common as space agencies plan more Great Observatories like the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Chandra gets to claim this record with the news that NASA astronomers used it to find Abell 1758, a space village contains two pairs of galaxy clusters made up of hundreds of small galaxies that are on a collision-course towards a record-setting cosmic collision.
“The Chandra data revealed for the first time a shock wave — similar to the sonic boom from a supersonic aircraft — in hot gas visible with Chandra in the northern pair’s collision. From this shock wave, researchers estimate two clusters are moving about 2 million to 3 million miles per hour (3 million to 5 million kilometers per hour), relative to each other.”
In a recent press release, NASA scientists reveal that the quadruple galaxy cluster system Abell 1758, first discovered in 2004 and located about three billion light-years from Earth, is not just four clusters moving around each other — they’re speeding towards each other like desperate soaked sink spiders circling a cosmic drain. While the newly-detected shock wave of hot gas helped determine their speed, Chandra’s view of how so-called heavy elements – those heavier than helium – are re-distributed during the collision process shows how close the galaxies in each pair are to becoming one, and how close those are to one massive merger.
Labeled image of Abell 1758 system.
Credit: Chandra X-ray Center
NASA released an excellent highlighted image of the northern and southern pairs of the colliding galaxies and a video recreation of the impending crash.
And the expected date for the explosion guaranteed to light up the universe … or at least the phones at the Guinness Universe Records office is? For that, one needs to dig into “Forming One of the Most Massive Objects in the Universe: The Quadruple Merger in Abell 1758,” the paper describing the discovery published recently in The Astrophysical Journal and written by Gerrit Schellenberger, Larry David, Ewan O’Sullivan, Jan Vrtilek (all from Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian) and Christopher Haines (Universidad de Atacama, Chile). Needless to say, it won’t be anytime soon.
The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to be launched in 2021, will join the Great Observatories until the Hubble is retired. In the meantime, astronomers will continue to use the Chandra X-ray Observatory to search for the telltale shock waves of hot gas that indicate crashing galaxy clusters.
Crashing Galaxy Clusters would make a great name for a band, and Shock Waves of Hot Gas sounds like their first heavy metal hit. Opening act? The Desperate Soaking Sink Spiders, of course.
Do you think the US Space Command and the proposed US Space Force have secret ‘black’ budgets that are designated for advanced technologies which could already be flying and are being spotted by civilians as UFOs? There’s a good chance that you do. Do you think those mysterious triangular crafts and snake-like UFOs might be some of them? Probably. Are you worried about these secret flying weapons and their potential to take us into (or even start) a space war? At this point, you most likely believe that too. Are you doing anything about it? While you’re still pondering your answer, Bruce Gagnon already is. He’s the co-founder of theGlobal Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, a group promoting an annual Keep Space for Peace Week International Week of Protest to Stop the Militarization of Space. While a shorter name would help, it hasn’t stopped Gagnon from spreading the fears that the space wars may have already begun.
“I’m sure they’re testing technologies for space warfare that we can’t even imagine, that I know for sure.”
In an exclusive interview with Daily Star Online shortly after the latest Keep Space for Peace Week (events were held across the U.S. October 5-12), Gagnon described seeing a photo of one such technology – the Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider, a very long-range, stealth strategic bomber capable of delivering conventional and thermonuclear weapons. Northrup allegedly made the rumored TR-3A Black Manta triangular or flying wing spy plane using funds from a so-called black budget. Photos of the B-21 are not yet known to exist, so whatever Gagnon saw was unauthorized by the Pentagon. Gagnon is a unique combination of war and peace – he served in the Air Force in Vietnam and that’s where he became a peace and anti-nuclear activist.
Artist rendering of the rumored B-21 Stealth Bomber
“But most importantly, the question of the kind of seed we carry from earth into the heavens must be considered by the people of our planet. Are we to allow the U.S., and other nations, to carry the bad seed of warfare, greed, exploitation and environmental contamination into space?”
The noble cause of Gagnon’s Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space is to keep space clean of nuclear power and contamination, keep it free of weapons and stop its exploitation by governments and businesses. One week of protests every year is obviously not enough, so Gagnon is stirring up interests and fears by connecting the recent spate of unexplained UFO sightings – Tic Tacs, snakes, triangles, etc. – with the secretive Space Command and proposed Space Force.
“They’re now training people, young people, they have space camps around the United States. They bring them in and get them excited they then move them into the Air Force Academy and are given a heavy indoctrination on warfare and space.”
Gagnon also looks at space and military camps for youths as scary and not-so-secretive indoctrination programs recruiting future space warriors under the guise of much-needed science and space education and career guidance.
Far-fetched? Do you trust a peace warrior’s warnings about your own government or that government’s warnings about space warriors being the only way to stop other government from dominating space? Do you trust billionaire rocket builders? Do you trust those who still haven’t figured out nuclear power on Earth to manage it safely in space? Do we really own space? Does anyone? Or does everyone? If it’s everyone, how do we get our voices heard over the fight songs of the space warriors?
Do we really know what is taking off or landing at our bases?
Bruce Gagnon reminds us of another time when similar questions were asked.
“The Columbus mythology is often invoked to describe our “manifest destiny” as it relates to space exploration and colonization. The noble explorer theme is used to cover the more practical notion of profits to be made in regards to space. The Columbus mythology does indeed fit. Only it reminds us that the single mindedness that pursues profits and power in the “New World” will also carry grave implications for centuries to come.”
Grave implications. Again.
It’s easy to poke fun at the Space Force because of the times and manner in which it was announced. But while we’re asked to pay for it, our demands for information and explanations of the Tic Tacs, triangles and secret aircraft go unheeded … and are sometimes poked fun at as well.
Should Space Force parades go the way of Columbus Day parades before they have a chance to get started?
Going back to just about as long as encounters with strange alien entities have been around there have been many types of beings that are most commonly described by witnesses who have seen them and people who claim to have been abducted. There are the “Greys” perhaps most well-known in popular culture and which are probably the first image that springs to mind for most in the mainstream, but there are also commonly reported encounters with reptilian beings, and even odder still are those describing something insectoid in nature. Here we will look at a selection of such encounters in recent years, but these are really just the tip of the iceberg, and it seems to be a phenomenon that is firmly entrenched in the world of the paranormal and UFOlogy. These reports are the strange of the strange, so get on your tin foil hats, because we are going for a ride into the furthest reaches of the utterly bizarre.
What have often been called “Mantis Men” or “Mantis aliens” typically are said to look very much as their name would suggest. They are usually described as standing 6-7 feet tall, with long, thin torsos, skinny, multi-jointed limbs, triangular, insect-like heads with large, slanted eyes and small or non-existent mouths, and the whole of the creatures covered with what appears to be some sort of segmented exoskeleton. One good description is given by UFO BC, and reads:
These Beings have long, narrow faces, with long, narrow, large eyes, sharply slanted upward and outward in an almost narrow-V position, giving an almost insect-like appearance. This comparison is heightened by the Praying-Mantis types’ extremely thin, long torsos, long, extremely thin arms which are usually crooked into a sharp bend at the mid-joint, with the hand and fingers sloping almost vertically downward from the wrist, and legs also bent at an almost right-angle at the mid-joint, creating a crouched pose. The overall effect is the characteristic ‘Praying Mantis’ look. It should be noted that experiencers feel that this type is no insect, but rather an intelligent, gentle spirited… and jerky moving, human-like life form. There are both males and females.
It may sound completely absurd, like something out of a bad science fiction movie, but there are actually numerous reports of encounters with such entities, running throughout a range of ages and walks of life. Such encounters can come in conjunction with UFO sightings and abductions, but just as often are reported by witnesses who see these creatures just roaming about, and the reports are so varied and weird that it is hard to know what to make of them at times. While most commonly associated with the UFO phenomenon and lumped together as aliens, Mantis Man sightings often happen out in the wilderness with no mention of UFOs, as if a particularly freakish Bigfoot report, and a few of these occurred as recently as the early 2000s in the state of New Jersey. The first in this series of encounters allegedly happened in 2002 at Stephens State Park, north of Hackettstown, New Jersey, where two men had been fishing at dusk along the Musconetcong River when they saw something very odd indeed. A friend of one of the witnesses would tell Lon Strickler, of Phantoms and Monsters of the surreal events that would transpire:
Apparently about a year ago my friend and his brother were down at Stephen’s State Park fishing right around dusk. During this time, while his brother was roughly 50 yards downstream fishing, he said he felt this strange vibration in his right ear and from that he turned and looked to the right. When he turned and looked to the right he said he saw this 6 to 7 foot praying-mantis-looking-man… just standing there and unable to believe that he could see him. He said the creature was black and gray and to be quite honest, the way my buddy was telling me this story, I was having a tough time. I know he saw this thing… because I could see it in his face.
Strickler would end up digging up another sighting of what seems to be a very similar creature in the same vicinity, which was seen by another fisherman as well. The witness claims that he had been out fishing in at the river with his boss in 2004, and they had both been waist high in the water when he says he just suddenly noticed a very outlandish entity making its way up the opposite bank. He explains:
I just “Caught it”. Movement out of the corner of my eye to my left and there it was—Humanoid. Tall. 6 foot at least –no reference points– but I sense 6’6″ – 7′. Moving away from me back up the bank. (I am chest-high in the river) The first thing I see was the ‘grasshopper’ thigh, but bending forward like a human. Then the whole form. He is looking at me over his shoulder, moving up the bank, astonished, amazed. What, that I am in the water in a strong current, that I can see him? But yes we lock eyes and this creature is astonished– I get the sense that he can’t believe I am in the water, that he can’t believe I have seen him, that I am not perturbed at all– something of all three, I still don’t know– just astonishment and he is actually trying to get away from me and the water! Triangular Head. Huge, slanted black eyes. Just like a Praying Mantis. It’s whole body was gangly, nobby, ((Nobby!) but you could still sense it was powerful, and no– I would not say it was a “Big Bug”– it was definitely humanoid despite the mantis/insect qualities.
Again, I stress the strong impression that The Mantis Man was cloaked and I “caught it” just right; it abruptly found itself against a “new”/blank background and was adjusting quickly. No, I do not believe it “slipped” into another dimension/plane. I detected movement and first saw that strong left thigh, (and strong right calf) then the whole thing and immediately those eyes/face. The whole encounter was only a couple of seconds. I can not tell you with any strong certainty what its feet or hands looked like –I wasn’t looking there– but I can tell you that its arms were “normal”, and not the literal Mantis forelegs I have recently seen in drawings of these “Aliens”.
The detail that it seemed so surprised to be seen is interesting, although it is hard to know what to make of that. Yet another sighting featured on Phantoms and Monsters happened in the same area, this time in July of 2014 by a witness who claims he had been driving along the Musconetcong River and just sort of taking in the scenery when he noticed something very tall standing out in the water. At first he took it to be a fisherman, but it seemed too strange looking and somehow not human, so he slowed down to get a closer look. This is when he would realize that it was definitely no fisherman, and he says of his encounter:
I saw something strange a few weeks ago on the Musconetcong River near my home here in Hackettstown, New Jersey. I was driving home from the drug store on Newburgh Rd. As I drove near the bridge over the river, I noticed to my left something (I thought a fisherman) standing in the river just off the south bank. I slowed the car and looked closer. It wasn’t a person and it was transparent-like with a weird shape. It moved slowly towards the bank and into the trees. I drove further so I could see it coming out of the trees. That’s the last I saw of it. It was tall, 8 ft. or so and had long thin arms hanging off of it. The color was a pale brown, but I could see through it! The head was small compared to the body. It was sunny that day so I thought it may be glare from the water, but after I thought back I realized I wasn’t seeing a mirage or glare.
This one almost seems to have been trying to cloak itself somehow, perhaps why the enitiy in the previous encounter was so baffled that it was seen. Another seemingly similar creature, although much smaller than these previous accounts, was also reported, this time in 2011 along the Thames River, in Connecticut. The woman claims she had been driving home from work at around midnight when she saw something she cannot explain. She says:
I saw a small 1 1/2 to 2-foot-tall Praying Mantis humanoid running on the side of Pequot Avenue in New London, CT. The avenue runs alongside the Thames River and I was driving southbound on Pequot when I saw it on the side of the road directly on my left. It was a mahogany brown color and it looked exactly like the CGI version on the show. I stopped my car and watched it and it was looking right at me the whole while as it ran towards a storm drain. It never took its eyes off me then it jumped down the storm drain.
Interestingly, another of these creatures was spotted in 2015 in the vicinity of Big Basin Redwoods State Park, California, which was related to the show Coast to Coast AM and involved the witness seeing an 8-foot-tall “Mantis Man” that apparently had the ability to turn invisible or vanish at will. While these reports are certainly very bizarre, there are other Mantis Man reports that are even more outlandish, and with these we truly take a trip into a realm deeply lodged in high strangeness. One very odd report that has made the rounds was given on UFO BC, by a witness calling himself “Jim G,” who lives in London, England. He claims that one evening in August of 2001 he woke to find two of these entities looming over his bed, apparently watching him as he slept, and they looked very much like some sort of insectoid humanoids. One entity was cloaked in a robe, but had what seemed to be a shiny black exoskeleton like that of a beetle, while the other was more of the classic description of a Mantis Alien, standing 7 feet tall and all segmented limbs and mantis head, with no noticeable clothing. Jim explains the mantis creature and the weird events that would play out thusly:
All I recall was that it was tall. At least 7 foot, it had to bend its neck because of the height of the ceiling. Its head was pointed with large eyes. Its for-arms were extremely long and moved in a jerky fashion. The cloaked figure was closer, crouching by my bed, so I couldn’t tell how tall it was, but I could clearly see that it was wearing some kind of overlapping ridged amour? Including a metallic looking breastplate that had a series of circles on it. Its head was dome-like with emotionless facial features. Its eyes were large and surrounded again by detailed ridges. It acted in a way that reminded me of a robot or insect.
I remember thinking to myself, nobody’s going to believe this! A bloody giant sized mantis and medieval-style dressed alien, what the hell is this? Before this incident, although I hadn’t see one, I was familiar with the gray (alien) types but I had never heard of the praying-mantis types. At this point, the mantis bent its upper body, over my bed and directly above me. In its hand it was holding a long metal object that looked like a needle. A green light shot directly from the needle and into my right eye. Maybe it’s a laser, I am not sure, but I do know it felt very painful. I could see all the veins from my eye, the same effect you get when an Optician checks your eyes. I screamed but no noise came out. I then felt something stick into my skull! I’m not sure what because by that time I had my eyes closed. I pretended to sleep and went into deep panic! My mind was racing at a million miles per hour. I heard a great whooshing sound and when I next reopened my eyes thankfully they had gone.
Another one of the weirder of these reports is an account chronicled by UFO researcher Linda Moulton Howe in her book Glimpses of Other Realities, Vol. II: High Strangeness. She tells the tale of a witness named Linda Porter, who claimed to have had an incredibly odd encounter with a telepathic mantis-like humanoid in a hallway in 1961 and that it had whisked her off to another dimension via what she called an “interdimensional tunnel.” The next thing she knew, Porter was with a “Praying mantis being in a light-filled room,” and she said:
I remember the being slowly coming around the corner and facing me. He stood very still and simply waited as if he knew how frightening he appeared to me. Eventually he began to talk to me (telepathically). He seemed to possess a great deal of dignity and gave the impression of being quite old. He walked me to this room (filled with dense light). The memory ends with me about to enter the room and the thought ‘Translated Into the Light’ has to do with what happened.
Adding to the utter strangeness of this case, Porter, who had been born with a heart defect, claimed that she had had her soul transferred by the creature into a cloned body of herself that was healthy, and that the creature had explained to her in depth about other dimensions and travel between them. Very weird stuff, indeed. In another peculiar account from UFO BC, there is a witness who says that her and her friend had been captured by tall, insectoid humanoids and then been subjected to some sort of violent, gruesome medical procedure. She would say:
I stood there helpless for the longest time, not knowing what to do but feeling a real sense of panic. Something had to be done quickly. All of a sudden there were two Beings that appeared next to my friend. They seemed to push me right aside and silently went right to work on her, like skilled surgeons. They stood to her left, standing together and working furiously on my friend. I had no idea who they were, what they were doing, but the first thing I thought of was ‘are they aliens’??? I stood there and watched…I thought they looked like Praying Mantises. Alien Praying Mantises…
Then I focused on my friend and saw her head was split wide open, like these aliens sliced it perfectly open. I saw freshly sliced raw flesh and these Aliens/Praying Mantis were busily removing pieces of bone, rock or whatever from her brain. This did not look anything like what I would imagine the inside of a brain to look but it was just such a clean cut. These two Alien/Praying Mantis worked quickly, without speaking one word. I seemed to black out and don’t remember any more of it.
What was going on here? What were they doing? What happened to the friend? Was this all a hallucination or is there anything more to it? Who knows? From the same site is a bizarre report from a witness who claims the Mantis Men were rather more benevolent towards him, and even gifted him with advanced technology. He explains:
My Praying Mantis figure was very kind to me. He urged me to stay calm and telepathically reassured me everything would be alright. My right eye was removed by a device that came down from the white ceiling. I started to really panic but the Mantis kept me from really freaking out. Then it was replaced. The Mantis also told me telepathically that I was a special person who would really make a difference here on earth. I am now 44 years old and have made no real significant differences to the human race. I think he may have just wanted to reassure a child at the time. I have retained 1 thing from my encounter. I still have the power to see major global disasters before they happen. I only report them to either my fiancé or my close family members because I know anyone else would just call me crazy. But now they believe me for the most part. Because when I see something clearly and tell them, it always happens.
Here we have looked at merely a selection from the files of truly otherworldly encounters with insectiod humanoids, and it is all really quite a lot to take in. What could possibly lie at the root of such reports? Are these things aliens or undiscovered creatures of some sort? With regards to Mantis Men the theory that these are interdimensional travelers is often brought up, so could that possibly be what is going on here, these beings coming across the veil between realities rather than across the sea of stars? Are these just hallucinations, delusions, or lies? As it is we are left pretty baffled by such reports, and it has come to the point where these accounts are largely even shunned by those within cryptozoology, UFOlogy, and the paranormal world in general. Yet, still these sightings and reports come in, and it sure does make one wonder just what is going on here.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
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