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...
10-01-2020
Aliens Ship Found In Antartica Using Google Earth Map, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Aliens Ship Found In Antartica Using Google Earth Map, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: January 6, 2020
Location of discovery: Antartica
Tools Used: Google Earth free map
This alien ship has landed on top of a small snowy hill, pushing itself deeply into the ice and snow of Antartica. The object is clearly out of place in this location, however alien bases and crashed ships seem to be frequently found in Antartica. This landed UFO was found by Argentine researcher Marcelo Irazusta. The ship has very artistic and unique design. The close up reveals that it has a nose area with a command center cockpit view...three long fins that are linked at the end...and it looks like several large engines at its back. The objects color is also a brownish grey metal. The objects back wing end is 112 meters across. From nose to end of tail is the same distance. From right to left is about 95 meters. This is an extraordinary discovery and one that needs to have scientists sent out to explore this craft and enter its interior. The technology salvaged from it could be used to transport humanity across the universe.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Aliens Appear On Ancient Stone Site In Cornwall, England, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Aliens Appear On Ancient Stone Site In Cornwall, England, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery: 2019-2020
Location of sighting: Cornwall, England
Strange figures were found on some rocks in Cornwall, just a few hundred km from where Stonehenge is located. These figure had heads and eyes like those of aliens. One even had a halo like light around its head, but doesn't resemble any biblical person ever mentioned looking more like a reptile than a human. There are many strange stones located around that area of England and the explanations of why there are there and the purpose is still a mystery.
This does however look like an ancient recording onto stone of aliens contacting humans thousands of years ago in England. Alien life spans are no limited like our own. The aliens that are recorded on those stones...they are still alive and out there. For them, sightings of them are frequent because of the long lives they live of thousands and millions or more year old. For us, the sightings seem periodic and huge amounts of time in between, because our lives as humans are all too short. You see...the difference in age of each of our species causes a huge difficulty in understanding why aliens don't work on our time frame.
I was looking through some NASA photos taken recently from the space station and I noticed this large rectangular metallic object. The object seems to be made by intelligent beings, because it has eight perfect right angles to it. Thats highly unlikely for it to be space debris. This could possibly be reflection, but I highly doubt that, most the NASA lenses are very expensive and cut out most reflections...as you probably know, certain filters can accomplish this. So it is my personal opinion that its an alien craft watching the space station...or possibly visiting. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
ShutterstockHet Bolavenplateau in Laos wordt onder meer gekenmerkt door indrukwekkende watervallen.
WETENSCHAPZo’n 790.000 jaar geleden is de grootste ons bekende meteoriet ooit ingeslagen op aarde. Waar precies, dat was een mysterie. Tot nu. Geologen menen de plaats van de inslag te hebben ontdekt in Zuid-Laos.
Volgens de onderzoekers ligt de inslagkrater met een diameter van ongeveer 15 km bedolven onder lava in een gebied van 910 km³ op het vulkanische terrein van het Bolavenplateau in het zuidoosten van Laos, niet ver van de grens met Thailand. Aanwijzingen daarvoor zijn de teruggevonden tektieten, glaskorrels van aards materiaal die ontstaan door smelting na de inslag van een meteoriet - een ruimteobject dat niet is opgebrand door de atmosfeer en vervolgens op aarde is neergestort. De stukjes gesmolten gesteente zijn na de inslag van de enorme meteoriet van 2 km breed eerst onze atmosfeer ingeblazen om daarna weer op aarde te vallen.
“Hun bestaan wijst erop dat de ingeslagen meteoriet zo groot was en zijn snelheid zo hoog dat hij de stenen die hij raakte kon doen smelten”, zegt professor Kerry Sieh, hoofdonderzoeker Earth Observatory of Singapore en co-auteur van de studie, aan CNN. Voor andere inslagen van meteorieten vonden wetenschappers de kraters aan de hand van tektieten, maar niet de krater van het zogenaamde Australaziatische tektietenveld. Dat strekt zich uit ten zuiden van Zuidoost-Azië en over Australië, en van het zuiden van Tasmanië tot Oost-Antarctica, met een westelijke uitstulping over Madagascar en een oostelijke uitstulping over de westelijke Stille Oceaan. Een enorm gebied dat zo’n tien procent van de aardoppervlakte uitmaakt.
“Er waren al heel wat eerdere pogingen om de inslagkrater te vinden”, weet Sieh. “Ze kwamen uit op Noord-Cambodja, Midden-Laos, Zuid-China, Oost-Thailand en Vietnam. Maar onze studie is de eerste die zoveel soorten bewijzen heeft samengebracht, variërend van de chemische aard van de tektieten tot hun fysieke kenmerken, en van zwaartekrachtmetingen tot metingen van de leeftijd van de lava die de krater zou kunnen bedelven.”
Volgens de berekeningen van deze studie is de krater zo’n 13 km breed en 17 km lang. Verder onderzoek is nu nodig. De geologen willen “tot een paar honderd meter diep boren om te zien of het gesteente onder de lava overeenkomt met de verwachtingen”.
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UFO-like anomaly appears next to the sun caught on camera
UFO-like anomaly appears next to the sun caught on camera
Linda Miller was doing some more filming at sunset and caught quite a few anomalies around the sun and and in our atmosphere.
Linda who captured the anomalies on December 29, 2019 is not sure whether the several objects are space junk, space rocks or satellites, or something else, but there is one object that changes direction.
She doesn't point out every single one, see if you can spot them all!
VIDEO: Strange UFO activity in the sky above Louisiana – 2020
VIDEO: Strange UFO activity in the sky above Louisiana – 2020
These strange lights were filmed over Louisiana on 5th January 2020.
Here’s the witness statement from the first footage in the video:
At approximately 6:05 pm on Sunday January 5, 2020, i stepped out back door to smoke a cigarette while watching the nfc wildcard game of Seattle vs eagles football. the second i stepped out, almost directly above me were multiple flashing lights. 5 to 7 or more. no sound whatsoever no definition other than an orb shape while it flashed. when there was no flash.. there was no object. the flash of white light occurred to the left and the right of the orb. nothing above or below. they appeared to moving in a west to south west direction. i immediately ran back in the house to grab my wife and told that she needs to come outside now. without grabbing my phone, i ran back outside to witness until she arrived. they moved very fast… but slow…. if that makes sense. i ran and grabbed my phone and proceeded to move west up the street to get a video of what i could… and the video is what physical evidence i have.
The night an Air Force jet mysteriously disappeared over Lake Superior—November 23, 1953—was a stormy one.
Near the U.S.-Canadian border, U.S. Air Defense Command noticed a blip on the radar where it shouldn’t have been: an unidentified object in restricted air space over Lake Superior, not far from Soo Locks, the Great Lakes’ most vital commercial gateway. An F-89C Scorpion jet, from Truax Air Force Base in Madison, Wisconsin, took off from nearby Kinross AFB to investigate, with two crew members on board. First Lieutenant Felix Moncla—who had clocked 811 flying hours, including 121 in a similar aircraft—took the pilot’s seat, while Second Lieutenant Robert Wilson was observing radar.
The men would not return from their intercept mission.
What followed, according to Donald Keyhoe, the former Marine Corps naval aviator and UFO researcher who wrote about the incident in his 1955 book The Flying Saucer Conspiracy—was “one of the strangest cases on record.”
F-89C Scorpion jet pictured 1956, the same aircraft Moncla was flying the day of the incident.
United States Air Force
Once airborne, Lieutenant Wilson had difficulty tracking the unknown object, which kept changing course. So with ground control directing the aviators over the radio, the Scorpion gave chase. The jet, traveling at 500 miles per hour, pursued the object for 30 minutes, gradually closing in.
On the ground, the radar operator guided the jet down from 25,000 to 7,000 feet, watching one blip chase the other across the radar screen. Gradually, the jet caught up to the unknown object about 70 miles off Keweenaw Point in upper Michigan, at an altitude of 8,000 feet, approximately 160 miles northwest of Soo Locks.
At that point, the two radar blips converged into one—“locked together,” as Keyhoe would put it later. And then, according to an official accident report, the radar return from the F-89 simply “disappeared from the GCI [ground-controlled interception] station’s radar scope.”
And then the first radar return, indicating the unidentified object, veered off and vanished too.
The United States Air Force, United States Coast Guard and Canadian Air Force conducted an extensive search-and-rescue effort. No wreckage, or sign of the pilots, was ever found.
Felix Moncla by a T-33 at Truax Field in Madison, Wisconsin, 1953.
Gordheath/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0
The Air Force’s official news release about the disappearance, delivered to the Associated Press, stated that the vanished jet “was followed by radar until it merged with an object 70 miles off Keweenaw Point in upper Michigan.” The statement appeared in a story in the Chicago Tribune with the headline, “JET, TWO ABOARD, VANISHES OVER LAKE SUPERIOR.”
The Air Force soon retracted the statement and changed its story: According to the new statement, the ground control radar operator had misread the scope. In fact, the F-89 had successfully completed the mission, intercepting and identifying the UFO as a Dakota—a Royal Canadian Air Force C-47 aircraft—flying some 30 miles off course. Lieutenant Moncla, probably stricken with vertigo, crashed into the lake during the return to base. Canadian officials refuted the account—no flights had taken place in the area that night.
According to Keyhoe, who would write about the Kinross Incident again in his 1973 book Aliens From Space, two separate Air Force representatives provided Lieutenant Moncla’s widow with contradictory explanations of the incident. In one version of events, the pilot had crashed into the lake while flying too low. In the other, the jet exploded at a high altitude.
Donald Keyhoe, a retired Marine Corps major, holds a copy of his book, "Flying Saucers from Outer Space," in which he claims the Air Force has secret motion pictures of the apparitions proving that they are interplanetary craft.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
The case file from Project Blue Book, the Air Force’s own UFO investigatory team, reiterated the Air Force assertion that the jet “successfully accomplished its mission,” and that the crash was an accident, “probably” caused by an “attack of vertigo.” It attributed the abnormal radar behavior to unusual “atmospheric conditions” and deemed the inability to recover wreckage as understandable, given the deep water.
Meanwhile, investigators from the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) discovered that any mention of the mission had been expunged from official records. And the Aerospace Technical Intelligence Center’s official line on the case was: “There is no record in the Air Force files of sighting at Kinross AFB on 23 November 1953… There is no case in the files which even closely parallels these circumstances.”
In the absence of a thorough and satisfying official explanation, “civilian saucer groups,” as Project Blue Book would call them, developed their own theories. According to one, the jet had crashed into the UFO’s protective beam like a “concrete wall.” Others speculated that the jet may have been “scooped” out of the air and taken aboard the spacecraft—perhaps so the captured men could teach their alien captors the English language.
In 1968, there were local newspaper reports of military jet fragments discovered near the shore of Lake Superior, but the find was never verified.
In 2006, Adam Jiminez, claiming to be a representative of the Great Lakes Dive Company, corresponded with UFO bloggers and members of the UFO community. He claimed that not only had an airplane wreck been discovered in the area, but a metallic object resembling a chunk of a flying saucer as well.
UFO researchers soon exposed inaccuracies in Jimenez’s story, and concluded that the Great Lakes Dive Company did not exist. Eventually, Adam Jimenez, too, vanished without a trace.
Now that the navy has confirmed that these UFOs recorded by its pilots are “real”
The spokesperson for the United States navy’s deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, Joseph Gradisher, has confirmed to Time magazine that the videos recorded by its pilots showing a series of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and released to the public are, in fact, real.
These videos, which show what the navy prefers to refer to as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, were sourced from the US department of defence, and were initially reported on in the New York Times in December 2017 as being part of the department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme, which monitored and documented UFO activities from 2007 to 2012. The programme was funded by the Senate to the tune of $22-million a year, which means that taxpayers’ contributions were used to fund it.
This is the first time that an identified current official from the US government has publicly acknowledged that the videos — which started being released in 2017, with more following in 2018 — are officially genuine recordings of UFOs conducting manoeuvres that are not possible by human pilots, as seen by US navy pilots in the course of the flight missions. However, the navy has declined to comment on “who” could be piloting these aircraft.
It appears that there is now a concerted campaign by a certain section of the US government to roll out a partial and gradual “official disclosure” process, designed to begin to release previously classified information to the wider public. If a partial disclosure is indeed under way, then the logical inference is that there has also been a deliberate programme of “official denial” with regards to UFOs that we can surmise has been operational since at least the initial debunking of the 1947 “Roswell” flying saucer incident, which was widely reported in the media. In 1972, the US defence department conducted a series of investigations into the regular sightings that were being reported across the country, which were ultimately compiled into a report titled Project Blue Book — now converted into a popular television series.
Now that the navy has confirmed that these UFOs recorded by its pilots are “real”, it suggests that the countries of the world collectively need to begin to articulate how they plan to engage with them in the event that an initial public contact event takes place. As the situation stands, the United Nations does not have a protocol to engage with interstellar aerial craft that traverse the Earth’s atmosphere at will. There is a designated UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), based in Vienna, Austria, which was established following the adoption of a Treaty on Principle Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and other Celestial Bodies.
Unoosa’s mandate is to promote “international co-operation for the peaceful uses of outer space” and to undertake research and training on the use of space science and technology to advance the social, economic and developmental initiatives on the planet. However, it does not have a programme or unit specifically dedicated to engaging with interstellar aircraft that are not human in origin, and that traverse Earth’s atmosphere and its immediate space vicinity.
Unoosa has listed the South African Space Agency (Sansa) as one of its partners. The agency is based in Pretoria, and was established in 2010 with a mandate to “promote the use of space and strengthen cooperation in space-related activities”. Sansa also states that its mission is “to lead and inspire the South African space community to create a better future”, and it pursues this through four programme areas: Earth observation; space engineering; space operations and space science.
However, despite the existence of these space-oriented international and national institutions, there are no programmes or projects designed to address the inevitable question of how humanity will engage and interact with prospective interstellar visitors from within or beyond our solar system and galaxy. If the US navy’s confirmation of the reality of UFOs leads to a prospective “first contact” scenario, humanity will be confronted by a whole range of questions, which it lacks an institutional framework to begin to address. This is a major and serious oversight in terms of forward planning and preparing the policy, scientific and societal constituencies to engage with potential interstellar aviators.
This year, the US government will formally operationalise its so-called Space Force within the defence department, as an additional and separate branch of its military complex, which is tasked with confronting threats in space. Regrettably, this typically US response to militarise and securitise any prospective engagement with nonhuman interstellar aerial craft could precipitate a number of unforeseen challenges.
Some analysts have irreverently questioned whether the launch of the Space Force, is intended to fight “space pirates”. Perhaps the US Space Force is based on a fundamental knowledge of who is piloting these confirmed UFOs, with a view to establishing a counterforce to contain or repel a possible attack. However, this is speculation until we have additional data as to who exactly is operating these UFOs.
An important question from a sociological and cultural perspective, is why the media and citizens have not asked more questions about the UFO sightings, which the navy now confirms are “real”. There could be a number of reasons why the story has not gone viral, linked to the distrust that people have towards governments in general, notwithstanding their predisposition to believe anything that emerges from the authorities through a partial disclosure, despite the fact that it could be a global game-changing event.
In addition, people could be viewing this as a deliberate attempt to distract them from their everyday struggles, given the age of austerity that is depressing economies and societies around the world. An alternative reason could be that reality of the implications of the existence of extra-terrestrial civilisations is too onerous to contemplate for a human society that is still predominantly beguiled and ensnared by its dogmatic religious and ideological convictions, which distracts people from dealing with such otherworldly realities. The investigative, print and broadcast media have a moral responsibility to interrogate this question further because public resources have been, and are still being, used to track and monitor UFOs.
In terms of a framework to understand the emerging phenomenon, the distinguished theoretical physicist Professor Michio Kaku — based at the City University of New York and a co-founder of string field theory — notes in his most recent book, The Future of Humanity, that “there might be 20-billion Earth-sized planets orbiting a sun-like star in our galaxy alone”. Kaku suggests that we could analyse the atmospheres of these planets “for oxygen and water vapour, a sign of life, and listen for radio waves, which would signal the existence of an intelligent civilisation”.
Kaku delivered a keynote address at the most recent Ufology World Congress — held in Barcelona, Spain, in September last year — in which he elaborated on a classification of planets, into Type-1, Type-2 and Type-3 civilisations on the basis of their energy consumption and their ability to undertake interstellar travel. The classification of advanced civilisation was proposed by the Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964. He suggested that a Type-1 civilisation is planetary, consuming all of the energy that falls on the planet from the sun, and is capable of space travel in the vicinity of the planet. A Type-2 civilisation is stellar, consuming all of energy of the planet plus all of the energy of emitted by its sun, and is capable of travel within the galaxy with the ability to reach about 100 nearby stars. A Type-3 civilisation is galactic, consuming the energy of billions of stars in its entire galaxy, and is capable of interstellar travel across the entire galaxy, with the ability to settle and build new civilisations. Kaku, notes that Earth is only approaching a Type-1 planetary civilisation, because we still primarily rely on “dead plants”, namely oil and gas, for our sources of energy.
According to Kaku’s presentation at the Ufology World Congress, based on the information that the US navy is now gradually releasing to wider society, the confirmed interstellar aircraft are most probably visiting Earth from Type-2 or Type-3 planetary civilisations. It is necessary for civilian institutions such as the Sansa and the Unoosa — working in tandem with citizen groups, which are already raising awareness across different communities around the world — to develop a protocol urgently to engage these prospective interstellar aviators, so that humanity is not caught off-guard in the event of an actual first contact scenario.
It is also incumbent on all of us to continue to raise awareness among our families, schools and places of work and worship to assist in the processing of the information and shifting our mindsets in terms of the now emerging reality of UFOs, and humanity’s place in the universe, as we enter the second decade of the 21st century.
Professor Tim Murithi is head of the Peacebuilding Interventions Programme at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, and editor of the Routledge Handbook of Africa’s International Relations. Follow him on Twitter @tmurithi12
Video of Mysterious Shining Triangle Hovering Over Texas on New Year's Day Puzzles Netizens
Video of Mysterious Shining Triangle Hovering Over Texas on New Year's Day Puzzles Netizens
From an enigmatic shadow allegedly lurking around a SpaceX rocket to cigar-shaped unidentified flying objects spotted across the US, 2019 provided alien hunters and conspiracy theorists with a lot of material to process. This year has already given them a reason to grab their tinfoil hats too.
A clip showing what looks like an enormous triangle-shaped UFO over Houston, Texas, on New Year’s Day has heated up the imagination of online commenters. The video, shared by Stephaine Westerfield, shows three lights apparently dancing in the night sky and maintaining formation while fireworks (or gunshots?) are heard in the background. The voice of what sounds like a child is also heard asking: “What are those?”
“Not sure what these lights are”, Westerfield noted in the caption.
Although the authenticity of the video could not be confirmed, it was immediately caught up by conspiracy channels. Some YouTube users rushed to offer their opinions on what it could be.
“Nice catch. The UFO(s) look legit to me. Too distant and bright to be 3 drones”, a user under the handle Bruce Wayne suggested, while another commenter claimed that it is one of the large triangle craft “that are being seen all over the world”.
Another YouTuber shared that it was not the only strange sighting spotted that day as, according to him, there was one light that looked like a star and moved slowly before suddenly turning bright yellow.
“Then there’s another 1 that does the same thing nearby the first one. Then, there’s 3 more to join it. In total I counted 5”, he noted in the comments.
A military-related conspiracy theory also popped up eventually, as one of the commenters claimed that it was a TR-3B surveillance plane, rumoured to be developed under a black project, which is also triangular in shape.
However, many had a more mundane explanation, saying it was just three drones in a triangle formation or Chinese lanterns.
The video emerged shortly after a YouTube user uploaded a clip of a triangular object hovering in the sky above a town in upstate New York in the US, which he believed to be a fascinating UFO sighting.
Given its tremendous altitude, the object was supposedly huge, as the person who recorded the video claims that they saw a red “orb” type object being dropped from the triangular craft just before they started filming. However, whether or not the video is genuine cannot be confirmed.
To some, he was a prophet. To others, a laughing stock. Even today, more than half a century after his death, George Adamski remains one of the most curious and controversial characters in UFO history.
Adamski had multiple claims to UFO fame. Starting in the late 1940s, he took countless photos of what he insisted were flying saucers. But experts, including J. Allen Hynek, scientific consultant to the Air Force’s Cold War-era UFO investigation team Project Blue Book, dismissed them as crude fakes.
Then, in 1952, Adamski reported that he had met and conversed with a visitor from Venus in a California desert, using a combination of hand gestures and mental telepathy.
A cigar-shaped Venusian interplanetary carrier photographed through a 6" telescope over Palomar Gardens, California taken by Adamski.
Mary Evans Picture Library/Everett
Adamski chronicled his alleged adventures in several books. The first, Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), coauthored with Desmond Leslie, recounted his chat with the Venusian. Widely read at the time, it later gained a new generation of fans in the trippy 1960s.
Adamski’s 1955 sequel, Inside the Space Ships, described further meetings, not only with the Venusian but also with emissaries from Mars and Saturn. In Adamski’s telling, every planet in our solar system was populated with human-like inhabitants, as was the dark side of the earth’s moon.
In the 1955 book, Adamski claimed that his new friends took him aboard one of their scout ships, flew him to an immense mother ship hovering over the earth, gave him a ride around the moon and treated him to a colorful travelogue about life on Venus.
Along the way, he was also tutored by a space man he called “the master.” The master, who was said to be nearly 1,000 years old, shared the secrets of the universe with Adamski, only some of which he was allowed to divulge back on earth.
Preposterous as his stories seemed, Adamski became an international celebrity and lectured widely. Queen Juliana of the Netherlands raised a public stir after inviting him to her palace in 1959 to discuss extraterrestrial doings. Adamski supposedly claimed a secret 1963 meeting with the pope, as well.
Adamski soon had followers all over the planet. But not everybody was on board. Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, not only denounced Adamski’s work but characterized his believers as “nitwits.”
George Adamski with a photograph of a Venusian Scout on February 18, 1959.
Norman Victor Herfort/Fairfax Media/Getty Images
George Adamski was reportedly born in Poland in 1891, came to the U.S. with his parents at as a young boy and grew up in far-northern New York state.
He seems to have had little formal education, though the press would later refer to him as “Professor Adamski”—a habit he appears to have encouraged.
Adamski enjoyed his first glimpse of glory in 1934 as the leader of a group calling itself the Royal Order of Tibet. The Los Angeles Times reported they had bought an old estate in Laguna Beach, California, and planned to establish the first Tibetan monastery in America on the site. The Times described “Prof. George Adamski” as being “as strange as the cult he sponsors.”
Somehow, Adamski convinced the reporter he had lived in the “ancient monasteries” of Tibet as a child. “I learned great truths up there on ‘the roof of the world,’” he was quoted as saying.
In 1936, he was back in the papers again, this time as the leader of a group called Universal Progressive Christianity, whose international headquarters, he said, would soon be established in Laguna Beach.
Aside from offering a tax plan to end the Great Depression in 1938, the “professor” stayed out of the news until after World War II. But when the postwar UFO craze took off, Adamski hopped right on.
A Venusian 'scout craft' photographed by George Adamski, 1952.
Mary Evans Picture Library/Everett
In October 1946, he said, he spotted his first UFO—“a large black object, similar in shape to a gigantic dirigible, and apparently motionless.”
His next sighting came in August 1947. This time, it wasn’t just a single object but a procession of them—at least 184 by his count. Then, in late 1949, at what he said was the urging of the U.S. military, he attached a camera to his six-inch telescope and began scanning the skies at every opportunity. Soon he had what he considered two good UFO pictures.
“Since then, winter and summer, day and night, through heat and cold, wind, rains and fog, I have spent every moment possible outdoors, watching the skies,” he wrote.
By the end of 1952, the skies over his California home had become a sort of UFO shooting gallery. Adamski estimated he took another 500 flying saucer photos, from which he got a dozen good ones. He claimed to have provided prints to the Air Force, but he kept the negatives.
By now, newspapers and magazines were publishing Adamski’s photos, and he was giving lectures as an authority on UFOs. Because he happened to live near Mount Palomar, home of the famous observatory, he was often misidentified as a professional astronomer. But as the genuine astronomer Carl Sagan later noted, the truth was a little more mundane: Adamski “operated a tiny restaurant” in the vicinity and had “set up a small telescope out back.”
A close encounter of the Venusian kind
A painting depicting an encounter with a visitor from Venus at Desert Center, California, 1952.
Mary Evans Picture Library/Michael Buhler/Everett
It was in November 1952, in a remote patch of California desert, that Adamski came face to face with his supposed visitor from Venus. “The beauty of his form surpassed anything I had ever seen,” Adamski wrote. “And the pleasantness of his face freed me of all thought of my personal self. I felt like a little child in the presence of one with great wisdom and much love…”
The Venusian’s flesh was as soft as a baby’s, Adamski reported after they touched palms, while his “hair was sandy in color and hung in beautiful waves to his shoulders, glistening more beautifully than any woman’s I have ever seen.”
When the two finally got around to communicating, it became clear that the Venusian had come to deliver a message. Earthlings should stop messing around with atomic bombs, he told Adamski, before they destroyed their entire planet. To punctuate his point, and to show that he had picked up at least one word of English, the alien added, “Boom! Boom!”
Adamski wasn’t the first American to claim he’d met an alien, but he was the first to go public, and he quickly became the most famous “contactee.” Countless others would follow in the decades to come, telling their own tales of what Project Blue Book’s Hynek famously labeled “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
His new notoriety turned the humble restaurant where he worked into a tourist attraction. One visitor was Edward J. Ruppelt, then head of Project Blue Book, who dropped by, incognito, in 1953 to find Adamski holding court and hawking copies of his UFO pix. “To look at the man and to listen to his story, you had an immediate urge to believe him,” Ruppelt wrote in his 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, adding that he had “the most honest pair of eyes I’ve ever seen.”
While Ruppelt clearly didn’t believe him, he was impressed all the same. “As I left, he was graciously filling people in on more details and the cash register was merrily ringing up saucer picture sales.”
Hynek also paid a visit to Adamski’s eatery, along with some fellow astronomers. Although he tried to engage Adamski on more scientific matters, Hynek later recalled, “All he wanted to do was sell me photos.”
Con man, crackpot or cosmic messenger?
George Adamski stands in front of a painting by Gay Betts depicting the Venusian space pilot he met in the Mojave Desert, California.
Mary Evans Picture Library/Everett
Adamski published at least one more book, Flying Saucers Farewell (1961) and continued to lecture widely.
At a press conference in March 1965, he predicted that a large fleet of flying saucers would soon descend on Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, Adamski wouldn’t be there to greet them—had they actually arrived. He died that April at age 74.
Since his death, Adamski’s critics have tended to portray him as a harmless crackpot, small-time con artist or perhaps a bit of both.
Others, like J. Allen Hynek, took a somewhat dimmer view, accusing Adamski and others like him, of discrediting the entire field of UFO research.
Author Arthur C. Clarke had made the same point years earlier, saying that Adamski and coauthor Leslie did “a real disservice by obscuring the truth and scaring away serious researchers from a field that may be of great importance.”
But Adamski stuck to his story to the end—including the upbeat but somehow ominous message he’d delivered in Flying Saucers Have Landed:
“My most urgent message and plea to every person who reads it is: Let us be friendly. Let us recognize and welcome the men from other worlds! THEY ARE HERE AMONG US.”
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Navy Admits It Has More Information/Video On The Nimitz UFO Encounter That They’re Not Sharing
Navy Admits It Has More Information/Video On The Nimitz UFO Encounter That They’re Not Sharing
JAZZ SHAW
There’s been an interesting, if not terribly informative development in the story of those UFOs encountered by the Nimitz aircraft carrier battle group back in 2004. As you may recall, there were three videos released over the past couple of years by the Navy through the efforts of To The Stars Academy (TTSA) showing encounters with bizarre flying objects exhibiting performance characteristics that defy much of our understanding of physics. One was from the Nimitz incident and the others were from a much later encounter involving the carrier Roosevelt. The videos were somewhat grainy and short in length. Many journalists have attempted to find out if more such videos exist, or at least if longer, clearer versions of the ones we’ve seen are available. All such requests were answered in the negative.
That is… until now. One researcher named Christian Lambright submitted a FOIA request to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) back in October looking for some very specific information along these lines. He finally received a response recently. The military didn’t supply him with any new videos or documents, but they did concede that they located other documents and another video that would be applicable to his request. They could not release them, however, because the documents were classified TOP SECRET and the video footage was SECRET. Their release, the Navy claims, could cause “grave damage” to national security. This information was published recently by Paul Dean. (Emphasis added)
Our review of our records and systems reveal that ONI has no releasable records related to your request. ONI has searched our records for responsive documents. We have discovered certain briefing slides that are classified TOP SECRET. A review of these materials indicates that are currently and appropriate Marked and Classified TOP SECRET under Executive Order 13526, and the Original Classification Authority has determined that the release of these materials would cause exceptionally grave damage to the National Security of the United States. Specifically, under Section 1.4, the materials would trigger protections under subcategory c), the Intelligence Activities of the United States, as well as the Sources and Methods that are being used to gather information in support of the National Security of the United States. In addition, the materials would trigger protections under subcategory e), Scientific and Technological Matters related to the National Security of the United States. For this reason, the materials are exempt from release under the (b) (1) Exemption for Classified Matters of National Defense. As a result these records may not be released and are being withheld.
We have also determined that ONI possesses a video classified SECRET that ONI is not the Original Classification Authority for. ONI has forwarded your request to Naval Air Systems Command to make a determination on releasability…”
We should immediately place these revelations in context, so let’s review a couple of important points.
Starting early last year, the Pentagon seemed to grow tired of fielding all of these questions about UFOs and started referring all journalistic inquiries to a single spokesperson, Susan Gough. This is an important point to make because we’ve heard testimony from several of the sailors from the Nimitz battle group who witnessed these events saying that they remembered seeing longer videos. However, when journalists asked the Pentagon about this, Ms. Gough informed us on multiple occasions that those three videos were the only ones they had and no longer or clearer versions existed.
Now ONI has gone on record stating that there is at least one additional video from the Nimitz encounter and it can’t be released because it’s classified SECRET. (They are reviewing that classification to see if it can be changed now so perhaps we’ll eventually see it.) So once again we have the Pentagon, through Ms. Gough, saying there are no more videos and we have ONI saying there is at least one more. Both of these things can not be simultaneously true. In other words, somebody is lying… again.
Who should we believe? We might able to apply a bit of a logic test to this situation and come up with a pretty good guess. One possibility is that someone at the Office of Naval Intelligence has decided to fabricate a fairy tale about nonexistent UFO video footage and send it out to researchers and journalists to… I don’t know. Gaslight them?
The other possibility is that when the Pentagon was asked about additional videos they lied to us. You may recall that I wrote a rather lengthy screed about a month ago about the Pentagon (and really most of the government) and their somewhat dubious relationship with the truth. This is the same Susan Gough who told us repeatedly for many months that the AATIP program was real and it investigated UAPs. (That’s their term for UFOs now.) Then on December 7th, she inexplicably put out a statement saying that AATIP had never had anything to do with UAPs. She also told us that TTSA’s Louis Elizondo was never in charge of or associated with AATIP (which may still be true) while numerous other sources claim that he ran the program and his name shows up on one of the only verifiable documents about AATIP associated with Harry Reid.
So I don’t know, sports fans. If we have to decide whether ONI is fibbing or the Pentagon is, which way are you leaning?
One additional thing to note here is that the response from ONI speaks of a set of briefing slides and a single video. But if you follow the link and look at Lambright’s FOIA request, you’ll note that it is structured very specifically to request information relating to UAP encounters happening in relation to the Nimitz battle group over a period from 10-16 November 2004. Having battled through the FOIA process myself on a number of occasions, I can assure you that the government never, ever gives up more than they have to under the law. Lambright apparently got exactly what he asked for, but nothing more.
To put it bluntly, ONI might be sitting on thousands of documents and as many videos. But if they originated from any time prior to November 10, 2004, or any date from November 17th of 2004 to the present, or if they happened anywhere else in the world but the Nimitz training exercise area, they would not include those items in the response.
What does that mean? Well, we’ve heard from the pilots involved in both the 2004 Nimitz encounter and the 2015 Roosevelt incident that they’ve been seeing these things “all the time.” This happens frequently enough to alarm some senior people in the military and they want answers. If that’s the case, do you really think they only managed to record three (or now possibly four) videos in the past sixteen years (at a minimum)? Unlikely in the extreme.
This is yet another example that’s turned up of the government feeding us bogus information on this subject and being caught. More than likely they have a mountain of evidence and they’re withholding it all. And they’re still lying about it. Mind you, this still doesn’t automatically mean that any of this has anything to do with extraterrestrials. For example, why was the slide presentation and the other video so classified? Perhaps that evidence might reveal some secret program of ours or the Russians or the Chinese demonstrating incredible technological advancements. You could understand how that might need to be classified. But without emptying the bag entirely, they should tell us whether it’s one or the other. And just as a favor… STOP. LYING. TO. US.
UFO sightings in North America jumped to nearly 6,000 in 2019
UFO sightings in North America jumped to nearly 6,000 in 2019
California, Florida and Washington top the rankings for most UFO sightings.
By IVAN PEREIRA
There was a rise in the number of North Americans who looked up into the sky in 2019 and found something that didn’t look like a bird or a plane.
The National UFO Reporting Center, which tracks calls and messages from people around the U.S. and Canada about strange sightings in the sky, reported that it received 5,971 sightings in 2019 -- a jump from 3,395 in 2018.
Peter Davenport, who runs the independent organization that's based in Davenport, Washington, said he couldn’t explain why more people called about seeing flashing white lights, fireballs, disc-shaped objects or other oddities in 2019.
"One of the mysteries of ufology is there is a fluctuation in the number of reports over the years," he told ABC News in a phone interview. "Some years it’s been low, but it’s gotten higher recently."
California led the country last year with the most number of UFO observations to the site: 485 in total, an increase of 182 sightings from 2018. Florida came in second with 385 sightings in 2019, which was 156 more reports than in 2018, according to UFO Reporting Center data.
Washington came in third with 222 reports last year, which represented an increase of 51 from 2018, according to the site.
Davenport’s site takes reports from callers and online submissions, many of which are anonymous, and lists them with as much detail as possible. For example, on April 15, a man and his girlfriend reported they saw a formation in the sky near Bakersfield, California.
"We witnessed 3 unidentified objects, one in middle being the larger escorted by two other smaller unidentified objects one to the left and one on the right having no lights and no sound and dark colored objects heading southeast traveling at an unknown speed and disappeared into the clouds beyond sight," the report said.
Davenport said he does not investigate any of the claims he collects and noted that some of the sightings may have been the same object that was seen by multiple people.
Rick Fienberg, a spokesman for the American Astronomical Society, emphasized that the "u" in UFO stands for unidentified, and many people are unaware of astronomical goings on in space on any given day. For instance, Jupiter and Venus were more visible to Earth last year and they can stand out in the night sky, according to Fienberg.
He also noted that Space X launched 180 new satellites into space last year, and those devices have lit up the night skies.
"If you’re not keeping up with the news and not familiar with the skyline, you might mistakenly see an unidentified flying object. It may be unidentified to you, but known to others," Fienberg said.
'It looks like a craft': UFO ball which 'interacted with the light' spotted in the skies of West Yorkshire
'It looks like a craft': UFO ball which 'interacted with the light' spotted in the skies of West Yorkshire
A blue-purple ball UFO which 'interacted with the light' was spotted in the skies of West Yorkshire by a concerned resident, a freedom of information request revealed.
The object was spotted after a resident was woken by a 'bright white light'.
The resident reported the sighting to police after filming video footage of the 'craft' "turning to her as she looked at it".
Weather conditions at the time were fine and it was not raining, the log states.
UFO spotting cc Adobe
The resident told police the UFO - which was spotted in Bradford in April 2018 - 'sounded like a helicopter'.
A police officer was not dispatched to the incident, the log confirmed.
Another caller in Bradford reported a 'triangle shaped red and blue' craft moving in the skies in August 2017.
The log states: "His friend stated it may have been a satellite but he does not think it is."
In August 2015, a Bradford resident also spotted an 'oblong shape with three flashing blue lights' moving exceptionally fast, according to the call log released by police.
The rocket core is headed to Mississippi for a "green run" test.
The first completed core stage of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket is guided toward the agency’s Pegasus barge on Jan. 8, 2020, ahead of its forthcoming journey to NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Teams rolled the core out from NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans to the barge in preparation for the core stage “green run” test series.
The heart of NASA's first Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket is on the move.
The 212-foot-long (65 meters) SLS core stage rolled out of NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans Wednesday (Jan. 8) and was loaded onto a barge, agency officials announced.
That barge will soon depart for NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, where the booster will endure a crucial, months-long "green run" test designed to demonstrate its fitness to send astronauts to the moon, Mars and other deep-space destinations.
A jazz band from a local high school escorted the booster out to the road Wednesday, said John Shannon, SLS vice president and program manager at Boeing, the prime contractor for the rocket's core stage.
"It was just a fantastic way to celebrate this historic milestone — sending the most complicated vehicle that's ever been built at Michoud, by far, out on its way to the test facility," Shannon said during a call with reporters on Wednesday afternoon.
The journey to Stennis will take about 9 hours, he added. The voyage is not yet underway, however; the travel date depends on the weather.
The SLS is key to NASA's human spaceflight plans. The rocket's first iteration, known as the Block 1, will stand 322 feet (98 m) tall and generate 8.8 million lbs. of maximum thrust at liftoff — 15% more than the agency's iconic Saturn V rocket, which launched the Apollo missions to the surface of the moon. The SLS core stage's four RS-25 engines will provide about 2 million lbs. of that thrust; the rest will come from two strap-on solid rocket boosters.
The future Block 2 SLS will be even brawnier, producing nearly 12 million lbs. of maximum thrust at liftoff.
NASA's Space Launch System rocket’s core stage, complete with all four RS-25 engines, is transported from NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans to the agency’s Pegasus barge on Jan. 8, 2020. (Image credit: NASA)
The core that just left Michoud will fly in the Block 1 configuration, on the very first flight of the SLS. That mission, known as Artemis 1, will launch NASA's Orion capsule on an uncrewed journey around the moon. Artemis 1 is currently scheduled to launch no earlier than November of this year.
But the SLS core has to pass the green run before Artemis 1 can get off the ground. That test series will put the core stage through its paces, checking out its many complicated and interconnected subsystems and ultimately lighting up the four RS-25 engines for a full 8 minutes — the amount of time they'll fire on an actual mission to the moon. (The "green" in "green run," by the way, refers to the previously untested nature of the hardware on the stand.)
If everything goes well with the green run and Mother Nature cooperates, the test campaign could wrap up by July or August, Shannon said. But weather issues, and the need to refurbish the core after various subtests, may well push completion into October, he added.
After the green run is done, the core stage will take another, much longer barge trip — an eight- to 12-day trek around Florida's west coast and back up the state's east side to NASA's Kennedy Space Center, the Artemis 1 launch site.
Artemis 1, in turn, is just the first of many planned missions in NASA's Artemis program, which seeks to land two astronauts near the lunar south pole by 2024 and establish a long-term, sustainable human presence on and around the moon by 2028.
Artemis 2, another lunar flyby, will be the first crewed flight of SLS and Orion. That mission is currently targeted for late 2022.
The SLS program has endured a series of cost overruns and delays. Indeed, a 2015 assessment estimated that the first core stage would be done by the end of 2017, Shannon said.
"So, we're about two years late," he said. "Boeing completely owns that."
Shannon cited two main issues that led to this latest delay. The first involved the new tooling used to weld the core stage together, as well as problems with the welding process itself.
"The other issue, I think, that caused us some difficulty was, we really underestimated the complexity of building the engine section, which is the very bottom of the rocket that holds all of the propulsion elements and all of the TVC [thrust vector control] and hydraulic elements," Shannon said.
But Boeing learned a great deal from this first build and is already applying the lessons, he added, stressing that the second SLS core is coming together at Michoud 40% faster than the first one did.
NASA Deputy Administrator Jim Morhard — who also participated in today's call, along with NASA SLS Program Manager John Honeycutt — said that delays are to be expected when building something as big and complex as an SLS core stage for the first time. And Morhard stressed that the future is bright for SLS and the Artemis program.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated byKarl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcom orFacebook.
But in the constellation of Ophiuchus, about 400 million light-years from Earth, two galaxies are almost ready to become one.
The galaxies are in the process of violently crashing into one another. Astronomers estimate it will take them another 10 to 20 million years to fuse completely; at that point, they'll form a new galaxy called NGC 6240.
Both galaxies contain a supermassive black hole in their center, and those are expected to merge as well.
This whole process is difficult to capture on camera, however. Black holes' gravity is so strong that nothing can escape — not even light — so astronomers attempting to see them have to rely on light from the matter that gets sucked in (before it disappears). The first-ever photograph of a supermassive black hole was published in April 2019.
But an international team of astronomers recently captured a sharp photo that shows how two supermassive black holes are caught in the galactic collision that's forming the NGC 6240 galaxy.
The astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a powerful telescope funded in part by the US National Science Foundation, to assemble the image. They presented their research at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Sunday.
The black holes themselves aren't visible in the photo, but you can see the glowing gas that surrounds them (the blue stuff in the images below).
NGC 6240 as seen with ALMA (top right) and the Hubble Space Telescope (bottom right). ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), E. Treister; NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello; NASA/ESA HubbleThat gas is located within the black holes' "sphere of influence" — the innermost region of a galaxy where the black hole is the dominant force of gravity. The two black holes are feeding on the gas, which causes them to grow bigger as the galaxies merge. Previous images weren't able to capture this gas in such detail.
'A chaotic stream of gas'
Ezequiel Treister, an associate astronomy professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile, told the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) that the gas doesn't form a rotating disk, as some scientists anticipated.
"We don't find any evidence for that," he said. "Instead, we see a chaotic stream of gas with filaments and bubbles between the black holes. Some of this gas is ejected outwards with speeds up to 500 kilometers per second. We don't know yet what causes these outflows."
Gas that isn't ejected from the sphere of influence will likely get sucked into the black hole.
The black holes are less massive than researchers expected
An artist’s impression of a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole surrounded by an accretion disc. Key features of black holes are labeled in red. ESO, ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser; Business Insider
The image also challenges astronomers' ideas about the masses of these particular black holes. By observing the photo, the team found that a lot of the gas was stuck in the spheres of influence instead of the black holes themselves. That means the black holes are much less massive than anticipated.
Until recently, astronomers believed that the supermassive black holes in the NGC 6240 galaxy had a mass equivalent to about 1 billion suns. The new photo suggests, however, that the black holes are about as massive as a few hundred million suns.
The finding suggests black holes involved in other galaxy collisions could also be smaller than expected.
"This galaxy is so complex that we could never know what is going on inside it without these detailed radio images," Loreto Barcos-Muñoz, a researcher at the NRAO, said in a statement. "We now have a better idea of the 3D structure of the galaxy, which gives us the opportunity to understand how galaxies evolve during the latest stages of an ongoing merger."
Our own Milky Way galaxy is expected to merge with the nearby Andromeda galaxy in about 4 billion years.
Young stars have been found in an old part of our galaxy
Young stars have been found in an old part of our galaxy
A star cluster in the Milky Way’s halo may come from gas torn from two other galaxies
A cluster of young stars (marked with blue stars) in the outer reaches of the Milky Way may have formed from gas torn off two smaller galaxies falling toward our own galaxy.
HONOLULU – A cluster of young stars in the Milky Way is hanging out where it seemingly shouldn’t exist.
Our galaxy is enveloped in an extensive halo of old stars and hot gas — gas which can’t cool down enough to clump together and form new stars. And yet, a flock of relatively new stars is hurtling through the halo, researchers reported January 7 during a news conference at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
The star cluster is about 120 million years old and sits about 94,000 light-years away from Earth. Astronomers found it by sifting through data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite for young stars clumped together and moving in the same direction across the sky.
The cluster “didn’t have time to form somewhere else, so it was probably born near where we see it,” said Adrian Price-Whelan, an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. “But how did it form there, where there’s very little cold gas that you need in order to form a new generation of stars?”
A clue, he said, lies with the Magellanic Clouds, two satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. The cluster appears to be speeding ahead of a stream of gas being torn from those galaxies by the Milky Way’s gravity, suggesting that perhaps new stars are popping out of shredded remains of these satellites.
If the cluster and the stream are connected, they reveal unknown conditions in the halo, said David Nidever of Montana State University in Bozeman at the same news conference. The stars appear to plow ahead, while gas in the halo drags on the stream, slowing it down. Taking into account the star cluster’s age and its 17,000-light-year distance from the leading edge of the stream, Nidever said that gas in the halo may be 10 times as dense as previously thought.
A newfound star cluster (blue dots) sits far above the spiral disk of the Milky Way (white dots) and likely formed out of material from the Magellanic Clouds (purple dots), two satellites of our galaxy.A. PRICE-WHELAN, SIMULATION BY J. HUNT
Europe has confirmed its participation in humanity's first full-on planetary-defense demo.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has officially approved the Hera mission, which will assess the results of NASA's asteroid-walloping Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART).
DART is scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in July 2021 and reach the Didymos two-asteroid system in October 2022. The NASA probe will then slam into "Didymoon," the 540-foot-wide (165 meters) satellite of the 2,540-foot-wide (775 m) space rock Didymos.
Telescopes here on Earth will document how the impact affects Didymoon and its orbit around Didymos, helping researchers gauge the effectiveness of the "kinetic impactor" asteroid-deflection strategy. The DART team had long hoped that such long-range data would be supplemented by up-close observations, and now that vision will become reality.
Hera will likely launch in 2023 or 2024 and get to the Didymos system two years later. The European spacecraft will gather a variety of types of data about the space rocks with the aid of two tiny cubesats, both of which will perform asteroid landings, ESA officials have said.
The Asteroid Prospection Explorer (APEX), which was provided by a Swedish-Finnish-Czech-German consortium, will investigate the interior structure and surface composition of both asteroids in the system. And Juventas, which was built by the Danish company GomSpace and the Romanian company GMV, will study Didymoon's structure and gravity field.
DART will also feature a cubesat. The Italian Space Agency's briefcase-sized Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIA) will separate from DART shortly before the big probe hits Didymoon; LICIA will observe the impact from a safe distance, beaming data and photos home to Earth.
Originally, by the way, an ESA craft was supposed to do this real-time impact-observing work. The Didymoon-whacking project, in its first incarnation, was a joint NASA-ESA effort called the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA). An ESA spacecraft called AIM (Asteroid Impact Mission) would have gotten to the Didymos system before DART arrived, collecting information both pre- and post-collision. But AIM was canceled in 2016, so AIDA was no more.
But the decision to approve Hera, which ESA announced last week at a gathering of European space leaders in Seville, Spain, means that NASA won't go it alone on this planetary-defense test.
"We are very pleased by the European Space Agency's decision to fund the Hera mission, a critical part of humanity's first attempt at deflecting an asteroid," the #SupportHera campaign, which has been advocating for the mission, wrote in a statement. "One day, the Hera mission could be crucial to protecting our planet from asteroids."
Kinetic impactors like DART aren't the only way to nudge dangerous asteroids away from Earth. For example, if the potential impact is far enough out in the future — a few decades, say — we could launch a "gravity tractor" probe out to the asteroid. This spacecraft would fly along with the rock, tugging it slightly but continuously onto a different trajectory.
And if the possible collision is just weeks or months away, we might be forced to go with the nuclear option, literally. Exploding nuclear bombs on or near the asteroid could blast the rock apart or at least push it off course, researchers have said.
DART won't be the first probe to smack an asteroid. Earlier this year, Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft sent an impactor barreling into the space rock Ryugu. That collision will likely help scientists better understand Ryugu's internal structure, so the Hayabusa2 mission could have planetary-defense applications. But that impact was designed primarily to unearth pristine material for sample collection.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated byKarl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcom orFacebook.
Gigantic Wave of Star-Forming Gas Is Largest Known Structure of Its Kind in Milky Way
MICHELLE STARR
In 1879, astronomer Benjamin Gould identified what looked to be a ring in the sky, measuring about 3,000 light-years across, made of dust and gas and young stars - interconnected stellar nurseries. Now, a new discovery has shattered our understanding of this structure, which has been known for 150 years as Gould's Belt.
According to data collected by the Gaia mapping survey of the Milky Way galaxy, Gould's Belt is just part of a much larger structure - a colossal, serpentine wave of gas and dust 9,000 light-years long, 400 light-years wide, and extending 500 light-years above and below the galactic plane.
This wave - newly named the Radcliffe Wave, after Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, where the research was conducted - includes many of the stellar nurseries found in Gould's Belt, and others besides.
It's the largest gaseous structure identified in the Milky Way (although not the largest structure in the galaxy; the Fermi gamma-ray bubbles, for example, span 50,000 light-years).
"No astronomer expected that we live next to a giant, wave-like collection of gas - or that it forms the local arm of the Milky Way," said astronomer Alyssa Goodman of the Smithsonian Institution, and co-director of the Science Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
"We were completely shocked when we first realised how long and straight the Radcliffe Wave is, looking down on it from above in 3D - but how sinusoidal it is when viewed from Earth. The Wave's very existence is forcing us to rethink our understanding of the Milky Way's 3D structure."
The Gaia satellite was launched in 2013, and has been collecting data ever since to produce the most accurate 3D map yet of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. This is what the researchers were studying to try to get a better understanding of the structure of Gould's Belt - to determine if the clouds do, in fact, form a ring in three dimensions.
They also used recently developed techniques based on the colour of stars to map the 3D distribution of dust around them, and to accurately measure the distances to stellar nurseries - regions where clumps of dust and gas collapse under their own gravity to form new stars.
Yet, as they looked closer at the data, they realised they were looking at a structure of these interconnected regions, but also a structure that was much bigger than Gould's Belt itself.
"Instead, what we've observed is the largest coherent gas structure we know of in the galaxy, organised not in a ring but in a massive, undulating filament," said physicist and astronomer João Alves of the University of Vienna in Austria.
"The Sun lies only 500 light-years from the Wave at its closest point. It's been right in front of our eyes all the time, but we couldn't see it until now."
radcliffe wave
(Alve et al., Nature, 2019)
If you look at it from the top down (obviously we can't physically do this, but we can simulate the perspective with a computer-generated map), the Radcliffe Wave is more or less a straight line. Come back down to the galactic plane and look at it side-on, however, and it has an impressive sinuous wiggle.
It's a peculiar shape, and it's not entirely clear how it came about. "It could be like a ripple in a pond, as if something extraordinarily massive landed in our galaxy," Alves said.
We know such a thing is possible - Gaia data have also helped previously identify giant ripples across the Milky Way's disc, thought to have been created by the collision with a dwarf galaxy less than a billion years ago. But the team's paper offers no speculation about the event that could have created the Radcliffe Wave, although those investigations could form the basis of a future study.
What they do know is that it does, on occasion, (harmlessly) interact with the Sun.
"[The Sun] passed by a festival of supernovae as it crossed Orion 13 million years ago," Alves said, "and in another 13 million years it will cross the structure again, sort of like we are 'surfing the wave'."
HONOLULU — Mysterious ultra-fast pinpricks of radio energy keep lighting up the night sky and nobody knows why. A newly discovered example of this transient phenomenon has been traced to its place of origin — a nearby spiral galaxy — but it's only made things murkier for astronomers.
The problem concerns a class of blink-and-you'll-miss-them heavenly events known as fast radio bursts (FRBs). In a few thousandths of a second, these explosions produce as much energy as the sun does in nearly a century. Researchers have only known about FRBs since 2007, and they still don't have a compelling explanation regarding their sources.
"The big question is what can produce an FRB," Kenzie Nimmo, a doctoral student at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, said during a news briefing on Monday (Jan. 6) here at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Scientists were given some help in 2016, when they discovered an FRB that repeated its quick-pulsing radio tune in random bursts. All previous examples had been one-off events.
The repeating FBR was eventually traced back to a dwarf galaxy with a high rate of star formation 3 billion light-years away, Nimmo said. The galaxy contains a persistent radio source, possibly a nebula, that could explain the FRB's origin, she added.
Astronomers have also managed to determine that three non-repeating FRBs came from distant massive galaxies with little star formation going on. This seemed to provide evidence that repeating and non-repeating FRBs arose from different types of environments, Nimmo said. But the new discovery challenges this simple story.
FRB 180916.J0158+65, as the object is known, is a repeating FRB discovered by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) observatory, a radio telescope near Okanagan Falls in British Columbia that Nimmo called "the world's best FRB-finding machine."
Follow-up observations by a network of telescopes in Europe allowed the research team to produce a high-resolution image of the FRB's location. This location turned out to be a medium-sized spiral galaxy like our Milky Way that is surprisingly nearby, only 500 million light-years away, making it the closest-known FRB to date. The results were published yesterday (Jan. 6) in the journal Nature.
Image of SDSS J015800.28+654253.0, the host galaxy of Fast Radio Burst (FRB) 180916.J0158+65. The green circle shows the location of the FRB. The image was captured by the 8-meter Gemini-North telescope. (Image credit: Gemini Observatory/NSF’s Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory/AURA)
Despite precisely locating the FRB, the team was unable to detect any radio sources in the spiral galaxy that could explain the mysterious outbursts. Even worse, this new entity seems not to fit the patterns established by previous repeating and non-repeating FRBs.
"This is completely different than the host and local environments of other localized FRBs," Benito Marcote, a radio astronomer at the Joint Institute for VLBI European Research Infrastructure Consortium and lead author of the Nature paper, said during the news briefing.
The researchers hope that subsequent data might help them get a handle on what this FRB is telling them. But until then, they might have to continue scratching their heads over these puzzling phenomena.
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Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
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