U-shaped UFO recorded over Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

U-shaped UFO recorded over Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. This happened on 21st December 2020.

Witness report:

 Horseshoe object meets contrail anomaly and later disintegrates. Observed large black cube shaped object in sky from highest vantage point in my city. Immediately pulled over and started filming. Object was moving very slowly left towards long contrail type anomaly which didn’t appear to be natural. Was forced to leave the area due to frustrated residents. Crossed the road and continued filming. Object had now morphed into a sideways horseshoe shape and had made contact with the contrail anomaly. A small protrusion stuck out from the dark object into the contrail anomaly which casted a very long shadow. Had to leave to pick up a delivery. Returned approximately 20 minutes later to find a dark horseshoe shaped cloud as if the object had dematerialized. I took pictures of this as well.

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

30-01-2020 om 20:56 geschreven door peter  

FIRST SQUID MRI STUDY SHOWS BRAIN COMPLEXITY SIMILAR TO DOGS

With their peculiar movement, deep-sea habitat, and surprisingly huge genomes, squid have fascinated humans for centuries. And now, for the first time, scientists have put the cephalopods in an MRI to get a better look at their brains — revealing that they are much more like another animal beloved to humans than we realized.

That's right: Your calamari has a brain just about as complex as a dog.

Scientists used an MRI machine to get a good look at the brain of a juvenile reef squid. They were able to identify 145 previously unknown pathways and connections, which could help unravel the mystery behind a nifty squid skill — camouflage.

It is a big step toward building a complete guide to the squid brain’s complex neural connections — known as a connectome map — the researchers say.

"This the first time modern technology has been used to explore the brain of this amazing animal,” Chung said in a statement.

The study, led by researchers Wen-Sung Chung and Justin Marshall from the University of Queensland, was published this month in the journal iScience.

CLEVER CEPHALOPODS

Chung explained that cephalopods — the family group that include squid and octopus — have “famously complex brains, approaching that of a dog and surpassing mice and rats, at least in neuronal number.”

Some cephalopods have more than 500 million neurons — about the same as dogs, which clock in around 530 million. Rats have just 200 million. Humans, meanwhile, are blessed with somewhere around 100 billion neurons — but don't let that go to your head. Millions of neurons don't always add up to the same skillset — like changing your body color at will.

The brain power of squids like Sepioteuthis lessoniana, the species imaged in the study, is one of the reasons they’re able to change color on cue. Ironically, squids are colorblind — so they’re sadly not too adept at observing their bodies change color. But the skill is among the traits that make squid so cool — like their ability to count and solve problems.

"We can see that a lot of neural circuits are dedicated to camouflage and visual communication,” Chung said. That gives squid a “unique ability” to hide from predators, hunt, and communicate with one another.

But to do the study at all, researchers first had to get the squid in the MRI machine — something that required them first fixing the (dead) squid and then preserving their tissue for examination.

Once in the machine, the researchers were able to image their brain in detail. They also took samples of the squids' brains and performed different analyses to help trace a comprehensive picture of their neural connections.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

From the data, the researchers may be able to get more specific information on some of the squid's characteristics, like figuring out why squid show a certain color at a given time. For instance, a squid might change the color of its body if a predator is nearby, to blend into its surroundings. But if it’s being scoped out from above, the cephalopod may only change its head color.

"Our findings will hopefully provide evidence to help us understand why these fascinating creatures display such diverse behaviour and very different interactions," Chung said.

The new research marks another first for cephalopod studies, following a recent study that decoded the genome of a giant squid. As Inverse reported at the time, the research revealed that the giant squid’s genetic complexity is closing in on that of a human. Giant squid have about 2.7 billion DNA base pairs in their genome, it turns out, while humans have about 3 billion base pairs.

Understanding the brain mechanics behind how squid behave can better allow scientists to make predictions about the history of cephalopods — like when they first evolved to have these adaptations, and what other incredible skills they could be hiding.

Abstract: Using high-resolution diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) and a suite of old and new staining techniques, the beginnings of a multi-scale connectome map of the squid brain is erected. The first of its kind for a cephalopod, this includes the confirmation of 281 known connections with the addition of 145 previously undescribed pathways. These and other features suggest a suite of functional attributes, including

• (1) retinotopic organization through the optic lobes and into other brain areas well beyond that previously recognized,
• (2) a level of complexity and sub-division in the basal lobe supporting ideas of convergence with the vertebrate basal ganglia, and
• (3) differential lobe-dependent growth rates that mirror complexity and transitions in ontogeny.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

30-01-2020 om 18:39 geschreven door peter  

DINOSAURS LITERALLY WALKED ON FIRE — STUDY

30-01-2020 om 18:12 geschreven door peter  

Which Religion Is Friendliest To The Idea Of Aliens?

Daniel Kolitz

Illustration: Benjamin Currie, Gizmodo

In the annals of most world religions, a quick walk-on from an alien would not, at least on the surface, seem particularly strange. Unusual occurrences are kind of key to the whole enterprise. And adherents of both camps—UFO-watchers and the religious—know what it means to believe in the face of long odds. Should a member of the former group decide to link up with the latter, where would they feel most at home? What religion is most amenable to the concept of life on other planets? For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of experts in religion to find out.

---

Diana Walsh Pasulka

Professor, Philosophy and Religion, University of North Carolina Wilmington, and the author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, and Technology

Before the question can be answered, it is a good idea to consider the issue of the definition of religion. For most people in the Western tradition, religion is something that follows a set form of patterns. There is a God, there are usually sacred books, and places to go for people. Generally, when it is explained that many non-Western and indigenous cultures do not think of religion in this way, it opens their minds to the fact that they’ve had an idea of religion that is not universal across the planet. In many indigenous spiritualities, for example, extraterrestrials, often called “star people,” exist and are even ancestors of certain tribes on Earth. Even in certain Western indigenous spiritualities, such as pre-Chrisitian Irish, for example, extraterrestrials came from the clouds and provided humans with knowledge about how to live.

Even in the Western traditions—take Catholicism for example—talk of extraterrestrial life has been going on for more than one thousand years. In 1891 Pope Leo XIII established a space observatory (which was there already) to study “unexplained flying objects.” Buddhism also references the existence of other worlds. It is obvious that most religions and spiritualities have considered the existence of beings from other worlds. It is actually not new.

What is new, however, is that there are “UFO religions,” or religions today that incorporate ideas that extraterrestrials are here for various reasons. The Nation of Islam is a classic example of such a religion. Obviously religions like that found by the French man Raël is a UFO religion, as he said he had a direct experience of a flying saucer and his spirituality emerged directly from that experience. So, these religions already incorporate these ideas, as well as many indigenous religions. In my opinion, should extraterrestrials be found to exist, I don’t think most religions or their members will have an issue with it.

Karen Pechilis

Professor, Comparative Religions, Drew University

I think Buddhism is a good candidate for being the religion most friendly to the idea of life existing on other planets, especially if politics can be bracketed out. Buddhism is an ‘open-enrollment’ religion that has a method of conversion (the Triple Gem) it has used for millennia to recruit members widely from across very different populations. In so doing, it has a history of interacting with pre-existing local traditions, rather than oppressing them. Thus, it is open to difference. Also, some Buddhist texts describe various regions, not all of them earthly, in which people live simultaneously but without contact among the regions. Lastly, the universal Buddhist prayer is “may all beings be (unselfishly) happy,” which is directed towards everyone, everywhere.

Douglas Vakoch

President of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI), a non-profit research organisation that creates and transmits interstellar messages to search for extraterrestrial civilizations

Once we detect ET, everything will change. Religions that have been resistant to the prospect of extraterrestrial life will be forced to take stock and re-evaluate their positions. We’ll no longer ask “Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?” but instead we will wonder, “What does the existence of extraterrestrials mean for your beliefs?”

When religious folk are asked today whether life beyond Earth is consistent with their faith, they’re put in an awkward position. They’re being expected to consider a scientific question through the lens of their religious beliefs. Do their scriptures make explicit reference to the existence of life on planets orbiting other stars? Does silence on this topic imply the absence of aliens, or simply that religious texts aren’t trying to answer scientific questions that were impossible even to ask in an earlier age?

For the world’s oldest religious traditions, many of these questions are nonsensical. Sacred texts written thousands of years ago were based on radically different cosmologies than those reflected in modern-day astronomy. It was inconceivable to ask whether there are inhabited Earths around distant stars, when no one imagined that the stars were anything like our own Sun. Attempting to extract a scientific answer from a religious scripture is doomed to failure.

Admittedly, some traditions will have an easier time than others in absorbing the news that we’re not alone in the universe. Numerous schools of Buddhism and Hinduism posit countless celestial realms, populated by beings more or less spiritually advanced than humans. News of extraterrestrial neighbours would be welcome and easily assimilated.

Within Christianity, two prominent denominations arose recently enough to be informed by nineteenth-century astronomical observations of planets in our own solar system. The founder of the Seventh-day Adventists had visions of extraterrestrials, and the Latter-day Saint scripture The Pearl of Great Price claims the existence of other inhabited worlds than Earth. In these traditions, aliens are assumed to exist, so no adaptation will be needed.

The more interesting question is whether the discovery of life beyond Earth will create an opening for a dialogue with an independently evolved species on another world. If so, which individuals or groups will initiate an enterprise that won’t come to fruition within a human lifetime? Given the distances between stars, an interstellar back-and-forth exchange could take centuries or millennia. Here on Earth, religions have been among the most successful social organisations to operate on such long timescales. Will the knowledge that a distant exoplanet is inhabited be the impetus for the launch of a multigenerational interfaith, interspecies dialogue?

Liz Wilson

Professor, Comparative Religion, Miami University of Ohio

Buddhism, hands down. No other religion offers as vivid a depiction of what life is like on planets far from ours. In Buddhist texts we learn what it feels like, phenomenologically, to be on another planet. We learn what it might be like to live in worlds inhabited by sentient beings, worlds that are imbued with sacred qualities.

Within Mahayana Buddhism, Buddhahood can take many forms. Their philosophers distinguish between the Buddha’s ineffable body—the eternal dharma-kāya (“truth-body”)—and bodies, like ours, that are subject to decay. In between these two bodies are celestial bodies of the Buddha that are associated with outer space, with universes outside our own. These “enjoyment bodies” (saṃbhoga-kāya) are built out of the vows that Buddhas made long before they became Buddhas.

Enjoyment bodies are composed of subtle energy and do not die like ordinary bodies on Earth. The realms where these enjoyment bodies preside are called Buddha fields (Buddha-kṣetra), and they are said to be countless in number. Just as every being is potentially a Buddha, all Buddhas launch themselves as volitional beings who make vows to be of benefit to sentient beings. Those vows take the forms of worlds in outer space where a being can take birth. The Buddha-fields are designed to help even the most foolish and stubborn of sentient beings to see reality as it really is. The best of the many Buddha fields that exist are described as pain-free, calmness-inducing, compassion-making pure paradises.

Pure lands are ideal places to achieve nirvana, since life there is designed to maximise opportunities for insight. For entry-level Buddhist practitioners, the goal is to achieve birth in a pure Buddha field after death. For advanced practitioners, the goal is to make your own. Since each Buddha-field is tailor-made according to the vow that one takes as a Buddha-in-the-making, the trick is to look around at what other Buddhas created with their vows. Before you come up with the blueprint for your own future Buddha field, you should travel around in meditative trace, look at other worlds, and survey the options.

Mahayana Buddhism offers a remarkably rich cosmology. For these Buddhists, life in outer space is an article of faith and a core practice.

Chris Taylor

Professor of Islamic Studies and Director of the Drew University Centre on Religion, Culture & Conflict (CRCC) at Drew University

Most religions historically were pretty focused on this planet, and many conceived it as the centre of the universe—if not literally, at least effectively—so the issue is not something that people spent a lot of time writing about, although I’m sure that individuals wondered about it.

Most religions are complex, so it’s not really possible to ask which one is “most friendly” to an idea like extraterrestrial life. One encounters thinkers in various traditions whose thought may not have specifically addressed this issue, but one suspects that they would have had little trouble accepting the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

In the Islamic tradition, for example, the great twelfth and thirteenth century mystical philosopher Ibn al-‘Arabi would have likely been very comfortable with contemporary theory in physical cosmology that our own universe may well be only one of multiple universes, likely occupying multiple and different dimensions of time and space. Once you can accept something as wild as that, getting your head around extraterrestrial life should be a breeze.

Most traditional religions understood that the actual cosmos is greater than the physical universe that we experience, and the actual cosmos consists of dimensions that transcend the physical. In fact, those dimensions were most often of greater interest to them than our physical cosmos, because ultimate reality, however they understood it, existed ultimately in those other dimensions and necessarily transcended our own physical cosmos, because for them ultimate reality was defined by two qualities that are impossible in the context of our physical cosmos: (1) it must be eternal; and (2) it must be unchanging.

They understood that everything of this cosmos cannot meet either criteria that they understood defines ultimate reality. So for many traditional religions, ultimate reality, however defined, might in some sense be found in this cosmos, but was necessarily not of this cosmos. When you think about that for a moment, it’s far more mind blowing than the possibility of other life in this cosmos.

Thus, traditional religions typically had much greater humility, I suspect, than most 21st century secular people do about what’s ultimately possible—both in this cosmos and beyond it.

Christian Weidemann

Lecturer, Protestant Theology, University of Muenster; recent papers include ‘Did Jesus Die for Klingons, too?’ and ‘Is the Origin of Life a Fluke? Why the Chance Hypothesis Should Not be Dismissed Too Quickly’

Every major religion on Earth could easily accommodate the discovery of (intelligent) alien life, with one exception: Christianity.

Christians maintain that persons who have committed moral wrongs are in desperate need of divine salvation. The good news is that, out of grace, God will save many (according to universalism, all) human sinners. Christians also believe that Jesus Christ plays an essential part in God’s terrestrial work of salvation: Jesus was a divine incarnation whose atonement (suffering, teaching, good example…) will ultimately reconcile many (or all) human sinners to God.

Now imagine the universe is teeming with other intelligent civilizations. What is a Christian believer supposed to say? Claiming that Christ died only for us, while the rest of the universe is screwed, would be incompatible with God’s love. If, however, earthly Jesus died for the whole universe, myriads of extraterrestrial sinners included, we would have to accept a geocentrism even more preposterous than the spatial variant. Neither is there a way out by suggesting that other intelligent species may not have been “fallen.” This proposal amounts to a negative human exceptionalism that is totally unbelievable, given that alien species are subject to the same general evolutionary mechanisms as we are. Natural selection favours “selfish” traits.

What about multiple incarnations? Here another difficulty of traditional Christian doctrine comes into play: Christ has two natures—he is “truly God and truly man.” But how are members of completely different biological species (“truly man” and “truly Klingon,” let’s say) supposed to stand in a relationship of personal identity? Even worse, if the number of sinful species in the universe exceeds a certain threshold, God would be forced to incarnate himself simultaneously. However, no single person who is an embodied being with a finite nature, i.e. a “truly” biological organism, can be more than one such being at the same time. If, on the other hand, the incarnations were not personally identical, many different persons with a divine nature would result—too many even for a Christian. Finally: May extraterrestrial sinners have been reconciled to God by means different from a divine incarnation? Perhaps, but even if the Christian believer concedes alternative means of salvation she is stuck with the highly implausible geocentric claim that the incarnation, i.e. one of the most remarkable events in the history of the cosmos, happens just 2000 years ago on our planet, although myriads of other inhabited planets were also available.

Therefore, I conclude, the traditional Christian believer can’t make theological sense of extraterrestrial intelligent life.

Kelly Eileen Hayes

Associate Professor, Women’s Studies, Indiana University

While it might sound like the plot of a sci-fi novel, the idea that benevolent and highly advanced beings from other planets are secretly facilitating human evolution is common to a number of religions. Members of the Brazilian religion called the Valley of the Dawn (Vale do Amanhecer), for example, claim to be the spiritual descendants of a race of beings from the distant star Capella, sent by God to jumpstart Earth’s evolution. According to Valley teachings, the elaborate pyramids built by various ancient peoples were actually technologically sophisticated structures for maintaining communications with Capella. On the North American continent, a related idea is central to Unarius, whose charismatic leader Ruth Norman, aka the Archangel Uriel, claimed to be in contact with the “Space Brothers”—highly evolved intelligences inhabiting other galaxies. Uriel promised her followers that the Space Brothers will touch down on Earth in their massive starships to usher in a new era of peace and unity, but only when human beings are ready to understand their message. Whether expressed in science fiction or religious mythology, our fascination with the possibility of extraterrestrial beings is a venerable one. Long before we developed the technology to explore the universe outside the Earth’s atmosphere, Enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Swedenborg and organised groups of Spiritists and Theosophists avowed the existence of advanced life forms on other planets. And so the answer to the question of which religion is friendliest to the idea of life existing on other planets is: a great many!

{ https://www.gizmodo.com.au/ }

30-01-2020 om 01:20 geschreven door peter  

The interior of Saturn’s moon Enceladus is geochemically complex, making its subsurface ocean quite habitable for possible life, according to a new study from Southwest Research Institute.

The geysers of Enceladus: huge plumes of water vapor erupting through cracks at the south pole of this moon of Saturn. The plumes contain water vapor, ice, salts, methane and both simple and complex organic molecules, the kind of molecules normally found in living systems. The geysers must come from somewhere. Scientists think there’s an ocean below Enceladus’ icy crust. Now a new study shows that the interior of Enceladus is more geochemically complex than once thought, boosting the prospects for life.

Image via NASA’s Cassini spacecraft/ Space Science Institute.

The interior of Enceladus – the ocean moon of Saturn that might support life – is even more complex than previously thought, according to a new study from scientists at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). These researchers have developed a new geochemical model of the moon. It’s based on an analysis of material in the moon’s water vapor plumes. The analysis suggests that carbon dioxide is being controlled by chemical reactions on the seafloor of Enceladus’ interior ocean. The findings open up intriguing new possibilities for life in Enceladus’ subsurface watery abyss.

The new peer-reviewed results were published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on January 22, 2020.

Lead author Christopher Glein of SwRI said in a statement:

By understanding the composition of the plume, we can learn about what the ocean is like, how it got to be this way and whether it provides environments where life as we know it could survive. We came up with a new technique for analyzing the plume composition to estimate the concentration of dissolved CO2 in the ocean. This enabled modeling to probe deeper interior processes.

From the new paper:

Enceladus, an ocean-harboring moon of Saturn, erupts a plume that contains gases and frozen sea spray into space. By understanding the composition of the plume, we can learn about what the ocean is like, how it got to be this way, and whether it provides environments where life as we know it could survive. This study presents a new perspective for analyzing the plume composition to estimate the concentration of dissolved carbon dioxide in the ocean. We find that the derived range based on two different data sets is intriguingly similar to what would be expected from the dissolution and formation of certain mixtures of silicon and carbon-bearing minerals at the seafloor. The deduced combination of minerals may be indicative of a fundamental process that has sequestered a large amount of Enceladus’ initial inventory of carbon dioxide into the rocky core. This inference echoes an emerging vision of a complex interior that hosts geochemically diverse environments. The dynamic interface of such complexity is where energy sources for possible life may arise.

View of Saturn’s moon Enceladus via the Cassini spacecraft. You can see the bluish tiger stripes on the moon’s left side. This image is tilted; the tiger stripes are at the moon’s south pole. Active geysers are erupting from the stripes even as we speak!

Image via NASA/ ESA/ JPL/ SSI/ Cassini Imaging Team/ Carnegie Science.

The researchers were able to come to these conclusions based on continued analysis of spectrometry data sent back by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The Cassini mission ended in late 2017, and the last close flyby of Enceladus was on October 28, 2015. According to the analysis, the best way to explain the abundant amount of carbon dioxide below the moon’s surface is by geochemical reactions between the rocky core and the water in the ocean.

Cassini had also previously detected silica (SiO2) and molecular hydrogen (H2) in the ocean, by analyzing the composition of geyser-like plumes of water vapor erupting from the icy surface. This water originates in the ocean below, and makes its way to the surface through large cracks at the south pole, called tiger stripes, finally erupting into space as water vapor. According to Glein:

Based on our findings, Enceladus appears to demonstrate a massive carbon sequestration experiment. On Earth, climate scientists are exploring whether a similar process can be utilized to mitigate industrial emissions of CO2. Using two different data sets, we derived CO2 concentration ranges that are intriguingly similar to what would be expected from the dissolution and formation of certain mixtures of silicon- and carbon-bearing minerals at the seafloor.

Distinct sources of observed CO2, silica and H2 imply mineralogically and thermally diverse environments in a heterogeneous rocky core. We suggest that the core is composed of a carbonated upper layer and a serpentinized interior.

Diagram depicting the interior of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, with its rocky core, subsurface ocean and plumes of water vapor.

Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ SwRI.

But this evidence also points to even more complex activity, involving hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. Cassini had previously found evidence for them, and now this new study adds to that. Both silica and molecular hydrogen are considered to be markers of hydrothermal activity.

Active hydrothermal vents would be an exciting discovery in an alien ocean such as the one on Enceladus. Why? They emit hot fluids rich in minerals and energy into the surrounding colder water. On Earth, they are central to ecosystems where a wide variety of life thrives. Could the same be true for Enceladus? According to Hunter Waite of SwRI and principal investigator of Cassini’s Ion Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS):

The dynamic interface of a complex core and seawater could potentially create energy sources that might support life. While we have not found evidence of the presence of microbial life in the ocean of Enceladus, the growing evidence for chemical disequilibrium offers a tantalizing hint that habitable conditions could exist beneath the moon’s icy crust.

The Cassini mission found evidence for hydrothermal activity – hydrothermal vents – on the bottom of Enceladus’ ocean. Could they help sustain life as they do on Earth?

Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ SwRI.

The scenario proposed by the researchers is that hydrothermal oxidation of reduced iron deep in the core creates H2, while hydrothermal activity intersecting quartz-bearing carbonated rocks produces silica-rich fluids. Such an environment could be quite habitable by earthly standards. Glein said:

The implications for possible life enabled by a heterogeneous core structure are intriguing. This model could explain how planetary differentiation and alteration processes create chemical (energy) gradients needed by subsurface life.

Cassini had previously found other tantalizing hints about the conditions in Enceladus’ ocean. When the spacecraft analyzed the water vapor from the plumes – that it flew through directly – it found water vapor, ice particles, salts, methane, and a variety of simple and complex organic molecules.

Another recent study by scientists at the Carnegie Institute for Science has also helped explain how the tiger stripes formed, and how they remain active, due to deformation of the ice crust by Saturn’s powerful gravitational pull. Another study from last summer found that Enceladus’ ocean is just the right age to support life.

Christopher Glein, lead author of the new study.

Image via NASA Astrobiology Institute.

All of these discoveries, and now this new study, are painting a picture of Enceladus as a potentially quite habitable world. But further research and return missions – now on the drawing boards – will be needed to finally answer the question of whether that deep, dark ocean is actually inhabited by any kind of alien lifeforms.

The newest findings don’t prove that there is life on, or rather in, Enceladus, but they do add to the growing evidence that the subsurface ocean is probably quite habitable. Along with Jupiter’s moon Europa, and possibly another moon of Saturn, Titan, Enceladus is looking more and more like one of the best places in the solar system to look for life beyond Earth.

• Bottom line: A new study from Southwest Research Institute shows that the interior of Saturn’s ocean moon Enceladus is more geochemically complex that previously thought, making the ocean quite habitable for possible life.
• Source: The carbonate geochemistry of Enceladus’ ocean
• Via SwRI

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

30-01-2020 om 01:00 geschreven door peter  

Scientists drill into Antarctic ‘doomsday glacier’ to see if it will collapse and flood the world

Jasper Hamill

A view of the ice front of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica

(Image: David Vaughan)

A team of scientists has dug down into a huge ice sheet known as the ‘doomsday glacier’ for the first time.

The Thwaites Glacier is located in ‘one of the most remote and hostile areas of West Antarctica’.

This huge chunk of frozen water was given its ominous apocalyptic nickname because of the risk it will break apart and dump so much freshwater into the ocean that sea levels rise by 65cm – more than two feet.

If this disaster came to pass, it could render coastal and low-lying cities totally uninhabitable and cause chaos around the planet.

Researchers used hot water to drill to a depth of 700 metres and are now carrying out tests to discover if the glacier will fall apart in the coming decades.

Dr Keith Nicholls, an oceanographer from the British Antarctic Survey, said: ‘We know that warmer ocean waters are eroding many of West Antarctica’s glaciers, but we’re particularly concerned about Thwaites.

‘This new data will provide a new perspective of the processes taking place so we can predict future change with more certainty.’

Instruments including a small robot called Icefin were lowered deep into the borehole.

View of a borehole cut into the glacier 

(Image: British Antarctic Survey)

This exploration machine is now swimming about beneath the ice to examine how it interacts with the ocean and study its melting behaviour.

Dr Paul Cutler, who manages the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) at the US National Science Foundation, said: ‘Thwaites Glacier is extremely remote, with only a handful of people setting foot on it until this year.

‘This has been our first season of land-based fieldwork to get a deeper understanding of this important yet under-studied glacier. It’s amazing to think we’ve only now drilled in this remote region some 200 years after the continent was first sighted.’

Our planet could be teetering on the edge of catastrophe

(Image: Getty)

Humanity is about to reach the climate change ‘point of no return’ and our attempts to save the planet have been ‘utterly inadequate’, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned last year.

Speaking before the start of a two-week international climate conference in Madrid, the UN chief said rising temperatures are already causing chaos around the world and suggested we’re approaching the moment when it’s too late to halt the progress of global warming.

He also said the world has the scientific knowledge and the technical ability to tackle global warming, but ‘what is lacking is political will.’

‘The point of no return is no longer over the horizon,’ Guterres told reporters in the Spanish capital.

‘ It is in sight and hurtling toward us.’

Guterres said there was mounting scientific evidence showing the impact man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are already having on the planet, including record temperatures and melting polar ice.

But he insisted that his message was ‘one of hope, not of despair’.

He added: ‘Our war against nature must stop and we know that that is possible.’

‘What is still lacking is political will,’ he added.

‘Political will to put a price on carbon. Political will to stop subsidies on fossil fuels. Political will to stop building coal power plants from 2020 onwards. Political will to shift taxation from income to carbon. Taxing pollution instead of people.’

Global warming ‘threatens the existence of human civilisations’ and we need to cut emissions immediately, researchers warned

(Picture: Getty)

Before the UN leader’s statement, scientists said nine climate change ‘tipping points’ have now been crossed and the ‘cascade of changes’ could spell doom for humanity.

µThey called for the establishment of a ‘state of planetary emergency’ and urged governments to take urgent action to stop the production of greenhouse gases and said global warming risked creating a ‘hothouse Earth’ that ‘could threaten the existence of human civilisations’.

‘A decade ago we identified a suite of potential tipping points in the Earth system, now we see evidence that over half of them have been activated,’ said Professor Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter and lead author of a new paper in the respected journal Nature.

‘The growing threat of rapid, irreversible changes means it is no longer responsible to wait and see. The situation is urgent and we need an emergency response.

‘We might already have crossed the threshold for a cascade of inter-related tipping points.

‘However, the rate at which they progress, and therefore the risk they pose, can be reduced by cutting our emissions.’

Countdown to doomsday:

1. If these nine natural Melting of Arctic sea ice.
2. Loss of Greenland ice sheet.
3. The disappearance of boreal forests.
4. Thawing of Permafrost.
5. Loss of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (currents which carry warm water from the tropics into the North Atlantic)
6. Death of the Amazon rainforest.
7. The demise of warm-water corals.
8. Melting of West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
9. Loss of parts of East Antarctica.

The collapse of major ice sheets on Greenland, West Antarctica and part of East Antarctica would cause roughly 10 metres of irreversible sea-level rise.

If rainforests, permafrost and boreal forests die off, huge amounts of greenhouse gases will be released into the air and amplify global warming.

We could stave off this disaster by reducing emissions, but this would only ‘allow more time for low-lying populations to move’ to another part of the world.

And once we’ve reached several tipping points, a cataclysmic ‘cascade’ could begin which accelerates climate change to terrifying proportions.

‘If damaging tipping cascades can occur and a global tipping cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to civilization,’ the scientists wrote.

‘No amount of economic cost-benefit analysis is going to help us. We need to change our approach to the climate problem.’

Co-author Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said: ‘It is not only human pressures on Earth that continue rising to unprecedented levels.

‘It is also that as science advances, we must admit that we have underestimated the risks of unleashing irreversible changes, where the planet self-amplifies global warming.

‘This is what we now start seeing, already at 1°C global warming.

‘Scientifically, this provides strong evidence for declaring a state of planetary emergency, to unleash world action that accelerates the path towards a world that can continue evolving on a stable planet.’

{ https://metro.co.uk/ }

29-01-2020 om 23:27 geschreven door peter  

NASA spacecraft breaks its own record with another swing by the sun

By Meghan Bartels

An artist's depiction of NASA's Parker Solar Probe at work observing the sun.

(Image: © NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)

NASA's Parker Solar Probe took one step closer to the sun Wednesday (Jan. 29) when it executed its fourth flyby of our star.

This is the first such maneuver, called a perihelion, that the spacecraft has completed since swinging past Venus in December, a move that shrank the probe's orbit. That so-called gravity assist means Parker Solar Probe broke its own record today for the closest a spacecraft has come to the sun, as the probe will continue to do repeatedly over the course of its seven-year mission.

At about 4:30 a.m. EST (0930 GMT), Parker Solar Probe's trajectory carried the spacecraft within about 11.6 million miles (18.6 million kilometers) of the sun, more than 3 million miles (5 million km) closer than previous flybys. Before Parker Solar Probe's launch, no spacecraft had come within 26.5 million miles (43 million kilometers) of the sun, a record set by the Helios 2 mission in 1976.

• Related: Hello, Venus! Parker Solar Probe Makes Second Planetary Flyby.

Parker Solar Probe won't have competition for its records anytime soon. But it will have some company in its work studying our star. The European Space Agency and NASA's joint mission to the sun, dubbed Solar Orbiter, is currently scheduled to launch on Feb. 7.

Augmenting the observations Parker Solar Probe is taking, Solar Orbiter will study the poles of the sun, which are out of view of the NASA probe. Solar Orbiter carries more instruments than Parker Solar Probe does, but the two spacecraft share a few tools, so scientists will be able to easily compare the data the probes gather from different locations around the sun.

• Related: NASA's Parker Solar Probe Mission to the Sun in Pictures

In particular, scientists want to better understand why the sun's outer atmosphere is so much hotter than the star's visible surface and how the solar wind material that streams off the sun reaches such high speeds.

If all goes well with the Solar Orbiter launch next month, some of that probe's instruments will be turned on by the time Parker Solar Probe makes its next perihelion, on June 7. Parker Solar Probe is making a series of 24 close flybys of the sun through 2025 in order to help scientists understand how the sun works. 

The first three flybys, conducted in 2018 and 2019, already introduced solar scientists to newfound phenomena. In a first batch of scientific papers from the mission, published in December 2019, researchers started pinning down new ideas about the solar wind.

• What's Inside the Sun? A Star Tour from the Inside Out
• NASA's Parker Solar Probe Mission to the Sun in Pictures
• NASA Sun Probe Spies the Solar Wind in 1st Birthday Photo

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

29-01-2020 om 22:45 geschreven door peter  

2 satellites will narrowly avoid colliding at 32,800 mph over Pittsburgh on Wednesday

29-01-2020 om 22:27 geschreven door peter  

Alien investigation series 'Project Blue Book' shows more weird encounters in Season 2

By Elizabeth Howell 

Michael Malarkey as Captain Michael Quinn (left) and Aidan Gillen as Dr. J. Allen Hynek in The History Channel's "Project Blue Book."

(Image: © Eduardo Araquel/History)

"Project Blue Book," the hit television docudrama about the U.S. military's investigations into aliens more than 50 years ago, is back for Season 2.

The History Channel series runs on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. EST and PST — check your local listings to confirm the time in your viewing area. The next episode is tonight (Jan. 28).

The series shares the same name as the real-life U.S. Air Force investigation into unidentified flying objects (UFOs), which was called Project Blue Book. That investigation launched in 1952 and continued until 1969. Experts examined more than 12,000 UFO sightings (of which more than 700 are still unexplained), according to series creator and executive producer David O'Leary.

• Related: Top-Secret UFO Program Revealed in TV's 'Project Blue Book' 

"For me, UFOs have been a lifelong obsession," he told Space.com. "I have always been fascinated by the question [of] 'Are we alone in the universe? And I never felt you could honestly answer that question without examining the UFO issue."

O'Leary said through his research on Project Blue Book, he became convinced that there "really is a phenomenon" of UFOs, even though experts often debunk the purported sightings, or say that the existence of UFOs doesn't necessarily mean that aliens are in our airspace. 

"Once I learned the chief of scientific consultants for the U.S. Air Force [J. Allen Hynek] and the first director of that program [Edward J. Ruppelt] both became convinced through this program that UFOs are real and represent a true scientific mystery and worthy of true scientific study, something clicked for me. This is unbelievable. So this is a drama series that examines this program through the eyes of these two men."

O'Leary has spent many hours reading the first-hand research from both Blue Book, via the declassified documents in Hynek's book "The UFO Experience" (Regnery, 1972), and from independent UFO historians. The producer also interviewed the last living director of Blue Book — Robert J. Friend, who died in June 2019 at age 99. Friend not only provided details of the investigations, but also discussed matters such as what the project's offices looked like. His testimony helped with the sets on the show, O'Leary said.

Some of the more famous examples of Blue Book investigations include the Roswell incident (in which a purported UFO crashed near Roswell, N.M.) and Area 51, Nev., a top-secret military testing ground that some people say is linked to alien research. 

Season 1 of Project Blue Book ran between January and March 2019, with 10 episodes — each one examining a UFO conspiracy in detail. Some of the stories examined include:

• A reported UFO "dogfight" over Fargo, N.D.,, in 1948, which some say was a weather balloon — although O'Leary's research indicated that there was a more ambiguous explanation. "It's a pretty intense and incredible sequence, where the pilot engages with this aircraft that seems to maneuver like nothing he's ever seen before," O'Leary said.
• A discussion about "foo fighters," or strange aerial phenomena that Allied aircraft pilots reported during the Second World War . Theories about these sightings range from aerial phenomena to fighter pilot fatigue. That said, Friend was a former foo fighter and O'Leary said that the old pilot genuinely believed that he saw something in the sky.
• The "Washington Merry-Go-Round" incident in 1952, when something breached restricted air space in Washington, D.C., two weekends in a row, sparking President Harry Truman's administration to scramble fighter jets, O'Leary said. "We still have no idea what they were.

O'Leary added that the show tries not to show the same kind of UFO sightings in each episode; some have focused on matters such as an "X-Files"-like chase of something in the forest, people who felt that they made telepathic connections with aliens, and a Kentucky family reporting an alien home invasion. 

While a Season 3 hasn't been confirmed yet, O'Leary said the show's team would be interested in producing more episodes. "We have a lot of new ideas, and areas to explore," he said, again pointing to the hundreds of unresolved cases under Project Blue Book.

• UFOs Are Real, But Don't Assume They're Alien Spaceships
• Thousands of Government UFO Reports Now Available at Canadian University 
• Are the aliens us? UFOs may be piloted by time-traveling humans, book argues

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

29-01-2020 om 22:09 geschreven door peter  

40,000 Year Old Archaeological Discoveries That Show There Was an Advanced Civilization

We look to the far-reaching spread of Denisovan DNA and artifacts. Andrew Collins traces the legacy of the Denisovans, through myth History and archeology, across the ancient world, leading to the origins of human civilization. What we find is a civilization more than 40,000 years old, with an advanced intellect and technology, merging with modern humans.

The Denisovans or Denisova hominins are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic human in the genus Homo without an agreed taxonomic name. Pending consensus on its taxonomic status, it has been referred to as Homo denisova, Homo altaiensis, or Homo sapiens denisova.

Other videos - peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

29-01-2020 om 21:32 geschreven door peter  

Twee ‘gepensioneerde’ satellieten dreigen vannacht boven de VS met elkaar in botsing te komen - HLN.be

Bron: Science Alert

Het gaat om de Infrarood Astronomische Satelliet (afgekort IRAS) die in 1983 werd gelanceerd en de satelliet genaamd GGSE-4 die sinds 1967 in het luchtruim hangt. Omdat ze al eventjes niet meer in contact met de aarde staan, betekent dat dat ze ook geen manoeuvres meer kunnen uitvoeren.

LeoLabs, de organisatie die ruimtepuin nauwgezet in de gaten houdt, gelooft dat ze elkaar op een afstand van 15 tot 30 meter zullen passeren. En de kans dat ze elkaar raken is 1 op 1.000. Een kleine kans, toch waarschuwt LeoLabs voor de mogelijke gevolgen. Een botsing zou immers nog meer ruimtepuin opleveren, en er vliegen naar schatting reeds 129 miljoen stukjes puin rond.

Vermits er in de ruimte wel duizenden oude satellieten – die niet meer in contact staan met de aarde – rondzweven, is het eigenlijk vreemd dat er niet vaker botsingen gebeuren. LeoLabs waarschuwt dat de kans op zo’n aanvaring vannacht een pak groter is.

• Het wordt steeds drukker in de ruimte: wie heeft het daar eigenlijk voor het zeggen?

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

29-01-2020 om 19:48 geschreven door peter  

SpaceX lanceert opnieuw Falcon-draagraket met zestig satellieten voor ‘Starlink’ - HLN.be

Op lanceercomplex 40 van Cape Canaveral vertrok met twee dagen vertraging - door ongunstige weeromstandigheden - om 15.09 uur Belgische tijd een Falcon-9 draagraket. 

Lees ook

Vrees van astronomen komt uit: vloot Starlink-satellieten van Elon Musk verstoort zicht op sterren en planeten

De nuttige lading bestond uit zestig satellieten voor Starlink, de constellatie die SpaceX aan het uitbouwen is voor wereldomvattend breedbandinternet, en waarvoor eerder in drie etappes al 180 kunstmanen zijn gelanceerd. De meegevoerde Starlinks wegen elk zowat 260 kilo en vormden samen de zwaarste nuttige lading ooit meegenomen door een Falcon-9. Het uitzetten van de lading in een cirkelvormige baan, op zowat 290 kilometer hoogte, duurde ongeveer een uur. Dit uitzetten gebeurde deze keer in één keer, in plaats van zoals gangbaar twee per twee. 

De eerste trap van de draagraket keerde veilig terug op droneship ‘Of Course I Still Love You’. Het is de 49ste keer dat SpaceX de eerste trap van een Falcon recupereert, deze eerste trap is trouwens al twee keer eerder gebruikt. Hergebruik drukt de lanceerkosten. 

De twee delen van de neuskegel moesten in netten van twee schepen, ‘Ms. Tree’ en ‘Ms Chief’, ploffen. Een van de twee helften is zoals verhoopt in een vangnet geland; het succes was voor Ms.Tee weggelegd. De andere helft van de neuskegel kwam in de Atlantische Oceaan terecht. SpaceX zal proberen het ding te bergen met het oog op hergebruik.

Starlink raakt net als concurrerende netwerken meer en meer omstreden, zeker gezien het feit dat SpaceX op duizenden kunstmanen mikt. Die verhogen de kans op botsingen in de ruimte en er lijkt ook geen plan te zijn om ze na uitdiensttreding weer naar beneden te halen. Bovendien kunnen ze de waarnemingen van astronomen verstoren. 

29-01-2020 om 19:36 geschreven door peter  

Family’s Close Encounter In Columbia Missouri

JUNE 28, 1973 ……..COLUMBIA MISSOURI

The mobile home of James Richards sat on the absolute outskirts of the city of Columbia in the state of Missouri. Not only that, but the home itself was at the end of dead-end footpath around 1000 feet from the nearest main road. All around this quiet and extremely humble abode were “scattered trees” aside from a small front yard. To say that Richards and his 16-year-old daughter, Vanea, as well as Jamie, her 3-year-old son were cut off from the vast majority of the community was an understatement.

Incidentally, the nearest property to Mr. Richards’ mobile home was a small house, lived in by an elderly lady. She was, however, “asleep at the time of the observation”.

On this particular evening, at a little past midnight on 28^th June 1973, Vanea was making her way to the north side of the mobile home, to the fridge so that she could place a baby bottle there. Although there was music filling the home from the record player which was spinning the vinyl disc around and around on its turntable, the open window allowed the sudden noise from outside to be heard easily.

Vanea would later describe the noise as a “thrashing” sound and it appeared to emanate from the trees around the side of the mobile home. The more she listened, now all but blocking out the record player, she could make out what appeared to be the sound of something “moving a large tree” outside.

She would remain where she was for a few more moments, listening intently to the mysterious and unnerving activity taking place outside. Then, as loudly as she could without alerting whoever, or whatever was outside, she would call out to her father.

Two Bright, Silver-White Beams Appear Out Of Nowhere!

Richards could hear his daughter call from the kitchen area of the mobile home as he sat in the living room with Jamie. Because of the hour and the fact that he himself was feeling sluggish and tired, he was rather slow in getting in out of the living room chair and up to the window where Vanea was calling him from.

By the time he had arrived at where his daughter was, she was moving with great pace from the outside screen door to the front door, locking both of them as quickly as she could. He would make his way to the kitchen window, now with a little more urgency than before. His daughter joined him a moment or two later, now satisfied that the doors were as secure as they could be.

As they both stared out into the darkness of the summer’s night, “two beams of light” suddenly became visible. They appeared to be between the trees and the nearby fence. Richards would guess they were approximately 50 feet from the kitchen window they were viewing them from and had a “tapered” look to them, with the wider section at the top.

He would further estimate the beams were around five feet apart, and remained this distance., suggesting they emanated from the same solid source overhead. Furthermore, they had a “bright, silver-white” color to them. However, try as he did, he could see no solid form “above or behind the beams”.

Then, they just disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared. It was then that both Richards and his daughter could see the “bright oval form” in their place.

The Woodland “Lit Up As Bright As Day!”

The father and daughter remained where they were at the kitchen window, both fascinated and alarmed at the scene and scenario unfolding before them.

They would later estimate that the “glowing form” was around 15 feet across and appeared to be only mere feet from the ground. So bright was the object that the pair had difficulty in keeping their sight on it, with Richards even having to look away at one point. Such was the brightness, that other than the silver glow, no other details of the exterior could be seen. Furthermore, because of this brightness, the area immediately outside the mobile home was “lit up bright as day”.

In this artificial daylight, the pair could see the trees moving as if a sudden strong wind had come out of nowhere unleashing its carnage on the area. However, more than that, it appeared that some trees were being manipulated in different ways than others, with Vanea even witnessing one tree being pulled toward the ground.

All the while, however, the only sound that reached them was that which initially caught Vanea’s attention, the strange thrashing noise. No other sounds or noises whatsoever came from the active scene outside, which must have given the scene an even more surreal feel.

Then, the thrashing sound stopped, although the trees continued to move. A moment later, a loud “cracking” sound rang out quickly followed by the bizarre movement of the trees also stopping. Although they didn’t know it at the time, or at least were not certain of it, investigation of the area the following day would show a large, heavy branch had been snapped off at a height of almost 20 feet.

A “Real Bright” Center With Duller, Fuzzy Edges!

Following this burst of activity, a deafening silence would suddenly envelop the mobile home, even seeming to leak into the building itself making the father and daughter feel more than uneasy. It was during these unsettling moments that Richards realized their dogs – who would normally bark at anything that moved outside the house – were completely still and silent. As he went from window to window of the mobile home surveying the area outside, he noticed them almost hiding away from whatever had been taking place only moments ago.

It was then that he went to his bedroom to retrieve his guns. He quickly returned into the kitchen area, the weapons and ammunition in his arms. He would load the guns and then place them on top of the freezer unit and out of the reach of anyone other than he and his daughter.

When he returned to the kitchen window where his daughter remained, watching the scene outside, he could see that the glowing craft remained hovering at a distance of around 50 feet from their home, although the brightness lit up a radius of around double that.

Although they could still make out no real detail of the craft other than it was oval-shaped and a “silver-white or aluminum” color, Richards would recall that the middle of it was “real, real bright” while the edges were decidedly duller. Vanea, similarly, would recall that edges of the object were somewhat “fuzzy”.

The pair remained at the kitchen window, nervous about what might happen next but not wishing to take their eyes from the situation for even a moment. After several more moments, however, Richards made the decision it was time to call for help.

Contact “The Police, The FBI” Or Anyone Who Can Help Me!

Whether by coincidence or not, almost in sympathy with his actions the object suddenly moved and changed its position. It would now take up temporary residence in the sky over a nearby field, approximately 200 feet from the mobile home.

Because there was not more distance between the craft and their location, the pair could now make out a lot more detail than they could previously. For example, the craft was a bright silver-white in the middle while at the edge was a “blue band of light”. Furthermore, an “orange glow extended around the outer edge”.

Richards and his daughter watched the craft return to its original position, describing the movement of it as “smooth and slow”. Shortly after this, he would reach for the phone and dial 113 for directory assistance.

The lady who took the call – identified as “Mrs. AB” would claim that Richards was “very excited and seemed to be frightened” although he was clear in describing the event. He would also request that she contact “the police, the FBI, or anyone who could help him!”

She would manage to calm him somewhat and assure him that she would contact an operator who would call him back. Several moments later, a “Mrs. P” called back and spoke with Richards for several minutes. During this exchange, the lights in the mobile home dimmed several times. This, of course, is a detail that often surfaces in close encounter experiences. Usually, however, these types of encounters occur while people are in their vehicles and experience their car’s cutting out without warning.

On Mrs. P’s instructions, he would hang the phone up, return to the window, and await the return call.

An Obviously Frightened But Sincere Witness!

While this was taking place, Mrs. P would contact Mrs. L, who would in turn attempt to call Richards. However, when she did, she would hear nothing other than a “deadline”. She would try the number five times, even calling Mrs. P back in between to check that the number she had was correct.

During this time, Richards himself began to worry that no one had contacted him back. So much so, that he picked up the receiver. Bizarrely, and adding even more to the strangeness of the situation, after the line appeared dead, he suddenly heard Mrs. M.

He would then relay the evening’s happenings to the operator, stating at this stage that he was decidedly frightened for his children.

For her part, Mrs. M would recall that Richards would repeat his story again and again. He would occasionally pause and shout out to his daughter, asking if the strange object was still outside.

Before long, Richards was transferred to Mrs. S at the Flight Service Station at Columbia Regional Airport.

Mrs. S would ultimately assure Richards that she would contact the police and report the sighting for him. She would also inform him that she had knowledge of another sighting on the 24^th June – only two weeks earlier – we will examine that incident later.

Shortly after the exchange, the pair would hang up.

A moment or two later, the object began to approach the mobile home once again.

A Last Visual Stand-Off!

Richards and Vanea watched the object approach, watching with a rising sense of fear intoxicating each of them. Richards would later describe a “cold feeling” overtaking him and the feeling of something imminent and dire about to take place. He would state that he “just froze” and had no idea what to do.

Even more, the distinct feeling that he, his daughter, and grandson were on their own in their out-of-the-way mobile home wouldn’t leave him. Nor would the insistence that all three of them would not for any reason step outside.

This visual stand-off continued for several minutes (although neither witness was completely sure just how long this was for). Then, the craft went into motion yet again. Once more, it went through the trees with a “smooth, slow motion”, although Richards recalls that during this particular burst of movement, the surrounding trees appeared undisturbed.

The craft once more would stop at a distance of around 200 feet from the Richards’ mobile home. As before, from this distance, the blue-orange glow of the outer edges of the vehicle were visible while the solid silver glow of the center section was now more defined. The object then appeared to fade away, although not into the distance (no trees appeared disturbed, for example) but as though it was literally fading from view. Within several minutes, the object was no longer visible.

• NOTE: The above image is real and from a New York trail camera in 9-2-09.

KEN PFEIFER WORLD UFO PHOTOS AND NEWS

HTTP://WWW.WORLDUFOPHOTOSANDNEWS.ORG

HTTP://WWW.WORLDUFOPHOTOS.ORG

HTTP://WWW.KENPFEIFERDISCOVERIES.COM

THANKS TO https://www.ufoinsight.com

Source:

•  http://worldufophotosandnews.org/?p=25027

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

29-01-2020 om 19:00 geschreven door peter  

The Lost Civilization of Atlantis: Buried beneath the Ice of Antarctica

Using the dating method of Dr. W.D. Urry. from the Carnegie Institution in Washington D.C., scientists discovered that Antarctica’s rivers, sources of fine-dispersed deposits, were flowing as depicted on The Orontius Finaeus map, about 6,000 years ago. About 4000 years B. C., glacial sediments started to accumulate.

In 1949, Admiral Baird’s expedition bore holes into the Ross Sea in three spots, where Orontius Finaeus marked river-beds. In the cuts, fine-grained layers were found, obviously brought to the sea with rivers whose sources were situated in temperate latitudes. 

Image Credit

Is it possible that the lost civilization of Atlantis is buried beneath the Ice of Antarctica?

Antarctica and Atlantis are two words commonly used in the same phrase. It’s not a mystery that many people firmly believe that Atlantis did, in fact, exist on Earth, and Antartica might just be the right place where we should search for Atlantis.

But while Plato was the first to write about the lost city-continent of Atlantis, its noteworthy to mention that many Native American legends are reminiscent of what Plato sustained in the distant past, reinforcing suspicion that Atlantis could have existed.

The legends of Native Americans come from different cultures separated by vast distances and isolated from one another. However, all of them tell a similar story of a once fallen civilization that existed in the distant past. In Central America, this ancient culture lived in Aztlan. According to legends, Aztlan was located to the south, on a white island and perished without warning as a result of natural catastrophic events. Many researchers maintain that Aztlan means “place of whiteness.” This is why it has commonly been connected to Atlantis and Antarctica, suggesting that Aztlan might have been the mythical Atlantis, the mythical place located to the south.

It is said that after the catastrophic events, the survivors of Atlantis fled to different continents where their ancient civilization ultimately merged with others and disappeared.

Skeptics will rush to discredit any theory linking Atlantis to Antarctica mostly because Antarctica today is a completely inhospitable and frozen environment where civilizations could not flourish. However, in remote antiquity most of Antarctica was hospitable. Proof of that is a number is enigmatic and ancient maps that depict the continent of Antarctica free of Ice. The most famous cartographical chart is without a doubt the famous Piri-Reis map, drawn by an admiral who served in the Navy of the Ancient Ottoman Empire.

Interestingly, the Piri Reis map was based on a number of even older maps which accurately trace the coastline of Antarctica WITHOUT the layer of ice that covers it today. This indicates clearly that whoever had the technology and ability to survey the continent of Antarctica must have done so thousands of years ago before the continent was frozen.

But how can a continent located to the south be free of Ice? Well, it turns out that Antarctica wasn’t always located where it is today. In fact, in the distant past, the continent of Antarctica wasn’t located at the South Pile, but instead somewhere between it and the Equator of our planet. This means that  Antarctica was located farther north and experienced a tropical or temperate climate, meaning that it was covered in forests, and inhabited by various ancient life forms. What does this mean? Well… given the little we know about the life on our planet in the distant past, it is likely that people might have lived on this now, icy continent and developed as a society just like people did in Africa, Europe, and Asia.

But how was this even possible? Thanks to a scientific theory called crustal displacement.

According to mainstream scholars, and the theory of continental drift, the crust of our planet is in fact divided into several tectonic plates that literally ‘float’ over a molted inner layer, Over the ages, these plates slowly bump against one another.

However, the theory of crustal displacement which expands the theory of continental drift, approximately every 40,000 years, the entire crust of our planet shifts as a single unit. After each ‘shift’ all the land masses on our planet, including entire continents are relocated to a new position on the planet.

Many researchers believed that this happened the last time around 10,000 B.C. and caused the continent of Antarctica to move from its position near the equator to its current position, on top of the South Pole.

“I still find the idea that Antarctica was once forested absolutely mind-boggling”,

“We take it for granted that Antarctica has alws been a frozen wilderness, but the ice caps only appeared relatively recently in geological history,” told Jane Francis of the University of Leeds.

Today, Antarctica is composed of around ninety-eight percent ice which is over a kilometer thick. So imagine, if in the distant past, ancient people inhabited Antarctica when it was covered with vegetation and forests, all of their “heritage” is now buried under a thick layer of ice. Even though it is uninhabitable today and only scientists venture out to Antarctica, in the distant past it might have been the perfect place for an ancient civilization to develop.

Interestingly, according to reports from Pravda.ru

In 1949, Admiral Baird’s expedition bore holes into the Ross Sea in three spots, where Orontius Finaeus marked river-beds. In the cuts, fine-grained layers were found, obviously brought to the sea with rivers whose sources were situated in temperate latitudes (i.e. free of glaciers).The samples were taken from three different locations.  70 deg. 17′ S 178 deg. 15′ W 2,990 M deep, 69 deg. 12′ S 180 deg. S. at 3,130 M. deep, 68 deg. 26′ S 179 deg. 15’W at 3,292 M. deep. (1)

The fine-grained sediment that was found is the sort that is carried by rivers from ice-free continents.  Also during the Byrd expedition of 1935 geologists made a rich discovery of fossils on the sides of Mount Weaver (Lat. 86 deg. 58’S) which included leaf and stem impressions and fossilized wood.  In 1952 they identified two species of a tree fern called Glossopteris once common to southern continents (Africa, South America, and Australia.)

Core samples taken from the Ross Sea during the Byrd expedition of 1947-1948 shows glacial marine sediment from the present to 6000 years ago.  From 6,000 to 15,000 the sediment is fine-grained suggests an absence of ice from the area.  Then there is a zone fine-grained sediment from 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, again suggesting that the area was ice free.  From 40,000 to 133,550 years ago there are two zones of coarse and two zones of medium-grained texture.  While comparing the three samples, two of them show that the end of the temperate period and the beginning of the most recent glacial period started 6,000 years ago and the third just 1,000 years after that.  So Antarctica has had recent period of temperate climate.  (Source) (Source)

All of this points to the undeniable fact that sometime between the 4th and 12th millennium B.C, there was an extremely advanced civilization on Earth, with great knowledge of navigation, cartography, and astronomy. Their technological advancements were way ahead of other cultures that would appear after them. This ‘lost’ civilization, most definitely preceded our modern civilization by tens of thousands of years. And many people firmly believe that this civilization could have been Atlantis, and evidence of their existence will be found beneath the thick layers of ice that currently cover the continent of Antarctica.

• Check out: The forgotten Diary of Vice Admiral Byrd – The Ultimate evidence the Hollow Earth is real?

(1) http://atlantisonline.smfforfree2.com/index.php?topic=18910.0

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

29-01-2020 om 17:59 geschreven door peter  

Antarctica Advanced Civilizations Were Located There and in Atlantis

COAST TO COAST AM -

Historian and symbolic cosmologist Tricia McCannon spoke about the evidence for world-wide advanced ancient civilizations in locations including Atlantis and Antarctica. We have discovered a web of thousands of pyramids all over the globe, in what appears to have been an ancient advanced worldwide culture, she cited.

There are ancient cities buried in Antarctica, she continued, as well as remnants of great ‘Inner Earth’ civilizations there, and at the North Pole.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

29-01-2020 om 17:16 geschreven door peter  

Jfrissina uploaded a video on January 27, 2020 showing a strange jellyfish like UFO hovering over the Great wall of China.

The sighting was recorded on the Great wall of China's CCTV before the sight was closed to the public.

Tourists point to the UFO at the moment it broke through the clouds, then disappeared back into them.

  

reaction of a person

First, that is not a CCTV feed from the "Great Wall Of China". It has none of the markers that are used to identify it's location, day and time.

Second, you know what all the REAL CCTV cameras at the Great Wall have in common? They point down, not up!

Third, this is not the ratio and refresh rate of a Chinese CCTV camera.

This footage is taken from someone's camera/phone resting on the great wall. What are the odds that someone would walk to the exact center of the frame of a CCTV camera and stop and point at something in the sky? Very, very slim odds.

Finally, notice anything odd about the rest of the people there? Even when the cowboy points UP, only his companion looks UP! People walking in front of him seeing him pointing up.... never look up. How rare do you think that is? How rare do you think it is when people point up at the sky at something that NO ONE ELSE looks up? Incredibly rare. Even the photographer on the right never for a second looks up, or points his camera at what the two are seeing. Because there's nothing to see.

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

29-01-2020 om 16:48 geschreven door peter  

RAF UFO Sighting Files To Be Published Online

UFO sighting reports recorded by the RAF are to be made available online for the first time. The RAF decided to cease its UFO unit in 2009, after concluding that no received report had ever provided any proof of potential threat in more than 50 years.

Records from the unit were previously passed to the National Archives. Most were initially classified before being declassified after a particular number of years.

However, most recent reports that RAF received will be made available online, following a Freedom of Information Act request. Members of the public reporting UFO sightings are now directed to their local police force.

RAF said, through their spokesman, that it had been assessed it would be better to make these records available to the public online rather than keep on sending documents to the National Archives. They are planning to publish them on to a dedicated gov.uk web page.

The publication is expected to happen within the first quarter of 2020 as a clearance process for the documents is still going on.

The RAF described the files in response to the FOI request as “comprising entirely of correspondence with members of the public.”

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

29-01-2020 om 16:27 geschreven door peter  

Sometimes UFOs show up in the most seemingly unlikely of places. The area of New York’s Hudson River Valley is known for its quaint, historical beauty, agriculture, and as a prominent winemaking region. Here many educated professionals have their homes in upscale neighborhoods, and it is one of the last places one would expect to be ground zero for some of the most intense UFO activity there is, yet for a few years starting from 1981, the peaceful Hudson River Valley began to gain a reputation as a hotspot for otherworldly phenomena that has generated much discussion to this day.

The beginning of it all is widely thought to have been on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1981, when an unnamed off-duty police officer was out in the yard of his home in Kent, New York, with his family just a few minutes before the start of the new year, but this was to prove to be a bit more exciting than usual. Off in the distance they spied a group of red, green, and white lights that were approaching from the south, and which they at fist just took to be a plane. However, as the object approached it could be seen that rather than a plane, the multicolored lights were embedded within a boomerang-shaped craft of some sort, which slowly passed right over their heads at a height of around 500 feet while issuing only an eerie, faint humming sound. On several occasions the lights were reported as shifting from multicolored to an all-white coloration in different patterns, and this was quite obviously no normal aircraft.

It would turn out that there were many other witnesses to this incident at the time, as on nearby Interstate 84 several motorists also observed the object and were so awed by it that they stopped their vehicles along the road to watch it make its inscrutable journey across the sky. One of these motorists was 55-year-old Edwin Hansen, who would explain that the massive boomerang or V-shaped object was big enough to block out the stars, and could be seen to project some sort of light beam to the ground. Oddly, Hansen would also claim that he had made what he believed to be some sort of telepathic contact with the craft, his mind filled with strange images and thoughts that were not his own and the sensation that something was reading his mind and telling him to not be afraid.

This was to prove to be far from a one-off sighting of an unidentified flying object, and the strangeness would resume in February of the following year. On February 26, 1982, a witness by the name of Monique O’Driscoll was driving with her daughter when they saw a strange light in the sky that seemed to take up position over a frozen lake. When they stopped the car they could see that it was a large V-shaped object with numerous red, blue, and amber lights dotting it, as well as an underside crisscrossed by some sort of metal beams. At one point the object seemed to approach them, giving them a bit of a scare, before making its way off into the night. This object would be seen by quite a few other witnesses as well, and the police office would get a deluge of panicked calls at the time. Whatever it was did not seem to be finished frightening the area’s residents, as on March 17, 1983 it was seen again by a few witnesses in Brewster, New York, including by the Deputy Clerk for Putnam County Dennis Sant, who saw it from his home. Sant was left utterly baffled by the bizarre incident, as well as not a little frightened, and he describes what he saw thusly:

It was a very large object. The structure of it was very dark gray, metallic, almost girder-type looking. The object seemed to be very silent. The lights were iridescent, bright, they stood out in the sky and three-dimension. It looked like a city of lights. It just hung in the sky, all brilliant colors… We followed the object around to the backyard. And at that point, a feeling of fright came upon me. Thoughts started to flood my mind, thoughts of the craft touching ground, thoughts of an encounter with an alien being.  Thoughts of being abducted. All types of fearful thoughts started to enter into my mind.

As with the other sightings, it was described as being a large boomerang-shaped craft, around 131 feet long, and more than 330 feet wide, with a multitude of bright red, green, amber and white lights along its fuselage, and it was largely silent. This incident would lead into another just a week later, when the object appeared on March 24, 1983 in the areas of Yorktown and New Castle to set off a whole new wave of sightings. Police began getting a flood of calls from people seeing weird things in the sky, all describing the same V-shaped lighted craft mostly described as being as large as a football field, although there were also reports of smaller objects dating through the sky or even two in different locations at the same time, suggesting there was more than one of them. Among the witnesses were several police officers, and one Officer Andi Sadoff of the New Castle Police explains what he saw as follows:

I was working a 4 PM to midnight tour and assigned to set up some radar to look for speeding cars and I looked up into the sky and saw a series of lights. And at first I thought it was a plane, it was quite a distance, quite far away, but it was, it was really quite large.  As I recall, there were mostly white lights, but there were green lights also. It was alternating green and white lights. It approached my vehicle and it stopped and it seemed to hover. And I’m looking at this thing, thinking what is it? I wasn’t afraid. I was just amazed. I was in awe of it. I didn’t know what it was. The only thing that I recall the most is I was amazed that there was no noise. There was no humming. There was no engine, there was no sound. It was absolutely silent.

This particular report was supported by another that occurred at exactly the same time, this time the witness being a senior manager for IBM by the name of Ed Burns. He was only about 10 miles away from Officer Sadoff, and says that he was first clued in to something strange going on when his radio started acting oddly. Burns says:

Out of nowhere, I got a lot of static on the radio. I thought maybe I was on the wrong number, and then I went over to turn the dial again and that’s when I looked up and saw this craft. It was a triangular ship. And the back had to be as large as a football field at least. And there was no noise. I’m not into astronomy… but what I had witnessed that night was not from this planet.

The ship seemed to generate sightings all up and down the valley on this evening, startling motorists and spotted numerous times by police officers, and the following evening the object was seen by various people yet again. The apperance was always nearly identical; large, descriptions like “as big as a football field” or as large as an aircraft carrier” were thrown around, V-shaped or triangular, the lights studding the exterior. However, interestingly, the reports showed varied behavior for the object or objects, such as that they would shoot beams of light, spin around like a top, shoot away at fantastic speeds, display patterns of colors with their lights, detach what appeared to be smaller craft from the main body, or wink in and out of existence. One witness named Jim Booke, a biomedical engineer, allegedly saw it silently circle over the Croton Falls Reservoir dropping what seemed to be lighted probes into the water and shooting a red beam of light into the reservoir, and indeed the object seemed to often stop over bodies of water. It all left people absolutely baffled, and this time the incident hit the news in a major way, finally catching the attention of UFO researchers Philip J. Imbrogno and J. Allen Hynek, who had been a senior consultant on the Air Force’s Project Blue Book.

The Hudson River Valley

Imbrogno and Hynek arrived in the area and began interviewing as many witnesses to the UFOs that kept appearing as they could. They also set up a phone hotline for people who had seen the objects and very quickly received hundreds of calls, which along with the floods of calls police had received caused them to estimate that there were perhaps thousands of people out there who had observed the phenomenon on March 24 alone, the majority of these being from along the Taconic Parkway. Many of the witnesses were found to be reliable and upstanding citizens, and all of them described the same enormous boomerang shaped craft. The two researchers became convinced that something very off was going on, but the police had other ideas.

According to law enforcement authorities, the whole thing was a prank being pulled by normal ultralight planes or helicopters flying in formation in such a way as to seem more mysterious. The Federal Aviation Administration agreed with this theory, as did officials from nearby Stewart Air Force Base. Supporting the plane theory even futher was a report from an air traffic control specialist named Anthony Capaldi, who also had seen the phenomenon but had come to the conclusion that it was planes in formation. He would say:

The first time I observed the formation, it looked a little peculiar. And from our vantage point in the tower, they just appeared to be just one big light because they were flying in tight formation. I don’t think if this formation flew over an individual’s head at a thousand feet that there’s any way you could mistake it for anything but the formation flying, due to the sound of the aircraft engines. And I imagine that at a thousand feet, you could really determine that it’s aircraft.

There was also a certified hoax when some prankish night pilots buzzed over the region in April of 1983, but interestingly most people who saw this formation immediately recognized them as planes, the same of which could not be said of the other waves of sightings. In fact, many of the witnesses insisted that they knew the difference between planes and what they had seen, and refused to believe that the objects were normal aircraft. This, plus the fact that besides the April hoax no one had ever been caught in the act and there were no suspects, as well as the fact that ultralight planes would unlikely be able to remain so silent and pull off the aerial activities witnessed or hold formation so well, and that so many people had reported these UFOs, Imbrogno and Hynek came to the conclusion that planes in formation were not an acceptable explanation.

In the meantime, the waves of sightings continued, with another on March 31, yet again that summer on July 12, 19, and 24, and yet another the following year on March 25, 1984, each one of these waves generating hundreds of sightings. Some of these reports were rather unsettling, such as a crew at the Indian Point Nuclear Plant, who claimed that the massive craft had hovered over one of the nuclear reactors and caused the facility’s security systems to shut down, which had caused the supervisor to almost have his men open fire upon it, before it suddenly shot off into the night. Even more such sightings flaps would pop up in the coming years until it seemed to stop in 1986. Imbrogno and Hynek would estimate that more than 5,000 people had seen these objects, and they would write an entire book on it titled Night Siege: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings. They also were able to find some certain idiosyncrasies among all of the data they managed to collect, such as that the sightings were clustered very tightly and seemed to fall on Monday, Thursday, and Sunday nights to a disproportionate degree. what this means is anyone’s guess.

Considering the sheer number of independent sightings in the Hudson River Valley between 1981 to 1986, the consistency of the reports, and the number of trained observers, as well as the intensity of it all over the course of years, it certainly seems as though, although some people may have tried to imitate it and hoax it, the phenomenon itself remains mired in mystery. Indeed, the UFO flaps of the Hudson River Valley have never really been satisfactorily explained, and are some of the most widely witnessed UFO phenomena ever seen. What was going on here? Was this just misidentified aircraft and hoaxers as the authorities would like us to believe, or is there something more to it all? If these really were visitors from another world, then what did they want and what brought them to this specific place at these specific times? It is likely we will never know, and the mystery remains a classic case within UFOlogy.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

29-01-2020 om 01:08 geschreven door peter  

“It had been assessed that it would be better to publish these records, rather than continue sending documents to the National Archives, and so they are looking to put them onto a dedicated gov.uk web page.”

While U.S. presidential candidates make vague promises that they will release the government’s secret UFO files if elected and the U.S. Navy debates the security ramifications of releasing any more information on the infamous “Tic-Tac” UFOs, the British government isn’t waiting for an election to let it’s public see anything and everything that’s in its X-files. Numerous British publications and online media sites have been reporting the comments of an anonymous RAF spokesperson who responded to a Freedom of Information request submitted by PA Media, a multimedia news agency. The release will take place “some time within the first quarter of 2020.”

“When I worked on the MoD’s ‘UFO desk’ we didn’t find definitive proof of extraterrestrial visitation, but there were so many bizarre and unexplained sightings that we didn’t entirely rule it out.”

That statement could be made by no one but Nick Pope, journalist and former Ministry of Defence employee who had his hand in investigating many of those files. Unfortunately, the RAF spokesperson squelched hopes that there would be some dirt on aliens in the release.

“The MoD has no viewpoint on the existence or otherwise of excess terrestrial existence and does not look into UFO reports.”

Don’t look to the U.S. government – now or after the election – to fill in the blanks with their own release of American X-files. UFO researcher Christian Lambright sent a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request to the Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) for records ON THE Nimitz Tic-Tac UFOs incident shortly after it came out. He recently got an answer.

“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.”

It’s highly likely that the British and U.S. X-files have similar, and probably some identical, information. Why is the British government dragging its files out from under a rock into the broad public daylight, while the U.S. government continues to hide theirs in an Indiana Jones secret warehouse? Could the U.S. be waiting to see what the British have (does anyone really believe we don’t already know?) and how their public reacts to it? Is our government really so afraid of riots in the streets if it releases a bombshell like the existence of extraterrestrials? Why won’t the same thing happen if some other country releases that info first?

We’ve seen lately what happens to whistleblowers. We’ve also seen what happens when the government tries to cover things up. We all want to believe in the existence of other life forms and their ability to visit us in sophisticated flying machines. Unfortunately, we’re at the mercy of an unsophisticated power system bent on keeping knowledge away from us.

Who will win? Let’s hope the British X-files answer our questions and we don’t have to wait for the U.S. government anymore.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

29-01-2020 om 00:36 geschreven door peter  

BY ROBERT KRULWICH

Image: Courtesy of the Neanderthal Museum

 

We have dreamed about it for so long. We've told stories, made movies, imagined what it would be like when we humans have our first "close encounter" with an intelligent alien, a creature about our size, who can gaze back, talk (even if we can't understand what's being said) who can scare us, thrill us, make us feel its mind. Who wouldn't want a moment like the one in E.T., when the little alien puts out his finger? But that's the movies.

We now know how big the universe is, how far the stars are from each other. Just as I was getting used to the idea that even if there's intelligent life out there, there's no way we'll ever be able to find the light years to get together, I opened Chip Walter's new book, Last Ape Standing, and discovered — it's already happened.

First Encounter

We've already met our intelligent alien. We almost certainly had sex with them. And we did it here, right here on Earth, not so many generations ago.

In Chip's book, he describes one such encounter: We're in Europe, in a forest, maybe. It was an ordinary day, around 40,000 years ago, and a small band of Homo sapiens, some hunters, slender, looking much like us, their families nearby, are moving through the woods, looking for a boar, rabbits, something to eat, when all of a sudden "they" appear.

"Imagine this encounter, and its shattering effect," writes Walters. "Each group must have gazed at the other in bewildered amazement."

In an instant they would have seen that these creatures resembled them, but were clearly not one of them. Why didn't they communicate in the same way or even make the same sounds? This wasn't simply a different tribe ... this was another creature altogether, perhaps a god or an animal, or something in between.

God? Animal? Something In Between

On one side of that meadow stood ... us, or rather our ancestors, a group we now call Cro-Magnon (after the cave in France where their bones were discovered). We were modern humans 40,000 years ago, emigrants from Africa, baby-faced, scant of hair, but loaded with brain. We were smart. We probably carried sharp hunting tools of our own design, flint knives and spears for throwing and we had taught ourselves to kill animals from a distance — animals like those aliens making mysterious noises on the other side of the meadow.

What did the other group look like? They looked kind of like us, but stronger. Their hands were huge, their shoulders big, rounded with muscle, their faces, ah, their faces came with enormous noses, rich with nasal membranes that could warm the cold, dry air they breathed up north, where they lived.

We were more recently up from Africa, still dark skinned. They'd been 200,000 years in Europe, had grown fair, freckled and some of them had red or blond hair. And while you wouldn't know it from looking, their brains were even bigger than ours, at over 1700 cubic centimeters. "That's about 300 ccs larger than your brain or mine," says Walter. We had never seen their like, but you, you reading this, you know them from photos and magazines. They were Neanderthals. And Neanderthals have gotten a bum rap for the last hundred years.

Caveman With A Club?

Image: Courtesy of the Neanderthal Museum

We think of Neanderthals as primitives, stooped, brutish, club bearing — one of those not-quite-upright apes in a standard Evolution of Man cartoon. But they weren't stooped. That was an error. In 1908, a prominent French scientist, Marcellin Boule, examined a set of Neanderthal bones found in Southern France, put them together, and discovered an apish, bowed figure. He decided that's what all Neanderthals looked like, but he was wrong.

Boule's specimen was 40 to 50 years old, seriously old for a Neanderthal. He had suffered from chronic arthritis, "a disease that had cruelly twisted the man's spine," Walters writes. (Thus, the stoop.) "Walking must have been agonizing given the state of his bones. He died with no more than two teeth, which would have made eating the normal rough, Neanderthal diet nearly impossible. Yet this man's fellow tribesmen must have carried and fed him specialized foods for years, otherwise he would never have lived to such a ripe age."

So these people (and they were "people" — we share a common ancestor; living up north for 200 thousand years had changed them and made them a different species), they were hardly "brutish." At the very least, they were gentle to their elders. They must have carried, fed and cared for that old fellow for years. What's more, there's evidence they thought about life in complicated ways.

There's a gravesite in Iraq where a Neanderthal was found, "positioned fetal-like, as though he were sleeping." Neanderthals buried their dead before we Homo sapiens did, and on this site, the skeleton appears to have once surrounded by flowers and evergreens. Investigators found traces of pollen below and around him, as if to say, "We didn't abandon this man. We too knew how to love, to grieve, and we laid him here with the same tenderness you have for your people, and like you, we wished him soft passage ..."

Neanderthals, says Steven Mithen of Reading University, may have spoken a more musical, tonal language, a mix of cooing and keening, singsong beats, accompanied by gestures. Chip Walter likes to think that in their speech, and early on with their burial practices, they may have been a touch "more softhearted than we are," but we really don't know.

So what happened that afternoon in our meadow, in that moment of very first encounter? Did we think, "Food!" and attack? Did we flee? Did they? Or did we watch them, wait, take tentative steps toward each other, wondering, "What are they? Can we get closer? Can we trust them?" "The big and primal question — the mastodon in the room so to speak," writes Walters, is the simplest one: "Are they a friend or an enemy?"

Killing Them With Kindness?

Anthropologists differ on what happened. There is some evidence, but not a lot, that we regularly attacked and eventually annihilated the Neanderthals. There's evidence too, that we crowded them out of the best hunting sites, making it harder for them to earn a living (and they needed to eat more than we do to stay alive). But the third possibility, writes Chip Walter, is that "if we killed them at all, we killed them with kindness. We neither murdered them nor outcompeted them. We mated with them and, in time, simply folded them into our species until they disappeared."

Image: Courtesy of the Neanderthal Museum

Love The One You're With

About 35,000 years ago, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals lived within shouting distance of each other in France and Spain for, at the very least, a few thousand years. If they mingled, some might have gone farther. There is a skeleton of a boy, found in Portugal, who lived after the last Neanderthals died in southern Spain, whose body seems to be a hybrid, part them, part us.

But the clincher is in your cells. I'm talking about you, you reading this, unless you are 100 percent Yoruba or San (groups that never emigrated from Africa). In 2010, scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, discovered that most humans on Earth, especially if they descend from Europe and most of Asia, carry about 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA in their cells. Proportions will vary. British comedian Eddie Izzard, discovered he's 2.8 percent Neanderthal. You don't carry Neanderthal DNA unless someone up your family tree coupled with one.

So that's our proof: that our first encounter with an intelligent alien led to ... umm, well ... more.

Image: Gilles Tosello/Science Source

---

Chip Walter's Book is Last Ape Standing: The Seven Million Year Story of How and Why We Survived. It's the story of our family tree, which includes, amazingly, 27 (and still counting) different varieties of walking, upright humans. Nature produced many, many different human species, only one line of which led to us. The rest just blinked out. Here's a gorgeous look at some of our predecessors:

As for close encounters, Neanderthals aren't the only intelligent humans who lived alongside us. In Siberia, a separate species called the Denisovans hunted and settled in the Altai Mountains 40,000 years ago. Another group, the Red Deer Cave people lived in south central China as recently as 11,500 years ago. And a mini-version of humanity, Homo floresiensis, often called "hobbits" may have been on an Indonesian island as recently as 17,000 years ago. Henry Gee, of Cambridge University, likes to think they may still be with us, hiding in some remote cave or forest in Indonesia.

Missing some content? Care to comment? Check the source: NPR

{ https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/ }

29-01-2020 om 00:00 geschreven door peter