Siberia’s Lake Baikal is the world’s largest freshwater lake by volume, the world’s deepest lake, the world’s clearest lakes and possibly the world’s oldest lake. That probably made it attractive to early humans, since the area contains evidence of some of the oldest settlements in Russia. (It may also be why it’s attractive to UFOs.) The significance and history of Lake Baikal make a recent discovery in North America even more exciting – researchers sequencing the oldest known human genomes from the area have found significant connections to the First Peoples of the Americas.

“The Upper Paleolithic genome will provide a legacy to study human genetic history in the future.”

Dr. Cosimo Posth is the leader of the Human Paleogenomics group at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for the Science and senior author of a new research paper published in the journal Cell. The Upper Paleolithic genome he’s referring to came from a fragmented 14,000-year-old found in 1976 at the Ust-Kyahta-3 site on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal in southern Siberia. The Upper Paleolithic age occurred between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago. Using the latest tools, Posth and his team matched the genetic mixture of this tooth to that of a Mesolithic era (15,000 to 5,000 years ago) individual from northeastern Siberia. This showed the early Lake Baikal humans had the wanderlust gene … at least in and around Siberia. But did they eventually wander thousands of miles across the frozen link to North America during the Bronze Age (3100–300 BCE)?

Are you up for a road trip?

“This individual from southern Siberia, along with a younger Mesolithic one from northeastern Siberia, shares the same genetic mixture of Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) and Northeast Asian (NEA) ancestry found in Native Americans, and suggests that the ancestry which later gave rise to Native Americans in North- and South America was much more widely distributed than previously assumed. Evidence suggests that this population experienced frequent genetic contacts with NEA populations, resulting in varying admixture proportions across time and space.”

According to the Max Planck press release, the answer is a qualified “yes.” The Lake Baikal wanderers intermingled in a gene-sharing way with the early Northeast Asians, who then crossed the bridge to become the first inhabitants of North America and the ancestors of the First Peoples. That’s close enough for headline writers and Dr. Posth, who says more genetic evidence from Upper Paleolithic Siberian groups will help fill in the gaps in the ancestral gene pool of Native Americans.

Lake Baikal — who would want to leave it?

In this age of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s interesting to note that this same genetic study uncovered more evidence of how the plague (bubonic, pneumonic and septicemic) first spread. The researchers tracked Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that can infect humans with the plague via the Oriental rat flea. The two Siberian individuals both showed evidence of it, which was significant to co-author Maria Spyrou of the Max Planck Department of Archaeogenetics.

“This easternmost appearance of ancient Y. pestis strains is likely suggestive of long-range mobility during the Bronze Age.”

Proof once again that you can run but you can’t hide from your genome.

Looking for something to take your mind off of (fill in the blank with what’s bothering you today)? Well, you’ve come to the right place … maybe. There’s word out of Italy (a place which could use some good news) that it is home to the first crop circle of 2020! That is, unless you thought an unusual one appearing in the UK in April was the first. It was, technically, until it was debunked … and that’s a good thing because it would have reminded some of what they wanted to forget – the coronavirus and Bill Gates. Wait … what?

Entity
@ oUllw40ndgQUEx3
A crop circle combining the coronavirus and the Microsoft logo appears⁉️😆

You know the logo.

Tweets and posts like that one (here’s one) began appearing in April, along with a single photograph (see it here) of a well-designed crop circle whose outer edge resembles the arms of a coronavirus and whose inner space was filled with a green Microsoft logo. As the conspiracy theory lights started popping up on the tote boards and proponents wondered if aliens are spreading the rumors about a link between the Microsoft founder and the virus, debunkers began shooting out the lights just as quickly. (Examples here and here.)

Image credit: Temporary Temples: Crop Circle Photography by Steve & Karen Alexander/Facebook, Macarena Bechara/Facebook

https://thelogicalindian.com/fact-check/bill-gates-coronavirus-vaccine-crop-circle-microsoft-21056

Image via Facebook, screen capture

“The claim is false. The viral graphic is doctored. A reverse image search led to the original crop circle photo. It was created in a wheat field in Wiltshire, England, in 2004. The images were posted by a Facebook group called ‘Temporary Temples: Crop Circle Photography by Steve & Karen Alexander’.”

Luis Delgado Salez draws our attention to this Photoshop Meme with this covering text – ‘If you understand you are already qualified as a conspiracy theorist. Welcome to the Club.’ 🤔 – via Oroborus Anaphaxeton III at www.facebook.com

Steve Alexander, a well-known crop circle photographer, followed up with his own debunking on Facebook (with pictures).

“Some of you might have seen the image of a crop circle which has been circulating recently on Facebook depicting the coronavirus and the Windows logo. Although there has been some anticipation that the circle makers might put down a formation this year showing the virus, and then leaving us to interpret what the message might be, this image doing the rounds is Photoshopped taken from a full-page photograph which was included in our book Signs Wonders and Mysteries.”

That settles that. On to Italy, where a report on May 8 in Corriere Romagna described the finding of a simple crop circle in Romagna near the road Via Carraia Bezzi. These details were in an update on the Santerno Facebook page (with additional close-up photos):

Inside the first circle of the year in Italy.
Update 2 Circle in Wheat.
Interesting elements:
– no trace of passage
– the ears are folded to higher knots and not at the base (they should be folded one by one, documenting is often a sign of authenticity)
– the center of the circle is much drier and without ears than the rest
– the circle is perfectly symmetrical to cm.
– in the exact center there is coal with some burns

Now THAT’S a crop circle!

Compared to those photographed by Steve Alexander and others, this one is a pretty rudimentary circle. However, it’s the first of 2020 and doesn’t have any conspiracy theories associated with it … except for who actually made it. The design suggests a trainee or first-timer (alien or human) but it’s early in the crop season – longer and stronger plants may make a difference.

Whether you believe they have an otherworldly origin or just a farmer-annoying human trespassing one, crop circles are an interesting phenomena, especially in times when we really need some distractions.

Scientists have found an incredible never-before-seen active Trojan asteroid. Named 2019 LD2, this Jupiter Trojan was first discovered in June of 2019 by scientists using the University of Hawaii’s Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (or ATLAS).

Trojans are a group of asteroids that orbit with a planet and are located either at the leading or trailing Lagrangian points (either 60 degrees ahead or 60 degrees behind the planet). Jupiter has by far the most Trojan asteroids with more than a million of them, while Neptune has 22 Trojans, Mars has 9, Uranus has 2, and even Earth has one that’s named 2010 TK7.

2019 LD2, which orbits ahead of Jupiter, has a comet-like tail, meaning that it’s currently active and this is the first time ever that scientists have made such a discovery. Alan Fitzsimmons, who is an astronomy professor at Queen’s University in Belfast, explained how incredibly fascinating this discovery is, “What makes 2019 LD2 so interesting is that we think most Jupiter Trojans were captured billions of years ago,” adding, “Any surface ice that could vaporize to spew out gas and dust should have done so long ago, leaving the objects quietly orbiting as asteroids — not behaving like comets.”

He went on to say, “We have believed for decades that Trojan asteroids should have large amounts of ice beneath their surfaces, but never had any evidence until now.” “ATLAS has shown that the predictions of their icy nature may well be correct.”

Fitzsimmons and his colleagues studied data captured by ATLAS that revealed the asteroid’s comet-like tail that was created by gas or dust. When the asteroid traveled behind the sun, it couldn’t be observed from Earth until the latter part of 2019 and into the early months of 2020. When 2019 LD2 was observed again in April of this year, it still had its comet-like tail. The data from ATLAS strongly suggests that it has been active on a continuous basis for nearly an entire year.

As for what made the asteroid comet-like in nature, the astronomers offered some suggestions, “Maybe Jupiter captured it only recently from a more distant orbit where surface ice could still survive. Maybe it recently suffered a landslide or an impact from another asteroid, exposing ice that used to be buried under layers of protective rock.”

While it’s not entirely certain as to what caused the comet-like tail, one thing for sure is that it’s an incredibly unique and fascinating space discovery. A press release detailing the discovery as well as pictures of the Trojan asteroid can be seen here.

Image of asteroid 2019LD2 taken on June 11th, 2019, using the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT) Networkʻs 1.0-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo, Chile.
Credit: JD Armstrong/IfA/LCOGT

ATLAS image of asteroid 2019 LD2 from late June 2019. Stars seem to streak by in the left panel because the images have been shifted and added to follow 2019 LD2, but the comet itself (indicated by two red lines) is almost lost in the crowded field of stars. The same data are shown at right, but with the stars subtracted. ATLAS uses this star-subtraction process (called difference imaging) for all asteroid search images. Here, the difference imaging reveals the tiny comet with its faint tail.
Credit: ATLAS/A. Heinze/IfA

Pyramids are no stranger to mystery and mystique. They have long generated all manner of conversations and discussions on what they are, how they were made, and whether there are more baffling mysteries to be found. Yet, this has largely been seen as a mystery bound to Earth. There are some place one might not be expected to find pyramids, such as our moon, for instance, but then why is it that people keep finding pyramids on the lunar surface?

One very interesting case comes from the Apollo moon missions, which are already surrounded by their fair share of strangeness. The Apollo program itself was a manned spaceflight program started by NASA in 1961 that put the first Americans in space in 1968, and would later focus on putting the first human on the moon. Between 1968 and 1972 these missions would send the first crewed space flights beyond Earth’s orbit in 1968, see the first man on the moon with Apollo 11 in 1969, and gather 842 pounds (382 kg) of lunar rocks and soil that would shed an immense amount of light on our knowledge of the moon. There would also be UFOs and other weirdness, apparently, and our case here concerns the Apollo 17 mission, which was the last of the missions in the Apollo program and the last time humans have travelled into space beyond low Earth orbit. Launched in December of 1972, the Apollo 17 mission was composed of Commander Eugene Cernan, Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt, Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans, and five mice brought along as a sort of biological experiment. During the course of the mission the crew would conduct three moonwalks, collect various samples, and it was the longest moon landing ever. They also supposedly photographed a pyramid on the surface of the moon. Wait, what?

The Apollo 17 moon pyramid

During their tme on the moon, the Apollo 17 crew carried out their mission on the surface with the aid of a rover near a place called Geophone Rock. They took numerous photos of the moon’s surface during their dangerous mission, and one of them shows what appears to be an artificial structure looming in the distance. This particular photo was written off as an overexposed “blank” at the time, as it seemed to show nothing but a solid background. Yet some curious photography enthusiasts cleared up the contrast and found that in reality the photo seems to show what looks like a pyramid structure. This was immediately jumped on by some in the UFO community as proof of aliens on the moon, but the photograph has been subject to much scrutiny, and accused of being simply an overexposed accidental shot of the rover itself. Whatever it is at least looks weird nevertheless, and it would not be the last time a pyramid would be purportedly found on the lunar surface.

The next case comes from when the moon was a focus of a study done through the famed Hubble telescope, which was launched into low Earth orbit in 1991. The orbital telescope has remained in nearly constant use ever since, able to capture extremely high resolution images due to being out beyond the distortion caused by the atmosphere, and it has been invaluable to uncovering the mysteries of our universe, taking some of the most breathtaking photos of our cosmos ever seen. In 1999, the Hubble telescope was used to take an array of pictures of the moon’s surface which are to date among the most well-defined and startlingly clear photographs ever taken of the moon, and many of these images were released to the public to great fanfare. Yet, in 2008 another supposed photo from the Hubble photographs that seems to have been curiously absent from the original batch was officially released. It is unclear on when exactly the image was taken or if it is even really authentic, but it seems to show a very clear shape of a well-defined pyramid casting a shadow over the surface. This image has been picked apart by conspiracy theorists and UFOlogists on the Internet ever since, and since NASA will neither confirm or deny the photograph it is still hotly debated. Is this a hoax, a trick of shadow and light, or something else?

The Hubble moon pyramid

More recently still is a series of images that came to light in 2019, when a UFO researcher Scott C. Waring uploaded them after discovering them in a batch of NASA moon photos. The photo in question is labelled as NASA photo PIA13510, and appears to show a large crater on the moon called Evdoks, in the center of which sits what appears to be a triangular structure that look very much like a 3-sided pyramid hidden in its shadows. Waring tinkered with the resolution and lighting to bring out the clarity, and the result took the Internet by storm. Although skeptics and astronomers think that the image is just a trick of light on an unusually shaped rock, Waring has gone all out in his endorsement of it as a real pyramid, saying:

It is convincing evidence of the existence of intelligent life on our moon. So the question remains, is this definitive proof that the pyramids in Egypt were built by aliens from our moon? It seems so.

The 2019 moon pyramid

Of course, the fringe ideas on these images say that this is evidence that aliens have built structures on our moon, and that these pyramids are perhaps connected to the ones we can find on Earth. However, not everyone is so convinced, and skeptics basically point to the same mundane phenomena blamed for creating the whole craze about the “Face on Mars.” Here we would have plays of light and shadow that perhaps combine with features of the landscape to create an image that seems more anomalous and mysterious than it really is. This is then magnified by a phenomenon called “pareidolia,” which is basically an incorrect perception of a stimulus, the brain trying to find familiar patterns or features in otherwise random images, such as in the rocks and craters of the moon or Mars. The effect is the same as what makes us see faces and animals in the clouds floating past us overhead, and is the brain’s attempt to find a familiar pattern where none exists. Believers will point out, however, that these images are very unambiguous in what they show, and that is obvious pyramids. On the moon.

As long as people keep poring through NASA photographs we are likely to keep getting claims like these, and extrapolations on what it means for history and how it pertains to extraterrestrial life. It doesn’t help that NASA typically doesn’t comment on such claims, fueling the fires of conspiracy debates. What are we seeing in images such as these? Are these natural phenomena, illusions, mind tricks, hoaxes, or something altogether more mysterious? Is NASA really trying to brush these under the carpet, or are they merely ignoring it all because it is not worth their time? It doesn’t seem to matter what the answers are to those who look for these enigmatic structures, and we can probably expect to see more images brought forward in the future.

Videos, selected by peter2011

This week I’ve done 7 or 8 radio shows and podcasts on my new book, The Rendlesham Forest UFO Conspiracy. More than a few people in Ufology have said that no-one in Ufology (apart from me LOL) believes in the “secret experiment angle.” Really? I could reel off a whole bunch of people who suspect the experiment angle is the genuine one. But, for today I’ll go with a perfect, right-on-target statement on this issue of a non-alien theory. It comes from long-time UFO researcher/writer Jacques Vallee. He said on Rendlesham/Bentwaters: “The Bentwaters case is a classic. At the landing site, they had a mix of ordinary guards, officers, sentries and so on – they all had orders to go to the site under a scenario. And that’s not what would have happened if the encounter were real – if a strange object landed on the base you wouldn’t be sending out a hundred people without weapons. The thing has all the earmarks of being staged for the benefit of the witnesses, so that they could be studied and the reactions of the different psychological types and of different ranks could be studied. And when you think about it, it’s not that weird [italics mine].”

Vallee concluded: ” If you were in charge of a project like that, you’d have to test it in conditions where nobody is danger and you can get the data you need. In cases like this one – not many but a few of them – that I investigated, I had to conclude that these were tests of virtual reality projectors.” There’s another angle too: the matter of holograms. In my book I suggest the events in Rendlesham Forest in December 1980 did not involve aliens. Rather, it was all a ruse in which sophisticated  holograms were used – for reasons along the lines Jacques Vallee suggested above. This week, I’ve been asked time and again something like this: “Why are you the only one talking about this hologram scenario?” This is particularly crazy, because that theory first surfaced way back in 1991! And is know by just about every Rendlesham researcher.

It’s certainly not every day that you get to meet with a pair of Edward Snowden-style whistle-blowers from the U.S. Department of Defense. But, incredibly, that’s exactly what happened to UFO researcher/writer Ray Boeche on November 25, 1991. The location, however, was not a dark and shadowy parking garage – as per the story of “Deep Throat” in Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s hit book of 1974, All the President’s Men. Rather, it was a pleasant restaurant in the Lincoln Marriott Cornhusker Hotel in Lincoln, Nebraska. I guess you’ve already got a good idea of what the two guys wanted to talk about. Along with various and sundry theories concerning the UFO phenomenon, it was those mysterious woods on the other side of the world and what went down deep within them in December 1980. Ray said: “I found it interesting that they would mention Rendlesham at the meeting. They said there was a sense that this was maybe, in some sense, staged. Or, that some of the senior people there were more concerned with the reaction of the men, how they responded to the situation, rather than what was actually going on. That this was some sort of psychotronic device – a hologram – to see what sort of havoc they can wreak with people. But, even if it was a type of hologram, they said it could interact with the environment. The tree marks and the pod marks at the landing site were indications of that.”

UFO investigator/author Jenny Randles had a good, solid, working relationship with Ray Boeche. She, too, addressed the matter of what Ray’s secret informants told him back in 1991. On the matter of those claims pertaining to highly sophisticated holograms, Jenny stated, in her 1998 book, UFO Crash Landing?: “This is a device which manipulates the subatomic basis of matter at a quantum level and builds a bridge between mind and physical substance. If I understood it correctly, this supposedly stimulated the mind into having vivid hallucinations but, at the same time, created physical effects in the real world which could take on a semblance of the appearance of the hallucinated images. What was seen was mostly in the mind – but it was not entirely without physical form and partially substantial in the same way that a hologram is real, but has no weight or solidity. The result is a terrifying apparition.”

In 2000, Georgina Bruni’s book on the Rendlesham controversy surfaced. It was titled You Can’t Tell the People. Georgina was certainly not a full-on believer in the theory that the incidents in the woods were nothing but the results of top secret human experimentation. She stressed to me that she viewed the hologram angle as a theory to be studied. Georgina was, though, incredibly generous with her information on this angle – and quite open to sharing with me what she found concerning a secret, domestic explanation for Rendlesham. Even if she didn’t fully buy into it, Georgina was happy to help when and where she could. Georgina also said to me that Ray Boeche’s informants “explained that holography and Fourier transforms are a way of separating an image from its object, the viewing of the image at a distance. In essence, they claim the world is a hologram composed of interference patterns which can be altered by disruptive static frequencies. They believe the human brain is part of this hologram and as such it is capable of performing its own Fourier transforms. However, they concluded that the human brain is unreliable, whereas a psychotronic device, much like a computer, would be able to exert an exact effect on animate and inanimate objects.”

Finally, there’s Encounter in Rendlesham Forest, a book published in 2014 and written by Nick Pope, John Burroughs and Jim Penniston. On the angle of a secret experiment for Rendlesham, they said in their book: “Suggestions as to how such an exotic test could have been accomplished include hallucinogenic drugs, mind control, and holographic technology.” What all of this tells us is that (A) the hologram controversy has circulated for almost thirty years and (B) it has appeared in almost all of the Rendlesham-themed books that have been published since the 1990s; albeit to small degrees. And, if people tell you that no reputable ufologist buys into the “secret experiment” angle,  refer them to Jacques Vallee’s words at the top of this article.

Just a few days ago while doing radio, I was asked what I thought about the so-called “Grey” aliens of Ufology. And of the possibility of them being some kind of “biological robot.” I was also asked what I thought about how this tied in with a now dead man who caused a controversial storm in 1997. In the summer of that year, one of the most inflammatory UFO-themed books ever written was published. Its title: The Day After Roswell. Ghost-written by William Birnes, the editor of the now-defunct UFO Magazine and of History Channel’s also defunct UFO Hunters, the book tells the story of Philip Corso. Specifically, Lieutenant Colonel. Philip J. Corso. U.S. Army. Corso’s story was both amazing and groundbreaking. But, was it true? While some in the field of Ufology embraced the story, many certainly did not. I viewed the whole story as disinformation intended to confuse the truth of what really happened at Roswell, New Mexico back in the summer of 1947. Or, it was nothing more than an elaborate and ingenious tale designed to make money from the gullible and the “I want to believe” crowd.

According to Corso, he, in near single-handed fashion, spearheaded a secret program designed to seed alleged alien technology and wreckage – recovered from the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico by the U.S. Army Air Force’s 509^th Bomb Wing in July 1947 – into the private sector. As a result of this clandestine operation, so Corso maintained, the United States was soon able to understand, and even back-engineer, at least some of the extraterrestrial materials. Fiber-optics, transistors, night-vision equipment, and computer chips, were all, allegedly, a direct outgrowth of the extensive studies of the Roswell materials. But, it’s not so much the technology reportedly found at Roswell that we need to focus our attentions on today. Rather, it’s the bodies of the beings allegedly found strewn around the crash site.

Contrary to what the UFO community said or assumed, Corso never explicitly stated that the Roswell corpses were extraterrestrial. In fact, what he really said was quite the opposite. In Corso’s story the so-called “Grey aliens” are actually created, built, or grown to perform specific tasks. As for the creators of the Greys, it was they, Corso maintained, who were the real aliens. Corso also said that, as far as he was aware, no one has ever seen the real aliens. Only ever their black-eyed, large-headed worker-drones. William Birnes said that Corso described the Greys as “…an android or biological robot. He said it had no digestive system whatsoever and was connected electronically to the navigation controls of the spacecraft.”

As for Corso himself, he stated: “…perhaps we should consider the EBEs [Extraterrestrial Biological Entities] as described in the medical autopsy reports humanoid robots rather than lifeforms, specifically engineered for long distance travel through space or time.” He expanded on this, outlining the profoundly weird nature of the Greys: “While doctors couldn’t figure out how the entities’ essential body chemistry worked, they determined that they contained no new basic elements. However, the reports that I had suggested new combinations of organic compounds that required much more evaluation before doctors could form any opinions. Of specific interest was the fluid that served as blood but also seemed to regulate bodily functions in much the same way glandular secretions do for the human body. In these biological entities, the blood system and lymphatic systems seem to have been combined. And if an exchange of nutrients and waste occurred within their systems, that exchange could have only taken place through the creature’s skin or the outer protective covering they wore because there were no digestive or waste systems.”

I can’t say I’m a fan of the writings and claims of Corso – at all. I find the majority of his story to be just too far out there. The biggest irony, however, is that for all the sensational claims made by the man, I actually do think that the Greys could very well be some kind of manufactured entities, rather than creatures born in a normal fashion.