Whatever you know about Brian Eno – member of Roxy Music, record producer, visual artist, inventor of ambient music and the Oblique Strategies – it’s not everything to know about this complicated creative genius. This week, he announced the release of the Starsounds Project, a musical composition of the sounds of stars. If you thought stars, including our own sun, sounded like huge blast furnaces, you’re in for a shock.

“These infrasounds were computed by astrophysicist Garik Israelian in 2005. This unique acoustic library inspired Israelian and Dr. Brian May, astrophysicist and legendary guitarist of Queen, to create a festival to bring together stars and music, and so Starmus was born.”

Dr. Brian May is the well-known mathematician and astrophysicist who worked with NASA on the New Horizons mission, promotes awareness of hazardous asteroids and occasionally dabbles in music. Dr. Garik Israelian is another astrophysicist known for his research on extrasolar planets, black holes and neutron stars and is known for his acoustic library of infrasounds produced by stars which cannot be heard by the human ear. However, he is better known for joining with Dr. May to create the Starmus International Festival in 2011 to celebrate astronomy, space exploration, music, art and science. The festivals have attracted musicians like Rick Wakeman and Tangerine Dream and have featured Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Stephen Hawking, Alexei Leonov, Jim Lovell and more.

“Starsounds”, a hypnotic piece with complex harmonies and mesmerising visuals, is being made available on the internet for the first time – finally, we can listen to the stars and both see and hear the music that they make!”

“Starsounds” is based on Dr. Israelian’s 2014 Starmus festival lecture “Our Acoustic Universe.” Eno took the infrasound recordings and sped them up so they could be heard. Then Paul Franklin and Oliver James of DNEG, an Oscar-winning visual effects studio, created images based on the star waveforms and images of our Sun. “Starsounds” was made available on the internet (You can listen to it here) because there is no 2020 version of the biennial festival.

“Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular, it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

“Starsounds” is considered to be ambient music – a term coined by Brian Eno to describe a form of background music that pulls the listener into the environment. Eno’s best known ambient music is “Ambient 1: Music for Airports,,” but he has used the concept on many projects, including David Bowie’s ‘Berlin Trilogy’ consisting of the albums “Low,” “Heroes” and “Lodger” – a group recognized as some of Bowie’s most innovative music.

Another of Brian Eno’s contributions to creativity is “Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas,” a card-based method for promoting creativity created with artist Peter Schmidt. Each of the printed cards contained a challenging constraint to help musicians and artists overcome creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking. When blocked, the instructions are to pick a card at random and follow the advice. Eno himself used them during the recording of Bowie’s Berlin trilogy – a pretty strong endorsement. Some examples:

• Use an old idea.
• State the problem in words as clearly as possible.
• What would your closest friend do?
• What to increase? What to reduce?
• Try faking it!
• Ask your body.
• Work at a different speed.

The original decks are now extremely rare but a fifth edition of Eno’s Oblique Strategies is available on his website.

Brian Eno, Brian May and others show the benefits of bridging the arts/science right brain/left brain divide. In a world where both arts AND science are being de-emphasized in schools, perhaps a project like Starsounds can inspire today’s youths to return to them. Give it another listen here.

And for a little Dr. May and David Bowie together, try some “Under Pressure.”

Other space sound videos, selected by peter2011

The lost continent of Zealandia, which sank into the ocean 23 million years ago after breaking away from the supercontinent Gondwanaland, isn’t technically a ‘lost continent’ anymore – it was discovered in the 1990s and upgraded from microcontinent in 2017. However, most of its submerged 2 million-square-miles (5 million square kilometers) remain a mystery.

That changed this week when GNS Science — New Zealand’s leading provider of Earth, geoscience and isotope research and consultancy services – unveiled two new maps of Zealandia and an open-to-the-public interactive website with more data on Te Riu-a-Māui / Zealandia – the new name for the lost continent. Te Riu-a-Māui translates to the hills, valleys and plains of Māui – the great East Polynesian ancestor explorer of the Pacific Ocean. Māui is the mythical ancestor of all Polynesians who explored the Pacific.

“We’ve made these maps to provide an accurate, complete and up-to-date picture of the geology of the New Zealand and southwest Pacific area – better than we have had before.

“Their value is that they provide a fresh context in which to explain and understand the setting of New Zealand’s volcanoes, plate boundary and sedimentary basins.”

Geologist Dr. Nick Mortimer, lead author of the maps, reveals in the press release that the maps are so much more than just the boundaries of Zealandia – they will help bring the geological history of New Zealand’s volcanoes from the mythical to the historical.

“Users can zoom and pan around different thematic geoscience webmaps of the region. They can readily view and interrogate the maps and turn layers on or off. They can also query features in the layers and generate custom maps of their own.”

Program Leader Dr. Vaughan Stagpoole describes how easy it is to use the webmaps. Traditionalists can also purchase printed copies at the GNS Science store. The three maps available so far are a Geoscience data webmap showing general information about the size and shape of Zealandia; a Tectonic webmap showing major faults, plate boundaries and locations of ancient and modern volcanoes; and a Bathymetric webmap color-contrasting the solid land and seabed to show coastlines, territorial limits and names of major undersea features. All are provided here courtesy of GNS Science, which holds their license.

While the maps are impressive, GNS Science will continue its research and update the maps and interactive website as more information becomes available.

Māui would be proud.

Videos, selected by peter2011

An interesting photo appeared this week in The Campeche Tribune showing an unidentified flying object taken while the photographer was shooting dust clouds from the Sahara Desert floating over Champotón Bay in the state of Campeche. While the photo is fairly clear despite the dust, the interesting part of the incident is that Campeche is the location of one of Mexico’s more famous UFO sightings – in 2004, Mexican Air Force pilots saw 11 UFOs and filmed them. Are these incidents related?

“I immediately took the photos and shared them in my social network. The characteristics are very similar to those of a flying saucer.”

Kind of like this, only not as close

The Campeche Tribune reports that local resident Luciano Carrillo photographed the UFO (see the photo here) on June 23rd at 7:15 pm. The dust haze is clearly visible and casts a shadow on a small island in the bay, but the saucer-like UFO is reflecting light from somewhere. Unfortunately, that’s the extent of the coverage by The Campeche Tribune and no other local media seems to have picked it up.

Radar operator: “There they go, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, no, there are eight. There we are going to see them, they go to an unusual speed. One, two, three, four, five , six, seven, eight in the screen.”

Captain: “Are they at the same altitude?”

Radar operator: “Affirmative”

Contrast the limited coverage of Luciano Carrillo’s UFO to that of the 11 UFOs seen and recorded by Mexican Air Force pilots on March 5, 2004. That incident and the video was reported by Mexican national news and on major news outlets around the world – CBS and Fox reported on it in the U.S. The objects were said to be flying at an altitude of 11,500 feet and the Air Force C-26 A crew claimed that they followed them and were surrounded by them, but the objects disappeared when they stopped the pursuit. Their speeds were said to have increased from 180 kph (112 mph) to 540 kph (335 mph) in seconds. The C-26A is a small plane and the crew was using it to search for drug smugglers. (You can see the entire video here.)

C-26 A (Credit: US Navy)

“I couldn’t say what it was … but I think they’re completely real.”

After hearing testimony like that from Lt. Mario Adrian Vazquez, the infrared equipment operator who recorded the UFOs, Mexico’s Defense Department released the video, the audio and the interviews, confirming the objects were unidentified. (Those were the days.) The news prompted celebrations from those who believed this was evidence of alien visitation, while skeptics suggested they were ball lightning (unlikely at that altitude), meteor fragments (kind of slow for that) or flares from oil rigs in the bay (kind of high for that too).

What other explanation could there have been for these UFOs? The location is about 1000 km (620 miles) from the Popocatapetl volcano where many UFO sightings have been reported. The bay off the coast of Campeche contains underwater asphalt volcanoes, but those aren’t known to attract UFOs. One other thing that wasn’t known by the public at the time but is well known now – UFOs would be seen and recorded later in 2004 by US Navy pilots attached to the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz. Was there ever an investigation into whether those two incidents may have been related? If there was, there don’t seem to be any public records of them, nor any follow-up of the Mexican Air Force sighting.

Which brings us back to the latest one. It’s unlikely there will be any government looks at Luciano Carrillo’s photo. It will probably be examined by UFOlogists for evidence of CGI tampering.

Military UFO sightings should get more investigation and probably do. Yet the public rarely gets to see the results. Whether you like the popular investigators and reporters in the UFO world or not, they’re at least keeping the incidents in the public eye, which is keeping pressure on the governments to disclose.

One of these days …

“In 1971, Zel’dovich predicted that quantum fluctuations and classical waves reflected from a rotating absorbing cylinder will gain energy and be amplified. This concept, which is a key step towards the understanding that black holes may amplify quantum fluctuations, has not been verified experimentally owing to the challenging experimental requirement that the cylinder rotation rate must be larger than the incoming wave frequency.”

Until now. This opening paragraph of a new study published in the journal Nature Physics is referring to the idea that black holes are not just matter-sucking bodies consuming all energy in their path but may actually be able to be mined by energy by a brave alien civilization or even humans – provided they can figure out a way to get close enough to plug their battery into the black hole charger. But how?

The idea came from British physicist Roger Penrose. In 1969, he theorized that rotational energy could be harvested from a black hole by lowering an object into the outer edge of its event horizon – the ergosphere – and then collecting the energy the black hole gave off as it dined. The first and biggest challenge was that the collector had to be stationary with the black hole, which meant it had to be moving at faster than the speed of light. This energy-harvesting idea became known as the Penrose Process.

While Sir Roger went on to share the 1988 Wolf Prize for physics with Stephen Hawking for the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems, renowned Soviet physicist Yakov Zel’dovich picked up the Penrose Process in 1971 and developed an experiment that could be conducted on Earth to test the theory. It involved shooting twisted light waves (used in optical tweezers and ultra-powerful microscopes) at a rotating cylinder which reflect them back with additional energy taken from the cylinder’s rotation due to something called the rotational Doppler Shift. Zel’dovich was certain it would work – he just needed a cylinder that rotated at least a billion times a second. Sigh.

Fast forward to the present. Marion Cromb, a Ph.D. student in the University of Glasgow’s School of Physics and Astronomy and lead author of the paper, came up with an alternative that would allow her and her research team to successfully test the Penrose Process using sound instead of light. Sound obviously travels far slower than light but performs the same way in a rotational Doppler Shift. They used a small ring of speakers to create a twist in the sound waves, then directed them at a rotating sound absorber made from a foam disc. Microphones on the other side picked up the sound as it passed through the disc. And?

“What we heard during our experiment was extraordinary. What’s happening is that the frequency of the sound waves is being doppler-shifted to zero as the spin speed increases. When the sound starts back up again, it’s because the waves have been shifted from a positive frequency to a negative frequency. Those negative-frequency waves are capable of taking some of the energy from the spinning foam disc, becoming louder in the process—just as Zel’dovich proposed in 1971.”

Eureka! … or whatever researchers yell these days — Cromb preferred to comment quietly to Phys.org.   Penrose and Zel’dovich’s theories on the possibility of harvesting energy from a black hole were proven in a lab experiment using the equivalent of your Wifi speaker and a fast-spinning Nerf bat. Yes, that is a long way from charging your spaceship at a roadside black hole for the ride home, but it’s still a proof.

One more point to ponder. Penrose came up with the process as a way for alien civilizations to harness black hole power. The experiment proves this is possible. Does this mean it may already be happening? What would that mean?

Akerue! (That’s a reverse Eureka!)

Whenever the matter of the Men in Black surfaces, it inevitably provokes debates on UFOs. It’s a far lesser known fact, however, that the MIB also have significant ties to the world of Cryptozoology – the study of unknown and mysterious animals. Just about everyone will know of the associations between the Mothman and the MIB encounters that dominated the city of Point Pleasant, West Virginia in the 1966-1967 era. So, I’ll avoid that particular affair and focus on some more obscure incidents. We’ll begin with a woman named Maureen Abbott. She saw, when she was in her twenties, what she describes as a large “black panther” late one winter’s evening in either 1954 or 1955. Astonishingly, it was doing nothing less than racing along the track as she stood, alone, awaiting a train on the Bakerloo Line of the London Underground. Describing the animal as running very fast, she said that as it passed her, it quickly looked in her direction, with a menace-filled frown on its visage, before vanishing into the darkness of the tunnels. Although Abbott did not see the creature again, she has never forgotten her brief, terrifying encounter with the unknown, deep below the city of London.

There is a very curious sequel to Abbott’s encounter: two-days later, she was visited at her home by a government official who, while the pair sat and drank cups of tea, advised her, in fairly relaxed tones, not to talk about the experience. Of course, to a degree, this aspect of Abbott’s story inevitably conjures up and provokes Men in Black-style imagery. If true, it suggests that elements of the British Government may wish to keep exceedingly quiet the fact that wild animals are on the loose in the heart of London’s old tunnels. Still on the matter of what have become known as “Alien Big Cats,” there is the following: I have seven reports on file where witnesses were on the receiving end of what can only be described as MIB-themed telephone harassment. Notably, in two of those seven cases, the witnesses claimed to have seen the bodies of dead ABCs: one was seen by the side of a road near the English village of Blakeney in 1986, by a shift-worker on his way home, around 3.00 a.m. The other body was almost literally stumbled upon, in October 1987, in an area of woodland near the English town of Bradford on Avon, during the early afternoon.

In both cases, the cats were very large, powerful-looking, and completely black in color. Neither witness told anyone – outside of their immediate family – anything about their encounters, chiefly because they had nothing to back up the claims. In the first case, the witness returned to the site at daybreak, around 7:00 a.m., and the body was gone. In the second case, precisely the same thing happened: when the frightened witness told her husband what she had seen, he accompanied her back to the site, around 3 or 4 hours later, after he returned home from work. That body, too, had curiously vanished. In both instances, however – and despite neither party having made an official report or having informed the local press – the witnesses were on the near-immediate receiving end of curious phone calls, filled with what can only be described as classic MIB-type interference and intimidation.

Moving on, there’s a strange tale from Puerto Rico. It surfaced in 2005, when I was on the island for a week with Paul Kimball’s Redstar Films team. The purpose: to get as much material as possible on the Chupacabra.  While we were there we did an interview with a farmer who lived in a small, isolated village, pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Late one night, approximately five years earlier, he jumped out of bed to the screams of his pigs – he was a breeder and seller of the animals. And, given that this was his only source of income, he raced to the back-door, grabbed a handy machete and a flashlight, flung the door open, and charged out into the muggy darkness. The scene was one of carnage. The bodies of a number of dead rabbits – which the farmer also kept – were strewn about the yard, many torn to pieces. And one of his prize-pigs was dead, too, lying on the ground. All of them, the pig and the rabbits, were killed in the same fashion: via three, huge puncture wounds to the neck. As the man, pretty much in a state of shock, prowled around the tree-shrouded yard, he heard movement in the undergrowth.

Wasting no time at all, he threw the machete in what he thought was the right direction. His instinct was right: the machete slammed into something solid. The sound was akin to metal hitting metal. Whatever it was, it didn’t hang around. In seconds, it was gone, having leapt into the safety of the all-encompassing, nearby woods. There were even weirder developments to come – in the form of none other than a man and a woman in black. It was early the next morning when the darkly-garbed duo descended upon the man’s farm. They asked all sorts of questions about the previous night’s events, making it clear to him that they knew far more about the attack in particular – and the mysterious attacker in general – than they were willing to admit. The strange pair listened, in an emotionless fashion, to everything that he had to say, then suddenly turned on their tails and vanished into the woods, along with his machete – which they made clear they were confiscating. The story was over.

Some monsters, like Bigfoot, the Chupacabra, the Yeti, and Ogopogo, are seen time and again and across decades – sometimes even centuries. There are, however, a few bizarre beasts that put in very brief appearances for startled eyewitnesses, and soon vanish, never to be seen again. Perhaps there is no better example of the latter than what has become known as the Dover Demon. It was around 10:30 p.m. on the night of April 21, 1977 when all hell broke loose. William Bartlett, then seventeen, was driving along Farm Street, in Dover, Massachusetts, when he spotted something both amazing and terrifying sitting on a wall. It was nothing less than a small, almost goblin-like, beast of about three and a half feet in height that had huge, glowing eyes and “tendrils” for fingers. Very curiously, it lacked ears, a nose, and a mouth. As for its head, it was described as being “melon”-like and extremely pale.

Sketch of the Dover Demon

In the wake of the affair of the Dover Demon, something very strange occurred in the mystery-filled town. Precisely two months to the day that the strange creature was first encountered, a pair of very weird men appeared on the scene. They were not invited, nor were they welcomed. Indeed, the MIB seldom are – if ever. They turned up in the town, quite out of the blue, at what was termed the Dover House. Loren Coleman says that the house “…was a group home in Dover, for emotionally disturbed boys, serving as a residential branch of the treatment center, the Walker School for Boys, in nearby Needham, Massachusetts. In 1977-1978, I was Walker School’s overnight program director and a social worker masters’ graduate therapy intern there.”

They arrived at the Dover House and spoke with one of the staff, who made the very unwise move of giving the men Coleman’s address. Fortunately, the MIBs did not pay a late-night visit to the Coleman home. Nevertheless, the story of the unsettling encounter did get back to Coleman. The two characters, he was told, were dressed in black leather jackets and white motorcycle helmets and warned the woman not to talk about the Dover Demon – under any circumstances, at all. This was very weird, given that the pair claimed to be nothing stranger than “investigators” from National Geographic! There was, however, something very strange about the disturbing duo: they spoke in a monotone, robotic, style, their arms were constantly by their sides, and they stood upright – almost like the military on guard duty.

What do you say when you look at a flying top photo the photographer swears is a UFO and it looks like an obvious fake? What do you say if a UFO expert carefully examines it and says it’s the best photograph of a UFO he’s ever seen? Most people would say, “Let me have another look at it.” OK. Take a look (click here) and then let’s come back and hear from the expert.

The UFO is reported to have made a strange sound as it rubbed against the top of the tree 

(Image: Triangle News)

The UFO was spotted by a man riding his bike 

(Image: Triangle News)

The UFO was spotted in a remote area near the village of Jastrowo, about 180 miles from Warsaw 

(Image: Triangle News)

“He is afraid to give his real name and surname. In Poland talking about UFOs means that people will take you as a person with mental problems.”

Especially when the UFO looks like something out of a 50s sci-fi movie. According to someone who would know – well-known Polish journalist and ufologist Robert Bernatowicz – the set of five photographs were given to him by a fearful Pole who wished to remain anonymous. Bernatowicz revealed that the witness was riding his bike in a remote area near the village of Jastrowo, about 180 miles west of Warsaw.

“The witness reports that he saw a UFO then took the photographs and then has a break in his memory of what happened next.”

Bernatowicz reveals to the Mirror, which appears to be the original source of the story (no Polish media sites seem to have reported it first), that the witness said the UFO was close enough to the treetops that he could hear it scrape against them. The missing memory may explain why there’s no mention of the sound of the UFO – unless it made none. (Look at it again.)

As stated before, Bernatowicz is a well-known ufologist in Poland, but that appears to be the extent of his investigation – it would have been nice to know more about the location, whether there were impressions or burn traces on the ground, evidence of the tree being hit, or other witnesses. Instead, he sent the photos to Philip Mantle, a well-known British UFO researcher and former Director of Investigations for the British UFO Research Association and former MUFON representative for England, who had this to say:

“I have worked on a number of alleged UFO photo-cases down the years with most of them turning out to either be something convention or a hoax.”

Mantle apparently couldn’t tell if the UFO in the photos was “something convention or a hoax,” so he sent them to Jason Gleave, who is described as a former RAF member who also worked for British Aerospace Airbus division and “now specialises in UFO photo analysis.” According to the Mirror, Gleave gave the photographs some intense scrutiny and analysis. (Take another look.)

“I overlaid the five separate images to confirm the movement of the object. It appeared to move in a small radius of approximately 200 feet, staying within approximately 150-200 feet altitude from ground level.”

Gleave points out that the lack of time of day, direction the camera was aiming and other key information made it difficult to better diagnose the object. He did the best he could with what he had …

“Also the shadow of the object on the ground is not detected, which makes me assume the Sun is behind the camera operator thus positioning the shadow off towards the distant foliage (similar to the nearby central tree). I have also embossed one of the images showing an enlarged and enhanced view of the object which is exhibiting no device or cabling system to suspend the object.”

And?

“In my conclusion to my analysis of the five images draws me to believe there is a structured object present and it is of an unknown origin.”

That led Phillip Mantle to state:

“If the analysis of Jason Gleaves is correct, and I have no reason to suggest otherwise, then these five UFO photos from Poland could be the best we have.”

Is it?

The Reddit UFO group, normally a pretty skeptical bunch, has uncommonly mixed feelings about it. Yes, it looks like one of the famous Billy Meier photos which are widely considered to be hoaxes (his ex-wife attests to this) but the UFO does appear to be very small (although not resembling any known drones) and quite a few commenters agree the photos don’t appear to be graphically altered.

It would be helpful if the witness agreed to be hypnotized so the “missing time” might be found. For this writer (after taking one more look himself), even with the strong endorsement by Mantle, the needle on these ‘best ever’ UFO photos is firmly pointed at “Really?”

Let the arguments begin!