The year was 1979, and a man by the name of Robert Taylor was a forestry worker for the Livingston Development Corporation, in Livingston, West Lothian, Scotland. He was a respected war hero, was known as a good, honest worker, and was not prone to spinning wild yarns or getting into trouble, so when on November 8, 1979 he stumbled back from a trip to a hill called Dechmont Law looking disheveled, with cuts on his face, torn clothes, and looking somewhat the worse for wear, people were very concerned. When the visibly shaken man had gotten his head together, he would begin spinning a spectacular tale of bizarreness that has gone on to become a well-known and much discussed piece of UFO lore.

According to Taylor, he had gone out with his dog to do a routine check on the fences, gates, and a sampling project going on in the area. Since there were no direct roads to the remote location, he parked his truck on the nearby M8 expressway and he and the dog made their way into the woods of Dechmont Law on foot. As they progressed through the forest, Taylor says he was startled to see the startling sight of a dark grey metallic “flying dome” around 20 feet in diameter and 30 feet high hovering in the air of a clearing just above the forest floor, apparently kept aloft by an array of “small propellers” around its outer rim. As he looked on in wonder at this bizarre sight, he would claim that the air was pervaded by a smell like “burning brakes.” Very strange indeed, but it was about to get even stranger still.

Taylor claimed that before he had even had time to really process the sheer bizarreness of what he was witnessing, two small spheres detached from the larger craft, which were described as having protrusions and nodules all over them and as looking like “sea mines,” and which started rapidly rolling along the ground to approach the frightened man as they issued a “plopping, sucking sound.” These mysterious spheres reportedly then “grabbed” him with sets of protruding spikes and began pulling him towards the large dome as he struggled against them. He would claim that he believed they had been emanating some sort of toxic gas, as the acidic smell of burning rubber got unbearable and he felt the strength leaving his limbs. The whole time his dog was barking ferociously at the objects.

At this point Taylor apparently lost consciousness, and when he awoke he was lying face down in the clearing, which was now empty and with no sign of the otherworldly dome or its malevolent spheres. He found that his clothes had been shredded and that he had cuts and abrasions on his face and body, whether due to his struggle with the spheres or inflicted directly on him he did not know. Taylor had then made his way back to his truck, but was unable to start it, the engine completely dead, and so had stumbled all the way home on foot. Whatever those objects had done to him was still in his system at the time, because he did not seem to have full control of his body and had trouble speaking. When he came staggering to his home in this rambling, dazed, barely coherent state his wife immediately called the police and an investigation would ensue.

Police at first treated this as a common assault, and wrote up Taylor’s mutterings of UFOs and spiked killer spheres as just the rantings of his stressed mind, but they nevertheless went to the scene to investigate and see if they could get some information about the perpetrator. The area where the dome had allegedly appeared was found to have flattened grass, and to contain 32 anomalous holes in the ground, which were about 3.5 inches in diameter each and formed a strange semi-circular pattern, as well as ladder-like marks that looked like the treads of a bulldozer, which were confined to just the clearing and did not come from or lead to anywhere. Authorities tried to find out what could have made the marks by contacting the Livingston Development Corporation, and one investigator would say of this:

After examining every piece of machinery they had up there, we did not find anything to match. These marks just arrived. They did not come from anywhere or go anywhere. They just arrived as though a helicopter or something had landed from the sky. An object of several tons had stood there but there was nothing to show that it had been driven or towed away. There appeared to be no rational explanation for these marks.

Robert Taylor in the clearing

In the meantime, Taylor’s ripped clothing was examined by forensics experts, who came to the conclusion that they had been torn by something hooking into them and pulling sharply upward, which when taken with the tread marks made the story of domes and spiked discs sounding less and less far fetched by the minute. Police would ultimately log the incident officially as an assault, but there was nothing more they could do except ponder the strange clues surrounding it all. For his part, Taylor would adamantly insist that his story was true all the way up to his death in 2007, and considering what an upstanding citizen he was many people believed him. What has come to be known as the Robert Taylor Incident, Livingston Incident, or Dechmont Woods Encounter, has since gone on to become a much discussed and highly regarded possibly genuine UFO incident, and UFO researcher and author Malcolm Robinson has said of it:

This case stands head and shoulders above any other Scottish case and has the prestigious hallmark of being the only case officially investigated by the police and forensic science laboratories in Great Britain. Most, if not all, British UFO researchers would say that this one case provides the best evidence that something, not of this Earth, occurred in that lonely wood and which today, stands the test of time as being one of the biggest UFO cases in the annals of British UFOlogy.

Of course there are skeptics of the whole thing, and other possibilities have been offered above and beyond that Taylor was attacked by aliens. For instance the strange markings in the ground have been speculated to have been left by the water company that had been laying a cable duct through the area and had been storing a large collection of PVC pipes near the clearing. Taylor’s story of the dome, the spheres, and the physical effects he experienced have been suggested as being the result of him suffering an isolated attack of temporal lobe epilepsy, which can cause the physical symptoms described and cause hallucinations, which could have all been exacerbated by a case of meningitis Taylor had struggled with not long before the ordeal. It could have also been that he had mistaken a nearby water tower for being an alien craft in this disoriented state. Other theories are that he had consumed hallucinogenic berries, that he had suffered a stroke, that he had seen a mirage of the planet Venus, or simply that he just made the whole thing up. There has never been any definitive answer, and considering that the sole witness has passed away we will probably never know for sure, but the legacy of this case lingers on today and probably will for some time to come.

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{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

27-12-2020 om 16:18 geschreven door peter  

We probably aren’t the first civilization in the Milky Way. It’s just that the others are dead

A new study suggests that it is likely that other civilizations have existed before us in the Milky Way -- before they annihilated themselves.

 by Tibi Puiu

Are there other intelligent lifeforms in the universe besides humans capable of founding a civilization? That’s the million-dollar question that people of all walks of life have, to their best of their ability, attempt to answer. There are many theories that attempt to explain the utter lack of, well, alien signals. For instance, one new study concludes that intelligent life may have appeared several times in the Milky Way, however, the vast majority of these civilizations have wiped themselves out already.

Ever since people first realized we are all living on a giant rock orbiting one of many stars, a heartbreaking thought must have crept the mind: we’re not that special after all. But since there are countless stars in the Milky Way, and countless galaxies in the universe, there must be other civilizations out there. This thought comes as a consolation, so we might not be the only ones drifting through the frightening darkness of outer space.

But if it’s true that we’re not that special after all, where is everybody else? Enrico Fermi, the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor, thought about this long and hard, and his correspondence with fellow scientists on the subject has remained known in history as the ‘Fermi Paradox’ — the notion that there is a virtually limitless number of stars, but nevertheless you don’t see any life floating around besides us. Where is everybody?

The question is a valid one when considering:

• There’s nothing special about our sun – it’s young, medium-sized and similar to billions of other stars in our galaxy.
• It’s believed there are between 100 and 400 billion planets in the Milky Way. Considering intelligent life appeared on one, it’s reasonable to consider there should be at least some other kind of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy.
• Millions of years of technological progress mean that an intelligent species should have the capability to travel to distant stars and even other galaxies. Just look at how our world has changed in the past 100 years alone.
• According to mathematicians Duncan Forgan and Arwen Nicholson from Edinburgh University, self-replicating spacecraft traveling at one-tenth of the speed of light — admittedly a quick speed — could traverse the entire Milky Way in a mere 10 million years. This means that civilization could potentially colonize the whole galaxy in a mere couple of millions of years. Except it didn’t happen.

Then there’s the Drake equation, first proposed in 1961 by American astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake, which describes the variables involved in fostering intelligent life. This equation estimates the number “N” of civilizations in the Milky Way based on variables such as the rate of star formation, the number of planets in solar systems that may support life, or the necessary technological prowess to signal a civilization’s existence.

Drake’s equation was made famous by the late Carl Sagan, who featured it during an episode of his timeless series Cosmos. But since Sagan first talked about Drake’s equation, much has changed. Thanks to observations by the Kepler telescope, we now have a much firmer grasp of how many Earth-like worlds may be out there.

In a new study, researchers affiliated with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech, as well as a high school student, have updated Drake’s equation with all the new things scientists have learned in the past decades, including the prevalence of sun-like stars harboring Earth-like planets or the frequency of supernovas that are unfriendly to life.

When they modeled the evolution of the Milky Way, the researchers found that life was most likely to emerge around 13,000 light-years from the galactic centers, where there is the greatest density of sun-like stars. The optimal time frame for the development of alien civilizations was also estimated at 8 billion years after the formation of the galaxy. For comparison, Earth is about 25,000 light-years from the galactic core and complex intelligent life evolved around 13.5 billion years after the Milky Way formed.

In other words, this study suggests that there are other regions of the Milky way where life is more likely to appear than in our corner of the galaxy. What’s more, other civilizations might have had a five billion-year headstart. The problem is they may have had a headstart for their self-annihilation.

According to the researchers, most civilizations that have appeared before us have likely self-annihilated. Other civilizations that are still active in the galaxy are likely young, due to the propensity of intelligent life to eradicate itself. Over a long-enough timeframe, the probability of self-annihilation borders on certainty.

“As we cannot assume a low probability of annihilation, it is possible that intelligent life elsewhere in the Galaxy is still too young to be observed by us. Therefore, our findings can imply that intelligent life may be common in the Galaxy but is still young, supporting the optimistic aspect for the practice of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence),” the authors wrote in their study that appeared in the pre-print server arXiv.

“Our results also suggest that our location on Earth is not within the region where most intelligent life is settled, and SETI practices need to be closer to the inner Galaxy, preferably at the annulus 4 kpc (kiloparsec) from the Galactic Center.”

The search for alien life is nowhere settled, though. The study’s biggest limitation is its sample size of confirmed civilizations: just one. Humans are biased to think that other civilizations might behave just like us. As such, these inherent biases may cloud our judgment, believing that other civilizations might also nuke themselves out of existence.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

27-12-2020 om 16:03 geschreven door peter  

Two Black UFOs Over Clouds Matching Speed With Space Station, Dec 26, 2020, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Dec 26, 2020

Location of sighting: Space Station
Source:

• https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/iss_ustream.html

Was watching the live cam and noticed two small black objects in the distance below. The objects were matching speed with the space station and there were two of them. At first I thought it could be the ISS shadow...but there are two of them! So I ruled that out. Something is keeping a close eye on the space station. The UFOs speed is equal to the space stations. This is 100% proof that aliens are keeping a close eye on humanity. We shouldn't call them aliens, we should call them watchers. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan

 

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

27-12-2020 om 14:57 geschreven door peter  

Two Black UFOs Over Clouds Matching Speed With Space Station, Dec 26, 2020, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Dec 26, 2020

Location of sighting: Space Station
Source:

• https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/iss_ustream.html

Was watching the live cam and noticed two small black objects in the distance below. The objects were matching speed with the space station and there were two of them. At first I thought it could be the ISS shadow...but there are two of them! So I ruled that out. Something is keeping a close eye on the space station. The UFOs speed is equal to the space stations. This is 100% proof that aliens are keeping a close eye on humanity. We shouldn't call them aliens, we should call them watchers. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan

 

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

27-12-2020 om 14:57 geschreven door peter  

Three UFOs Near Rocket Launch Then Explosion Over Suzhou, China! Dec 26, 2020, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Dec 26, 2020

Location of sighting: Suzhou, Jiangsu, China

Source: Email report

 

They guy said he caught sight of something strange over Suzhou, China yesterday. He said it may be a rocket launch, but seemed more like a failed rocket launch. However in the video I can see at 16 seconds into it...there are three glowing objects in the path ahead of the rocket...at 18 seconds...one of them actually comes so close that it may have hit the rocket...at 45 seconds into it...an explosion occurs. It looks like aliens did not approve of the payload aboard this top secret rocket launch in China and the aliens destroyed it. 100% proof that aliens not only watch over us, but watch out for us and keep us safe. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan

 

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

27-12-2020 om 14:52 geschreven door peter  

AMAZING! Cigar-shaped UFO filmed over Andes (Chile)

This really interesting UFO video was filmed from a plane that was flying over Andes in Chile on 11th November 2020.

Witness report: (Google translate from Spanish)

 I present my case, my name is Rodrigo from Chile, on 11/11/2020 on the sky flight H272 from Puerto Montt to Santiago (departure 18:36, arrival 20:14 hours). Approximately arriving in Santiago at 8:00 p.m., I was looking at the landscape (Andes mountain range) the only “cloud” (dark and fat, in the shape of a worm) catches my attention, “rain cloud” style, above the peak of the Montana. From my window at an angle of about 65 degrees.
As the plane was in parallel with the “cloud”, I noticed that it began to be “clearer” (I thought it was “something” normal of the winds and altitude) and it was there that at the right point of the cloud, it made a ” small flash of white light “that caught my attention and amazement (in a matter of second), I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, I was stunned, when I turned around and saw inside the cabin if someone was looking at the same thing as me, the person closest to me, I was in an intermediate seat to mine (Mrs. Older) sleeping with masks (I also had the mask on), when trying to take my cell phone that was locked and is unlocked with facial recognition, I lost valuable seconds when using alphanumeric unlock. After enabling the cell phone, I focus on the “cloud” to take a photo and then a video.
As can be seen in the photo “it was no longer a rain cloud”, but it took the form of something solid and clearer. After the first photo, go to video in slow motion format (effect that was used when making videos to my daughter), where “you can see that it is no longer a cloud” but a “solid disk” (it passed all its metamorphosis) It was impressive to see the “UFO” (calmly in my house and thanks to google map, look for the reference hill, when measuring, it showed me that the UFO was approximately 6 kilometers long). Video 1 and Video 2 (use of filter on video)
When the plane moves away from the UFO, at first glance it gives a visual effect of fading on the horizon, it may be an optical effect, but when occupying filters in the video the UFO was still but getting smaller …), at that moment the plane makes a U-turn preparing the landing, at that moment I thought I had already lost sight of the UFO, and to my surprise I see it again at another point of the Andes mountain range, on the horizon, where I take my cell phone , I unlock it for the last photo and video of the UFO …

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

27-12-2020 om 14:43 geschreven door peter  

Ex-CIA boss John Brennan believes there may be life beyond Earth

{ https://nypost.com/ }

26-12-2020 om 23:26 geschreven door peter  

Richard Rokeby claims mysterious lights that started appearing near Burton Dassett, Warwickshire, in December 1922 were UFOs mistaken as the festive ghosts of World War One soldiers

By Berny Torre

Mysterious lights believed to be the festive ghosts of World War One soldiers were in fact aliens, a police detective has claimed.

Mysterious lights believed to be the festive ghosts of World War One soldiers were in fact aliens, a police detective has claimed.

The sightings were attributed to a natural phenomenon known as marsh gas or Will O' the Wisps by a local newspaper.

But amateur UFO researcher Richard Rokeby has penned a book, The Lights Upon The Hills, where he claims the witness accounts show they were actually ETs.

The married dad-of-three wrote: "Following the First World War desperate families wanted to believe that there is a hope of communicating with their lost sons again.

"Therefore, it would be natural at this time to assign any strange phenomena to ghosts and spirits.

"But as we will see if we look at these events through modern eyes, it is very clear that what they are witnessing is an historic Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon event."

He told of how several sightings of "multi-coloured" lights moving at speed were reported by the Banbury Guardian in February 1923.

And insisted the paper's explanation was not "credible" as the lights reportedly spooked horses and exerted "downward pressure".

The author wrote: "What we have here is multiple witnesses saying that they saw strange lights in the sky and above the ground moving in ways that modern aircraft find very difficult to do today.

"I firmly believed that what was actually being witnessed here was a mass Unidentified Flying Object ( UFO) or Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAP) event.

"Therefore, over the course of this book I hope to show that what was seen in the winter of 1922-23 was not ghosts or marsh gas, but was in fact a well documented, multi-witnessed, extraterrestrial encounter and that these encounters may have been happening for hundreds years, are still happening today and perhaps a large event is going to occur there again and very soon!"

Top British flying saucer investigator Philip Mantle has published the former Army man's book on the Flying Disk Press.

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

26-12-2020 om 23:11 geschreven door peter  

Planetary Researchers Create Map of Early Mars’ River Systems

Using data from the Context Camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, planetary researchers have generated an 8-trillion-pixel global map of Mars and performed the first systematic global survey of Martian fluvial (river) ridges.

Mars used to be a wet world, as evidenced by rock records of lakes, rivers, and glaciers.

The Martian river ridges were formed between 4 and 3 billion years ago (the Noachian to Hesperian period), when large rivers deposited sediments in their channels, rather than only having the water cut away at the surface.

Over time, sediment built up in the channels; once the water dried up, those ridges were all that was left of some rivers.

The ridges are present only in the southern hemisphere, where some of Mars’ oldest and most rugged terrain is, but this pattern is likely a preservation artifact.

“These ridges probably used to be all over the entire planet, but subsequent processes have buried them or eroded them away,” said lead author Dr. Jay Dickson, a researcher in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at Caltech.

“The northern hemisphere is very smooth because it’s been resurfaced, primarily by lava flows.”

“Additionally, the southern highlands are some of the flattest surfaces in the Solar System,” said co-author Dr. Woodward Fischer, also from the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at Caltech.

“That exceptional flatness made for good sedimentary deposition, allowing the creation of the records being studied today.”

The new map allows planetary researchers to explore questions at global scales, rather than being limited to patchier, localized studies and extrapolating results to the whole hemisphere.

In addition to identifying 18 new fluvial ridges, using the map allowed the team to re-examine features that had previously been identified as fluvial ridges. Upon closer inspection, some weren’t formed by rivers after all, but rather lava flows or glaciers.

“If you only see a small part of a ridge, you might have an idea of how it formed,” Dr. Dickson said.

“But then you see it in a larger context — like, oh, it’s the flank of a volcano, it’s a lava flow.”

“So now we can more confidently determine which are fluvial ridges, versus ridges formed by other processes.”

“Now that we have a global understanding of the distribution of ancient rivers on Mars, future explorations — whether by rover or by astronauts — could use these rock records to investigate what past climates and tectonics were like.”

“One of the biggest breakthroughs in the last twenty years is the recognition that Mars has a sedimentary record, which means we’re not limited to studying the planet today,” Dr. Fischer said.

“We can ask questions about its history.”

“And in doing so, he says, we learn not only about a single planet’s past, but also find truths about how planets evolved… and why the Earth is habitable.”

The team’s results are published in the journal Geology.

• J.L. Dickson et al. The global distribution of depositional rivers on early Mars. Geology, published online December 21, 2020; doi: 10.1130/G48457.1

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{ http://www.sci-news.com/ }

26-12-2020 om 22:56 geschreven door peter  

Massive Tsunami Hit the Neolithic Middle East 9,000+ Years Ago

Study may explain why previous archaeological surveys have found no evidence until the Late Neolithic for low-lying coastal villages at Tel Dor, Israel

The small bays of Israel’s Tel Dor.

Image courtesy of University of Haifa-UC San Diego Carmel Coast Marine Archaeology Expedition.

This wasn’t Noah’s flood. But it was still a catastrophic event that profoundly changed the landscape and could have given rise to legends, too. According to a new study from an international team of researchers, a massive tsunami swept over the coastline near Tel Dor, Israel, sometime between 9,910 and 9,290 years ago.

The date makes it the oldest known paleo tsunami in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, the paper is by Gilad Shtienberg, Richard Norris and Thomas Levy from the University of California San Diego, with colleagues from Utah State University and the University of Haifa. It is part of an ongoing, long-term project between UC San Diego’s Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology (SCMA) and Haifa’s Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies, directed by paper co-author Assaf Yasur-Landau, to investigate how humans have, over the past 12 millennia, adapted to climate and environmental change along Israel’s Carmel Coast.

The researchers discovered evidence for the tsunami by cutting open sediment cores from their coastal study area at the South Bay of Tel Dor. In these samples, they found an abrupt layer of seashells and sand, dated to between 9,910 and 9,290 years ago, in the middle wetland layers deposited 15,000 to 7,800 years ago. The only way that this marine material could have arrived so far inland, or what would have been inland at that time, the authors determined, was through a destructive wave.

They estimate that the wave capable of doing this would have traveled inland between 1.5 to 3.5 kilometers (about 1 to 2 miles) and would have been between 16 and 40 meters (52 to 130 feet) high at the coast.

Tsunamis are not uncommon in the eastern Mediterranean; historical records and geographic data suggest that a tsunami has been occurring about once per century over the past 6,000 years. For comparison, however, previously documented tsunami events have traveled inland only around 300 meters (or about 1,000 feet). In other words, this Neolithic event was significant. The authors suspect a strong earthquake on the Dead Sea Fault System was followed by an underwater landslide.

If there was a village at the site, this tsunami would have devastated it – and destroyed crop lands, pastures and herds, as well as near-shore marine fisheries and resources.

This event, which occurred during the Early to Middle Neolithic cultural periods of the region, might explain why previous archaeological surveys have found no evidence for low-lying coastal villages in that particular area until the late Neolithic, the researchers said. The evidence for earlier settlement may have been wiped out.

“We can’t know for sure why people weren’t living there, in a place otherwise abundant with evidence of early human habitation and the beginnings of village life in the Holy Land,” said Levy, the paper’s senior author, co-director of UC San Diego’s SCMA and an archaeology professor in the university’s Department of Anthropology. “Was the environment too altered to support life? Was the tsunami part of their cultural knowledge – did they tell stories of this destructive event and stay away? We can only imagine.”

By the Late or Pottery Neolithic period, however, archaeological sites along the coast begin to reappear – and coincide with the resumption of wetland deposition in the core samples from Dor, indicating resettlement and highlighting, Levy said, people’s resilience in the face of massive disruption.

One of those rare Pottery Neolithic submerged sites was excavated at the South Bay of Tel Dor by Assaf Yasur-Landau and Levy’s joint University of Haifa-UC San Diego team as part of the PLOS ONE paper.

To conduct their analysis, the authors of this paper used photogrammetric remote sensing techniques to create a digital model of their study area at Tel Dor, combined with underwater excavation and terrestrial borehole drilling. The dating was locked down using a relatively new radiometric dating technique called Optical Stimulated Luminescence, or OSL, in co-author Tammy Rittenour’s Luminescence Laboratory at Utah State University. OSL dates the last time quartz sediment was exposed to light.

“Our project focuses on reconstructing ancient climate and environmental change over the past 12,000 years along the Israeli coast,” said Shtienberg, the paper’s first author and a Koret postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego’s SCMA, who is studying the sediment cores. “We never dreamed of finding evidence of a prehistoric tsunami in Israel.”

In the future, the researchers hope to do more geophysical research in deeper water and send divers down to test their results and perhaps find evidence of earlier settlements.

The research is supported, in part, by funding from the Koret Foundation (Grant ID 19-0295); the Murray Galinson San Diego-Israel Initiative; the Israel Institute (Washington, D.C.); Marian Scheuer-Sofaer and Abraham Sofaer Foundation; Norma and Reuben Kershaw Family Foundation; Ellen Lehman and Charles Kennel - Alan G Lehman and Jane A Lehman Foundation; Paul and Margaret Meyer and the Israel Science Foundation (Grant ID 495/18).

{ https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/ }

26-12-2020 om 22:33 geschreven door peter  

Archaeologists Find Evidence of Neolithic Mega-Tsunami in Israel

A catastrophic tsunami occurred sometimes between 7,910 and 7,290 BCE with an extreme 16 m (52.5 feet) wave height and 1.5-3.5 km (0.93-2.2 mile) run-up on the Carmel coast of Israel, according to new research published in the journal PLoS ONE.

“Tsunami events in antiquity had a profound influence on coastal societies,” said lead author Dr. Gilad Shtienberg from the Department of Anthropology in the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues.

“6,000 years of historical records and geological data show that tsunamis are a common phenomenon affecting the eastern Mediterranean coastline, occurring at a rate of around 8 events per century in the Aegean region over the past 2,000 years and approximately 10 per century over the past 3,000 years in the Levant basin.”

“Most of these events are small and have only local impacts.”

In the study, the researchers found a large paleo-tsunami deposit (between 9,910 to 9,290 years ago) at the archaeological site of Tel Dor in northwest Israel.

“Tel Dor, located along the Carmel coast of northwest Israel, is a maritime city-mound that has been occupied from the Middle Bronze II period (2000 to 1550 BCE) throughout the Roman period (3rd century CE) while Byzantine and Crusader remains are also found on the tel,” they said.

“The local environment of Dor is characterized by a series of unique embayments/pocket beaches that stand out from the linear morphology of the southeastern Mediterranean littoral shore face.”

To conduct their analysis, the scientists used photogrammetric remote sensing techniques to create a digital model of the Tel Dor site, combined with underwater excavation and terrestrial borehole drilling to a depth of 9 m (29.5 feet).

In their samples, they found an abrupt layer of seashells and sand, dated to between 9,910 and 9,290 years ago, in the middle wetland layers deposited 15,000 to 7,800 years ago.

They estimate that the ancient tsunami had a run-up of at least 16 m and traveled between 3.5 to 1.5 km inland from the paleo-coastline.

The near absence of Pre-Pottery Neolithic A-B archaeological sites (11,700-9,800 years ago) suggest these sites were removed by the tsunami, whereas younger, late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B-C (9,250-8,350 years ago) and later Pottery-Neolithic sites (8,250-7,800 years ago) indicate resettlement following the event.

“We can’t know for sure why people weren’t living there, in a place otherwise abundant with evidence of early human habitation and the beginnings of village life in the Holy Land,” said Professor Thomas Levy, a researcher in the Department of Anthropology and the Levant and Cyber-Archaeology Laboratory in the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology at the University of California, San Diego.

“Was the environment too altered to support life? Was the tsunami part of their cultural knowledge — did they tell stories of this destructive event and stay away? We can only imagine.”

“Our project focuses on reconstructing ancient climate and environmental change over the past 12,000 years along the Israeli coast; and we never dreamed of finding evidence of a prehistoric tsunami in Israel,” Dr. Shtienberg said.

“Scholars know that at the beginning of the Neolithic, around 10,000 years ago, the seashore was 4 km (2.5 miles) from where it is today.”

“When we cut the cores open in San Diego and started seeing a marine shell layer embedded in the dry Neolithic landscape, we knew we hit the jackpot.”

_____

G. Shtienberg et al. 2020. A Neolithic mega-tsunami event in the eastern Mediterranean: Prehistoric settlement vulnerability along the Carmel coast, Israel. PLoS ONE 15 (12): e0243619; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0243619

{ http://www.sci-news.com/ }

26-12-2020 om 22:25 geschreven door peter  

Since the dawn of the space age, Mars and the moon have gotten almost all the lander love. Only a handful of spacecraft have landed on Venus, our other nearest neighbor world, and none have touched down on Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter thought to be one of the best places in the solar system to look for present-day life (SN: 5/2/14).

Researchers are working to change that. In several talks at the virtual American Geophysical Union meeting that ran from December 1 to December 17, planetary scientists and engineers discussed new tricks that hypothetical future spacecraft may need to land on unfamiliar terrain on Venus and Europa. The missions are still in a design phase and are not on NASA’s launch schedule, but scientists want to be prepared.

Navigating a Venusian gauntlet

Venus is a notoriously difficult world to visit (SN: 2/13/18). Its searing temperatures and crushing atmospheric pressure have destroyed every spacecraft lucky enough to reach the surface within about two hours of arrival. The last landing was over 30 years ago, despite increasing confidence among planetary scientists that Venus’ surface was once habitable (SN: 8/26/16). That possibility of past, and perhaps current, life on Venus is one reason scientists are anxious to get back (SN: 10/28/20).

In one of the proposed plans discussed at the AGU meeting, scientists have ridged, folded mountainous terrain on Venus called tessera in their sights. “Safely landing in tessera terrain is absolutely necessary to satisfy our science objectives,” said planetary scientist Joshua Knicely of the University of Alaska Fairbanks in a talk recorded for the meeting. “We have to do it.”

Knicely is part of a study led by geologist Martha Gilmore of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., to design a hypothetical mission to Venus that could launch in the 2030s. The mission would include three orbiters, an aerobot to float in the clouds and a lander that could drill and analyze samples of tessera rocks. This terrain is thought to have formed where edges of continents slid over and under each other long ago, bringing new rock up to the surface in what might have been some version of plate tectonics. On Earth, this sort of resurfacing may have been important in making the planet hospitable to life (SN: 4/22/20).

But landing in these areas on Venus could be especially difficult. Unfortunately, the best maps of the planet — from NASA’s Magellan orbiter in the 1990s — can’t tell engineers how steep the slopes are in tessera terrain. Those maps suggest that most are less than 30 degrees, which the lander could handle with four telescoping legs. But some could be up to 60 degrees, leaving the spacecraft vulnerable to toppling over.

“We have a very poor understanding of what the surface is like,” Gilmore said in a talk recorded for the meeting. “What’s the boulder size? What’s the rock size distribution? Is it fluffy?”

So the lander will need some kind of intelligent navigation system to pick out the best places to land and steer there. But that need for steering brings up another problem: Unlike landers on Mars, a Venus lander can’t use small rocket engines to slow down as it descends.

The shape of a rocket is tailored to the density of air that it will push against. That’s why rockets that launch spacecraft from Earth have two sections: one for Earth’s atmosphere and one for the near-vacuum of space. Venus’ atmosphere changes density and pressure so quickly between space and the planet’s surface that “dropping a kilometer would go from the rocket working perfectly, to it’s going to misfire and possibly blow itself apart,” Knicely says.

Instead of rockets, the proposed lander would use fans to push itself around, almost like a submarine, turning the disadvantage of the dense atmosphere into an advantage.

The planet’s atmosphere also presents the biggest challenge of all: seeing the ground. Venus’ dense atmosphere scatters light more than Earth’s or Mars’ does, blurring the view of the surface until the last few kilometers of descent.

Worse, the scattered light makes it seem like illumination is coming from all directions at once, like shining a flashlight into fog. There are no shadows to help show steep slopes or reveal big boulders that the lander could crash into. That’s a major issue, according to Knicely, because all of the existing navigation software assumes that light comes from just one direction.

“If we can’t see the ground, we can’t find out where the safe stuff is,” Knicely says. “And we also can’t find out where the science is.” While proposed solutions to the other challenges of landing on Venus are close to doable, he says, this one remains the biggest hurdle.

Sticking the landing on Europa

Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, on the other hand, has no air to blur the surface or break rockets. A hypothetical future Europa lander, also discussed at the AGU meeting, would be able to use the “sky crane” technique (SN: 8/6/12). That method, in which a platform hovers above the surface using rockets and drops a spacecraft to the ground, was used to land the Curiosity rover on Mars in 2012 and will be used for the Perseverance lander in February 2021.

“The engineers are very excited about not having to deal with an atmosphere on the way down,” said spacecraft engineer Jo Pitesky of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in a recorded talk for the meeting.

Still, there’s a lot that scientists don’t know about Europa’s surface, which could have implications for any lander that touches down, said planetary scientist Marissa Cameron of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in another talk.

The best views of the moon’s landscape are from the Galileo orbiter in the 1990s, and the smallest features it could see were half a kilometer across. Some scientists have suggested that Europa could sport jagged ice spikes called penitentes, similar to ice features in the Chilean Andes Mountains that are named for their resemblance to hooded monks with bowed heads — although more recent work shows Europa’s lack of atmosphere should keep penitentes from forming.

Another mission, the Europa Clipper, that’s already underway will take higher-resolution images when the orbiter visits the Jovian moon later this decade, which should help clarify the issue.

In the meantime, scientists and engineers are running elaborate dress rehearsals for a Europa landing, from simulating ices with different chemical compositions in vacuum chambers to dropping a dummy lander named Olaf from a crane to see how it holds up.

“We have a requirement that says the terrain can have any configuration — jagged, potholes, you name it — and we have to be able to conform to that surface and be stable at it,” says John Gallon, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (The dummy lander was named for his 4-year-old daughter’s favorite character in the movie Frozen.)

Over the last two years, Gallon and colleagues have tested different lander feet, legs and configurations in a lab by suspending the lander from the ceiling like a marionette. That suspension helps simulate Europa’s gravity, which is one-seventh that of Earth’s.

Without much gravity, a massive lander could easily bounce around and damage itself when trying to land. “You’re not going to stick the landing like a gymnast coming off the bars,” Gallon says. His team has tried sticky feet, bowl-shaped feet, springs that compress and push into the surface and legs that lock to help the lander stay put on various terrains. The lander might crouch like a frog or stand stiff like a table, depending on what type of surface it lands on.

Although Olaf is hard at work helping scientists figure out what it will take to build a successful Europa lander, the mission itself, like its Venusian counterpart, remains only on some planetary scientists’ wish lists for now. Meanwhile, other researchers dream about voyages to entirely different worlds, including Saturn’s geyser moon Enceladus.

“Some people will pick favorites,” Cameron says. “I just want to land someplace we’ve never been to that’s not Mars. I’d love that.”

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

26-12-2020 om 20:45 geschreven door peter  

Discoveries about the cosmos and ancient life on Earth tantalized scientists and the public in 2020. But these big claims require more evidence before they can earn a spot in science textbooks.

1. Cloudy with a chance of life

The scorching hellscape next door may be a place to look for life. Telescopes trained on Venus’ clouds spotted traces of phosphine in quantities that suggest something must be actively producing the gas (SN: 9/14/20). On Earth, phosphine is emitted by certain bacteria or industrial processes, leading some astrobiologists to speculate that microbes may be living in Venus’ relatively temperate upper atmosphere. But other research teams’ analyses suggest the phosphine detection was a misread — perhaps the result of a fluke in data processing (SN: 10/28/20).

2. Flashback

For the first time, astronomers may have glimpsed a fast radio burst in the Milky Way. Even more intriguing, the source of the super-bright boost of radio waves appears to be a magnetar — a type of neutron star with an intense magnetic field (SN: 6/4/20). But it’s too soon to claim that magnetars caused any of the dozens of previously detected fast radio bursts, as those flashes came from galaxies too far away to trace the bursts back to a source.

3. Totally tubular

Tubes stuck to the outer shells of hundreds of fossilized brachiopods discovered in an outcropping in China may have housed the earliest-known parasites. The clamlike brachiopods lived about 512 million years ago. Researchers speculate that organisms living inside the tubes swiped food from their filter-feeding hosts (SN: 6/2/20). That the tubes were never found alone or on other fossils in the outcropping suggests that the organisms could not survive on their own. But some critics question whether the relationship was truly parasitic, given that the tubed-up brachiopods didn’t seem any worse off than their tube-free counterparts.

4. Found: ordinary matter

Only about half of the universe’s expected amount of ordinary matter has ever been cataloged. But this year, astronomers claimed that the other half is hiding out in intergalactic space (SN: 5/27/20). That conclusion is based on an analysis of how a small sample of fast radio bursts from other galaxies were distorted by particles on the way to Earth. Before the case of the missing matter can be closed, though, more of these bright blasts of radio waves need to be examined.

5. Start your cosmic engines

A ghostly subatomic particle may have been revved up by a star’s destructive encounter with a black hole. Sensed by the IceCube detector in Antarctica, the neutrino carried 200 trillion electron volts — about 30 times as much energy as that of a proton accelerated by the Large Hadron Collider. Scientists matched the neutrino detection to a flash of light in the sky caused by a black hole shredding a star. The probability of the neutrino and the flash coinciding by chance is just 0.2 percent. If the finding holds up, it would be only the second time a high-energy neutrino has been traced to its source, and the first direct evidence that shredding a star can accelerate neutrinos to high energies (SN: 5/26/20).

6. On the move

The long-running debate over when humans first traveled to and from the Americas rages on. One group of researchers reported that people arrived to North America more than 15,000 years earlier than generally thought, based on the discovery of roughly 33,000-year-old stone tools unearthed in Mexico (SN: 7/22/20). Some archaeologists, however, doubt that the artifacts are even stone tools and say they instead are just naturally broken rocks.

Another research group reported that Indigenous South Americans crossed thousands of kilometers of open ocean and reached eastern Polynesia more than 800 years ago, not long after settlers from Asia initially colonized the islands (SN: 7/8/20). That conclusion rests on genetic evidence suggesting the intrepid South Americans mated with ancient Polynesians. But some anthropologists question whether early South American groups had the equipment or seafaring skills necessary for the journey. Ancient Polynesians, who were expert navigators, may have traveled to South America, bringing new DNA with them on a return trip home.

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

26-12-2020 om 20:26 geschreven door peter  

Extraterrestrial evidence: 10 incredible findings about aliens from 2020

26-12-2020 om 20:01 geschreven door peter  

Microplastics revealed in the placentas of unborn babies

Health impact is unknown but scientists say particles may cause long-term damage to foetuses

Damian Carrington Environment editor *  @dpcarrington

{ https://www.theguardian.com/international }

26-12-2020 om 18:23 geschreven door peter  

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

26-12-2020 om 18:06 geschreven door peter  

Alien Face Found On Mars Almost Looks Human, Why Is NASA Missing These Things? Photos, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: Dec 25, 2020
Location of discovery: Mars
Source photo: 

• http://www.gigapan.com/galleries/13476/gigapans/192393

I found an alien face and it is important, more important than any other discoveries you can make on Mars. But is it life? Is it fungus? Is it a plant? Is it an animal? No...but NASA has never shown you such things either, but if you have been watching me over the last 15 years...you would already know that I have reported most of those already. A face is a sculpture of the ancient species that once walked this planet...that once owned this planet we call Mars. They lived, concurred and died on this planet. A cycle that we humans are also following. Criticize this face as being ugly, a rock a figment of my imagination, but know this...its fate and yours...is the same in the end. Nothing in the universe can change that. So, lets focus on the positive shall we? We now know the facial appearance of this alien species. Something 30 seconds ago you never knew existed. In just 30 seconds...I changed your whole perspective on life. Imagine what I could do with a full hour. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

 

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

26-12-2020 om 17:42 geschreven door peter  

Tower Found On Earths Moon 2.5km Tall, A Testament To Alien Intelligence On Our Moon! NASA Source! Photos, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: Dec 25, 2020
Location of discovery: Earths Moon

Source photo:

• http://ser.sese.asu.edu/LO/lo5-125-h2a.tif

I found a tower in this old Lunar Orbiter photo today. The tower is about 2.5 km tall. Its probably gone unnoticed so long because it sits on a crater edge in the shadows. The bottom base has six legs supporting it, but only four are viable at this angle. Defiantly proof that a species far more advanced than our own lives on the moon right now.  This is why we don't go back and never will. Its occupied and they don't want us inferior species messing up their society and culture. Humans...we do what we want, how we want. It seems futile to aliens to try to change us. 

 

I also found a lot of other things, but will only report a few below. Most people wont have the experience or practice at seeing these things...but any university student in the art department would pick them out without trouble. Or...test yourself, can you see below what I saw? Or...do you see nothing? Its not luck, not a gift, not a curse, just good old practice at my passion. I'm sure your passion is something I probably don't get too. Why am I so good at it? Because I don't require others approval of my discoveries. I already know...without doubt what they are, who possibly has my experience about this that I could possible need their approval? No one exists with such experience. Just me...and I approve. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan

Huge Black structure in below photo. 

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

26-12-2020 om 17:37 geschreven door peter  

This day in UFO history: The 1980 UFO Landings In Rendlesham Forest

England holds one of the most compelling UFO landing accounts. In late December 1980, invasion of unidentified flying objects over a period of several nights took place in the joint air bases of Bentwaters and Woodbridge, situated within the vast Rendlesham Forest in late December.

Description of alien beings added to the controversial stories of the twin air bases. The hype took into another level with anomalous radar readings, electromagnetic effects, and surrealistic atmospheric conditions. Professionals, deemed to be credible, have been coming forward revealing their knowledge of the real alien event on the Bentwaters and Woodbridge Air Force Bases.

Uncorrelated object showed on the radar screens at RAF in Norfolk shortly after midnight on December 27, 1980. The thing then suddenly vanished in the area of the Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk. Bentwaters RAF radar also picked up the object.

The bases were allegedly housed a large stockpile of nuclear weapons, and the Woodbridge was the base of the 67th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron.

The radar operator that night, Mal Scurrah, said that they did not have any idea of what they captured on their radar. They checked the air traffic agencies and found out that there should have been nothing in the vicinity at the time. They sent a jet aircraft to investigate, and the pilot reported seeing a dazzling light in the sky in front of them after getting within about a quarter of a mile.

They saw on radar the object was stationary and it moved off in seconds. In just five minutes the UFO reached 90,000 feet and higher, and they had lost it in the radar scope.

The Woodbridge/Bentwaters started their extraordinary events with the sighting of a massive glowing object by three security guards of the twin bases. They followed the lights into the forest with initial thought that it was a commercial or military aircraft that crash landed.

The patrol was stunned to see a saucer-like craft with small beings with large heads suspended by a type of beam from the bottom of the craft. The beings reportedly performing a repair to their craft unaware of the three men watching their activities.

The guards radioed the base headquarters and requested emergency help. Assistance reportedly arrived headed by senior officers of the base. Later, there would be off record reports that they encountered strange anomalies, such as reality-bending, time displacement, and surreal atmospheric conditions.

Some of the senior officers allegedly communicated with the alien beings.

Called out on the second night of the sightings was then the now famous Colonel Halt. The group of Colonel Halt was reportedly one of the groups to chase the glowing UFO in the forest. He made an audio recording of the details of his trek into the woods.

Patrolmen Jim Penniston, John Burroughs, and Larry Warren later co-wrote a book about the incident, titled Left at East Gate.

Other men who were present during the encounter later revealed that there was an underground theater where soldiers were interrogated, sworn to secrecy and threatened. They also revealed that they were shown several films featuring UFO recoveries around the world. It was also reported that an alien being was there in one of the meetings.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

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

26-12-2020 om 16:59 geschreven door peter  

Credit: Gabriel on Unsplash

• Small objects such as asteroids get trapped for a time in Earth orbit, becoming "minimoons."

• Minimoons are typically asteroids, but this one is something else.

• The new minimoon may be part of an old rocket from the 1960s.

From time to time, asteroids whizzing past Earth get trapped by our gravitational pull, falling into orbit around the planet. These rocks only stay for a while, eventually escaping and continuing on their journey to who-knows-where. While they're here, they're considered "minimoons."

Astronomers have detected an object that's likely to become our next minimoon. But it's either not an asteroid or it's an odd one. Really, scientists suspect it's man-made tech returning home after many years out in cold, lonely space.

Minimoons

Scientists have confirmed just two prior minimoons. One was 2006 RH120, which orbited us from September 2006 to June 2007. The other was 2020 CD3, which got stuck in the 2015–2016 timeframe, and is believed to gotten away in May 2020.

2020 SO, the new kid on the block, is expected to arrive in October 2020 and pop out of orbit in May 2021.

Identifying 2020 SO

The first clue 2020 SO isn't your ordinary asteroid is its exceptionally low velocity. It's traveling much more slowly that a typical asteroid — their average rate of travel is 18 kilometers (58,000 feet) per second. Even moon rocks sent careening into Earth orbit by impacts on the lunar surface outpace pokey 2020 SO.

For another thing, 2020 SO has an orbital path very similar to Earth's, lasting about one Earth year. It's also just slightly less circular than our own orbit, from which it's barely tilted off-axis.

So, what is it? NASA estimates that the object has dimensions very reminiscent of a discarded Centaur rocket stage from the Surveyor 2 mission that landed an unmanned craft on the moon. Back in the day, rocket stages were jettisoned as craft were aimed toward their desired position. This stuff, if released high enough, remains in space. It appears that this Centaur rocket, launched in September 1966, is now making its way back homeward, at least for a little bit.

When 2020 SO arrives at its closest point in December, the rocket is expected to be about 50,000 kilometers from Earth. Its next closest approach is much further: 220,000 kilometers, in February 2021.

Centaur rocket stage

Credit: NASA/Wikimedia

What we may be able to learn

Earthly space programs being as young as they are, scientists would love to know what's happened to our rocket during a half century in space.

While 2020 SO won't get close enough to drop into our atmosphere, its slow progress has scientists hopeful that they'll still get some kind of a decent look at it.

Spectroscopy may be able to reveal what the rocket's surface is like now — has any of its paint survived, for example? Of course, being out in space, it's likely to have been hit by lots of dust and micrometeorites, so the current state of its surfaces is also of interest. Experts are curious to know how reflective the rocket is at this point, valuable information that can help planners of future long-term missions anticipate how well a craft out in space for extended periods will remain able to reflect sunlight.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://bigthink.com/ }

25-12-2020 om 23:52 geschreven door peter