Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 11 MONTHS.
ON 06/05/2024 MORE THAN 1.972.210
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
26-01-2021
Camera Captures a Long-White Object Streaking Over the Californian Sky
Camera Captures a Long-White Object Streaking Over the Californian Sky
A video sparked intrigue and debate after a UFO enthusiast shared it online, showing an unidentified flying object streaking across California’s sky.
YouTube username Donald Sanders has uploaded a 40-second clip taken from what looks like a home security camera.
The camera appears to point outwards from a porch with a good view of the street and the sky.
On January 12, Tuesday, the camera caught a long object passing overhead, leaving many UFO believers convinced that it was an alien spacecraft.
The footage shows the dark sky with the glow of light pollution lighting up the screen’s left portion.
Stop-motion footage shows a cigar-shaped white object suddenly appears out of the lit area of the dark sky. The long object quickly disappears just above the eye-view above a palm tree.
A couple of seconds later, the object reappears in the same spot before streaking off across the sky and out of sight.
The object appears to have three lights, one at either end of the shape and a third in the center.
Mr Sanders captioned the clip online as: “Weird UFO.”
According to Bay News 9, California posts 10,015 UFO sighting reports, the highest in the USA.
Filer’s Files 4 2021 - Aliens Live Under the Sea - PART I
Tampa, Florida disk captured on January 17, 2021
Filer’s Files 4 2021 - Aliens Live Under the Sea - PART I
Major George A. Filer III ret. USAF
New Jersey State Director
MUFON Eastern Region Director
In special reports, this week’s files cover: Tehran, Iran 1976 UFO Intercept, Under Ocean UFOs (USOs), Iranian ICBMS: Israel and US Military in Range, Israel May Attack Iran’s Nuclear Facilities. New Media Propaganda Calls for Deprogramming Trump Supporters; Nostradamus Predicts a Rough Year in 2021, Space Force Letter, and Carbon 60.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Teas, and Washington.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Argentina, France, Mexico, Northern Ireland, and England in the United Kingdom.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFO’s are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
Special Projects
Tehran, Iran 1976 UFO Intercept
Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, has some interesting quotes from both of Shah of Iran and the F-4 pilot who tried to shoot down the UFO.
Leslie Kean´s book on UFOs has a short chapter written by Jafari who was carrying 8 missiles: 4 x heat-seeking and 4 x radar. No mention of Vulcan cannon. He goes back to base quickly from home as he is the Squadron CO. He is quickly in the air and his plane weapons load-out indicates that Northern Iran was a front-line air defense identification zone hotspot.
Unlike the debunkers´ theories who claim ineptness in radar operation, he orders his weapons officer back seater to break radar lock on the object and re-paint it, to insure they are not picking up ground effect or a mountain. He says he selected and tries to fire a Sidewinder when he loses weapons panel, all instruments and communications. He is freaked out but does not lose his nerve at any moment.
At base USAF Colonel Mooy tells him “he is lucky he could not fire”…They have blood tests, both aircraft checked for radiation and a battery of questions for the crews over a period by Iranian scientists writing a scientific report.
The Shah visits the base: “When the base commander told the Shah that I was the pilot who had chased the UFO, the shah asked me, “What do you think about it?” I answered, “In my opinion they cannot be from our planet, because if anyone on this planet had such power, he would bring the whole planet under his own command.”He simply said, “Yes,” and told us this was not the first report he had received.”
Above worth a look: experienced U.S. military pilots fly a simulator (in aircraft) to evaluate Jafari´s claims.
This debunker make a number of claims of radar ineptitude, lack of experience night flying, Jupiter and U.S. contractors who they say stated that Jafari´s F4 was notorious for systems malfunctions and the maintenance shoddy. The same thing happened to two craft.
Still trying to find a bio for Jafari but a number of points: this was a high-speed frontline area; you do not get to fly top-notch interceptors with live warheads without being very competent; the IIAF received a lot of training and support from U.S. Iran´s pilots and their operational commanders in the Iran-Iraq war pulled off some daring and cunning complex ops against the Iraqis, despite the chaos of the revolution, purges and initial Iraqi successes. They did very well all things considered. Jafari is a general who went on the record and is not the only witness. I have to come down on his side against the debunkers. How would Jupiter be flying around his aircraft when he is at Mach etc??? Easy to debunk when you were not there. Plus all the official U.S. and Iranian interest in the fascinating case.
So my question is, if Jafari and apparently the Shah, do not believe the craft are terrestrial, then why have humans not been dominated by an ET species – that is – if we accept the possibility of the extraterrestrial hypothesis – whether these are space-faring humans from far away in time and / or space / intra-dimensional etc, or other species?
Lt Pirouzi also attempted to intercept the UFO and could not fire his weapons.
If one looks at the ETH, then judging by human behavior, which is the subjugation of the tech inferior by the tech superior, there are only a couple of valid theories as to why we have not been dominated / defeated yet.
ETs or “others” do not have hostile intent – but tell that to the hundreds of Western and probably Russian and Chinese and other pilots who have lost their lives in UFO encounters, plus the highly suspicious link between UFOs and nukes.
ETs or “others” are steadily infiltrating human societies as per Prof David Jacob´s “They Walk among Us” theories, because while they have the tech to defeat earth militaries, they want the planet, resources and population for their use; not killed or destroyed.
ETs or “others” know or believe that terrestrial earth militaries have an effective means of defense.
There is some ET balance of power, i.e., more than one ET race in play, who balance each other out and/or have alliances with terrestrial powers to prevent one side having an absolute advantage as to be able to physically take over the earth. We are already living in an ET-dominated scenario – we just do not know it – like the humans in The Matrix.
Editor’s Note: I briefed the 21st Air Force general staff that morning about the confidential UFO incident. Allegedly the incident was imaged on our satellites and the generals were very interested in the inability of the Sidewinder missiles s to fire. Later the F-4 weapons system was checked out and was functioning properly. I also flew with Iranian pilots and they seemed as competent as ours at the time before the Islamic Revolution of 1979 placed clergy in positions of power.
Under Ocean UFOs (USOs)
F-18s chase Craft that came out of the Ocean
Former U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor was a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Fravor, who was the subject of a New York Times article about his 2004 UFO sighting, discussed a spooky new sighting a fellow pilot revealed to him after they were both out of the Navy.
According to Fravor, the eyewitness was a former pilot of the MH-53E Sea Dragon, the Navy version of the Marine Corps’ CH-53E Sea Stallion, based at Naval Station Roosevelt Roads, on the island of Puerto Rico. Twice while recovering spent practice munitions out of the water, the pilot spotted a weird underwater object.
In the first incident, the pilot saw a “dark mass” underwater as he and his team retrieved a flying practice drone. The pilot described the object as a “big” mass, “kinda circular,” and he was certain it wasn’t a submarine. In the pilot’s second sighting, a practice torpedo that the pilot was sent to recover was “sucked down” into the depths of the ocean in the presence of a similar underwater object. The torpedo was never seen again.
Elsewhere in the interview, Fravor reveals that a 79-year-old woman contacted him after his sighting went public. The woman explained that her father, a naval officer, was at one time based at the naval station in San Francisco in the 1950s. When she was a child, her father showed her a telegram that stated unidentified objects had been sighted going in and out of the water at a now forgotten set of latitude and longitude coordinates. The woman’s father told her, “We get these all the time, and it’s always in the same area.”
A BQM-174 high performance target drone similar to that recovered according to retired U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor.
DAN KITWOOD GETTY IMAGES
These sightings are similar to Fravor’s own sighting. According to the retired Navy pilot, the only reason he had seen the now-infamous “Tic Tac” UFO was because it was hovering above a mysterious larger object that was sighted underwater. Fravor describes the object as cross shaped and approximately the size of a Boeing 737 jetliner. He has further described the water above it as though it were “boiling” or “frothing,” and said the object disappeared after it caught his attention.
United Airlines 737-924 airliner.
ICON SPORTS WIREGETTY IMAGES
In 1970, biologist Ivan Sanderson published the book “Invisible Residents._ Sanderson, a noted student of unusual phenomena, devoted the book to sightings of what were later called Unidentified Submerged Objects, or USOs. USOs are defined as unknown craft that are sighted in the water, sighted rising up out of the water, or diving into the water. Sanderson catalogued scores of reports of USOs:
On the 19th of April, 1957, crew members aboard the Kitsukawa Maru, a Japanese fishing boat, spotted two metallic silvery objects descending from the sky into the sea (original emphasis). The objects, estimated to be ten meters long, were without wings of any kind. As the hit the water, they created a violent turbulence. The exact location was reported as 31° 15’ N and 143° 30’ E.
Sanderson also reports an incident that reportedly took place off the coast of Puerto Rico in 1963 during an anti-submarine warfare exercise.
This book is a groundbreaking contribution to the study of the UFO enigma, originally published over 30 years ago. In this book, Sanderson, a renowned zoologist with a keen interest in the paranormal, puts forward the curious theory that an OINTS”-Other Intelligences-live under the Earth’s oceans.
This underwater, parallel, civilization may be twice as old as Homo sapiens, he proposes, and may have an overdeveloped what we call space flight.” Sanderson postulates that the OINTS are behind many UFO sightings as well as the mysterious disappearances of aircraft and ships in the Bermuda Triangle. What better place to have an impenetrable base than deep within the oceans of the planet? Yet, if UFOs, or at least some of them, are coming from beneath our oceans or lakes, does it necessarily mean that there is another civilization besides our own that is responsible? In fact, could it be that since WWII a number of underwater UFO bases have been constructed by the very human governments of our planet? Whatever their source, Sanderson offers here an e exhaustive study of USOs (Unidentified Submarine Objects) observed in nearly every part of the world. He presents many well-documented and exciting case studies of these unusual sightings.
OINTS”-Other Intelligences-live under the Earth’s oceans
Stories of mermaids and mermen have continued for thousands years. Sources say a “list” of possible prosaic explanations for these mysterious airborne encounters was provided. However, the report expressly stated that the potential for UAP (UFO) to be “alien” or “non-human” or undersea technology
All sources interviewed confirmed that the Task Force issued an updated second UAP position report later in the summer of this year. Like the first, officials say this recent intelligence report was very widely distributed and shared amongst the Intelligence Community.
Cube shaped UFO (UAP) comes out of in Atlantic Ocean
“It went viral,” said one intelligence official who had read the report. It’s possible the object may be a GPS dropsonde, a sensor on a parachute that provides info on the vertical profile of a storm. But as McMillan points out (and confirms with an atmospheric researcher), the actual dropsonde doesn’t appear in the photo—just the potential square-cone parachute. And there would obviously have to be an aircraft above the object to drop it, and no such craft is visible in the image. A military pilot reportedly encountered the object while flying over the Atlantic Ocean on the East Coast of the U.S. in 2018 and captured it with their personal cell phone. It’s likely that a backseat weapons system operator on an F/A-18F Super Hornet took the photo of the object, which McMillan calls “inverted” and “bell-shaped,” and describes it having “ridges or other protrusions along its lateral edges, extending toward its base.”
The launch of a ballistic missile from under water
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) held a two-day drill named Great Prophet 15 which culminated on Saturday with the launching of two anti-warship ballistic missiles at a simulated target in the northern Indian Ocean.
According to Iranian media reports, the missiles fired from central Iran successfully hit a target at a distance of 1,120 miles, putting Israeli and US military targets in range. The US frequently has carrier strike groups in the region to ensure safe and free shipping through the vital Strait of Hormuz.
“Long-range missiles for maritime targets indicates that if the enemies … show any ill will towards our national interests, maritime trade routes or territory, they will be targeted and destroyed by our missiles,”
Iran Nuclear Facilities
Armed forces chief of staff Major General Mohammad Bagheri as saying. “This is Iran’s third military exercise in less than two weeks after a naval exercise in the Gulf of Oman on Wednesday and Thursday, and an army drone drill on January 5-6, 2021. Last week’s drill included a bomb-carrying drone attack on a missile defense system followed by the launch of a barrage of “new generation” surface-to-surface Zolfaghar and Dezful solid-fuel ballistic missiles.”
Biden Team Holding Secretive Talks with Iran to Return to Nuclear Deal
Officials in the incoming Biden administration have already engaged in talks with Iran regarding a return to the 2015 nuclear accord, and have updated Israel on those discussions, Israel’s Channel 12 News reported on Saturday.
The station offered no sourcing for the report, and didn’t provide details on the content that was allegedly discussed.
US President Joe Biden has expressed his desire to return to the deal, while Jerusalem is advocating that any return to the deal must include new restrictions on Iran’s ballistic missile program that allegedly can now hit Israel’s well as its support for terrorism and destabilization worldwide.
On Wednesday, the Walla News site reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is putting together a team to strategize for a round of initial talks with the Biden administration regarding Tehran’s nuclear program.
Israel will likely attempt to destroy Iranian facilities when they feel Iran is ready to load a nuclear weapon on a long range missile? Netanyahu trusted Trump but it is doubtful they trust Biden after Obama gave Iran billions of dollars cash enough to buy the latest Rumanian Air Defense System.
S300 Russian Air Defense Weapons
US President Joe Biden is anticipated to assume a more appeasing approach to Iran than did the Trump cabinet and has said that if Tehran returns to the terms of the 2015 nuclear agreement, the US would also rejoin, nullifying the tight economic sanctions that have devastated Iran’s economy for the past two years.
Israel May Attack Iran’s Nuclear Facilities
The British Sunday Times reported, “Israeli Air Force pilots have completed their mission training and fighter jets have been prepared for an Israeli attack on Iran. The article reported that “the elite Hammers Squadron, the 69 Strategic Defense Squadron stationed at “Hatzerim Air Base, will likely lead the attack. The F-15’s are equipped with weapons that will be tested in combat for the first time, and that two missile submarines were on standby: one in the Persian Gulf and the second in Haifa Bay. A few years ago, The Israeli Air Force flew a formation of fighter bombers over Tehran on a practice mission. Iran failed to fire a shot at the invading Israeli formation and the head of Iran’s Air defenses was fired and some updates were made.
In 1981, the Israeli Air Force destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor Osirak but unlike Iraq’snuclear reactor Iran’snuclear facilities are scattered and hardened under deep rock and concrete and dispersed at some 40 underground sites. The Times also said that special Israeli Defense Forces would also be helicoptered into Iran to take out targets that could not be destroyed in an air strike. Covert action by the Mossad is also possible. The day Iran gets a nuclear weapon; Israel will have no choice but to attack. Watch the UFO reports because they tend to flock to the world’s trouble spots. British Sunday Times
The New Media Propaganda Calls for Deprogramming Trump Supporters;
Democrats, members of the mainstream media and Big Tech are elevating their rhetoric about their political opponents to alarming heights, Sean Hannity said Monday. “This kind of rhetoric is now commonplace on the left,” Hannity said “[Robinson] wondered [on MSNBC] how mostly White, mostly Republican voters, how do we deprogram them? Into what? Little socialists like you? The News media lies and exaggerates so I refuse to buy anything they advertise.?
Drug overdose deaths far outpace COVID-19 deaths in San Francisco
Drug deader caught with 2 Kilos
SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco Chronicle reporteda record 621 people died of drug overdoses in San Francisco so far this year, a staggering number that far outpaces the 173 deaths from COVID-19 the city has seen thus far.
The crisis fueled by the powerful painkiller fentanyl could have been far worse if it wasn’t for the nearly 3,000 times Narcan was used from January to the beginning of November to save someone from the brink of death, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday. San Francisco just completed its 30th year as a sanctuary city, with policies prohibiting local authorities from cooperating with ICE officials who attempt to arrest the drug managers.But illegal immigrants and their political allies keep the flow of drugs into the city at a high rate since the police are told not to arrest the drug dealers. Those on drugs often have to steal, rob and even kill to buy the drugs. Expect a 100,000 drug deaths this year as the drug trade will flourish.
26,000 Troops have to Sleep on Cement Floors in D.C.
For almost a week the new Democratic unity has 26,00 National Guard troops sleeping together on the cold cement floors of parking garages.
Capitol Hill, members of the National Guard could be seen huddled in groups; trying to get some sleep on the floor of our capital’s parking garages in freezing temperatures. For unity the building of the border wall has been stopped the borders are now open to new disease and drug smuggling and criminals will no longer be sent back to their home country. Few if any bathrooms can be found. One soldier was nearly hit by a car.
The 26,000 National Guard presences was aimed at maintaining security for the one thousand people attending the presidential inauguration using more soldiers to guard Washington D.C. had more than President Lincoln used to guard the city during the Civil War.
Lawmakers were expected to start the trial for impeachment effort against outgoing President Donald Trump.
The 128 page Democratic Party’s Manifesto is very similar to the1936 Soviet Constitution that allowed Joseph Stalin to rule Communist Russia with an Iron Hand.We Pray for the he Lives Lost to the Corona Virus and for the...
Nostradamus Predicts a Rough Year in 2021
Nostradamus is the world’s most famous prophet and presumed mystic who predicted a worldwide Plague in 2020. He predicted 2020 marks a sacred moment, favorable and, at the same time, dangerous in the history of mankind, meant to bring both disasters and revelations.
2021 Predictions of Michel De Nostradamus
Getty Images
For 2021 Nostradamus predicts a major earthquake will hit the area between California, USA, and Vancouver, Canada. The Europeans and Americans will face the immigrant issue, and the terrorist attacks will be increasingly high
World-ending asteroids, zombies and ruinous famine are on deck for 2021, according to French philosopher Michel de Nostradamus, whose track record for predicting the future has been freakishly accurate.
Nostradamus, who died in 1566, has famously prophesied calamitous events through his “Les Prophéties,” a collection of poetic quatrains. The Renaissance-era seer alluded to such events as the French Revolution, the development of the atomic bomb and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
He foresaw a 2021 has an even more destructive than last year when millions died from biological warfare.
In his writings, he mentions “Few young people: half-dead to give a start.” “Fathers and mothers dead of infinite sorrows / Women in mourning, the pestilent she−monster: / The Great One to be no more, all the world to end,” the philosopher went on, ominously.
Nostradamus also appears to allude to the corona virus pandemic of 2020 — but writes that the following year will be even more destructive, perhaps bringing famine to the world. Already, the pandemic has resulted in millions of Americans heading to food banks for the first time. And the UN has warned that food insecurity will be an even bigger problem in 2021.
Nostradamus wrote. “The Great Mover renews the ages: / Rain, blood, famine, steel, and plague, / is the heavens fire seen, a long spark running.”
Editors Note: Nostradamus trail of sparks could be referring to missiles. Others are predicting Washington D.C. is nit by a large bomb or missile.
Letter from D Jackson on Space Force
I had sent a previous message, but had to end it at the point that I did, for concerns over “too much text” in a particular sending. While reading through one of the little “sub-articles” found on the NUFOC website link from my most recent “Filer’s Files”, I found within the January18, 1978 Ft. Dix/McGuire AFB “alien shooting” incident article mention towards the main witness having been in the same career field within the Air Force that I had myself, and it sort of struck a cord with me when reading about his fears of being “Court Marshaled” under UCMJ if he divulged information to anyone about the event. I can remember my time in the Air Force having plenty of time hanging around what we called CSC (Central Security Control), our version of the “Police Station”/motor pool/armory, reading through the thick book of USAF UCMJ Regulations that we had there, to kill spare time. Having been an officer in the Air Force yourself, you are likely quite familiar with such, as well as the fact that each branch of the military has its own UCMJ coded regulations, and likely extends in various versions over the Coast Guard, FBI, CIA, DHS, etc. Anyway, I can remember encountering multiple coded regulations within the Air Force version specifically prohibiting its individual members from relaying ANY unauthorized release/discussion of sighting/encounter information with “outside sources”, to include subjects of UFOs/aliens/evidence, and I think also dealing with prohibiting the withholding of information/evidence from superiors concerning such as contacts/physical evidence/descriptions/observations, etc. I think there is even prohibition of conversation contact with an alien.
Space Force photo of large Ship
With all of that in mind, I think it becomes obvious that the 2017 Navy UFO encounter releases represents a “controlled release” of information, likely to justify the soon-to-follow “formation” of the new U.S. Space Command. If the “powers that be” are coming clean about the existence of UFOs, then why did they use basically “generic” UFO sighting information, instead of including such things as reputed crash/recoveries, alien body recoveries, back-engineering efforts, etc.? I have a feeling, that the reason includes, after the successful public justification/launch of the Space Command, the UFO subject has been returned to a “need to know” basis, outside of those “powers that be”. The continued existence of those afore-mentioned UCMJ regulations “encourages” branch members from divulging true “information”. Being fairly high up in the MUFON echelon as US Eastern Section Director, perhaps you could determine to speak with whatever MUFON “political people” the organization has, about a concentrated drive to get those annoying regulations officially stricken/repealed, even if through Presidential decree.
I would hope that MUFON is beginning some very in-depth research/observation of the new Space Command, in areas of Statement of Mission, recruitment qualifications, funding, available equipment/technologies in network, etc. Might be interesting just to find out how much of a “Top Secret/Eyes Only” wall that may be encountered. I had better let you go, again! Take care! Thanks to Jackson
Strange Craft
The True Story of Major George Filer an Air Force Intelligence Officer and flyer’s Life with UFOs.
Filer belongs to the generation of pilots and airmen who first became aware of the strange aircraft showing up in the Earth’s atmosphere. These men – military professionals began to whisper amongst themselves about encounters with suspected extraterrestrial aircraft.
Award-winning investigative reporter John Guerra spent four years interviewing Filer, a decorated intelligence officer.
Filer’s most memorable case – the shooting of an alien at Fort Dix Army Base/ McGuire AFB in 1978 – is fully recounted. UFO information, for the first time, after decades of denying what its intelligence officers, pilots, and air traffic control personnel know to be true, the military finally admitted to what Filer describes in this incredible book. By John L. Guerra (Author) click on this link: https://amzn.to/2SmCKMy
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:FILER FILES - overzicht met foto's met dank aan Georges Filer en WWW.nationalUFOCenter.com (ENG)
Filer’s Files 4 2021 - Aliens Live Under the Sea - PART II
Tampa, Florida disk captured on January 17, 2021
Filer’s Files 4 2021 - Aliens Live Under the Sea - PART II
Major George A. Filer III ret. USAF
New Jersey State Director
MUFON Eastern Region Director
In special reports, this week’s files cover: Tehran, Iran 1976 UFO Intercept, Under Ocean UFOs (USOs), Iranian ICBMS: Israel and US Military in Range, Israel May Attack Iran’s Nuclear Facilities. New Media Propaganda Calls for Deprogramming Trump Supporters; Nostradamus Predicts a Rough Year in 2021, Space Force Letter, and Carbon 60.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Teas, and Washington.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sightings were reported over Argentina, France, Mexico, Northern Ireland, and England in the United Kingdom.
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFO’s are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
Forward these files to your friends and neighbors.
UFO Sightings in the United States
Sightings are from MUFON CMS
Arizona Light
Grand Canyon – on January 6, 2021, I have photos with several strange things going on in the photos. Some round objects move very quickly on the left section in the live photos. Also spot light appear shining from possible unknown craft. Curious if my camera was malfunctioning or if something else was happening in photos. Please investigate. Thank you!
California Object
Glenn– November 29, 2020, walked out on my porch and across the way there was a huge disc sitting ominously. I’ll let you guys decide for yourselves what it is.
Colorado Green Light
Cannon City — While walking my dogs at the Arkansas River walk on January 13th, 2021 at 4 pm, my one dog sat down and refused to walk. She does this when we cross paths with mountain lions or bears. When I surveyed the immediate area I saw a large green orb on the River Bluff trail. It was close to ground level and started to rise, then changed course going to its left and towards us. As it approached my other dog started howling and barking, and my dog that had sat down was shaking in fear. I didn’t hear or smell anything, when my dog started howling. It paused, then changed course again back towards the trees, dropping to ground level. It seemed to grow in size again, and then shrank, seeming to wink out of existence. My dogs refused to walk any further on that trail.
Delaware Triangle
Milford— on January 1-, 2021, observed bright silvery star like object that was blinking. Watched for some time, took video, Watched it morph, go stealth, change characteristics, move, change colors. I have seen a similar object before in September and October, 2020,
Florida Boomerang
Sebastian – On October 15, 2020, a very large football Field size boomerang shaped craft about 200 feet above us flew over our community silently around 8o’clock at night. It was translucent on the bottom and the only reason we saw it was the clouds were wrapping around it as it broke through the cloud cover .It change the direction towards a very large lightning storm as we jumped in the car tried to follow it. At the river’s edge we parked the car as it flew towards a very large lightning storm and was gone.
Tampa– January 17, 2021, driving down Cypress going west and I was taking pictures of the sky and I caught a photo of what I believe to be a ufo. After the live feed of the photo the craft was seen.
Georgia Light
Lawrenceville– on January 1, 2021, I saw these formations, near Orion and clustering around Aldebaran and Theta Tauri. The brightness and shape of the V in the Taurus Constellation changed frequently
Missouri Object
Red Oak – on January 1, 2021, am submitting, by proxy, this account of the sighting my 15 yr old niece encountered about a half a mile from Red Oak ,Missouri on the 12th of January, 2021. She went outside to feed her calf at 7:15 am. She happened to see a cross shaped object with very odd wings with various pulsating lights. The body had a long rear fuselage that was a glowing red, and had thick trails of deep, blood red smoke emanating from each of the side protrusions. This object rose up, and traveled over her and traveled west silently. My niece is a very Christian, and honest young lady who would never make up a story like this. Kaili was very shaken by this and was having a hard time trying to process it all. She said it was like a slow silent horror movie.
Texas Cigar
University Park – on January 14, 2021, while driving to work eastbound at about 7:30am, I observed a white, fuzzy, cigar shaped object high in the sky. It did not move during the several minutes that I watched it. There was at least one plane moving off in the distance. I snapped a couple of pictures of the object with my iPone and went off to work. I didn’t mention it to anyone, except my husband.
Washington Objects
Olympia – On October 13, 2020, when I finished pouring concrete at a house job sight I took a few pictures of the area. I didn’t notice the object until I reviewed my pictures. I had no idea that I had taken a picture of this object.
Mr. Lanier – on January 8, 2019, when I took the picture I could not nor could anyone else see any clouds besides the ones starting to engulf Mt Rainier. None of us heard anything and not one person saw the saucer shaped cloud beforehand or afterward I took the picture. We didn’t notice the saucer looking cloud until reviewing the photographs and some say they see the U.S.S Enterprise from Star Trek.
Worldwide UFO Sightings
Argentina 1950 Disc
Mendoza– on March 22, 1950, this is a photograph taken in 1950 at ”Bodega Trapiche”, located in the province of Mendoza, Argentina. The kid in the photo is my grandmother. At the moment the photo was taken they didn´t realize that there was a ”saucer” shaped object behind them.
France Cylinder
Nimes — December 7, 2019, I turn to you after several contacts at http://www.cnes-geipan.fr … He does not answer me so I want to testify, there are 3 unidentified objects every evening.
Mexico Triangle
Sonora– on April 13, 2015, when accessing Google Maps, I captured several images and I have attached one of them that required me to zoom and pan around the sky and surrounding areas. The longitude and latitude coordinates are included. When I returned to view some of them again a few were gone.
Northern Ireland Bright Light
Belfast – on January 25, 2020, I was walking home along the river just after dark and suddenly noticed 3-5 very bright lights appear in front of me about 100 yards ahead. The lights were weird looking, very bright green and staggered in different levels and all about 6-8 feet from the ground. They disappeared and within a minute an extremely bright green light reappeared directly inform of me.
UK/England Objects
Atherstone – on August 8, 2020, I have the pictures which were live photo’s from my iPhone. They were edited to zoom in to take Live Photo stills of the craft. At first look we hadn’t caught them until I recheck months later when I was considering deleting them. I am disabled and don’t usually leave my home. I was with my daughter and as I am now learning there are things in the sky which we have both witnessed. This is now my 6th sighting of something I can’t explain. As we were driving, to my left I noticed something darting around in the sky. It was darting forward, back, up, down. It was stopping and able to change direction instantly. I couldn’t stop driving due to any angry man in a van behind me. I saw the craft stop in mid air and I saw 3 silver orb like objects streak off the craft. My daughter was getting footage. The main craft appeared grey and I saw the top of the main craft decrease in size as 3 little craft flew off it. The main craft then just disappeared, like poof! The biggest was the large, completely silent triangle craft going over me.
Kings Lynn – on December 21, 2004, unknown craft travelling slowly and silently were observed. Sound on the video is my central heating boiler I was standing near to.
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Put another way, a young person in the U.S. is nearly 11 times as likely to die in a swimming pool than in a school shooting. Few public officials would say pools are doing a poor job protecting swimmers, but the statistics suggest that we need “more lifeguards at pools, as opposed to guards at schools,” Fox said
The Filer Research Institute feels the scientific study of UFOs is for the benefit of humankind and is an important endeavor. The US Air Force investigated UFOs publicly for more than twenty years under Project Blue Book; and I continue this advanced research. I believe the God of the universe has spread life throughout the cosmos and UFO’s are visiting us in ever-increasing numbers.
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Filer’s Files salutes our fighting men and women Georgie Filer and Eddie Pedrick my grandsons who both drowned. We pray that God will bless those who read these files spiritually.
A few months ago a group of NASA exoplanet astronomers, who are in the business of discovering planets around other stars, called me into a secret meeting to tell me about a planet that had captured their interest. Because my expertise lies in modeling the climate of exoplanets, they asked me to figure out whether this new planet was habitable – a place where liquid water might exist.
These NASA colleagues, Josh Schlieder and his students Emily Gilbert, Tom Barclay and Elisa Quintana, had been studying data from TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) when they discovered what may be TESS’ first known Earth-sized planet in a zone where liquid water could exist on the surface of a terrestrial planet. This is very exciting news because this new planet is relatively close to Earth, and it may be possible to observe its atmosphere with either the James Webb Space Telescope or ground-based large telescopes.
The habitable zone is the not-too-hot, not-too-cold region around a star where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface. Liquid water is a key ingredient for life as we know it, so exoplanets in their stars’ habitable zones are compelling places to search for life.
Habitable zone planets
The host star of the planet that Gilbert’s team discovered is called TESS of Interest number 700, or TOI-700. Compared to the Sun, it is a small, dim star. It is 40% the size, only about 1/50 of the Sun’s brightness and is located about 100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Dorado, which is visible from our Southern Hemisphere. For comparison, the nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away from Earth. To get a sense of these distances, if you were to travel on the fastest spacecraft (Parker Solar Probe) to reach Proxima Centauri, it would take nearly 20,000 years.
There are three planets around TOI-700: b, c and d. Planet d is Earth-size, within the star’s habitable zone and orbits TOI-700 every 37 days. My colleagues wanted me to create a climate model for Planet d using the known properties of the star and planet. Planets b and c are Earth-size and mini-Neptune-size, respectively. However, they orbit much closer to their host star, receiving 5 times and 2.6 times the starlight that our own Earth receives from the Sun. For comparison, Venus, a dry and hellishly hot world with surface temperature of approximately 860 degrees Fahrenheit, receives twice the sunlight of Earth.
Until about a decade ago, only two habitable zone planets of any size were known to astronomers: Earth and Mars. Within the last decade, however, thanks to discoveries made through both ground-based telescopes and the Kepler mission (which also looked for exoplanets from 2009 to 2019, but is now retired), astronomers have discovered about a dozen terrestrial-sized exoplanets. These are between half and two times larger than the Earth within the habitable zones of their host stars.
Despite the relatively large number of small exoplanet discoveries to date, the majority of stars are between 600 to 3,000 light-years away from Earth – too far and dim for detailed follow-up observation.
Why is liquid water important for habitability?
Unlike Kepler, TESS’ mission is to search for planets around the Sun’s nearest neighbors: those bright enough for follow-up observations.
Between April 2018 and now, TESS discovered more than 1,500 planet candidates. Most are more than twice the size of Earth with orbits of less than 10 days. Earth, of course, takes 365 days to orbit around our Sun. As a result, the planets receive significantly more heat than Earth receives from the Sun and are too hot for liquid water to exist on the surface.
Liquid water is essential for habitability. It provides a medium for chemicals to interact with each other. While it is possible for exotic life to exist at higher pressures, or hotter temperatures – like the extremophiles found near hydro-thermal vents or the microbes found half a mile beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet – those discoveries were possible because humans were able to directly probe those extreme environments. They would not have been detectable from space.
When it comes to finding life, or even habitable conditions, beyond our solar system, humans depend entirely upon remote observations. Surface liquid water may create habitable conditions that can potentially promote life. These life forms can then interact with the atmosphere above, creating remotely detectable bio-signatures that Earth-based telescopes can detect. These bio-signatures could be current Earth-like gas compositions (oxygen, ozone, methane, carbon dioxide and water vapor), or the composition of ancient Earth 2.7 billion years ago (mostly methane and carbon dioxide, and no oxygen).
We know one such planet where this has already happened: Earth. Therefore, astronomers’ goal is to find those planets that are about Earth-size, orbiting at those distances from the star where water could exist in liquid form on the surface. These planets will be our primary targets to hunt for habitable worlds and signatures of life outside our solar system.
Possible climates for planet TOI-700 d
To prove that TOI-700 d is real, Gilbert’s team needed to confirm using data from a different type of telescope. TESS detects planets when they cross in front of the star, causing a dip in the starlight. However, such dips could also be created by other sources, such as spurious instrumental noise or binary stars in the background eclipsing each other, creating false positive signals. Independent observations came from Joey Rodriguez at Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University. Rodriguez and his team confirmed the TESS detection of TOI-700 d with the Spitzer telescope, and removed any remaining doubt that it is a genuine planet.
My student Gabrielle Engelmann-Suissa and I used our modeling software to figure out what type of climate might exist on planet TOI-700 d. Because we do not yet know what kind of gases this planet may actually have in its atmosphere, we use our climate models to explore possible gas combinations that would support liquid oceans on its surface. Engelmann-Suissa, with the help of my longtime collaborator Eric Wolf, tested various scenarios including the current Earth atmosphere (77% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, remaining methane and carbon dioxide), the composition of Earth’s atmosphere 2.7 billion years ago (mostly methane and carbon dioxide) and even a Martian atmosphere (a lot of carbon dioxide) as it possibly existed 3.5 billion years ago.
Based on our models, we found that if the atmosphere of planet TOI-700 d contains a combination of methane or carbon dioxide or water vapor, the planet could be habitable. Now our team needs to confirm these hypotheses with the James Webb Space Telescope.
Bacteria living in harsh conditions like this geothermal basin in Yellowstone National Park provide clues about habitable zones on other planets.1tomm/Shutterstock.com
Strange new worlds and their climates
The climate simulations our NASA team has completed suggest that an Earth-like atmosphere and gas pressure isn’t adequate to support liquid water on its surface. If we put the same quantity of greenhouse gases as we have on Earth on TOI-700 d, the surface temperature on this planet would still be below freezing.
Our own atmosphere supports a liquid ocean on Earth now because our star is quite big and brighter than TOI-700. One thing is for sure: All of our teams’ modeling indicates that the climates of planets around small and dim stars like TOI-700 are very unlike what we see on our Earth.
The field of exoplanets is now in a transitional era from discovering them to characterizing their atmospheres. In the history of astronomy, new techniques enable new observations of the universe including surprises like the discovery of hot-Jupiters and mini-Neptunes, which have no equivalent in our solar system. The stage is now set to observe the atmospheres of these planets to see which ones have conditions that support life.
A new study of the seven Earth-sized exoplanets around TRAPPIST-1 indicate that all 7 planets are extremely similar to each other in makeup, but potentially quite different from Earth.
The 7 planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system orbit their star at a distance that would easily fit within the orbit of Mercury. The system is actually more similar to Jupiter and its moons (top) than our solar system. Planets e, f and g are located within the habitable zone of TRAPPIST-1.
An exciting discovery by the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2017 revealed seven Earth-sized planets orbiting the nearby star TRAPPIST-1, less than 40 light-years away. Details about these planets have been hard to come by, but astronomers have wondered, are any like Earth? Are some like Venus? Do any have clouds or even surface water? Late last week (January 22, 2021), astronomers added another piece to the puzzle of TRAPPIST-1’s planets, when they published a paper in the peer-reviewedPlanetary Science Journal detailing these worlds’ compositions. The team found them to be made of similar stuff to each other, but quite unlike the planets in our solar system.
TRAPPIST-1 is a red dwarf star, by far the most common type of star in our Milky Way galaxy. Three of the TRAPPIST-1 planets are firmly within the star’s habitable zone – aka the Goldilocks’ Zone – in which liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface. At present, the feeling among astronomers is that it’s unlikely water will be found on the surfaces of TRAPPIST-1’s three innermost planets, and, if the four outermost planets do have surface water, it isn’t much. The discovery contradicts an early belief among astronomers that low-density planets like these must be abundant in water. It also raises questions about just how Earth-like and habitable the seven exoplanets might be.
Astrophysicist Martin Turbet of the University of Geneva is a co-author on the new study. He said in a statement:
By combining the planetary interior models from the Universities of Bern and Zürich with the planetary atmosphere models we are developing at the University of Geneva, we were able to evaluate the water content of the seven TRAPPIST-1 planets with a precision literally unprecedented for this category of planet.
Our internal and atmospheric structure models show that the three inner planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system are likely to be waterless, and that the four outer planets have no more than a few percent water, possibly in liquid form, on their surfaces.
Now let’s think a moment about the eight planets in our solar system. They vary widely in density, with the large gas and ice giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) being less dense, and the terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars) being more dense. Since the seven bodies in TRAPPIST-1 were known to share a relatively similar density to each other, researchers were met with a quandary when comparing these exoplanets to Earth. If indeed any of them did have surface water, astronomers’ density estimates would need to change.
That’s why, at the outset of the study, researchers worked to determine whether the lower density of the seven exoplanets was the result of water or their interior makeup, both of which would determine whether the planets are very or only somewhat Earth-like in nature. According to a statement about the research, the exoplanets are roughly 8% less dense than Earth. For the lower density of the planets to be the result of surface water, roughly 5% of each planet’s mass would have to exist as surface water.
That’s a lot! In comparison, water represents just 0.1 percent of Earth’s mass. So you can see right away that these worlds are compositionally quite different from Earth.
Martin Turbet is an astronomer at the University of Geneva and a co-author on the study that calculated the densities of the exoplanets in TRAPPIST-1.
Eric Agol is an astronomer at the University of Washington and the lead author on the study that calculated the densities of the exoplanets in TRAPPIST-1.
Image via The Daily at the University of Washington.
But, as it turns out, even the potential for a few percent of water mass is questionable. Astronomer Eric Agol at the University of Washington is lead author on the research. He added in the statement that the planets are likely to have less than a few percent of water mass; otherwise, the similar densities within the group would be an extraordinary coincidence.
To answer this quandary, researchers examined the composition of the seven exoplanets, looking for similarities in the group and between the group and Earth. Most rocky planets are believed to be made of metals like magnesium, iron and nickel, and non-metals like sulfur, oxygen, and silicon. Due to the discrepancy in density between the group and Earth, researchers surmised that the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets may have a similar makeup to Earth but with significantly different ratios, for example, a lower percentage of iron. While iron represents 32% of Earth’s total mass, the study indicates that iron should represent about 21% of the mass of each TRAPPIST-1 exoplanet.
Agol told EarthSky:
The lower density indicates that these planets have a different make-up, and hence a different history, than our solar system’s terrestrial planets. Perhaps the star + disk started off with less iron? Or perhaps the iron core never formed, and the iron remained oxidized in the mantle?
Artist’s concept of the similar densities of the 7 exoplanets in the TRAPPIST-1 star system. Their similar densities suggests they all have a similar composition. The new study has led scientists to believe that the planets have rocky surfaces and iron-rich cores. Their cores are likely smaller than Earth’s, since the planets each have a mass roughly 8% less than Earth’s. Previous theories considered deep ocean layers on the surface of each planet, or planets with no core.
To determine the mass of each planet, scientists measured changes in their orbital periods. They measured how long it took for each planet to orbit TRAPPIST-1 and to cross in front of the star as seen from Earth. This process is called transit timing. Combined with radius measurements of each planet, scientists were able to calculate the densities of the planets with more precision. Using a comparison against Earth’s mass, the team was able to calculate the percentage of iron likely to be present in each of the seven exoplanets.
Using data from the now decommissioned Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers determined that all 7 of the planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1 have similar densities. This finding helped the astronomers characterize the composition of these exoworlds in comparison to Earth. While all 7 planets are considered to be roughly Earth-sized, they are each about 8% less dense than our home planet, meaning their makeup, while potentially similar to Earth, in terms of elements like iron, is significantly different in percentages.
Combining these data with radius measurements of each planet, scientists calculated the densities of the planets with more precision than before. Using a comparison against Earth’s mass, the team was able to calculate the percentage of iron likely to be present in each of the seven exoplanets.
Agol said:
We found that about 2/3 of the iron is required compared with Earth since these are lower density.
Whether the differences between Earth and the TRAPPIST planets change the potential for life somewhere in the TRAPPIST-1 system is a complicated question. While the presence of liquid water could signal the potential for life, other factors contribute to a planet’s suitability for life to arise, thrive, and survive. On Earth, for example, a strong magnetic field protects our planet and life from high-energy particles from the sun. Our atmosphere is filled with sufficient oxygen and carbon as well as other gases required for animal life, photosynthesis and habitable surface temperatures.
Despite these challenges, Agol is not discounting the potential for life on TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets just yet. He said:
The connection to habitability isn’t clear yet. The structure of the planets might affect their ability to have plate tectonics, to carry a magnetic field, and other possible implications. These aspects of Earth affect the presence and change of life on Earth.
So, lots of questions left to explore.
The study was made possible by data sets taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope since the discovery of the star system more than four years ago. Between 2016 and 2020, when the telescope was decommissioned and stopped collecting data, Spitzer recorded 1,075 hours of observing time for TRAPPIST-1. Although the decommissioning of Spitzer has put a hold on observations, it does not mark a permanent end to TRAPPIST-1 studies.
Agol said:
If the James Webb Space Telescope is successfully launched and commissioned later this year, then we plan to continue monitoring the transits with that telescope to try to detect the atmospheres withtransit transmission spectroscopy. Each transit will provide a timing, so we can continue to refine the masses of the planets.
After the discovery of exoplanets orbiting TRAPPIST-1 in 2016, the Spitzer Space Telescope logged 1,075 observing hours on the star system, generating enough data for astronomers to accurately determine the densities and makeup of each planet. The Spitzer Space Telescope was decommissioned in January 2020.
Bottom line: A new study of the seven Earth-sized exoplanets in the TRAPPIST-1 system indicate that all seven planets are extremely similar to each other in makeup, but potentially quite different from Earth.
Big discovery! NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed 7 Earth-sized planets orbiting a tiny star only 40 light-years away. Three of them are firmly in the habitable zone.
At a news conference in Washington D.C. today (February 22, 2017), NASA announced that its Spitzer Space Telescopehas observed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in what’s called the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water – key to life as we know it. The discovery sets a new record for greatest number of known planets in a star’s habitable zone. After all, our solar system has only two planets in the habitable zone: Earth and Mars. This exoplanet system – called TRAPPIST-1 – has three.
Because they are located outside of our solar system, these planets are scientifically known as exoplanets.
This illustration shows the possible surface of TRAPPIST-1f, one of the newly discovered planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system. Scientists using the Spitzer Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes have discovered that there are seven Earth-size planets in the system.
Only about 40 light-years (235 trillion miles) from Earth, in the direction to our constellation Aquarius, TRAPPIST-1 – classified as an ultra-cool dwarf. It’s so cool that liquid water could survive on planets orbiting very close to it, closer than is possible on planets in our solar system. All seven of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary orbits are closer to their host star than Mercury is to our sun. According to a NASA statement:
The planets also are very close to each other. If a person was standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth’s sky.
The researchers say that the planets might also be tidally locked to the TRAPPIST-1 star. That means that the same side of the planet is always facing the star, therefore each side is either in perpetual day or night. If that’s true, the planets could have weather patterns totally unlike those on Earth, such as strong winds blowing from the day side to the night side, and extreme temperature changes.
The TRAPPIST-1 star, an ultra-cool dwarf, has seven Earth-size planets orbiting it. This artist’s concept appeared on the cover of the journal Nature on February 23, 2017.
According to the study – published today in the journal Nature – all of the TRAPPIST-1 planets are likely to be rocky. Further observations will hopefully reveal whether any have liquid water on their surfaces. The mass of the seventh and farthest exoplanet hasn’t yet been estimated. Scientists believe it could be an icy, “snowball-like” world.
Michael Gillon, lead author of the paper and the principal investigator of the TRAPPIST exoplanet survey at the University of Liege, Belgium. Gillon said in a statement:
The seven wonders of TRAPPIST-1 are the first Earth-size planets that have been found orbiting this kind of star. It is also the best target yet for studying the atmospheres of potentially habitable, Earth-size worlds.
This artist’s concept shows what each of the TRAPPIST-1 planets may look like, based on available data about their sizes, masses and orbital distances.
Following up on the Spitzer discovery, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has initiated the screening of four of the planets, including the three inside the habitable zone.
This 360-degree panorama depicts the surface of a newly detected planet, TRAPPIST 1-d, part of a seven planet system some 40 light years away. Explore this artist’s rendering of an alien world by moving the view using your mouse or your mobile device.
Thomas Zurbuchen is associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. He said in a statement:
This discovery could be a significant piece in the puzzle of finding habitable environments, places that are conducive to life. Answering the question ‘are we alone’ is a top science priority and finding so many planets like these for the first time in the habitable zone is a remarkable step forward toward that goal.
This poster imagines what a trip to TRAPPIST-1e might be like.
Bottom line: NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has observed 7 Earth-sized planets orbiting a tiny star called TRAPPIST-1. Three of them are firmly in the habitable zone.
In the animation in this post, the rhythmic movement of newly discovered planets around the star TOI-178 is represented through a musical harmony, created by attributing a note (in the pentatonic scale) to each of the planets. Hear the music of these planets.
The animation above represents the orbits and movements of the planets in the TOI-178 star system. All but one of these six exoplanets one locked in rare resonance orbits. This star is about 200 light-years away. As the planets orbit the star, they make patterns that repeat themselves rhythmically, with some planets aligning every few orbits. The European Space Agency – which announced the new finding today (January 25, 2021) – said the planets were found in data collected by its Cheops planet-watcher, a telescope in space. Their release said that the finding:
… challenges current theories of planet formation.
The results were published today (January 25, 2021) in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
In the artist’s animation above – which is through the European Southern Observatory – the rhythmic movement of the planets around their central star is represented by a musical harmony:
… created by attributing a note (in the pentatonic scale) to each of the planets. This note plays when a planet completes either one full orbit or one half orbit; when planets align at these points in their orbits, they ring in resonance.
So five of the worlds in the TOI-178 system create a kind of music of the spheres. In the meantime, ESA said, the planets have very different compositions from one another.
This graphic is a representation of the TOI-178 planetary system, as revealed by ESA’s exoplanet watcher Cheops. The system consists of 6 exoplanets, 5 of which are locked in a rare rhythmic dance as they orbit their central star. The 2 inner planets have terrestrial densities (like Earth) and the outer 4 planets are gaseous (with densities like Neptune and Jupiter). The 5 outer planets follow a rhythmic dance as they move in their orbits.
These distant planets aren’t the only objects in space known to follow resonance orbits. Three of Jupiter’s moons – Io, Europa and Ganymede – do something similar. For every orbit of Europa, Ganymede completes two orbits, and Io completes four. Astronomers would say this is a 4:2:1 pattern. ESA explained:
In the TOI-178 system, the resonant motion is much more complex as it involves five planets, following a 18:9:6:4:3 pattern. While the second planet from the star (the first in the pattern) completes 18 orbits, the third planet from the star (second in the pattern) completes nine orbits, and so on.
Three of Jupiter’s Galilean moons exhibit a 3-body resonance. Conjunctions are highlighted by brief color changes. There are two Io-Europa conjunctions (green) and three Io-Ganymede conjunctions (grey) for each Europa-Ganymede conjunction (magenta). This diagram – not to scale – is via Wikimedia Commons.
Astrophysicist Adrien Leleu of the University of Bern, the University of Geneva and the National Center of Competence in Research PlanetS led the research. His team found the relationships between five of six planets orbiting the star TOI-178. Leleu said:
This result surprised us, as previous observations with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) of NASA pointed toward a three-planets system, with two planets orbiting very close together. We therefore observed the system with additional instruments, such as the ground based ESPRESSO spectrograph at the European Southern Observatory (ESO)’s Paranal Observatory in Chile, but the results were inconclusive.
When Leleu and his colleagues first proposed to investigate the system more closely, they weren’t sure what they’d find. Leleu said:
After analyzing the data from 11 days of observing the system with CHEOPS, it seemed that there were more planets than we had initially thought.
The team had identified at least five planets. They decided to invest another day of precious observation time on the system to confirm. They found that there were indeed five planets present with orbital periods of around 2, 3, 6, 10 and 20 days respectively.
While a system with five planets would have been quite a remarkable finding in itself, Leleu and his colleagues noticed that there might be more to the story: the system appeared to be in harmony. Leleu explained:
Our theory implied that there could be an additional planet in this harmony; however its orbital period needed to be very nearly 15 days.
Adrien Leleu of the Center for Space and Habitability (University of Bern, the University of Geneva and the National Center of Competence in Research PlanetS).
Image via University of Bern.
To check if their theory was in fact true, the team scheduled yet another observation with CHEOPS, at the exact time that this missing planet would pass by, if it existed. But then, an accident threatened to cancel their plans. Co-author Yann Alibert at the University of Bern commented:
Just before the time of the observation, a piece of space debris threatened to collide with the CHEOPS satellite.
Therefore, the control center of the European Space Agency (ESA) initiated an evasive maneuver of the satellite and all observations were interrupted. Another co-author, Nathan Hara of the University of Geneva, said:
But to our great relief, this maneuver was done very efficiently and the satellite could resume observations just in time to capture the mysterious planet passing by. A few days later, the data clearly indicated the presence of the additional planet and thus confirmed that there were indeed six planets in the TOI-178 system.
With that came another surprise: compared to the harmonic, orderly way the planets orbit around their star, their densities appear to be a wild mixture. ESA Project Scientist Kate Isaak said:
It is the first time we observed something like this. In the few systems we know with such a harmony, the density of planets steadily decreases as we move away from the star. In the TOI-178 system, a dense, terrestrial planet like Earth appears to be right next to a very fluffy planet with half the density of Neptune followed by one very similar to Neptune.
Adrien Leleu concluded:
The system therefore turned out to be one that that challenges our understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary systems.
Artist’s concept of the TOI-178 system with the planet in the foreground orbiting most distantly around the star.
Bottom line: The star system TOI-178 now is known to have 6 exoplanets, with all but one locked in rare resonance orbits. As the planets orbit the star, they make patterns that repeat rhythmically, with some planets aligning every few orbits. The European Space Agency announced the finding on January 25, 2021. It said the planets were found in data collected by its orbiting CHEOPS planet-hunter telescope.
At the request of President Joe Biden, a moon rock is now on display in the Oval Office.
Lunar sample 76015,143 is a remnant from a violent asteroid impact on the moon’s surface.
Astronauts collected the sample during Apollo 17, the final mission to the moon.
As President Joe Biden took the oath of office on the steps of the Capitol building on Wednesday, White House staffers busily prepared the Oval Office for his arrival. They added a bust of Caesar Chavez behind the resolute desk, swapped out one set of gold curtains for another, and replaced a portrait of Andrew Jackson with that of Benjamin Franklin, among other changes.
The White House team also added an alien artifact to the shelves of the Oval: a Hacky Sack-sized chunk of the moon.
According to a Washington Post report, Biden selected the lunar sample in hopes that it might "remind Americans of the ambition and accomplishments of earlier generations." The sample is on loan from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, the agency says.
“I’m so jazzed, as are a lot of my colleagues,” Noah Petro, a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, tells Popular Mechanics. “The first thing everybody wanted to know was ‘Which sample is it?’”
The answer: Lunar Sample 76015,143.
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Astronauts Harrison “Jack” Schmitt (the only geologist to ever visit the moon) and Eugene Cernan collected sample 76015,143 during Apollo 17, the final crewed mission to the moon. Notably, Apollo 17 took place in December 1972, the same month President Biden lost his first wife, Neilia, and daughter, Naomi, in a car accident.
NASA astronaut Jack Schmitt snapped this image of astronaut Eugene Cernan exploring Station 6, the field location where sample 76015,143 was collected.
NASA
Between 1969 and 1972, Apollo astronauts collected 842 pounds of lunar samples from the surface of the moon. “Every single piece of moon rock that was collected tells us something important about the history of the moon,” Petro says.
Schmitt chipped sample 76015,143 off of a boulder at Station 6, a field site at the base of the North Massif, a mountain on the northern side of the Taurus-Littrow Valley. You can actually watch Schmitt and Cernan traipse across the lunar surface and discuss the sample site on the website Apollo 17 in Real Time. The 3.9 billion-year-old sample, a type of rock called an impact melt breccia, tells the catastrophic tale of the last great asteroid impact on the near side of the moon.
When a meteor or asteroid hits the surface of the moon, it transfers an enormous amount of energy to the lunar surface, which can fracture and melt rock in the moon's crust, Petro explains. "That rock, when it melts, forms in a geologic instant," he says.
According to NASA, sample 76015,143 can be traced to the impact that created the Imbrium Impact Basin, a crater that's 711.5 miles in diameter. (Petro, however, argues the origin of sample 76015 is still up for interpretation.)
In any regard, samples like 76015,143 act as an important time capsule. "Since big impact events ‘reset’ the age of the rock, any date we measure from the sample can tell us when the impact happened," Michelle Thompson, a planetary scientist at Purdue University, tells Popular Mechanics. "By doing this for lots of different rocks, we can understand the bombardment history of the moon."
A lunar roving vehicle parked at Station 6.
NASA
Most of the lunar samples collected during the six Apollo missions are tightly sealed in storage containers at the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Some of the samples were split into small pieces or sliced into thin sections and examined as soon after they arrived on Earth. Others remain untouched, preserved until technological advances can reveal even more about their origin. Scientists opened one sample, also from Apollo 17, just two years ago, months after the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.
“What we learn from these samples is kind of the same stuff that we learn from samples on the Earth,” Petro says. “How did that material form? What is it made of? What kind of rock is it?”
But unlike rocks collected on Earth, lunar rock samples are extremely old. The moon, which researchers estimate to be at least 4.5 billion years old, doesn’t have rock-recycling plate tectonics like Earth does, and there aren’t the same erosive properties that eat away at Earth-bound rock outcrops. This means the lunar surface is home to some of the oldest rocks we can get our gloves on.
These samples also help researchers better understand the harsh environment of space. "If you look at the surface of the rock under a microscope, you can see all of these micro craters, produced by hypervelocity dust particles impacting the surface," Thompson says. "While Earth has an atmosphere to protect us, the moon doesn’t, and it's constantly bombarded with this dust."
President Bill Clinton holds a lunar sample given to him by Apollo astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins on the 30th anniversary of the mission.
TIM SLOANGETTY IMAGES
At times, NASA has struggled to keep track of all these samples, many of which have been cleaved apart into tinier pieces and loaned to museums and other research institutions around the world. President Richard Nixon gave several lunar souvenirs away as gifts to foreign dignitaries, who subsequently misplaced them. In 2002, three Johnson Space Center interns brazenly stole $2 million worth of moon rocks. The FBI later recovered the samples when the ringleader of the heist tried to sell them on the internet.
Sample 76015,143 isn’t the first lunar sample that has made its way into the Oval Office. On July 20, 1999, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins presented President Bill Clinton with sample 10057,30, a sizable moon rock they collected during their historic mission to the lunar surface. (A 2.375-inch sliver pulled from the sample’s parent rock, 10057, was sandwiched between two panes of nitrogen-filled glass and fitted into a stained glass window at the Washington National Cathedral in 1974.)
The placement of sample 76015,143 in the Oval Office may signify more than Biden's commitment to science and technology; it may also hint at the direction in which he'll steer NASA.
In 2019, NASA unveiled the Artemis Program, which aims to send the first woman and next man to the moon in 2024. It's a tight deadline, and the program has already experienced a number of delays and cost overruns. Many havequestioned whether the Biden administration will choose to refocus efforts elsewhere in the solar system.
In its press release announcing the placement of sample 76015,143, NASA claimed the sample signifies a "support for America’s current moon to Mars exploration approach."
Sample 76015,143 may be as much of a window into the future as it is into the past.
In symbolic recognition of earlier generations’ ambitions and accomplishments, and support for America’s current Moon to Mars exploration approach, a Moon rock now sits in the Oval Office of the White House. At the request of the incoming Biden Administration, NASA loaned the Moon rock that was put on display in the Oval Office Jan. 20. It is from the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and its display case is inscribed with the following:
Lunar Sample 76015,143
Apollo 17 astronaut Ronald Evans and moonwalkers Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan, the last humans to set foot on the Moon, chipped this sample from a large boulder at the base of the North Massif in the Taurus-Littrow Valley, 3 km (almost 2 miles) from the Lunar Module. This 332 gram piece of the Moon (less than a pound), which was collected in 1972, is a 3.9-billion-year-old sample formed during the last large impact event on the nearside of the Moon, the Imbrium Impact Basin, which is 1,145 km or 711.5 miles in diameter.
The irregular sample surfaces contain tiny craters created as micrometeorite impacts have sand-blasted the rock over millions of years. The flat, sawn sides were created in NASA’s Lunar Curation Laboratory when slices were cut for scientific research. This ongoing research is imperative as we continue to learn about our planet and the Moon, and prepare for future missions to the cislunar orbit and beyond.
News travels fast — at the lickety-split speed of light, potentially. Back in December, great attention was paid to a report that a mysterious radio signal appeared to have come from the vicinity of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth.
Proxima Centauri, which is just 4.2 light-years from us, is known to host two planets. One of those two worlds, Proxima b, is slightly more massive than Earth and might be capable of supporting life as we know it.
The Breakthrough Listen project, part of the Breakthrough Initiatives group, made the recent detection using the Parkes radio telescope in Australia, dubbing the signal BLC1 for "Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1."
Breakthrough Initiatives is backed by Yuri Milner, a science and technology investor and philanthropist who founded the organization. Its Breakthrough Listen activity is a $100 million program of astronomical observations and analysis, the most comprehensive ever undertaken in the search for evidence of technological civilizations in the universe.
Space.com recently talked with Breakthrough Initiatives executive director Simon Peter "Pete" Worden about BLC1 and the search for alien "technosignatures" more generally; the protocols for announcing an ET detection; and the latest about the prospects for life on Venus, another study effort being undertaken by Breakthrough Initiatives.
Spoiler alert: Don't be heartbroken in learning how tough "radio-waving" between civilizations truly is!
Space.com: What's the latest on the purported Proxima Centauri signal?
Worden: We're about to submit our papers on the signal. We're virtually certain now that it's interference. I can't get into the details. However, our intent was that this was kind of a pathfinder, so we're happy with the opportunity. It's the first signal that passed our basic test.
Space.com: That basic test comes down to what elements?
Worden: The key thing for us is that we have gone through the "what if" — what if it's this, what if it's that? What are the sources of interference? So we're just about completed with that. An internal review team is looking at our papers, one on the approach we've taken, and the other is on the actual data collected. Then we'll submit them to a journal. But we're virtually certain that it was interference.
The Parkes radio telescope is an icon of Australian science, and one part of the Australia Telescope National Facility. (Image credit: Parkes Radio Telescope/Australia Telescope National Facility)
Space.com: So it was a good test of the procedures that you have set in place?
Worden: Yes, but it's a technical thing too. Ultimately, this underscores that we need to have several different instruments. We're just in the process of bringing online the South African MeerKAT radio telescope, the first phase of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) set of radio dishes. In fact, we're probably going to do some coordinated observations, both with MeerKAT and the Parkes radio telescope in the next couple of months. In general, we're learning what it is that we expect to see in terms of a technosignature.
Space.com: The Parkes telescope in Australia, used to pick up the signal, reportedly has had trouble in the past with interference. Why so?
Worden:That's true of any radio telescope. A big issue a decade ago — whenfast radio bursts[FRBs] were detected, there were two kinds of FRBs. One of them we now understand as a fast radio burst … the other one turned out to be due to microwave interference. There's all sorts of interference that you have to track down. The real answer is that when you see these things you need to very quickly bring a second instrument online.
S. Pete Worden, executive director of Breakthrough Initiatives. (Image credit: S. Pete Worden)
Space.com: The Proxima Centauri signal story first broke in the media. Should there be a look at protocols for handling release of information that, indeed, a technosignture has been discovered?
Worden: The only protocol we have is the "Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence," which was developed by the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA). So our next task is to set up something, probably very comparable to the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams. That hasn't been set up as yet. There are no government protocols for this. Then there's a related issue that has to do with managing the messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence.
Space.com: What lessons learned can you glean from this Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1 incident?
Worden: This was the first red-alert process. It mostly worked OK. We were reasonably pleased. It leaked to the press. There were probably about 20 people on the team. So it's hard to figure out why it wouldn't leak.
S. Pete Worden, executive director of Breakthrough Initiatives, with Knight-Commander of the Luxembourg Legion of Merit. (Image credit: S. Pete Worden)
Obviously, job one is to set up networks to validate that a signal is a technosignature or could be. We're working through that. No matter how interesting an individual signal is, it's still a random signal until it is validated by different instruments, different researchers. So the question is how to get other people quickly on the sky to look at these things. As we have more and more instruments and better and better detectors, we're going to get a lot of things like this. So don't get too excited when there's an alert for a bunch of people to go take a look at things. As for a bottom line, we really want to make the technosignature area a legitimate scientific concern once again. It's now on the way to being that.
Space.com: Lastly, Breakthrough Initiatives is also studying a look at the findings that the upper atmosphere of Venus may be a hot spot for life. What is the status of your study?
Worden: It is going pretty well. Sara Seager, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at MIT, is leading that. We're doing a design study as well as some lab work about what to look for at Venus. We're getting back to Yuri Milner in the next month or two and see if he wants to go forward with some sort of mission. We're looking at small, medium and large missions. We have been working with a number of people, including Rocket Lab and their interest in this area.
Venus in ultraviolet light, as seen by NASA's Pioneer-Venus Orbiter in 1979. Does life lurk within the planet's top cloud layer? (Image credit: NASA)
Space.com: What's your personal take about the life-in-the-Venus-clouds proposition?
Worden: There's something very interesting [at Venus]. I think the only way we're going to figure it out is actually send a probe there. What do you look for? It turns out we can probably send a small probe fairly quickly and fairly cheaply, for tens of millions of dollars. The question is how definitive is the result that it gets. Then the question has to be followed up with a larger thing that gets into the atmosphere of Venus. Ultimately, you want to grab something, put it under a microscope, obtain a detailed chemical analysis and image it. So that's where we are.
Leonard David is author of the recently released book, "Moon Rush: The New Space Race," published by National Geographic in May 2019. A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook. This version of the story published on Space.com.
The Wendigo is without doubt a highly dangerous creature, one which is a staple part of the folklore and legend of the Native American tribe known as the Algonquin. The monster is typically described as a tall, crazed and violent thing that roams the forests of the Pacific Northwest, the northernmost states of the U.S., and Canada. It is a large, humanoid beast that dines on human flesh. There is, however, another aspect to the lore surrounding the Wendigo. Namely, that if a person eats human flesh, he or she can shapeshift into a Wendigo. Adding to the legend, the Wendigo has the ability to take control of our minds – always for terrible and horrific reasons. In that sense, as well as a shapeshifting angle, there is what we might term a mind-shifting process, too.
Legends of America state: “The legend lends its name to the disputed modern medical term Wendigo psychosis, which is considered by some psychiatrists to be a syndrome that creates an intense craving for human flesh and a fear of becoming a cannibal. Ironically, this psychosis is said to occur within people living around the Great Lakes of Canada and the United States. Wendigo psychosis usually develops in the winter in individuals who are isolated by heavy snow for long periods. The initial symptoms are poor appetite, nausea, and vomiting. Subsequently, the individual develops a delusion of being transformed into a Wendigo monster. People who have Wendigo psychosis increasingly see others around them a being edible. At the same time, they have an exaggerated fear of becoming cannibals.”
Business Standard say: “Despite their gaunt physiques, Wendigo are described by some as giants, measuring at about 14.8 to 15 feet in height. Whilst there are slight variations as to the physical description of this creature amongst the different Algonquian peoples, it is generally agreed that Wendigo have glowing eyes, long yellowed fangs and long tongues. Most Wendigo are also said to have sallow and yellowish skin, though others say that they are matted with hair or have decaying skin. According to ethno-historian Nathan Carlson, it’s also been said that the wendigo has large, sharp claws and massive eyes like an owl. However, some other people simply describe the wendigo as a skeleton-like figure with ash-toned skin.”
One of the more intriguing theories for what may have provoked the legends of the Wendigo is that they were based upon early, centuries-old reports of Bigfoot encounters. Certainly, there are more than a few reports in which Bigfoot-type beasts have acted violently in the presence of people. There are even reports of people vanishing in the woods and forests of the United States – amid theories that the Bigfoot, when food is scarce, will feed on just about anything. And that includes us. Of the various stories that surround the Wendigo, certainly the most horrific revolves around a Cree Native American named Swift Runner, who lived with his family in an area of forest close to Edmonton, Canada.
As 1878 rolled over into 1879, Swift Runner turned up in the city of St. Albert, Canada. He told a bleak and harrowing story of how all of his family – his wife, his six children, and his mother and brother – had fallen victim to the recent, hostile winter, in which food was beyond scarce and temperatures plunged. As plausible as the story told by Swift Runner to a group of Catholic priests sounded, there was a significant red flag. Swift Runner hardly looked emaciated. In fact, he looked very well fed. That’s because he was: Swift Runner spent the winter devouring his entire family, eating their flesh and gnawing on their bones – as the St. Albert police found to their horror when they traveled to the site of his home in the woods. Suspicions soon began to surface that Swift Runner was possessed by a Wendigo: he began to exhibit bizarre activity, such as howling, growling, and screaming in savage fashion. Tales circulated that, on one occasion, Swift Runner was seen to transform into a savage-looking humanoid, a definitive Wendigo – something caused by his taste for human flesh.
The Wow! signal owes its name to the exclamation written on a paper printout from Ohio State’s Big Ear Radio Telescope in1972 that was evidence of a strange 72-second signal that stunned astronomer Jerry Ehman, and its lasting fame to the fact that it’s never been explained and never been picked up again. A recent paper claimed to have traced the signal to the star 2MASS 19281982-2640123 in the Sagittarius constellation 1800 light-years from Earth, but it’s still a theory. Now, another astronomer has proposed to have identified Wow! as leakage from a power beam propelling an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Time to drop the mic and yell “Wow!”?
“The most observable leakage radiation from an advanced civilization may well be from the use of power beaming to accelerate spacecraft and transfer energy. Power beams are now more credible because we’re building our own: The Starshot project plans launching probes to nearby stars in this century, making power beaming a credible source concept. And power beaming is being developed for military applications, where it is termed ‘directed energy’.”
James Benford, a plasma physicist and CEO of Microwave Sciences, summarizes in Centauri Dreams the paper he’s presented to the journal Astrobiology. He compares the Wow! signal to the powerful laser beams being proposed to power laser sails to nearby stars and to the ‘directed energy’ weapons being developed by militaries to attack and destroy without explosives. In his summary, Benford proposes that leakage – energy that doesn’t directly hit the propelled object – could be powerful enough to be seen by other nearby intelligent species, and shows how it would explain the four parameters of the Wow! signal — the power density received, the signal’s duration, its frequency and its revisit time. The last parameter is the interval until the signal is seen again and Benford explains that it’s the least discussed but possibly the strongest argument for power beam leakage.
“The Wow! observation has never recurred. I take this absence as a clue to its origin.”
Leakage of a highly directed high power beam from around the vehicle would still be powerful, explaining parameter 1. The Big Ear was fixed in orientation, rotating with the Earth, and the duration of the Wow! signal – 38 seconds – matched the duration of a model of a power beam from another star system – 36 seconds, explaining parameter 2. The Wow! Signal was at the 1.42 GHz frequency, a protected radio astronomy bandwidth, so it couldn’t be a transmission from Earth or its satellites – parameter 3. Finally, there’s the recurrence factor.
“The angle of the radiated beam with respect to the light path between the two stars is larger than the width of the beam. Thus, the beam is generally not observable from the target planetary system. If the Wow! was driving a probe to a star, that star was at that time far from the direction of the beam. Earth could accidentally receive the leakage from the beam, since stars move relative to each other. So leakage radiation from star probe launches using the Wow! beam will not be seen again from Earth. This fits the non-observations to date.”
laser sail depiction
Wow! Benford concludes that power beams are the most credible explanation for Wow! because we’re building our own, thus proving they can existence. He also builds a case for treating SETI as a search for these random power beams rather than communications signals – a case that will take a lot more convincing of the astronomy and SETI worlds focused on those types of signals.
It’s not time to drop the mic – but James Benford definitely builds a case for tossing it in the air or spinning it around on its cord (for fans of a certain age).
Banned Disney UFO Documentary: Alien Encounters From New Tomorrowland 2021
Banned Disney UFO Documentary: Alien Encounters From New Tomorrowland 2021
“Alien Encounters From New Tomorrowland” BANNED DISNEY UFO DOCUMENTARY In March of 1995, without warning, Disney aired a family special. the documentary was so controversial that it was pulled from the airwaves and banned from ever being shown again. Robert Urich, the legendary Jim Street in S.W.A.T. (1975), is the host of this voyage around the UFO’s and its mystery.
From New Tomorrowland, in Disneyland, Urich talks about UFO, contacts, evidence of it arrives, abductions, military documents, and other things that surround this controversial thematic. From the 30′s years ahead, the UFOs always have been there very close to us, every day, every time. Exist the aliens?,in truth, they come to planet Earth? Could it be a fiction created by the military?
And the last and most important question: if they exist, would they will be our friends…or our enemies? Written by Chockys
Nog een maatje groter: zwarte gaten kunnen volgens astronomen ‘Stupendously’ zwaar worden
Er zijn zwarte gaten, zware zwarte gaten, superzware zwarte gaten, en vanaf heden zijn er ook belachelijk grote, krankzinnige of kolossale zwarte gaten: ‘Stupendously Large Black Holes‘ werden ze gedoopt, kortweg SLAB’s. Deze exemplaren kunnen volgens onderzoekers wel 100 miljard keer zwaarder zijn dan de zon.
Het is wellicht een van de meest fascinerende verschijnselen in de ruimte: een zwart gat of een gebied in de (astronomische) ruimte waar de zwaartekracht zo sterk is dat het alles in zijn buurt genadeloos opslokt, zelfs de meest heldere sterren. Fascinerend, maar ook ontzettend mysterieus.
Zo mysterieus dat wetenschappers van de Queen Mary University of London in hun recent onderzoek - gepubliceerd in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society - ‘hypothetische’ zwarte gaten omschrijven. “Hoewel er momenteel geen enkel bewijs is gevonden voor het bestaan van SLAB’s, is het geloofwaardig dat ze bestaan”, aldus astronoom en onderzoeker Bernard Carr.
Massa en omvang van
Hoe zit dat dan precies met die massa van zwarte gaten? Zwarte gaten kunnen onderverdeeld worden in verschillende categorieën, afhankelijk van hun massa. Zo zijn er minuscule zwarte gaten. Hun massa varieert van enkele gram tot het gewicht van de maan. Daarnaast zijn er stellaire zwarte gaten met een massa van 5 tot wel 100 zonsmassa’s - een standaardeenheid, gelijk aan de massa van de zon. Planeten zijn overigens veel lichter dan de zon. Zo is een zonsmassa gelijk aan 328.901 maal de massa van de aarde. Middelgrote zwarte gaten hebben een massa van 500 tot 1.000 zonsmassa’s.
Superzware zwarte gaten hebben tot slot een massa tot (vele) miljoenen de massa van de zon. Messier 87 (M87) is daar een - inmiddels wereldberoemd - voorbeeld van. Dit monster is wel 6,5 miljard keer zo zwaar als onze zon en werd op 10 april 2019 als eerste zwarte gat gefotografeerd.
En daar zou het stoppen, zo redeneerden astronomen tot voor kort. Er zou een limiet op de massa van zwarte gaten zitten: ze groeien en trekken materie aan, maar door te groeien wordt hun omgeving ook ‘schoongeblazen’ wat ervoor zorgt dat ze uiteindelijk niet meer groter worden. Althans, dat dacht men.
SLAB’s
Maar nu komen de SLAB’s om de hoek loeren, hypothetische primordiale zwarte gaten die miljarden keren zwaarder dan de zon kunnen zijn. Waar dat idee plotseling vandaan komt? Volgens het recente onderzoek zouden de zwarte gaten toch nog kunnen groeien dankzij ‘Weakly Interacting Massive Particles’ (WIMPs) of hypothetische deeltjes donkere materie - nog zo’n mysterieus gegeven. Deze deeltjes materie reageren niet met licht (waardoor we ze ook niet kunnen waarnemen) wat in het voordeel van de zwarte gaten speelt. Waar andere (kleinere) zwarte gaten groot worden door stervende sterren te verslinden en/of samen te smelten met andere zwarte gaten, groeit een SLAB dankzij de zwarte materie.
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Ruimtetelescoop CHEOPS onthult uniek planetair systeem: “Eerste keer dat we dit waarnemen”
De Zwitsers-Europese ruimtetelescoop CHEOPS heeft een uniek planetair systeem onthuld, zo heeft het Europese Ruimtevaartburea ESA maandag bekendgemaakt. De vondst stelt trouwens de huidige planeetvormingstheorieën op de proef.
De ontdekking van een toenemend aantal planetenstelsels, die niet op ons eigen zonnestelsel lijken, blijft ons begrip van de vorming en evolutie van planeten verbeteren. "Een indrukwekkend voorbeeld is het planetenstelsel TOI-178, zo'n 200 lichtjaar van ons vandaan in de Beeldhouwer-constellatie", zegt ESA maandag.
Astronomen verwachtten al dat ster TOI-178 twee of meer exoplaneten zou herbergen nadat ze deze hadden geobserveerd met NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Nieuwe, zeer nauwkeurige waarnemingen met de in 2019 gelanceerde CHEOPS laten nu zien dat de ster minstens zes planeten herbergt en dat dit vreemde zonnestelsel een zeer unieke structuur kent.
Een van de bijzondere eigenschappen is dat de planeten - behalve de planeet die het dichtst bij de ster staat - een ritmische dans volgen als deze zich in hun banen bewegen. Dit verschijnsel heet ‘orbitale resonantie’, en houdt in dat er patronen zijn die zich herhalen terwijl de planeten rond de ster draaien, waarbij sommige planeten om de paar draaiingen op één lijn komen te staan.
Een soortgelijke resonantie wordt volgens ESA waargenomen in de banen van drie manen van Jupiter: Io, Europa en Ganymedes. Voor iedere draaiing van Europa maakt Ganymedes twee draaiingen, en Io maakt er vier (dit is dus een 4:2:1 patroon).
Een van de exoplaneten, een dichte, aardse planeet zoals de onze, ligt vlak naast een even grote en pluizige planeet - zoals een kleine Jupiter, en daarnaast ligt een planeet die erg op Neptunus lijkt
Veel complexer
In het TOI-178 systeem is de resonante beweging veel complexer aangezien er vijf planeten bij betrokken zijn, die een 18:9:6:4:3 patroon volgen. Terwijl de tweede planeet van de ster (de eerste van het patroon) 18 draaiingen voltooit, voltooit de derde planeet van de ster (tweede van het patroon) negen draaiingen, enzovoort.
Hoewel de planeten in het TOI-178 systeem op een zeer ordelijke manier rond hun ster draaien, volgen hun dichtheden geen bepaald patroon. Een van de exoplaneten, een dichte, aardse planeet zoals de onze, ligt vlak naast een even grote en pluizige planeet - zoals een kleine Jupiter, en daarnaast ligt een planeet die erg op Neptunus lijkt.
ESA/CHEOPS Mission Consortium/A. Leleu et al.
Onverwacht
"Dit is niet wat we verwacht hadden, en het is de eerste keer dat we zo'n opstelling in een planetenstelsel waarnemen", zegt Adrien Leleu van de Universiteit van Bern en Genève.
"In de weinige systemen die we kennen waar de planeten in dit resonantieritme ronddraaien, nemen de dichtheden van de planeten geleidelijk af naarmate we ons verder van de ster verwijderen, en dat is ook wat we op grond van de theorie verwachten."
Geen catastrofale gebeurtenis
Catastrofale gebeurtenissen zoals reusachtige inslagen zouden de grote variaties in de dichtheden van de planeten kunnen verklaren, maar het TOI-178 systeem zou niet zo evenwichtig zijn als dit het geval zou zijn geweest. "De draaiingen in dit systeem zijn zeer goed geordend, wat ons vertelt dat dit systeem sinds de geboorte vrij rustig geëvolueerd is", zegt Yann Alibert van de Universiteit van Bern.
De ontdekking van de complexe structuur van het TOI-178 systeem stelt zodoende de huidige theorieën over planeetvorming op de proef.
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Pilot Captures Foo Fighter Near His Plane Over Karachi, Pakistan 1-23-2021, UFO Sighting News.
Pilot Captures Foo Fighter Near His Plane Over Karachi, Pakistan 1-23-2021, UFO Sighting News.
Above screenshot has a pakistan png plane added to give you an idea of what he was flying.
Date of sighting: 1-23-2021
Location of sighting: Over Ocean area near Karachi, Pakistan
Source: MUFON, reported today.
Wow, just wow! Guys this is 100% an actual foo fighter. The legendary WWII orbs that would ride along side the planes and follow them over the ocean. This sighting took place along the coast near the city of Karachi, Pakistan. Look carefully at the screenshot above. Do you notice it has a metal ring around it and a brilliant white light coming from its center? That is the most focused Foo fighter photo in the history of UFO research! Absolute proof aliens are still following planes and keeping an eye on humanities activities. Best freaking sighting in several months.
Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Eyewitness states:
We were flying at 35000 feet.Operating Captain was just in the process of sitting down on his seat and the aircraft started to turn on the route which enabled him to see this brilliant white round object above and to the right of the aircraft.It could either have been hovering or moving slowly (difficult to tell due relative motion).Cell phone cameras were put in action fat to capture the object.After landing was found out that it had been seen/filmed in different areas as well.
Is there anyone out there? What is the alien agenda? And why has the government gone to such great lengths to stifle the overwhelming evidence that otherworldly creatures exist? Some of our greatest minds ask these questions and more in a quest to unveil the truth behind this massive cover-up–and whether Earth can afford to ignore the extraterrestrial messages much longer.
Enlarge/ Three barrels welded together are lowered onto a pressure dome for SN2 at the South Texas Launch Site this week.
BOCA CHICA BEACH, Texas—How badly does Elon Musk want to get to Mars? Let me tell you a story. On Sunday, February 23, Musk called an all-hands meeting at the South Texas site where SpaceX is building his Starship spacecraft.
It was 1am.
At an hour when most Americans were throwing down their last shots before closing time, at home in bed, or binge-watching The Office before it leaves Netflix, Musk brought his team together. He wanted to know why the Starship factory wasn’t humming at all hours. Why steel sheets weren’t getting welded into domes and fuel tanks, why tanks were not being stacked into rockets, why things weren’t going as fast as he wanted.
Musk always wants to go fast. He will not live forever, and the money may eventually run dry. He knows this. One day, the window to spread humanity to Mars may close, but Musk doesn’t know when. So he needs to squeeze through before the window shuts.
To really accelerate, his bleary-eyed engineers and technicians responded, they needed enough employees to assign workers to particular stations within the burgeoning factory, allowing each person to specialize. This would require a lot more hands that could build things.
“I said, ‘OK no problem,’” Musk recalls. “I said, ‘You can hire people—just know your reputation is on the line. Don’t bring your brother-in-law who can’t ever get a job. Not that person, OK? You’re going to be responsible for them. Everyone’s got their relatives that they know at the family gathering who, man, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to work with that person. Don’t bring that person. Bring the person who you’d put your reputation on the line for.’”
SpaceX had held a much publicized “career day” in early February, and the company hired several dozen new employees. By contrast, this Starship factory’s scale-up would be all word of mouth. And it would happen immediately.
Musk told his team members they would have a recruitment gathering just 12 hours later, at 1pm that Sunday. They would have another one on Monday at 1pm and then again at 8pm. Long lines of people showed up, family members and friends, mostly local. Cars and trucks jammed the roadside up and down Boca Chica Highway. At 11pm on Monday night, SpaceX was still hiring.
All told, the company added 252 people to its South Texas Launch Site on that Sunday and Monday. It doubled the workforce, just like that, to more than 500 workers. Most of the new hires, even those who had inked contracts at midnight, were told to report for work the next morning. A year ago, perhaps a dozen or so people worked on site. Soon, the Texas factory will probably be SpaceX’s largest location outside of its headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
Elon Musk will spend money to go fast, and in South Texas he is proving it. In a matter of weeks, SpaceX has built a small city down here, hard by the Rio Grande River. It is all rather astonishing. And maybe, just maybe, this new Muskville really will serve as a launch pad to the first city on Mars.
Meet the chief engineer
This past weekend, following the hiring spree, I visited the company’s facilities at Musk’s invitation. My tour included a visit to the launch pad. You may have seen the video footage of a Starship prototype known as Serial Number 1 (SN1) blowing apart during a pressurization test. This happened the night before my arrival. Engineers had loaded liquid nitrogen into the vehicle’s fuel tanks to determine their ability to hold very cold liquids at high pressure. The answer: not very well.
Starship SN1 test failure.
Bent, blackened, and charred, steel wreckage was strewn about the site. At first glance, it looked bad. But upon closer inspection, not all seemed lost. The launch tower for the vehicle appeared largely undamaged. The ground systems and fuel tanks that support Starship on the pad were located behind a berm and bore only a few scars from rocket shrapnel.
SN1 was never destined to fly, anyway. The plan for this vehicle, had it survived the pressurization test, was to install a Raptor engine and perform a static test firing. If everything looked just right on this test, Musk might have greenlighted a test with three Raptor engines. But probably not. The attitude of engineers working on the program boiled down to this: it sucks to lose SN1, but the next vehicle in line is already outpacing it. SN2 will soon be ready for tank testing.
Not that Musk felt particularly happy about losing a Starship. On Saturday and Sunday, he huddled with his engineers inside the University of Texas’ Stargate building, at the periphery of the company’s South Texas footprint. A year ago, the few rooms SpaceX leased on the building’s second floor were the only facilities on site aside from a few construction trailers. Now it is merely the front door. SpaceX has taken over the entire building, turning it into a mix of offices and storage.
On Sunday afternoon, I met Musk inside a Stargate conference room where he sat at a long table, wearing an “Occupy Mars” T-shirt and drinking a Diet Coke.
This gallery shows the aftermath of SN1's pressure test failure. This piece flew more than 100 meters, and across Boca Chica Highway.
Eric Berger
Just a shot showing Starhopper's proximity to the launch pad. It survived!
This rocket has ceased to be. It rests in peace. This is an ex-rocket.
A close-up view of Starhopper, just because. We were told that the landing legs were made of the biggest pipe an engineer could order online, and get delivered within 48 hours.
Here's an upper view of hopper. She was a pig. Her walls were made from 13mm-thick steel. SN2 will be made with 4mm thick walls.
Things got a bit hot coming in for a landing.
More views of SN1 here.
Launch stand is mostly good, however.
So is the ground support equipment (although we passed a few chunks of debris that ended up there).
The nearby landing site is unharmed.
A second shard of debris on the other side of the highway.
“Well, I just had a lot of talks with the team about that today,” he said of the SN1 failure. “It’s what you might call the thrust puck—there’s an inverted cone where we mount the three sea-level engines. In fact, it’s drawn on that whiteboard over there.”
He walked up to the whiteboard and pointed to a frowning face. “This is my drawing,” he said with a smirk. Then, with a dry-erase marker in hand, Musk proceeded to lecture about rockets.
“There’s a sad face because we have an inverted cone,” he said. “It’s such a dumb design. It’s one of the dumbest things on the whole rocket because it’s heavy, expensive, and unreliable.”
Basically, the SN1 failure boiled down to bad welds in a weak section of Starship near the engine. When exposed to pressure, the welds burst.
Musk was not happy because he had not heard about this specific issue, in this section of Starship, before the test failure. Do you think Musk addressed that with his team? Yeah, he addressed that.
“We sent out a note to the team that this was badly designed, badly built, and badly checked,” he said. “That’s just a statement of fact. I met with the whole quality team, and I said, ‘Did you think that that thing was good?’ They said, ‘No.’ I told them that, in the future, you treat that rocket like it’s your baby, and you do not send it to the test site unless you think your baby’s going to be OK. They said that they did raise the concern to one of the engineers. But that engineer didn’t do anything. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘then you need to email me directly.’ Now they understand. If you email me directly, and if I buy off on the risk, then it’s OK. What’s not OK is they think that the weld is not good, they don’t tell me, they take it to the pad and blow it up. Now I have been clear. There’s plenty of forgiveness if you pass me the buck. There is no forgiveness if you don’t.”
What you need to understand about Musk is that he is the chief engineer of SpaceX—and that’s not a courtesy title. Musk previously told me that at the very beginning of SpaceX, no great engineers would take the job, and what’s the point of hiring someone to be chief engineer who isn’t great? So he became the chief engineer of SpaceX. Almost every technical rocket decision made at SpaceX comes to him eventually. Especially the hard ones. He has spent many, if not the majority, of his days since December in South Texas. During Christmas, employees there say, he worked all-nighters alongside them to get the dome structure and the welds right for SN1.
Yet Musk has not been spending so much of his time in South Texas just to build a Starship. Rather, he’s trying to build a production line for Starships. He wants to build a lot of them. And fast, always fast.
“Production is at least 1,000 percent harder than making one of something,” he said. “At least 1,000 percent harder.”
Musk should know. He lived through “production hell” at Tesla in 2017 and 2018, building up factories, changing processes, spending many sleepless nights and going through all manner of mental agony. Now, Tesla is making as many as 10,000 cars a week.
He wants to implement a similar system in South Texas. Musk, in fact, aims to reach a point where the company builds a Starship a week by the end of this year. And after that? Maybe they’ll go faster. SpaceX is designing its factory here to build a Starship every 72 hours.
The knuckle seamer
In addition to hiring, SpaceX has rapidly expanded its facilities in South Texas in recent months. The company has built two large windbreaks, which will essentially serve as “high bays” for stacking the Starship vehicle. In just the last six weeks, SpaceX completed construction of two football-field sized tents and is working on a third. Although they are huge, the tents were not quite tall enough for SpaceX’s needs. So the first two are stacked on a single row of sea vans, the intermodal containers used to ship material around the world. Eventually, SpaceX plans to cut windows in the sea vans and make offices. Because the third tent needs to be even higher, it is stacked on a double row of sea vans.
Musk wants a linear flow through the tents, whereby rocket parts come into one end of the factory and move from station to station until large chunks of Starship end up in a high bay for stacking into a vehicle.
The process of building a Starship on site begins with large “barrels.” Each of these is about two meters tall and nine meters in diameter. To make a barrel, a length of 301 full hard stainless steel is unspooled, cut once, and welded along this seam into a cylinder. In an unpressurized state the barrels are cumbersome, as each weighs nearly 1,600kg. To construct the outer skin of Starship, 17 barrels are stacked and welded together, with a nose cone on top. As of Saturday, since manufacturing operations began in Boca Chica about 11 months ago, the company has built 50 barrels. But the process is accelerating. The company can now make two barrels a day, and it aims to reach a production cadence of four barrels a day.
The first of the big new tents, erected in January, is filled with tank domes for the SN2 and SN3 vehicles. Pressurized domes are difficult because they cap off the ends of fuel tanks and must hold chilled rocket propellant—in Starship’s case, methane—and liquid oxygen at high pressures. So they must be made with care. The current process for building a pressure dome takes about a week; 1 or 2 days to tack up and fit steel sheets, 4 days to weld the sheets together, and 1 to 2 days for X-ray inspections and repairs. But in Muskville, taking a week to make a dome is way too slow.
So Musk has challenged his team to find ways to go faster, to cut production time, and to improve weld qualities. He has let his engineers engineer. And they think they’re close to a solution for dome welding with a tool called a “knuckle seamer.” They built a prototype in the second tent.
The knuckle seamer looks something like a giant zipper that articulates over the front and back of a dome, like a taco shell around its filling. On the front, the seam to be welded is designed to line up along the zipper, which clamps down for a precise fit. Then, in about 10 minutes, an automated torch will trace down the length of the curve, providing a precise weld. Following this, the dome is rotated to bring the next seam into view.
Other engineers have built an in-house, shielded machine to X-ray the welds. Presently, an X-ray team shows up, quarantines a work area, the premises are vacated, and then radiation tests look for imperfections. With this new X-ray machine, SpaceX hopes to compress a process that can take a day down to a few hours.
This is all happening so fast. These machines existed only in the minds of engineers four weeks ago. The tent they’ve installed them in for testing was built less than three weeks ago. Musk has always had a knack for hiring brilliant young engineers, and those in the Boca Chica tents were mostly in their 20s, busting their tails for the boss. Willingly. Why? Because Musk empowers them to go fast, do cool things, and, very soon, to see their machines fly.
Absolutely mad
Why the hell does Elon Musk need to build so many Starships, anyway?
Because he’s actually serious about settling Mars. It’s not a joke. It’s not a con for more government money (although Musk won’t turn that down). No, Mars is the raison d’être for SpaceX. And now, in South Texas, Musk is getting close enough to Mars that he can almost taste its red dirt.
Let’s just step back for a moment to acknowledge how nuts this is. Starship is only the upper stage for SpaceX’s Super Heavy rocket, but it is arguably the most novel spacecraft ever built. No one has ever built a fully reusable rocket, and the second stage that goes into space is the hardest part. SpaceX remains a long way from making the interior of Starship habitable for humans on a journey to Mars. But even building a fully reusable vehicle that can lift 150 tons into low Earth orbit would be a marvel. That’s more throw capacity than the Apollo Program’s Saturn V rocket had.
Compare that to NASA and its Space Launch System, the big rocket that the space agency has been developing for a decade and for which Boeing only recently completed a single core stage. This core stage is about 15 meters taller than Starship but lacks its complexity. NASA will, in fact, toss each SLS core stage into the ocean after a single use. And Boeing doesn’t have to make the engines, as the rocket uses 40-year-old space shuttle main engines. Despite this, and with nearly $2 billion in annual funding from NASA, Boeing’s stretch goal for building core stages is one to two per year... some time in the mid-2020s.
SpaceX’s stretch goal is to build one to two Starships a week, this year, and to pare back construction costs to as low as $5 million each.
“That’s fucking insane,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s insane,” Musk replied.
“I mean, it really is.”
“Yeah, it’s nuts.”
“As I look across the aerospace landscape, nobody is doing anything remotely like this,” I said.
“No, it’s absolutely mad, I agree,” Musk said. “The conventional space paradigms do not apply to what we’re doing here. We’re trying to build a massive fleet to make Mars habitable, to make life multi-planetary. I think we need, probably, on the order of 1,000 ships, and each of those ships would have more payload than the Saturn V—and be reusable.”
Musk has thought about this a lot, obviously.
“The point at which one says the goal is to make life multi-planetary, it means that we need to have a self-sustaining city on Mars,” Musk said. “That city has to survive if the resupply ships stop coming from Earth for any reason whatsoever. Doesn’t matter why. If those resupply ships stop coming, does the city die out or not? In order to make something self-sustaining, you can’t be missing anything. You must have all the ingredients. It can’t be like, well this thing is self-sustaining except for this one little thing that we don’t have. It can’t be. That’d be like saying, ‘Well, we went on this long sea voyage, and we had everything except vitamin C.’ OK, great. Now you’re going to get scurvy and die—and painfully, by the way. It’s going to suck. You’re going to die slowly and painfully for lack of vitamin C. So we’ve got to make sure we’ve got the vitamin C there on Mars. Then it’s like, OK, rough order of magnitude, what kind of tonnage do you need to make it self-sustaining? It’s probably not less than a million tons.”
Enlarge/ SpaceX will need to send many, many ships to settle Mars.
SpaceX
That’s not a precise number, of course. It’s a rough estimate. But Mars settlers will need vast quantities of stuff. The settlers will need to build an entire industrial base to mine the Red Planet, and there are many steps in mining. To make consumer products requires a huge infrastructure base to refine and shape materials.
“I’ll probably be long dead before Mars becomes self-sustaining, but I’d like to at least be around to see a bunch of ships land on Mars,” Musk said.
A machine to build a machine
SpaceX engineers and technicians in Boca Chica needed eight months, from last April through November, to build the first Starship prototype, MK1. (It blew its top, too.) But the workers in South Texas only needed a month, from late January to late February, to assemble SN1. And SN2 is following only about two weeks behind SN1.
“The problem with the MK1 stuff was that I didn’t have my eye fully on the ball, because I was still taking care of a lot of Tesla stuff,” Musk said. “Now Tesla, I think, is in a good situation here, so that’s why I’m pretty much camped out in Boca. The MK1 was a failure not because the rocket failed at low pressure, but because we failed to build a production line.”
Now he has built the production system. It’s not finished. It’s not perfect. But it’s starting to pay dividends. The factory is beginning to flow linearly, from one station to another. And after last week’s flurry of hiring, the company has the workers it needs to produce rockets one after another.
“If you’re just trying to make one of something, it can all basically just be made by the engineering team,” he said. “But if you want to actually make something at reasonable volume, you have to build the machine that makes the machine, which mathematically is going to be vastly more complicated than the machine itself. The thing that makes the machine is not going to be simpler than the machine. It’s going to be much more complicated by a lot. Things need to be translated into instructions that the average person can understand. You can’t have somebody with an engineering master’s degree from MIT hand-making every single part. It’s not possible. There just aren’t enough. MIT’s not graduating enough people.”
So Musk is making the machine to make the machine. Musk has brought lessons learned from Tesla’s assembly line so workers do not burn out. They will work three 12-hour days and then have a four-day weekend. Then they’ll work four 12-hour shifts with a three-day weekend. Thus, with four shifts, the Boca Chica site can operate at full capacity 24 hours a day, seven days a week. SpaceX is throwing in hot meals every three to four hours, for free.
The company is building toward a critical test flight later this spring, a hop to about 20km that will prove the Starship vehicle can fly in a controlled manner and safely return to Earth. After this, Musk has set an aspirational goal of flying an orbital mission—maybe with SN5 or SN6, he really doesn’t know—before the end of 2020.
Despite the velocity at which SpaceX is moving, this seems unlikely, because SpaceX has yet to build its Super Heavy rocket. This is the mammoth, reusable first stage that will kick Starship into orbit. It will be powered by as many as 37 Raptor engines. This sure seems like a lot of engines, but the Falcon Heavy has shown the way, flying successfully with 27 Merlin engines of its own.
Enlarge/ If the Falcon Heavy can fly with 27 engines—can 37 be that hard?
SpaceX
“If we’re making tanks for the ship, the booster’s just a longer tank with more engines on the base and no heat shielding,” Musk said. “We’ll bring it back and land it just like the Falcon 9. We’ll make the booster using the same domes and cylinder sections that we do for the ship. If you build a ship line, you’re kind of building the booster line anyway. The only thing that really changes is the aft dome where you’re transferring thrust load into the booster. You’ve got like 31 engines, potentially 37—that thrust dome obviously has to be unique, relative to the rest of the vehicle. It would use the same, or similar legs, as the ship. It’s less complicated in that it doesn’t need any heat shielding, but more complicated on the engine side.”
Let’s be honest: it’s pretty darn complicated. But the one thing SpaceX has shown over the last two decades is an increasing competence in building rockets. When it comes to innovation in rocket science is there anyone better in the world? Probably not.
Just iterate, baby
I’ve spoken with plenty of the earliest engineers who worked at SpaceX, and almost all of them have noted that Musk tackles the hardest engineering problems first. For Mars, there will be so many logistical things to make it all work, from power on the surface to scratching out a living to adapting to its extreme climate. But Musk believes that the initial, hardest step is building a reusable, orbital Starship to get people and tons of stuff to Mars. So he is focused on that.
He knows he won’t get Starship right at first. He employs some of the smartest engineers on this planet, and they’re still, in many ways, fumbling toward solutions for the extremely hard problem of getting a super-large vehicle out of Earth’s gravity well into orbit—then to land it and fly it again. Musk has come to believe the only way to realistically achieve this is through trial and error, by iterating closer and closer to the right design.
The hardest part of any rocket is the engine. And SpaceX is almost there with the Raptor engine iterations. “We’ve done this with Raptor,” he said. “Like, we’re on Raptor engine 23 or something, Maybe 24. It’s lighter, cheaper, better in almost every way than Raptor version one, which sucked and blew up, basically. One of about six or seven Raptors that blew up, I’ve lost count.”
The point is, Raptor is now in a good place. The next step involves building a spaceship with the tanks and plumbing to harness the power of six Raptor engines. The first two Starships have blown up during pressurization tests, but with each new iteration of Starship, Musk and his band of engineers are learning.
“A high production rate solves many ills,” he said. “If you have a high production rate, you have a high iteration rate. For pretty much any technology whatsoever, the progress is a function of how many iterations do you have, and how much progress do you make between each iteration. If you have a high production rate then you have many iterations. You can make progress from one to the next.”
None of this is cheap. Boca Chica is a fairly remote location to ship materials into. And the company has gone really fast, sparing few expenses. How long can it go like this, and how is he paying for all of this? Musk declined to offer specifics.
“We’re just paying for it internally,” he said. Then he paused and added, “Success is not assured.”
It is not. But when it comes to space and automobile production, history has shown that Musk pushes through difficult financial and technical challenges. The Falcon 1 rocket failed three times before it finally reached orbit. Tesla faced bankruptcy on several occasions. Musk has always pulled through. He now flies the most powerful rocket in the world, the Falcon Heavy, and the most cost-efficient (and only) reusable orbital rocket, the Falcon 9. Tesla is the world’s biggest electric car company.
Even so, maybe you think Elon Musk is going to fail in his Mars ambitions. Any reasonable person might. This kind of thing makes the Apollo Program look like child’s play, and the Moon Landing is regarded as perhaps the most significant technical achievement of the 20th century. But should we really be working on a repeat of Apollo half a century after we already did it? Maybe we should reach higher and further.
Walking through those tents in South Texas, amid the bustle of those workstations, surrounded by rolls of stainless steel, it becomes easier to believe that we should and that we can. The place feels the way a US Navy shipyard must have felt in the weeks after Pearl Harbor—insanely busy but also purposeful.
These kids and swarms of recently hired technicians are fighting against impossible odds every day, and they’re determined to win. Don’t tell them it can’t be done. They’re not having any of that in Muskville.
24-year-old Lauren Nevil of Farmington, New York, contacted the Singular Fortean Society earlier this month to report a sighting of strange, white aerial lights seen during a power outage last November.
The outage came as a result of a stormfront with high winds which knocked out power for thousands of residents in western New York on November 15th, 2020.
In an interview with investigator Tobias Wayland, Nevil said she was preparing to go to bed that evening when her mother alerted her to something strange happening outside.
"I remember specifically because I was trying to get to sleep, and it was a windy night, and all the power went out. I live in a townhouse complex. I remember the power going out and my mom came upstairs [calling my name]. I said, ‘What? I’m trying to go to sleep because I have to get up for work the next morning.’ She said, ‘Look outside!’ She was freaking out," said Nevil.
"I looked out my bedroom window, facing towards the parking lot, and I saw all of these strange lights in the sky,” she continued. “My mom was flipping out, and I was like 'What is going on?' She called my sister into my room, and we could see everything because there was no light pollution, so it was clear. It was a clear sky. We didn’t know what was going on. We didn’t know if it was satellites. My sister counted 10 to 15 lights. I’m not sure how long it lasted, maybe about 10 to 15 minutes."
Historical weather data for that evening shows that at the time of the sighting, which Nevil believed took place between 10 and 10:30 p.m., the sky over Farmington was mostly cloudy, meaning that while a small portion of the sky might have been visible, it would have been mostly obscured.
"It was just a bunch [of lights] all clustered together," she explained. "They were bright, [and] they were just sitting there. I think the oddest thing was that they were clustered together in a group—not in any sort of formation. It was very strange."
Weather conditions that evening make it likely that the lights were below the cloud cover, given Nevil's description of events.
"This wasn’t like any star or anything," she said of the lights.
After the three women spent “10 to 15 minutes” observing the stationary lights, they “all just kind of disappeared,” said Nevil.
"[The lights disappeared] kind of like one at a time," she said.
Nevil told Wayland that she had done some research of her own prior to contacting the Singular Fortean Society.
"I’ve looked up websites where people report UFOs, and in the area that I live people have seen stuff, although that’s the first time I’ve ever really seen anything," she said. "I’m kind of freaked out."
Wayland found five reported sightings from Farmington in the case files of the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC).
NUFORC's files also showed that the city of Rochester, only 20 miles northwest of Farmington and located directly adjacent to Lake Ontario, has had many dozens of reported UFO sightings going back decades.
This sighting isn’t the only unusual encounter had by Nevil, who said she and her sister have also experienced a string of nighttime visitations by unknown entities.
"When we used to live in our old house, before we moved, my sister and I would sometimes feel like someone was sitting on our bed, like the pressure. It felt like someone was sitting there. That happened every once in a while," she said. "Our beds would shake, too. We don’t know what that was."
Her sister, said Nevil, had even woken up to find "someone was standing over her, leaning over to look at her," although "that hasn’t happened in a long time."
Nevil said that, despite having been in bed when she experienced the paranormal events, she was sure that she was "fully awake” at the times they occurred.
If you could fly two billion miles in the direction of the Pegasus constellation, and knew where to look, you would find a thin, flat object, about the size of a football field and up to ten times more reflective than the average comet. If you watched it for a while, you would notice that it is tumbling as it moves away from the sun, turning end over end roughly every seven hours.
This object passed the Earth in October 2017. As it began its return to interstellar space, the Canadian astronomer Robert Weryk identified it among the images from what was then the world’s most powerful camera, a telescope in Hawaii called Pan-STARRS1. The astronomers in Hawaii called it ‘Oumuamua, a Hawaiian word meaning “first scout from a distant place”.
‘Oumuamua was the subject of great excitement. It was the first object humans have observed travelling through the solar system from interstellar space. But it also became controversial: its shape, the way in which it approached us, and the way it moved away are not consistent with the behaviour of an asteroid or comet. For 11 days, the world’s telescopes searched for meaning from this strange visitor.
A year later, the debate about ‘Oumuamua intensified when one of the world’s foremost astronomers, Avi Loeb, submitted a paper to the Astrophysical Journal Letters. In it, Loeb and his colleague, Shmuel Bailey, argued that ‘Oumuamua’s strange properties indicated that it was “a new class of thin interstellar material, either produced naturally, through a yet unknown process […] or of an artificial origin”. Since then, Loeb has maintained that the most rational, conservative explanation is that ‘Oumuamua was produced by an alien civilisation.
We will almost certainly never see ‘Oumuamua again, because it is heading away from the solar system at 30 kilometres a second. But Loeb says scientists must prepare now for what happens when the next such object arrives, as he believes it will very soon. If he is right, these objects surround us in numbers that are almost unimaginable.
***
Avi Loeb is a fast talker; he has the rapid fluency of someone who has spent decades giving lectures, but there is also an unpractised enthusiasm to his speech. He keeps the accent of his native Israel, though he has lived in the US since 1988, when he took a fellowship at Princeton University. His first interview was with the famous physicist Freeman Dyson, who was also well known for theorising about alien civilisations.
Loeb spent almost a decade as chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, the longest any scientist has held that position. He has made or helped to make a number of major breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe, including different ways of detecting exoplanets – planets orbiting stars other than the sun. He has correctly predicted incredible phenomena, such as stars that streak across the depths between galaxies at nearly half a billion miles an hour. He is the founding director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, part of the Event Horizon Telescope project that in April 2019 presented to the world the first photograph of a black hole.
Practically all of Loeb’s predictions have had the backing of his peers, except one.
In the autumn of 2019, Loeb and a colleague – a senior astronomer at Harvard – attended a seminar on ‘Oumuamua. “After it ended,” Loeb told me, “I left the room together with a colleague of mine who is a conservative, mainstream astronomer, and he said: ‘This object is so weird – I wish it never existed.’”
This is, Loeb says, “a terrible thing to say for a scientist… you should accept with open arms anything that nature gives you”. But he has also found such attitudes to be common. There is, he says, a widespread “taboo” on talking about extraterrestrial intelligence.
Why does Loeb believe that ‘Oumuamua was alien technology?
First, unlike most things in space, ‘Oumuamua was not moving relative to what astronomers call the local standard of rest. Loeb calls this a “very special frame of reference, sort of the galactic parking lot”. It was not that ‘Oumuamua visited us but that the sun and its attendant planets, moving through space at 450,000 miles an hour, moved past it, the sun’s gravity bumping it as a ship’s wake disturbs a piece of flotsam.
But what really excites Loeb is what happened next. ‘Oumuamua “showed an excess push away from the sun, in addition to the sun’s gravitational force acting on it”. This happens with comets, which can speed up as the frozen material on them vaporises, causing them to swerve through space and producing a distinctive “tail”. Based on the change in its speed, Loeb says ‘Oumuamua would have had to lose “about a tenth of its mass. That’s quite a lot… we should have seen a very clear cloud of gas around it.”
But ‘Oumuamua had no tail. Close observation by the Spitzer Space Telescope saw nothing around it; it did not even radiate any heat. And it did not move erratically, as comets do, but accelerated smoothly away from the sun. The most rational explanation for this, Loeb says, is that it was pushed by sunlight itself.
‘Oumuamua’s shape is also distinct from almost everything else we have observed in space. Its brightness varied by a factor of ten every eight hours, suggesting “a very extreme geometry”. The most popular depiction of ‘Oumuamua is of a long, cigar-shaped rock, but research by Sergey Mashchenko, a computational astrophysicist at McMaster University in Canada, suggests a 91 per cent chance that it is disc-shaped.
Each of these factors is highly unlikely for any astronomical object. Taken together, Loeb says, they make ‘Oumuamua “a very rare object, if it’s coming from the same reservoir of objects [asteroids and comets] that we are familiar with”.
For Loeb, the rational answer is to find something that fits the data and is familiar to us.
Astronomers were able to do this in September, when another object, called 2020 SO, was discovered in orbit around the Earth. Just like ‘Oumuamua, 2020 SO appeared to have been pushed from its gravitational course by sunlight. And this time, Nasa confirmed that 2020 SO was artificial. It was a piece of a Centaur rocket, launched from Florida in 1966, that had been recaptured by the Earth’s gravity.
For Loeb, 2020 SO “illustrates the fact that we can identify an object that behaves in a peculiar fashion, that has no cometary tail, and yet it exhibits an extra push. And if ‘Oumuamua, indeed, was that kind of an object, the question is: who produced it?”
***
Loeb’s biggest concern about ‘Oumuamua is not that it has disappeared from sight, but that the response to it “betrays the culture of science”. The Copernican principle, the change in thinking that allowed humanity to begin modern astronomy, states that we are not at the centre of the universe. To pretend, in the face of confounding data, that ‘Oumuamua is just another asteroid is to act as if we are.
Loeb’s sense of scale and probability is informed by a long study of the early universe. In a 2014 paper, he described the likelihood that rocky planets with liquid water provided the chemistry to support life when the universe was as little as ten million years old. In the 13.8 billion years since that time, billions of galaxies – each home to billions of Earth-like planets – have formed. To say that life, intelligence and civilisation have emerged only once in such an expanse of time and space is, he argues, a radical view.
“There is nothing more conservative than saying that if you arrange for the same circumstances, you get the same outcome,” he says. For Loeb, the conservative assumption about humanity is “that we are a middle-of-the-road kind of life that exists everywhere. I don’t think that we are special or unique.”
But if we are not unique, it follows that ‘Oumuamua is not unique, either.
Pan-STARRS began searching for near-Earth objects in early 2014, and discovered ‘Oumuamua in under four years. Applying the Copernican principle, we should assume that we will see another object once every three or four years. But this frequency may change, because our ability to see them is about to increase.
This year, the telescope at the Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile will take its first test pictures – astronomers call this “first light” – of the night sky. Even more powerful than Pan-STARRS, this will repeatedly photograph everything visible in the sky using a mirror more than eight metres across and the biggest digital camera in the world.
“We could then find one such object every month,” says Loeb, “because, you know, there should be many more out there.”
The question of how many ‘Oumuamuas are out there is the point at which the inferences become dizzying. If we see one every few years, Loeb infers that “there should be one in every volume roughly the size of the orbit of the Earth around the sun”. This is a vast area in human terms, but in the immensity of space, “it’s pretty small. So it means that there are plenty of them, a quadrillion of them, inside the Oort cloud. Inside the solar system. There are lots of them.”
It is difficult to reconcile the idea that we are surrounded by trillions of pieces of alien technology with scientific conservatism. Humanity’s understanding of itself would be radically changed if we knew that other life had once built such things.
But Loeb believes, as he explains in his compelling and personal new book on ‘Oumuamua, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, that humanity’s understanding of itself should change now. The book is not so much a claim for one object as an argument for a more open-minded approach to science – a combination of humility and wonder that he worries has been supplanted by elitism and “intellectual gymnastics”.
“The crime here,” he tells me, is that a whole branch of astronomy, “a subject that is so appealing to the public, that the scientific community can address with its instruments and methodology, is not being addressed at all.”
But if Loeb is right, we may soon have no choice but to wonder. Next month, on 18 February, the Perseverance rover will land on Mars to search for signs of life. Any evidence, even of ancient microbes, on our celestial neighbour would suggest that life is far more abundant than is generally accepted.
“We might learn much more in the coming year,” says Loeb. “So, let’s wait and see.”
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
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