UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Alien abduction cases have become so numerous that it is hard to even keep track of them anymore. Many of them follow the same beats as well, which can cause the effect of melding them all together until one doesn’t know which one is which. Yet, there are some that stand tall above the crowd in their sheer, absurd bizarreness, and that is what we are here to look at. There are not many alien abduction cases that come away with hard evidence, but here we have one that not only produced evidence, but allegedly also a sample of alien DNA. Down the rabbit hole we go.

The man known as Peter Khoury came from Lebanon to Australia with his family in 1973, and he at the time already had experience with strange UFO phenomena. In 1971, he had had his first encounter back in his home country at the age of 7, on a seemingly normal day when he was out playing with some other children. According to him, at some point he had noticed that the other kids had become somewhat frozen in time, like insects in amber or statues, and above them there had been hovering a mysterious egg-shaped craft. These kids would later wake from their frozen status with no memory of what had happened, leaving Khoury as the only witness to the whole outlandish thing. The incident would hang in the back of his mind for years, and it would seem that this would not be the last of his strange UFO experiences.

By 1981, Khoury had fully adjusted to his new life in Australia and had met his future wife, Vivian. The two dated for years, eventually marrying in 1990, but it was in 1988 that they would have a very bizarre shared experience of seeing a UFO, but it would get weirder. He claims that on the evening of July 12 of that year he had been lying in bed with Vivian and woke up with the sensation that someone was grabbing his ankles, after which he was suddenly paralyzed and unable to move. He then saw four dwarf-like hooded entities enter the room, accompanied by a taller creature with golden skin and oversized black eyes, this latter one approaching him to stick a needle right into his head. As the entity did this, it assured him that it would be “just like last time” and told him not to panic. Throughout it all, Vivian remained totally asleep and oblivious to it all. Khoury then lost consciousness.

The next morning, Khoury told his wife what had happened, and examining his head she found a spot of blood and puncture mark that corroborated his wild tale. It seems as if he was very confused at the time, having no knowledge of the greater phenomena of alien abductions and so unable to come to terms with what was happening to him. This was the main thrust that pushed him into the UFO field, even inspiring to start his own contactee support group called the UFO Experience Support Association. However, for as bizarre as this all was, it was nothing compared to what was in store for him.

One evening in 1992, Khoury came home and lay down, as he was not feeling well in the wake of an injury he had sustained at work. He drifted off to sleep but was jolted awake to find two women sitting on the edge of his bed, one Nordic in appearance, one Asian, and both with oversized eyes, impossibly chiseled features, and incidentally both completely naked. The Nordic woman then apparently grabbed Khoury and pulled his face to her breast, and in his panic he bit her, taking off a piece of her nipple in the process, but this caused no bleeding or reaction of pain from the woman. She merely stopped her assault and the two women sat there watching Khoury as he experienced an intense coughing fit. He doubled over coughing, and at some point realized that the two women were now gone. Khoury then went into the bathroom coughing uncontrollably, and it was there where he would realize that he had the overwhelming desire to urinate, which was painful and as he did so noticing that there were some blonde hairs wrapped around below down there. This was incredibly odd, as there was no way they should have been there, so he saved them in a plastic bag, convinced they must have come from the blonde stranger, who he was starting to think had not been totally human. So far so weird, but it gets even weirder. All of this came to the attention of Australian ufologist Bill Chalker, who had a look at the hair himself and decided to pursue genetic testing on it with a group of scientists and forensic investigators. Chalker would say of the enigmatic hair:

I began an investigation into the hair sample, when biochemical colleagues agreed to undertake what was the world’s first PCR (polymerase Chain Reaction) DNA profiling of biological material implicated in an alien abduction experience. The analysis confirmed the hair came from someone who was biologically close to normal human genetics, but of an unusual racial type – a rare Chinese Mongoloid type – one of the rarest human lineages known, that lies further from the human mainstream than any other except for African pygmies and aboriginals. There was the strange anomaly of it being blonde to clear instead of black, as would be expected from the Asian type mitochondrial DNA. The thin blond hair, which appeared to have come from a light-skinned caucasian-type woman, could not have come from a normal human of that racial type. Instead, though human, the hair showed five distinctive DNA markers that are characteristic of a rare sub-group of the Chinese Mongoloid racial type. A detailed survey of the literature on variations in mitochondrial DNA, comprising tens of thousands of samples, showed only four other people on record with all five of the distinctive markers in the blond hair. All four were Chinese, with black hair.

We had the shaft with one set of DNA, and the root showing a different type, and we could not understand it. And eventually, we concluded that this seemed to be the result of some sort of advanced cloning technique. And also we had evidence in the nuclear DNA that this person who needed to hear I guess, you could say, had what appeared to be CCR five dilution factor, which is an interesting property, because it leads you to be perhaps impervious to things like smallpox and AIDS, that kind of thing. So that would be a very handy thing to have. But unfortunately, it’s not shared that widely around the Earth. They have this constellation of unusual DNA properties within one small hair sample. It was bizarre. To keep a very complex story somewhat uncomplicated, what seems to be suggested by the range of findings is possible evidence for advanced DNA techniques and DNA anomalies & findings, for which we are only now discovering or starting to make sense of in mainstream biotechnology.

It is all pretty wild. A look through vast databases of DNA samples showed that no person with blonde hair could be found in Australia who shared these unique genetic characteristics, leaving it a mystery and potentially solid physical evidence of something very strange going on. What was going on here? Where did this hair come from and what does it all mean? Chalker himself would say of it:

Are we dealing with ‘humans’ from elsewhere, namely those with human DNA, albeit very rare and somewhat anomalous? This case raises all sorts of issues, such as human ‘panspermia'” — the theory that human-like beings may have migrated to Earth in the fairly recent past from elsewhere in the galaxy, perhaps giving rise to the sudden appearance of modern homo sapiens sapiens, a species not directly descended from their immediate predecessors, the Neanderthals. Also, given the Asian mongoloid connection, we looked at the problem of European-like rare Asian types in the past. The controversial saga of the Taklamakan mummies in remote Western China is turning the early history of China on its head. These mummies include people who are quite tall, some 6 feet or so, and some are blond. I’m not suggesting a connection here, but you can understand this investigation has opened up all sorts of interesting possibilities about the biological nature of some of the beings implicated in abduction cases. While such cultural and mythic connections are fascinating speculations, they provide for an interesting perspective on the many stories of Nordic type beings implicated in UFO abduction and contact cases.

Khoury would go on to have other abduction experiences, such as one in 1996 in which he was woken to see small hooded figures seeming to pass through a mirror, after which they levitated him off the bed to pull him towards them before he blacked out, but nothing comes close to the story of the hair. In the meantime, the story was printed in an article in the Center for UFO Studies publication International UFO Reporter, entitled Strange Evidence, and Chalker included it in a whole book on cases like this, called Hair of the Alien: DNA and Other Forensic Evidence of Alien Abductions. Of course there is plenty of skeptical input on this all. Not only does the story not make much sense in some respects, but it does not seem that these scientists supposedly analyzing this supposed alien DNA have ever come out officially to publish the findings in any sort of peer reviewed journal and we obviously have not been hit with any news that alien DNA has officially been found. It all ends up another wild ride that leads off into the murk where we are not sure what is going on. Is there anything to this, or is it just a sensational yarn? Time will tell.

This sand dune, known as Dingo Gap, was crossed by Mars Curiosity in 2014. This image has been ... [+]

NASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS

When we look out at our planet Earth from space, we see a myriad of diverse colors. The sky itself is blue, as the atmosphere preferentially scatters shorter-wavelength blue light in all directions, giving our atmosphere it’s characteristic color. The oceans themselves are blue, as water molecules are better at absorbing longer-wavelength red light than they are blue light. Meanwhile, the continents appear brown or green, dependent on the vegetation (or lack thereof) growing there, while the icecaps and clouds always appear white.

But on Mars, one color dominates: red. The ground is red: red everywhere. The lowlands are red; the highlands are red; the dried-up riverbeds are red; the sand dunes are red; it’s all red. The atmosphere itself is also red in every location we can measure it. The lone exception appears to be the icecaps and clouds, which are white, albeit with a reddish hue as observed from Earth. Yet quite surprisingly, the “redness” of Mars is incredibly shallow; if you dug just the tiniest bit beneath the surface, the redness vanishes. Here’s the scientific story behind just what makes the red planet so red.

Mars, along with its thin atmosphere, as photographed from the Viking orbiter.

Mars, along with its thin atmosphere, as photographed from the Viking orbiter in the 1970s. The ... [+]

NASA/VIKING 1

From space, there’s no denying the red appearance of Mars. For all of recorded history in a wide variety of languages, the redness of Mars has been its most prominent feature. Mangala, the Sanskrit word for Mars, is red. Har decher, its ancient name in Egyptian, literally means “red one.” And as we’ve progressed into the space age, photos that distinguish the surface from the atmosphere clearly show that the air above Mars itself has an intrinsically red color.

In Earth’s atmosphere, Rayleigh scattering dominates, casting blue light in all directions while the red light travels relatively undisturbed. However, the atmosphere of Mars is only 0.7% as thick as Earth’s, rendering Rayleigh scattering from the gas molecules in Mars’s atmosphere a negligible effect. Instead, dust particles in the Martian atmosphere dominate in (likely) two ways:

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greater absorption at short optical wavelengths (400-600 nm) than at longer (600+ nm) wavelengths,
and that larger dust particles (~3 microns and larger) scatter longer-wavelength light more efficiently than atmospheric gas particles scatter shorter-wavelength light from Rayleigh scattering.

The light received on Mars's surface is severely suppressed in shorter (bluer) wavelengths

Compared to the irradiance received at Earth's surface, the light received on Mars's surface is ... [+]

J.F. BELL III, D. SAVRANSKY, & M.J. WOLFF, JGR PLANETS, 111, E12 (2006)

If you look at the suspended atmospheric dust in detail on Mars, and ask, “what is it like,” the answer is incredibly informative. Just from looking at its spectral properties — or “how it affects the light” — we can see that the dust is very similar to the regions on Mars that:

are high in reflectivity,
represent bright soil deposits,
and are rich in iron: i.e., containing large amounts of ferric oxides.

When we look at the dust in detail, particularly with the OMEGA instrument on ESA’s Mars Express mission, we find that the most common type of dust comes from nanocrystalline red hematite, which has the chemical formula α-Fe₂O₃. The particles that make up this hematite are small: between about 3 and 45 microns in diameter. That’s the right size and composition so that the rapid Martian winds, which typically blow at speeds close to ~100 km/hr, continuously sweep large amounts of dust up into the atmosphere, where it remains fairly well-mixed, even when there are no dust storms.

The same panoramic composite image of Mars, shown with two different color assignments.

The same panoramic composite image, taken by Opportunity, shown with two different color ... [+]

NASA / JPL-CALTECH / CORNELL / ARIZONA STATE UNIV.

When we look at the Martian surface itself, however, the story gets far more interesting. Ever since we began examining the Martian surface in detail — first from orbiting missions and, later, landers and rovers — we noticed that surface features would change over time. In particular, we’d notice that there were darker areas and brighter areas, and that the dark areas would evolve in a particular pattern:

they’d begin dark,
they would get covered in dust that we suspect was from the brighter areas,
and then they would go back to being dark once again.

For a long time, we didn’t know why, until we started noticing that the dark areas that change all had a few things in common, particularly when compared to the dark areas that didn’t change. In particular, the dark areas that changed over time had relatively lower elevations and smaller slopes, and were surrounded by brighter areas. By contrast, the higher-elevation, steeper-sloped, and very large dark areas didn’t change in this way over time.

A variety of rock types and colors can be seen from this Curiosity image of Mars.

On Mars, bare-rock structures hold onto heat far better than sand-like structures do, meaning they ... [+]

NASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS, MARS CURIOSITY ROVER

It was a duo of scientists — one of whom was Carl Sagan — who puzzled out the solution: Mars is covered with a layer of this thin, sandy dust that’s driven by winds all across the Martian surface. This sand gets blown from area to area, but it’s easiest for that dust to:

travel short distances,
travel either from higher to lower elevations or to comparable elevations, rather than up to much higher elevations,
and to get blown off of areas with steeper slopes, as opposed to areas with shallower slopes.

In other words, the red dust that dominates the color palette of Mars is only skin deep. That’s not even a poetic turn of phrase in this case: most of Mars is covered by a layer of dust that’s only a few millimeters thick! Even in the region where the dust is thickest — the large plateau known as the Tharsis region, consisting of three very large volcanoes just offset from Olympus Mons (which appears to the plateau’s northwest) — it’s estimated to be a meager 2 meters (~7 feet) thick.

Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) colorized topographic map of Mars's western hemisphere

Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) colorized topographic map of the western hemisphere of Mars, ... [+]

NASA / JPL-CALTECH / ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

You might look at these facts, then, and wonder the following: do we have a topographic map of Mars and a map of the ferric oxides on Mars, and do these maps correlate with one another in any way?

It’s a smart thought, and one that we’ll take a look at in just a second, but “ferric oxide” doesn’t necessarily mean “red Mars dust” the way you might think. First off, ferric oxides are present everywhere on the planet:

within the crust,
found in lava outflows,
and in the Martian dust that’s been oxidized by reactions with the atmosphere.

Given that the atmosphere, even today, contains significant quantities of both carbon dioxide and water, there’s a readily available source of oxygen to oxidize any iron-rich material that makes it to the surface: where it contacts the atmosphere.

As a result, when we look at a ferric oxide map of Mars — again, made by the fabulous OMEGA instrument aboard ESA’s Mars Express — we find that yes, the ferric oxides are everywhere, but the abundances are highest across the northern and mid-latitudes, and lowest across the southern latitudes.

This map plots the distribution of ferric oxides across Mars.

This map, by the OMEGA instrument on ESA’s Mars Express, plots the distribution of ferric oxides, a ... [+]

ESA/CNES/CNRS/IAS/UNIVERSITÉ PARIS-SUD, ORSAY; BACKGROUND IMAGE: NASA MOLA

On the other hand, the topography of Mars shows that the elevation of the red planet varies in an interesting way across its surface, and in a way that’s only partially correlated with the abundance of ferric oxides. The southern hemisphere, predominantly, is at a much higher elevation than the lowlands in the north. The greatest elevations occur in the ferric oxide-rich Tharsis region, but in the lowlands to the east of it, the abundances of ferric oxides plummets.

What you have to realize is that the red hematite form of ferric oxide, which is possibly the culprit for the “redness” of Mars, isn’t the only form of ferric oxide. There is also magnetite: Fe₃O₄, which is black in color instead of red. Although the global topography of Mars appears to play a role in the abundances of ferric oxide, it clearly isn’t the only factor at play, and might not even be the primary factor in determining Mars’s color.

Topographic map of the surface of Mars from MOLA.

The Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) instrument, part of Mars Global Surveyor, collected over 200 ... [+]

MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR MOLA TEAM

What we think is occurring — and this has been a consistent picture for many years — is that there is a bright, globally distributed, globally homogeneous set of dust that gets swept up into the atmosphere and remains there. That dust is basically suspended in the thin Martian atmosphere, and although events like dust storms can increase the concentration, it never drops to a negligibly low value. Mars’s atmosphere is always rich with this dust; that dust provides the atmosphere’s color; but the color features of Mars’s surface aren’t uniform at all.

The “settling of atmospheric dust” is only one factor in determining the surface color of various regions of Mars. This is something we’ve learned very well from our landers and rovers: Mars isn’t a uniform red color at all. In fact, the surface itself is more of an orangey shade of butterscotch overall, and that various rocky objects and deposits on the surface appear to have a variety of colors: brown, golden, tan, and even greenish or yellow, depending on what minerals make up those deposits.

This image, taken by Mars Pathfinder of its Sojourner rover, shows a variety of colors.

This image, taken by Mars Pathfinder of its Sojourner rover, shows a variety of colors. The rover's ... [+]

NASA/MARS PATHFINDER

One question that’s still under investigation is the exact mechanism by which these red hematite particles form. Although there are many ideas that involve molecular oxygen, it’s only found in tiny, trace amounts from the photodissociation of water. Reactions involving water or high temperatures are possible, but those are thermodynamically disfavored.

My two favorite possibilities are reactions involving hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂), which occurs naturally on Mars in low abundances, but is a very strong oxidant. The fact that we see large amounts of α-Fe₂O₃but no hydrated ferric iron minerals could be an indication of this pathway.

Alternatively, we might get hematite simply from a purely physical process: erosion. If you mix together magnetite powder, quartz sand, and quartz dust together and tumble it in a flask, some of the magnetite converts to hematite. In particular, a “black” mixture (dominated by magnetite) will appear red, as the quartz gets fractured, exposing oxygen atoms, which attach to the broken magnetite bonds, forming hematite. Perhaps the notion of “water is responsible for ferric oxides” is a literal red herring after all.

The start of the 2018 dust storm that led to the demise of NASA's Opportunity rover.

The start of the 2018 dust storm that led to the demise of NASA's Opportunity rover. Even from this ... [+]

NASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS

So, all in all, Mars is red because of hematite, which is a red form of ferric oxide. Although ferric oxides are found in many places, only the hematite is largely responsible for the red color, and the small dust particles that are suspended in the atmosphere and that coat the top few millimeters-to-meters of Mars’s surface are wholly responsible for the red color we see.

If we could somehow calm the atmosphere for long periods of time and let the Martian dust settle out, you might expect that Rayleigh scattering would dominate like it does on Earth, turning the skies blue. This is only partly correct, though; because the Martian atmosphere is so thin and tenuous, the sky would appear very dark: almost completely black, with a slight bluish tint to it. If you could successfully block out the brightness coming from the planet’s surface, you would likely be able to see some stars and up to six planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, and sometimes Uranus — even during the daytime.

Mars might be the red planet, but only a tiny, minuscule amount of it is actually red. Fortunately for us, that red part is the outermost layer of its surface, pervasive in the Martian atmosphere, and that accounts for the color we actually perceive.

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