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...
12-08-2021
Passenger and Military Jets Both Report Seeing a UFO Over Eastern Canada
Passenger and Military Jets Both Report Seeing a UFO Over Eastern Canada
A July 30 report describes a “bright green flying object” that “flew into a cloud, then disappeared.”
A CANADIAN MILITARY TRANSPORT PLANE REPORTED SEEING A UFO OVER THE GULF OF SAINT LAWRENCE ON JULY 30.
FILE PHOTO BY LARS HAGBERG/THE CANADIAN PRESS
On the night of July 30, a Canadian military and a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight reported a UFO over the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.
According to an aviation incident report posted on the night of Aug. 11, both flights “reported seeing a bright green flying object” that “flew into a cloud, then disappeared” in a stretch of open water between Quebec and Newfoundland.
The KLM passenger flight (KLM618) was travelling from Boston to Amsterdam while the Canadian military transport aircraft (CFC4003) was flying between CFB Trenton, a base in Ontario, and Cologne, Germany.
Whatever they are, these kinds of enigmatic objects and lights have caught the attention of the U.S. government, which has openly investigated UFOs for years and recently released a report on 143 U.S. military sightings, including objects that appeared to “maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion.”
Canada, by contrast, appears far less interested. In a recent statement to VICE World News, a spokesperson from the Department of National Defence said, “We do not track reports or collect information about sightings” of UFOs.
Data posted to Twitter by aviation and shipping researcher Steffan Watkins suggests the Canadian flight even changed course and altitude at the time of the sighting, which might actually have occurred on July 31.
KLM airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the July 30 UFO report in CADORS.
In a statement to VICE World News, a Canadian military spokesperson said Canada’s air force has “no intent or need to investigate this further.”
“In this particular incident, there is nothing to indicate that what the crew saw posed any kind of safety risk to the aircraft,” they added. “We believe that they saw something—they would not have filed a report otherwise.”
A spokesperson from Nav Canada, the private company that operates Canada’s air traffic control system and whose employees would have received the initial reports, told VICE World News that “there is no additional Nav Canada information available for these events.”
In all statements relating to its aviation reporting system, Transport Canada cautions the “reports contain preliminary, unconfirmed data, which can be subject to change.”
Two planes reportedly spotted a “bright green flying object” that “flew into a cloud” before vanishing.
On 30 July, two flights – one of them military, the other civilian – apparently encountered a flying object that could’ve been a UFO over the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Vice News reports citing the Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Reporting System (CADORS), the Canadian government’s flight incident archive.
At the time of the sighting, the passenger jet – KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Airbus A330-300 (KLM618) – was travelling from Boston to Amsterdam, while the other – Canadian military transport aircraft (CFC4003) – was bound for Cologne, Germany from Canadian Forces Base Trenton in Ontario.
The aircraft "reported seeing a bright green flying object" which "flew into a cloud, then disappeared."
The "Occurrence Event Information" section in CADORS' report labels said encounter as "Weather balloon, meteor, rocket, CIRVIS/UFO."
A disclaimer on the CADORS website, however, warns that "for the most part, CADORS reports contain preliminary, unconfirmed data which can be subject to change."
Nieuwe berekening van NASA: asteroïde Bennu in 2182 het gevaarlijkst
De aardappelvorminge ruimterots Bennu vormt op 24 september 2182 een mogelijke bedreiging voor de aarde. Het kan zijn dat de asteroïde dan op onze planeet botst. De waarschijnlijkheid is ongeveer 1 op 2700 (0,037 procent). In het algemeen geldt voor de periode tot 2300 een mogelijkheid van 1 op 1750 (0,057 procent).
Hoewel de kans dat Bennu de aarde raakt erg klein is, blijft het een van de twee gevaarlijkste bekende asteroïden in ons zonnestelsel, samen met een andere, genaamd 1950 DA, aldus de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA. NASA-onderzoekers gebruikten bij hun berekeningen gegevens van de ruimtesonde OSIRIS-REx.
De kans op een botsing doet zich pas ná 2135 voor, wanneer de planetoïde zeer dicht langs de aarde raast. De zwaartekracht van de aarde past Bennu’s baan dan zodanig aan dat een botsing bij een volgende passage mogelijk wordt.
De kans dat de ruimterots tussen 2135 en 2300 inslaat bleek na de nieuwe analyse zo’n 1 op 1.750. In september 2182 is dus de kans op botsing het grootst.
Aardappelvormige rots
De Amerikaanse ruimtesonde OSIRIS-REx heeft de afgelopen jaren onderzoek gedaan bij Bennu. Dat is een aardappelvormige rots van ongeveer een halve kilometer doorsnee. Hij draait in een baan rond de zon, momenteel op 306 miljoen kilometer afstand van de aarde. De asteroïde kan wetenschappers iets vertellen over het ontstaan van ons zonnestelsel en over het ontstaan van leven op aarde.
De metingen van OSIRIS-REx helpen de bewegingen van de mogelijk gevaarlijke asteroïde de komende eeuwen beter te begrijpen, aldus NASA. Het vermindert de onzekerheden over de toekomstige baan aanzienlijk. Ook verbetert het het vermogen van wetenschappers om de waarschijnlijkheid van een inslag te bepalen en banen van andere asteroïden te voorspellen.
NASA deelt "belangrijke ontdekking" bij asteroïde Bennu
Een van de doelen van NASA is het vinden en in de gaten houden van asteroïden en kometen die in de buurt van de aarde kunnen komen en gevaarlijk kunnen zijn voor onze planeet. “De OSIRIS-REx-missie bood een buitengewone kans om deze modellen te verfijnen en te testen, waardoor we beter kunnen voorspellen waar Bennu zal zijn wanneer hij over ruim een eeuw dicht bij de aarde komt”, aldus de de organisatie.
De missie van de OSIRIS-REx kost 1 miljard euro. In 2016 werd de sonde gelanceerd en in 2018 kwam hij in een baan rond Bennu. Vanuit alle hoeken werd de rots gemeten en gefotografeerd. Die gegevens werden naar de aarde gestuurd om te bestuderen.
Een ander onderdeel van het onderzoek volgt nog. In oktober vorig jaar daalde de OSIRIS-REx af naar het oppervlak van Bennu om daar ongeveer 60 gram steentjes en stof op te zuigen. Die zijn verzameld in een bakje aan boord van de sonde. Een paar maanden geleden begon de OSIRIS-REx aan de miljoenen kilometers lange terugreis naar de aarde. Het is de bedoeling dat hij in september 2023 op aarde landt, waarna wetenschappers het opgehaalde gruis onder de microscoop kunnen leggen.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
The UFO Phenomenon | Full Documentary
The UFO Phenomenon | Full Documentary
It is now beyond doubt that strange, anomalous objects filling our skies and caught on camera are the real deal. Even the Pentagon admits it’s true. These seemingly intelligently controlled craft are operating above the clouds, in our oceans and in our orbit – travelling at hypersonic speeds far beyond any known human technology and completing manoeuvres unknown to science. The subject of conspiracy and derision for years, UFOs are now the hottest topic in Washington and the world. Five-time Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist Ross Coulthart – who has been investigating the phenomena for the past two years – led the 7NEWS Spotlight team across the US, amassing never-before-seen compelling evidence and speaking to the key players behind an event that will change the course of history.
MUFON CASE : 117235 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ( August 11, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : strange object closeup Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117235
Witnessed by 4 audio removed b/c of yelling & cussing words It is not a balloon or drone
Date Submitted : 2021-08-11 Date of Event : 2021-08-11 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : blackobject.mp4
VIDEO 2 : MUFON CASE : 117231 Palos Heights, Illinois Glowing UFO Spotted in Illinois Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117231
I was outside and I was sitting there on a chair in the middle of our yard, I look up to my right and see a normal plane flying at regular distance from the ground heading to midway airport like they usually do. I then look out far east and in the atmosphere I see this cylindrical glowing object, it did NOT look like a normal plan and was flying on a steady path at a normal not fast or slow speed, but was FAR OUT in the atmosphere. This video was cropped so I don't disclose personal information about where I live. However, this video is completely untampered with and I have the time and date stamp mark on the original video I recorded to prove it. This was recorded from an I-phone 11 Pro, the footage I am going to show you is a slowed down recording I made frame by frame from the original video I took.
Date Submitted : 2021-08-11 Date of Event : 2021-08-08 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : evidence.mp4
VIDEO 3 : MUFON CASE : 117236 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania creature security cam footage Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117236
A ufo was sighted around the neighbourhood last night.
Date Submitted : 2021-08-11 Date of Event : 2021-08-11 MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : Aug112021.mp4
MUFON CASE : 117221 Brooklyn, New York ( August 10, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Giant blue ufo ejecting ufos : Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117221 : Recorded from cellphone which turned off for no reason
Date Submitted : 2021-08-10 Date of Event : 2021-08-09
Flashing UFO Sighted Over Colombia ( August 9, 2021 )
Intense extream flashing UFO was sighted over the skies of Colombia on August 9, 2021 : UFO has intense extream flashing light
what is this mysterious bright flashing light above Colombia.
They are everywhere
credit : U.S.F
Transparent UFO Sighted Over Mt. Fuji Shizuoka Japan ( August 10, 2021 )
Transparent Cloaked UFO was sighted over Mt. Fuji Shizuoka Airport, Japan : 富士山静岡空港 on August 10, 2021 : What is this mysterious transparent spherical UFO / UAP/ ORB doing over Mt. Fuji Shizuoka Airport : Here i present the original
Closer every day and more evident
credit : アルマ・ウリベ
What Is Above Us?(UFO SIGHTINGS)
Several unexplained sightings. Come and join in on the discussions? All Lunar and Planetarium videos made by Terry's Theories. Source of first video MUFON case # 117112 Source of second video MUFON case # 117024
A UFO expert and filmmaker from Nova Scotia says the latest American report could be a subtle way to show how the U.S. is experimenting with new technologies.
(Mike Blake/Reuters)
At the end of June, the U.S. government issued a long-awaited report on UFOs. The unclassified nine-page report, released to Congress and the public, includes 144 observations — mostly from U.S. navy personnel — of what the government officially refers to as "unidentified aerial phenomenon," or UAP, dating back to 2004.
Since the acronym UFO, standing for Unidentified Flying Objects, is generally associated with the possibility of extraterrestrials, the government uses UAP.
The government's report on what these objects are is inconclusive. U.S. intelligence services suggest these objects might be technology belonging to Russia or China, for example.
Paul Kimball has other ideas about what's going on with this report.
Kimball is a Nova Scotia filmmaker, television producer and historian. His first film from 2002 was a documentary called Stan T. Friedman Is Real. It was about his uncle, the New Brunswick UFO researcher Stanton Friedman.
Friedman was one of the world's foremost investigators and lecturers on the UFO phenomenon, and broke the story of the Roswell, New Mexico, crash back in the 1970s.
"I was always interested in talking to him at family reunions," said Kimball. "He was the cool uncle who was talking about space aliens."
Kimball spent a decade researching UFO phenomena before stepping back from the subject, but he still keeps tabs on what's going on.
"These kinds of things have happened every now and then for about the last 70, 75 years. And they call them 'flaps,' when interest in UFOs break out into the broader public consciousness," Kimball said.
The current flap started with a series of videos that were taken by the United States military and shared with the public a few years ago.
In this 2015 video declassified by the U.S. Department of Defence, U.S. navy pilots track an unidentified flying object off the coast of Jacksonville, Fla. 0:35
"The U.S. navy has come out and said, 'Yes, these are real videos. Our guys took them and we're not exactly sure what they represent,'" said Kimball. "And that's kind of it. You know, I hate to be the skunk at the garden party, but at the moment that's as far as it goes. Then there's the UFO media machine, as I like to call it, that latches on to that and drums up interest in the subject and says, 'Well, OK, space aliens.' And it's a very long leap to get from these videos to space aliens.
"We have some anomalies. We can't necessarily explain them. No evidence to say that they're space aliens, but no evidence to say that they're not, you know, so leaving the door open."
As far as what else the U.S. government might be up to with the release of this current report, Kimball tells a story his close friend, Karl T. Pflock, told him.
The late Pflock was deputy assistant secretary of defence in the Ronald Reagan administration, a strategic planner, a CIA officer, UFO researcher, and author of Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe.
"Karl actually believed that space aliens had visited Earth," said Kimball. "So we weren't talking about somebody who said there were never any space aliens. But, he said, 'Look, most of these cases can be explained by testing advanced weapon systems. The government is working on technology that is 10 or 15 years in advance of what they'll admit to.'
"You're sort of seeing in many of these cases, like the Belgian triangle flap that occurred in the 1980s, that was probably delta-wing aircraft being tested by the United States military. Well, you would mistake that potentially for a UFO."
Kimball suggests governments have been experimenting with hypersonics, the kind of technology that, theoretically, could be what these navy pilots may be seeing but not actually know anything about. If it represents tech being developed by the United States, these videos are a way to let America's enemies know what's coming soon without being overt about it. But if it's the tech of another superpower, that would be a problem.
"That would be very concerning from a national security point of view, which is, I think, why members of Congress are really interested in it," said Kimball.
Retired Canadian astronaut Col. Chris Hadfield has been following the conversation about UFOs, but says the idea that they're alien technology 'doesn't even pass the basic common sense test.' 1:03
For the record, Canada's Department of National Defence doesn't have a dog in this fight. Spokesperson Jessica Lamirande sent a statement to CBC News on the subject of the American report.
"The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) do not typically investigate sightings of unknown or unexplained phenomena outside the context of investigating credible threats, potential threats, or potential distress in the case of search and rescue," the statement said.
"Although we collaborate closely with the U.S. for aerospace control, we are not aware of any Canadian nexus or participation in the U.S. Department of Defence's UFO studies at this time, nor does the CAF have a unit dedicated to investigating UFOs."
Kimball remains an agnostic about extraterrestrial visitors to Earth, but he also thinks the subject is worth serious consideration.
"I'm very open to the idea of the paranormal or the supernatural or things beyond our understanding, however you want to frame it," he said.
"The odds are there are extraterrestrials in our galaxy. So could they be coming here? Yeah. Have I seen anything yet that absolutely convinces me that they have been coming here? No. But I've seen enough to make me think this isn't a subject that you should laugh at."
High speed UFO-Fastwalker passes close to a drone in straight path
High speed UFO-Fastwalker passes close to a drone in straight path
On August 8, 2021 a drone owner in the city of Vera Cruz, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil captured a high speed object at the moment the object passes close to the drone in straight path.
The drone owner wonders whether the object was a small airplane, another drone, a bird or eventually something else.
After analyzing the object with other similar objects moving through the sky at very high speed, it looks like it is a so-called UFO "fastwalker".
“Fastwalker” is a term used by NORAD and branches of armed forces to describe unidentified aerial phenomena moving and/or changing directions at high speed far beyond what current aerospace technology is capable of.
UFO Sighted Over Middleburgh, New York ( August 8, 2021 )
Impressive UFO was sighted over the skies of Middleburgh, Schoharie County, New York on August 8, 2021
STATEMENT : UFOs in our airspace.
They are everywhere
credit : A Esemplare
New Crop Circle, Kitt's Lane, Nr West Meon, Hampshire.( August 8, 2021 )
This Stunning crop circle was discovered on August 8, 2021 North West of Meon in Hampshire, England . Crop circle show a unique six pointed star design aligning with what seekers call the 'Lion's Gate 8/8.'
credit : Stonehenge Dronescapes
RELATED VIDEO
What's Happening? Glitch in the Matrix ? ( August 8, 2021 )
What's happening? Glitch in the matrix ? August 8, 2021 : What if we are living in a simulation, and the world as we know it. This is the simulation theory -- the idea that our entire universe could be running inside of some sort of extra-dimensional computer ..
STATEMENT : What's happening?!?! Glitch in the matrix.....?
Is this a glitch in the matrix an account for a missing period of time or a lapse in the space-time continium.
credit : .W Wijk
UFO Sighted Over Spain ( August 8, 2021 )
UFO Mothership or Portal Entrance ? This was sighted over Spain on August 8, 2021
STATEMENT : Strange cloud appears in Spain, what is it?
ORIGINAL : Aparece una nube extraña en España, ¿qué es esto? Closer every day
credit : H Motti
RELATED VIDEOS
Huge UFO Sighted Over Mexico City ( August 8, 2021 )
A Huge UFO was sighted over a Mexican Federal Highway in Mexico City
STATEMENT : They send me this video in private message of a UFO sighting in Mexico City ORIGINAL : Me mandan, este video por privado, de un avistamiento O.V.N.I en Ciudad de Mexico
credit : U.S.F
UFO Filmed Deploying Two Objects & Fast-walker UFO Filmed By Drone Over Brazil. August 8, 2021
Guys, thanks for all the kind words and support. It meant alot to me....
Clip one was filmed on the 8th of August 2021 from the Mooca District of São Paulo, Brazil. In the clip we can see this brightly lit object fly over the sky of Mooca, the quick thinking witness pulled over his car and managed to filmed the UFO moments before it deployed two smaller objects. The Main craft seem to be Plasma in origin, as it doesn't seem solid. Thanks to Diego Santos for allowing me the use of his footage and to view the original: https://youtu.be/K5A1b2ar-nk
Second clip was also filmed on the 8th of August 2021 from Vera Cruz in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The Fast-walker was filmed by the camera on-board this drone. The object passes close to drone in straight path but what could this object be??? Thanks to Fabricio Bullerjahn for allowing me the use of his footage and to view the original: https://youtu.be/_v20x74tBOs
Anunnaki Revealed: Who Were These Beings of Ancient Astronaut Theory? – Part I
Anunnaki Revealed: Who Were These Beings of Ancient Astronaut Theory? – Part I
The modern era has witnessed an incredible surge in the popularity of all forms of media concerning the mythology of the ancient Mesopotamians.Fueling this ever-growing trend are the writings of a number of researchers who propose connections between several Sumerian myth cycles and the theory that the human race was engineered or created by a group of extraterrestrial beings. Known as Ancient Astronaut Theory , this field is largely reliant upon the translations of cuneiform tablets supposedly made by Zecharia Sitchin, whose series of Earth Chronicles books form the foundation upon which the modern church of the alien gods has been built.
Central to Sitchin’s narrative is a group of mythic beings known as the Anunnaki, whom he claimed crossed their own DNA with that of Homo erectus in order to create mankind—for the purpose of using humans as slaves to mine gold and other minerals. Today these Anunnaki are often portrayed as the equivalent of the Old Testament creator God.
But what does the cuneiform corpus actually say about the Anunnaki and other mythic beings? How does the version of these beings and their activities presented in Ancient Astronaut media compare with how they were truly represented in the ancient world?
To begin with, Anunnaki translates to “princely blood” or “seed of Anu”, not “those who came down” or “those who came from heaven to earth”, as many modern sources have claimed. The Anunnaki are “the Sumerian deities of the old primordial time;” a pantheon of gods who were the children of the sky god Anu and his sister, Ki. Significantly, some scholars have come to realize that the Anunnaki should more appropriately be considered demi-gods or semi-divine beings. Apparently, Anu’s sister Ki was not originally considered a deity and was only ascribed the status of a goddess much later in the history of the myth cycle.
Akkadian cylinder seal dating to circa 2300 BC depicting the deities Inanna, Utu, and Enki, three members of the Anunnaki.
“Some authorities question whether Ki was regarded as a deity since there is no evidence of a cult and the name appears only in a limited number of Sumerian creation texts. Samuel Noah Kramer identifies Ki with the Sumerian mother goddess Ninhursag and claims that they were originally the same figure. She later developed into the Babylonian and Akkadian goddess Antu, consort of the god Anu (from Sumerian An).”
Essentially, this would mean that the Anunnaki were born of a union between a sky god and a mortal female, who was later deified in mythic traditions.
Four copper-alloy statuettes dating to c. 2130 BC, depicting four ancient Mesopotamian gods, wearing characteristic horned crowns.
Furthermore, “Ki” is the Sumerian sign for “earth”, and Anu’s consort is sometimes considered the personification of the earth itself. This is similar to Biblical tradition, where mortals were created out of the dust of the earth (Genesis 2:7). The concept of a group of half-divine beings born of mortal women is very similar to the Biblical and extra-Biblical tradition of the Nephilim.
One of the most heavily referenced ancient texts which describes the Nephilim is the Extra-Biblical Book of 1 Enoch attributed to the patriarch Enoch, son of Jared and father of Methuselah. 1 Enoch is considered an apocryphal text today, and is rejected by most mainstream theological establishments, but this was not always the case. Many of the early Church Fathers, such as Athenagoras, Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, and Tertullian accepted the book as scripture, and fragments of 10 copies of 1 Enoch in Aramaic have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. 1 Enoch is also quoted in the Biblical Book of Jude , and it has been estimated that there are as many as several hundred more references throughout the New Testament itself.
Joshua 1:1 as recorded in the Aleppo Codex, 10th century AD
The most famous portions of 1 Enoch feature an elaboration on certain events before the deluge recorded in the Bible (specifically Genesis chapter 6, verses 1-4). According to 1 Enoch, a group of 200 fallen angels known as the Watchers, led by an individual named Semyaza (or Semjaza) descended upon Mount Hermon, where they swore an oath to father lineages with human women. Each of these “took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them”, a union which resulted in the birth of “great giants”.
These giants eventually “consumed all the acquisitions of men”, and, “when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind.” (1 Enoch, Ch. 6-7) These activities provoke the action of God, who curses the giants to war against one another “that they may destroy each other in battle”, and sends the archangels to bind the Watcher leadership “in the valleys of the earth”. (1 Enoch 10) As is well known today, the Hebrew texts refer to the powerful beings born to the Watchers as The Nephilim.
Location of the Sanctuary of the Anunnaki
Scholars have found profound similarities between the mythologies of the Anunnaki and the Nephilim. In 1971, Edward Lipinski published a scholarly analysis of several ancient texts, including the Old Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, all which feature important details revealing the true location of the sanctuary of the Anunnaki in ancient Eastern thought and cosmology. Lipinski found that: “In fact, the Old Babylonian version of the [Gilgamesh Epic] identifies Hermon and Lebanon with the dwelling of the Anunnaki”.
He emphasizes lines 12-21 of the Old Babylonian Gilgamesh, which tell of the destruction of Humbaba, the guardian of the abode of the gods at the hands of Gilgamesh’s companion Enkidu, after which the text states that the two “penetrated into the forest, opened the secret dwelling of the Anunnaki.” While later mythologies suggest alternate locations for the home of the Anunnaki, Lipinski explains that the oldest Mesopotamian and Near Eastern Canaanite texts point to the Cedar forest of Mount Hermon:
“…traces of the older tradition can be found in the mention of the mountain which was the abode of the gods, and whose accesses were hidden by the Cedar Forest whose guardian was Humbaba. This mountain was, we believe, the Anti-lebanon-Hermon…The southern range of the Anti-Lebanon is therefore likely to be the mountain in whose recesses the Anunnaki dwelled according to the Old Babylonian version of the Gilgames epos. In the Old Babylonian period the Anunnaki were still the gods in general….Mount Hermon should thus be identified with the dwelling of the gods.”
Lipinski also points out the fact that Mount Hermon was considered the guardian of international treaties in the ancient world, and connects this tradition with the oath sworn by the Watchers in 1 Enoch. Incorporating apocryphal texts such as The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs and 1 Enoch into his study, Lipinski concludes:
“Mount Hermon is the cosmic mountain which joins the earth with the lowest heaven. The same conception lies behind the episode of the sons of God in the Book of Enoch. The celestial beings gather on the summit of Mount Hermon because this is the mountain of the gods, the Canaanite Olympus.”
Mount Hermon is located at the southern end of the Anti-Lebanon mountain range, straddling the borders of Syria and Lebanon. Hermon’s highest peak reaches 9,232 feet (2814 meters). The area abounds with ancient altars going back millennia, and was still the host of shrines and rituals as recently as the time of Constantine the Great. Of further significance is the fact that Gilgamesh was renowned in the ancient world for obtaining knowledge from the pre-flood (or “antediluvian”) world, as stated by the Ugarit Epic of Gilgamesh (lines 5-9):
“He explored everywhere the seats of power, he knew the totality of wisdom about all things. He who travelled the distant road to Utter-napisti, who crossed the ocean, the wide sea, as far as the sunrise: he brought back tidings from the antediluvian age.”
These passages bring us full circle with Lipinski’s interpretation of the Old Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh epic, where the ancient king journeyed to Mount Hermon—abode of the Anunnaki…
Jason Jarrell and Sarah Farmer are investigative historians and avocational archaeologists. They study many subjects including depth psychology, Biblical mysteries, political science, and comparative mythology. They’re also authors of Ages of the Giants: A Cultural History of the Tall Ones in Prehistoric America (2017). Learn more at their website: ParadigmCollision.com
Top Image: Ordered universe and cuneiform (Public Domain) and Akkadian cylinder featuring Anunnaki. ( Public Domain );Deriv.
Central to Ancient Astronaut Theory and author Zecharia Sitchin’s narrative, is a group of mythic beings known as the Anunnaki, whom he claimed crossed their own DNA with that of Homo erectus in order to create mankind—for the purpose of using humans as slaves to mine gold and other minerals. Today these Anunnaki are often portrayed as the equivalent of the Old Testament creator God.
But what does the cuneiform corpus actually say about the Anunnaki and other mythic beings? How does the version of these beings and their activities presented in Ancient Astronaut media compare with how they were truly represented in the ancient world?
Babylonian representation of the national god Marduk, who was envisioned as a prominent member of the Anunnaki
Mount Hermon is located at the southern end of the Anti-Lebanon mountain range, straddling the borders of Syria and Lebanon. Hermon’s highest peak reaches 9,232 feet (2814 meters). Gilgamesh was renowned in the ancient world for obtaining knowledge from the pre-flood (or “antediluvian”) world, as stated by the Ugarit Epic of Gilgamesh (lines 5-9):
“He explored everywhere the seats of power, he knew the totality of wisdom about all things. He who traveled the distant road to Utter-napisti, who crossed the ocean, the wide sea, as far as the sunrise: he brought back tidings from the antediluvian age.”
These passages bring us full circle with Lipinski’s interpretation of the Old Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh epic, where the ancient king journeyed to Mount Hermon—abode of the Anunnaki.
The concept of ancient knowledge from the pre-flood world is actually inherent in many Eastern traditions. For example, there is a similar story in the apocryphal Book of Jubilees about Kainam, a son of the Biblical Arphaxad:
“And the son grew, and his father taught him writing, and he went to seek for himself a place where he might seize for himself a city. And he found a writing which former generations had carved on the rock, and he read what was thereon, and he transcribed it and sinned owing to it; for it contained the teaching of the Watchers in accordance with which they used to observe the omens of the sun and moon and stars in all the signs of heaven. And he wrote it down and said nothing regarding it; for he was afraid to speak to Noah about it lest he should be angry with him on account of it.” (Jubilees 8:1-5)
Interestingly, there are several ancient sources, which suggest that Gilgamesh himself was a half-god or semi-divine being of gigantic stature. According to the Sumerian Kings List, Gilgamesh was the 5th king of Uruk, who reigned sometime between 2800 and 2600 BC. While there are traditions considering the father of Gilgamesh to be king Lugalbanda, the Sumerian Kings List states that his true father was a “lillu-spirit, a high priest of Kulaba”, and he is described in the epic as “two-thirds god”.
Gilgamesh is believed to have attained victory over the kings of Kish, centralizing Uruk’s power, and tradition has him expanding the city of Uruk, including its temple precinct and walls. In several fragments of a twelfth-century-BC copy of the Gilgamesh Epic discovered at ancient Ugarit, Gilgamesh is described as “Surpassing all (other) kings (!), renowned for bodily stature” (line 16) and again as “Gilgames, renowned for bodily stature, hero born in Uruk, butting wild bull!” (lines 18-19). Lines 34-36 of the Ugarit Gilgamesh offer specific details on Gilgamesh’s size: “Eleven cubits was his height, four cubits the width of his chest. A triple cubit was his foot and a reed-length his legs”. According to these measurements, Gilgamesh would have stood between 16 and 18 feet tall (4.8 to 5.4 meters tall). In connection to Gilgamesh being a giant, the fragmentary Book of Giants from the Dead Sea Scrolls names several Nephilim giants as Ohya, Mahway, Hahya, and Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh, the king-hero from the city of Uruk, battling the 'bull of heavens'
Returning to the subject of Mount Hermon, Gilgamesh is not the only ancient giant directly associated with this prominent locale. Several Old Testament books ( The Book of Numbers , Deuteronomy, and The Book of Joshua ) record the battle of Moses and the Israelites against Og, an Amorite king of Bashan. In Deuteronomy 3:11 (KJV), Og is described as “of the remnant of giants”, and his bed (or sarcophagus) is measured as nine cubits long and four cubits wide, meaning that Og himself may have been 12 or 13 feet in height (approx. four meters tall).
In Joshua 4:5 (KJV), it is revealed that Og “reigned in mount Hermon, and in Seclah, and in all Bashan”, a region which would include the slopes of Mount Hermon and the Golan Heights.
Entities of the Underworld
Still another factor connecting the Anunnaki with the story of the Watchers and their offspring is their status as underworld beings. In Mesopotamian cycles, the Anunnaki are frequently depicted as “fates” or judges of the dead who occupy the subterranean realm or function as “spirits of the earth”. In tablets discovered at Nippur from around 2000 BC, the Anunnaki are “the seven judges”, underworld entities that accompany Ereshkigal, queen of the subterranean realm. When Ishtar descends and is brought before the assembly, they fasten their “eyes of death” upon her, causing her to perish.
An early nineteenth-century drawing of a statuette of Hecate, with whom Ereshkigal was syncretized.
The mountain abode of the Canaanite god, El is also frequently associated with secret or hidden natural springs and underground rivers. Lipinski associates these connotations with the sources of the Jordan River, one of which is the spring of Banias, originating at the foot of Mount Hermon. He furthermore elaborates that the mountain was considered in ancient times to cover “one of the outlets of the Deep or Ocean from which came the waters of the Flood…an eruption of the subterranean ocean on which the earth was believed to rest.”
In 1 Enoch, God commands the archangel Michael to “Go, bind Semjaza and his associates who have united themselves with women…bind them fast for seventy generations in valleys of the earth…”(1 Enoch 10:11-12), while Raphael is commanded, “Bind Azazel hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness: make an opening in the desert, which is in Dudael, and cast him therein.”(1 Enoch 10:4)
Ancient Hittite relief carving from Yazılıkaya, a sanctuary at Hattusa, depicting twelve gods of the underworld, whom the Hittites identified as the Mesopotamian Anunnaki.
There are also references to the fate of the Watchers in New Testament books, including Second Peter , which states, “…God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness…” (2nd Peter, 2:4, KJV). The word translated as “hell” in this verse is actually the Greek Tartarus, referencing the deepest underworld of Greek mythology—the prison of the Titans.
Not only were the Titans giants, but like the Anunnaki, they were the offspring of an earth goddess (Gaia) and a sky deity (Uranus). Some scholars consider it likely that the Greek mythos was largely based on the older Eastern Mythologies. The same concept is repeated again in the Book of Jude, verse 6, which mentions, “the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness”.
One of the giant Titans, Atlas, who was punished to bear the heavens on his shoulders for all time.
It is widely known that the archetypal myth cycles of the Mesopotamian and Near Eastern traditions share a common origin, and that the subjects of these cycles also appear in the Biblical, extra-Biblical, and even Quranic texts. The purpose of this article is to identify the specific mythic concept behind the Anunnaki in the ancient world.
Contrary to much of the popular literature and other media of today, the evidence recorded by the academic research of scholars and a comparative study of the actual cuneiform and other ancient texts indicates that the true identity of the Anunnaki is to be found in the Eastern tradition of a group of half-gods, spawned by cross-breeding between divine beings and mortal females at Mount Hermon in the Anti-Lebanon mountain range. These beings are often associated with knowledge from the world before a great deluge and were later assigned roles in the underworld. This would suggest that rather than making the Anunnaki the equivalent of the “Elohim” who created man in the Book of Genesis; they should more properly be compared to the Nephilim and the fallen angels described in Genesis Chapter 6, 1 Enoch, and other extra-biblical texts.
Jason Jarrell and Sarah Farmer are investigative historians and avocational archaeologists. They study many subjects including depth psychology, Biblical mysteries, political science, and comparative mythology. They’re also authors of Ages of the Giants: A Cultural History of the Tall Ones in Prehistoric America (2017). Learn more at their website: ParadigmCollision.com
Top Image: Ordered universe and cuneiform (Public Domain) and statue of Gilgamesh. ( CC BY 2.0 );Deriv.
ANCIENT ALIENS: THE MILLENNIA-LONG HISTORY OF OBSESSING ABOUT EXTRATERRESTRIALS
ANCIENT ALIENS: THE MILLENNIA-LONG HISTORY OF OBSESSING ABOUT EXTRATERRESTRIALS
The idea that other worlds might be home to alien beings has been part of our thought for as long as we have been looking skyward.
TO FEEL SMALL, all we have to do is look up.
The Sun, the Moon, the stars, the planets, and the Milky Wayare evidence enough that Earth is not all thatis.
And for as long as humans have had words, we have been sharing stories about the presumed builders and occupiers of those vaulted heavens: the gods, spirits, angels, and demons who were, in a sense, the first extraterrestrials.
According to a Cherokee story, for example, the Milky Way is a great web spun across the sky by Grandmother Spider, who used it to reach the other side of the world and bring back the sun.
In one grisly Aztec myth, the war god Huitzilopochtli sprang from his mother Coatlicue’s womb fully grown and fully armored. He beheaded his sister, Coyolxauhqui, who had been plotting to kill Coatlicue, and cast her head into the sky, creating the Moon.
Materialist interpretations of the cosmos eventually began to take the place of mythological ones. But the idea that there might be other beings in the sky has stayed with us, and it found its first proto-scientific roots in Greece in the sixth century BCE.
Anaximander, a philosopher who lived in Miletus in modern-day Turkey, contributed one key idea. He was the first to propose that Earth is a body floating in an infinite void, held up by nothing. For someone who lived 2,200 years before Isaac Newton, this was a stunning insight. The philosopher Karl Popper called it “one of the boldest, most revolutionary, and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thought.”
Anaximander also thought Earth was a cylinder with the continents arrayed on one flat end, so he wasn’t right about everything. But he did invent the idea of space, a place with no absolute up or down.
And just as important, Anaximander’s system was the first to leave open the possibility that there are other worlds like ours. (Though, to be clear, he may not have believed that these worlds existed elsewhere in space. He may have thought they preceded or would succeed Earth in time or perhaps coexisted in some parallel universe.)
Anaximander’s successors were more definite about the idea that came to be known as “the plurality of worlds” and more willing to explore its implications.
In the fifth century BCE, the Thracian philosopher Leucippus and his pupil Democritus invented atomism: the belief that the visible universe consists of tiny, indivisible, indestructible atoms, churning in the void without purpose or cause.
In this picture, worlds aren’t divinely created; they simply form when enough atoms collide and stick together. Democritus thought that there was an infinite supply of atoms, so he reasoned that there must be an infinite number of worlds. His pupil Metrodorus of Chios put it this way: “It seems absurd, that in a large field only one stalk should grow, and that in an infinite space only one world exists.”
And then there’s Epicurus. He lived about a century after Democritus and is most notorious for his philosophy that pleasure — best obtained through modest, self-sufficient living — is the greatest good.
But Epicurus read Democritus and thoroughly absorbed his empiricist, atomist worldview, including the idea that there must be many worlds. “There is an unlimited number of cosmoi [worlds], and some are similar to this one and some are dissimilar,” Epicurus wrote in a letter to the historian Herodotus.
Epicurus’s ideas are important not just because they were prescient but because they became a long-lasting irritant for future philosophers and theologians. Unfortunately, most of his writings are lost. What we know about his thought comes mainly from De rerum natura, or On the Nature of Things, a book-length poem by his Roman disciple Lucretius.
You can think of this book, written around 50 BCE, as the first volume of popular science. Here’s what Lucretius said about the Epicurean view of other worlds:
If store of seeds there is
So great that not whole life-times of the living
Can count the tale …
And if their force and nature abide the same,
Able to throw the seeds of things together
Into their places, even as here are thrown
The seeds together in this world of ours,
’Tmust be confessed in other realms there are
Still other worlds, still other breeds of men,
And other generations of the wild.
The passage is a milestone in discussions of extraterrestrials. It goes beyond the basic idea that infinity must contain many worlds to offer what is probably the first straightforward assertion in Western literature that aliens must exist. The first and sadly the last for a very long time.
The truth is that the mechanistic, nonsupernatural picture of the world offered by Anaximander, Democritus, and Epicurus was radical for its day. It failed to gain a large following in ancient Greece.
In Athens in 450 BCE, the philosopher Anaxagoras posited that the sun is a fiery rock and that the Moon is an Earthlike body that glows in the sun’s reflected light. He was promptly arrested on charges of impiety and sentenced to death. After his friend and former pupil Pericles came to his defense, he was released but banished.
Both Plato (428–348 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) lambasted Democritus’s idea of a plurality of worlds on theological grounds. Plato, a monotheist, argued that there is only one creator and that therefore there can be only one world, “if the created copy is to accord with the original.”
Aristotle similarly thought that a plurality of worlds would require a plurality of Prime Movers to keep them in motion — a plainly heretical idea. The idea of infinite worlds also conflicted with his view of physics, in which the five basic elements — earth, air, fire, water, and divine aether — tend to move up or down toward their “natural places” at the center or the edges of the universe.
Because things made of earth always sink to the center, Aristotle believed, Earth must be the only world, and there can be no solid bodies in the heavens.
Though Aristotle was a pagan, his anthropocentric picture of the universe was a gift to early Christian theologians. The Book of Genesis, which says God purposefully created the heavens and the earth, left no room for other worlds or other sentient beings (unless you count angels and demons).
The New Testament then introduced the idea that God was incarnated as Christ to rescue the faithful from sin and damnation — a flattering story implying that humans are uniquely worthy of Christ’s sacrifice. As the scientist and Christian apologist William Whewell would later put it, the Incarnation made Earth into “the Stage of the Great Drama of God’s Mercy and Man’s Salvation.”
By contrast, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius offered a picture of a purely mechanical universe where everything arises from the purposeless collisions of atoms and where humans might be just one of an infinite number of intelligent races. “Small wonder the early Christians tossed the Epicurean package, extraterrestrials and all, into the abyss of doctrinal errors,” writes the Catholic ethicist Benjamin Wiker.
As Christianity swept across the decaying Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries CE, the Church Fathers ridiculed and suppressed the Epicureans and their ideas and allowed their writings to burn or crumble. Atomism, the pursuit of pleasure, the plurality-of-worlds idea — all of it slipped into darkness, where, as Wiker observes, “it stayed for nearly a thousand years.”
KEPLER, COPERNICUS, GIORDANO BRUNO, AND MANY WORLDS
Somehow, though, Lucretius’s poem On the Nature of Things managed to cross the abyss into the 15th century.
The Swerve, a delightful book about “how the world became modern” by the Harvard literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, tells the story of the Florentine book collector Poggio Bracciolini, who recovered a copy of the poem in the library of a monastery in southern Germany in 1417.
Within 60 years, hundreds of manuscripts and print editions were in circulation, reigniting interest in Epicureanism. Greenblatt argues that the poem’s atheistic and materialist ideas helped usher in Renaissance humanism — an inquisitive philosophy that, despite its name, began to question humanity’s privileged station in the cosmos.
Whether the credit is due to Bracciolini or not, the Renaissance saw steadily growing interest in the idea of the plurality of worlds and its corollary, the possibility that other worlds might be populated by other beings. Mikołaj Kopernik, better known as Nicolaus Copernicus, provided one key stepping stone.
The Polish mathematician and astronomer were born in 1473 — coincidentally, the same year the first print edition of On the Nature of Things appeared. (Note the date here: Copernicus lived at the same time as Christopher Columbus, who was 22 years his senior; Leonardo da Vinci, who was 21 years older; Niccolò Machiavelli, four years older; and Martin Luther, 10 years younger.)
Copernicus is central to the story of extraterrestrials not because he believed in them — the question didn’t seem to interest him — but because he was the first person to propose, based on observation and calculation, that Earth was not the center of the visible universe.
Around 1510, Copernicus began writing the commentaries and manuscripts that would become De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres). Finally published in 1543, the year Copernicus died, the book upended the old Aristotelian system.
It argued that Earth rotates around its pole, that the Moon orbits Earth, and that Mercury, Venus, the Earth-Moon system, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn all travel around the Sun at their own rates.
Finally, it asserted that the firmament — the outermost celestial sphere, containing the stars — must be incomprehensibly far away, at least compared to the distances between the sun and the planets.
Copernicus’s heliocentric model accounted for important oddities that the old Aristotelian system couldn’t adequately explain, such as the occasional “retrograde” or backward motion of the other planets against the background stars.
But, of course, heliocentrism wasn’t immediately accepted, not least because it amounted to a huge demotion for Earth. It left us with only a single heavenly attendant, the Moon, and it forced Copernicus’s readers to reckon with the idea that we live on a planet that is just like any other.
This premise — that there’s nothing particularly special about Earth and that we aren’t in a privileged, central position to observe the universe — would come to be known as the Copernican principle, and it’s at the core of the modern-day case for doing research related to the search for extraterrestrial life (SETI).
Copernicus knew his theory would provoke religious objections, which may be why he declined to publish it during his lifetime. His follower Giordano Bruno was not so cautious. Bruno was a Sicilian subject who entered the Dominican order in Naples and then became a religious vagabond. He read Lucretius and Copernicus, took their ideas deeply to heart, and made some startling leaps of his own.
In three sets of dialogues published between 1584 and 1591 — La cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper), De l’infinito universo et modi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds), and De immenso (Of vastness) — Bruno argued that at least some of the stars are suns with their own planets and that some of these planets must have their own residents.
On this and many other subjects, Bruno’s daring views conflicted with long-standing doctrines of the Catholic Church: For starters, that the universe was created for humanity alone and that there can be no people on other worlds without another Christ to redeem them.
Bruno was arrested in Venice in 1592 on charges of blasphemy and heresy and sent to Rome, where his trial lasted seven years. On February 17, 1600, he was hanged naked upside down and burned at the stake.
Bruno’s persecution was widely followed by people living outside Rome, but it couldn’t prevent the emergence of a new understanding of the heavens. In 1609, Johannes Kepler, the German mathematician and astronomer, published Astronomia nova (New Astronomy), which extended Copernicanism in crucial ways.
Understandably, Kepler was elated to receive a copy of Galileo Galilei’s Siderius nuncius (Starry Messenger) soon after it was published the following year. The book announced Galileo’s discovery of mountains on the Moon and four satellites orbiting Jupiter: we call them Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
These Jovian moons formed what was, in essence, a miniature solar system obeying the same rules as the planets. This discovery provided spectacular evidence for Copernicanism and in Kepler’s mind confirmed his own theories about planetary motion.
Jupiter and its large moons.NASA/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
But here’s the interesting part for our purposes: Even though Kepler (a Protestant) knew of Bruno’s travails and the Catholic Church’s attitude toward the plurality-of-worlds idea, he sent Galileo (a Catholic) a congratulatory letter that included speculation about extraterrestrials. Any planet important enough to have moons, Kepler supposed, must also have people.
“These four little moons exist for Jupiter, not for us,” he wrote. “Each planet in turn, together with its occupants, is served by its own satellites. From this line of reasoning, we deduce with the highest degree of probability that Jupiter is inhabited.”
Galileo cannily declined to endorse that idea. “The view of those who would put inhabitants on Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, and the Moon, meaning by ‘inhabitants’ animals like ours, and men in particular” was “false and damnable,” he wrote in his pamphlet Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie Solari (Letters on Sunspots) in 1613.
But while Galileo may have sidestepped Bruno’s error in this case, he eventually ran afoul of the church for different reasons. His volume Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems), a rousing defense of Copernicus, angered Pope Urban VIII and his inquisitors. In 1633, the church sentenced Galileo to a house arrest that lasted until his death in 1642.
OF THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS
From Democritus to Galileo, thinkers treated the idea that other worlds might be home to alien beings — the word alien comes from the Latin term alius, “other” — with great seriousness. After all, believing in aliens could get you banished or burned at the stake.
But in 1686 a Frenchman named Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle became the first writer to exploit the subject’s humorous possibilities. His book Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) was another early example of science popularization.
Fontenelle made a rigorous case for Copernicanism, but to keep things entertaining he also used whimsical proto-science-fiction notions about the cultures of the other planets. The people of Venus, Fontenelle mused, are “sunburnt, full of verve and fire, always amorous, loving verses, loving music, inventing celebrations, dances, and tournaments every day.”
The inhabitants of Saturn, by contrast, are “quite phlegmatic. … These are people who don’t know what it is to laugh, who always take a day to answer the slightest question asked them.”
These ideas didn’t contradict the doctrine of Christ’s unique incarnation on Earth, Fontenelle reassured his readers because people on other planets would not be descended from Adam and wouldn’t need saving. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the church from putting Conversations on its Index of Forbidden Books.
Christian Huygens, the Dutch astronomer who explained the rings of Saturn and discovered its moon Titan, took a more serious tack in Cosmotheoros, published posthumously in 1698 and translated into English as Celestial Worlds Discover’d; or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants, and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets.
He noted that Venus and Jupiter have atmospheres, one requirement for life. He expanded on Bruno’s assertion that other stars must have their own planetary systems and reasoned that where there are planets, there must be people.
By Huygens’s time, the plurality-of-worlds concept was beginning to seem ordinary. Eighteenth-century thinkers such as Edmond Halley, Gottfried Leibniz, Alexander Pope, Immanuel Kant, William Herschel, Pierre Laplace, and Thomas Paine accepted it as part of a scientific-realist worldview.
This view was, however, still incompatible with strict Christianity. That’s what motivated a leading 19th-century scientist and one-time believer in other inhabited worlds, William Whewell, to abandon pluralism and publish one of the strongest catalogs of scientific arguments against the idea.
A brilliant polymath, Whewell was a professor of mineralogy at the University of Cambridge, then a professor of moral philosophy, and finally the head of Trinity College, where Sir Isaac Newton had studied and taught.
In the 1830s, Whewell published essays that left room for the idea of extraterrestrials. But he later grew increasingly disturbed by the question of whether God had provided “a like scheme of salvation” for every other world.
If both pluralism and the Incarnation could not be true, Whewell decided he would stick with the Incarnation. So he assembled a scientific and philosophical broadside against the idea of other worlds, which he published in 1853 under the title Of the Plurality of Worlds: An Essay.
Whewell pointed out that humans, according to the geological record then being unearthed, had been present on this planet for only an “atom of time.” If Earth had been, in effect, uninhabited through most of its history, then it wouldn’t be surprising if other distant planets were also empty.
In any case, he pointed out, no planets around other stars had yet been observed, and many nebulae, star clusters, and multiple-star systems would be unsuitable places for them. Here in the local neighborhood, Whewell noted, the Moon has no atmosphere or water; Jupiter features crushing gravity and may lack a solid surface; Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are probably too far from the sun and therefore too cold to support life; and Mercury and Venus are probably too close to the sun and therefore too hot.
He wasn’t sure about Mars, but he theorized that only Earth is in what he called “the Temperate Zone of the Solar System.”
In short, though Whewell’s ultimate goal was to defend Christian theology, he was the first to marshal empirical evidence to point out the real weaknesses in the plurality-of-worlds idea.
This challenge was, in a sense, long overdue. Copernicus was correct to revoke Earth’s privileges as the pivot point of the universe, but that insight by itself says nothing about what else might exist in the universe.
We know today that Democritus and Epicurus were on the right track when they theorized about atoms and other worlds, but they didn’t have any hard data, and neither did Bruno, Kepler, Huygens, or Fontenelle. Whewell concluded: “The belief that other planets, as well as our own, are the seats of habitation of living things, has been entertained, in general, not in consequence of physical reasons, but in spite of physical reasons.”
Coming from the master of Trinity, this attack caused a ruckus in the scientific world. Defenders of pluralism were forced to go back to their laboratories and telescopes (which is evidence, if you’re in an optimistic mood, that materialists and religious believers aren’t engaged in a winner-take-all war, but rather in a healthy competition of ideas). Even today, the essential aim of astrobiologists and exoplanet hunters is to provide what Whewell called the missing “physical reasons.”
Percial Lowell’s Mars canals.ullstein bild Dtl./ullstein bild/Getty Images
PERCIVAL LOWELL AND THE CANALS OF MARS
One of the researchers who poured new energy into the pursuit of extraterrestrials in the late 19th century was Percival Lowell. An amateur astronomer, Lowell used his wealth and his connections as a member of an old Boston Brahmin family to establish his own observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1894.
The year before that, the distinguished Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had published La vita sul pianeta Marte (Life on Mars), laying out his observations of “seas,” “continents,” and waterways on Mars. After reading Schiaparelli’s book and another on Mars by the French astronomer Camille Flammarion, Lowell became convinced that the alleged waterways were artificial canals, and he built the observatory in order to observe, document, and publicize them.
One piece of lore, endlessly repeated in books, magazine articles, and web posts about Mars, says that Lowell’s imagination was fired by one of history’s most comic mistranslations. Schiaparelli, so the story goes, described the lines he saw on the surface of Mars using the word canali, “channels.”
English translators, however, rendered it as “canals.” A channel isn’t necessarily artificial; a canal is. The misleading word choice was what supposedly sent Lowell on his wild quest.
This is one of those stories journalists call “too good to fact-check.” In reality, Schiaparelli had begun talking about canali as early as 1878, the year after a close Mars–Earth approach. He was well aware that his work had inspired others to speculate that the canali were artificial, and perhaps used for irrigation. He did nothing to tamp down this speculation.
“Their singular appearance and the fact that they are designed with absolute geometrical precision as if they were drawn with a ruler or a compass, has led some to see in these features the work of intelligent beings, inhabitants of the planet,” Schiaparelli wrote in La vita sul pianeti Marte. “I will be careful not to combat this assumption, which includes nothing impossible.”
Regardless of who inspired his canal obsession, Lowell set out to confirm Schiaparelli’s discovery, making nearly nightly observations of Mars starting in mid-1894. He duly discovered 184 canals, putting Schiaparelli’s 79 to shame.
Lowell published these findings in a popular volume, Mars (1895), followed by “Mars and Its Canals” (1906) and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908). Like Schiaparelli before him, Lowell was struck by the “uniformity,” the “precision,” and the “supernaturally regular” appearance of the alleged canals. He wrote in the first volume, “Too great regularity is in itself the most suspicious of circumstances that some finite intelligence has been at work.”
Such a great collection of works would need builders, of course, and Lowell would go on to deduce — based on Mars’s lower gravity — that Martians must be far larger and stronger than humans. And older and wiser, too.
“A mind of no mean order would seem to have presided over the system we see — a mind certainly of considerably more comprehensiveness than that which presides over the various departments of our own public works,” he wrote. “Certainly what we see hints at the existence of beings who are in advance of, not behind us, in the journey of life.”
The public greeted Lowell’s work rapturously, scientists more coolly. Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of evolution by natural selection, was still alive when Lowell’s books appeared. He eviscerated the idea of intelligent, canal-building Martians.
Wallace pointed out, correctly, that there is little liquid water on Mars to transport in canals. And he anticipated later critiques of SETI by highlighting the fantastic odds against the appearance of even one technological species in a given star system, let alone two on neighboring planets.
Given the series of evolutionary accidents that opened the way for the emergence of primates, each accident dependent on the previous one, “the total chances against the evolution of man, or an equivalent moral and intellectual being … will be represented by a hundred million of millions to one,” Wallace wrote.
Wallace was right that there are no men on Mars. But there was an intelligence at work in the story: Lowell’s. We know from decades of telescopic, orbital, and robotic exploration of the red planet that there are no canals or even features such as sand dunes or dust storms that could create the illusion of canals. What Lowell saw had to have been what astronomer Simon Newcomb would call, in 1907, unconscious “visual inferences” — projections of Lowell’s desire to see what he already believed was there.
I’m reminded of the snide acronym sometimes used by tech-support workers to describe questions from naive computer users: PIBKAC, Problem Is between Keyboard and Chair. In Lowell’s case, the problem was between the telescope eyepiece and the drawing pad.
But even before Wallace published his critique in 1904, it was too late to defuse Lowell’s idea. Martians had escaped into popular culture. H. G. Wells took Lowell’s concept of an ancient, advanced race of Mars dwellers and added a layer of imperial malice in The War of the Worlds, which was published in serial form in 1897 and as a print novel in 1898.
Edgar Rice Burroughs used Mars, a.k.a. “Barsoom,” as the setting for a series of pulpy stories and novels published between 1912 and 1948. Orson Welles adapted H. G. Wells’s story as a live radio drama broadcast on Halloween Eve in 1938, and its simulated news format scared at least a few listeners into believing invaders from Mars had really arrived.
The hostile-Martian cliché spread so quickly that by 1948 it would be satirized in the form of every nerd’s favorite Looney Tunes villain, Marvin the Martian, followed in 1950 by Ray Bradbury’s groundbreaking short-story collection The Martian Chronicles, about the conflicts between telepathic Martians and settlers from Earth.
Today we know that Mars is cold and dry and that if there are real Martians, they’re probably microbes, buried below the surface. But Mars has been extremely fertile as a garden for our own evolving theories, fears, and longings about extraterrestrials.
We don’t know yet whether the sky is full of “still other worlds with other breeds of men,” as Lucretius poetically put it. Yet there remains one stubborn and absorbing fact: on the very next planet, life is not out of the question — even if that life winds up being us.
The enigmatic submarine with which the “Nazis traveled in time”
The enigmatic submarine with which the “Nazis traveled in time”
Twitter fiction goes far beyond what we could imagine. This account of how the Nazis traveled through time could make even Indiana Jones’s hair stand on end.
This ugly and fascinating fish is a monkfish. It is known as AF-67 and is the author of one of the most devastating discoveries in recent centuries.
The AF-67 monkfish was part of Pleanville University’s “Haliade Project”. They selected 77 deep-sea fish and equipped them with micro-cameras and tracking devices to explore the deep sea through them.
With the microcameras and tracking beacons installed, AF-67 was released into the Indian Ocean, hoping that it would decide to dive into the Lamu-Rhino abyssal pit.
It is a pit with a depth of about 10,500 meters. AF-67 dived her to the bottom.
Monkfish was one of the fish chosen for this project because it has its own light source.
This is important to obtain images at a depth of 10,500 meters, where the only sunlight that shines is due to its absence. Where things do not emit heat.
Once recovered, this monkfish obtained dozens of interesting but not particularly relevant images. Mostly videos of other abyssal creatures that were already in the catalog of marine biologists.
But amid so much irrelevant information, AF-67 made an unexpected discovery. At first they confused it with the corpse of a sperm whale.
After analyzing some of the frames carefully, they realized that it was a human-made artifact. Probably a sunken submarine.
Hypotheses confirmed by seeing a swastika on the pressure helmet … And a serial number. This “license plate” allowed the identification of the device: EL U-515.
A Nazi submarine that caused many headaches to the US intelligence services, and gave a lot to talk about in the world of conspiracies. Why?
Because that submarine disappeared when it carried inside “The Bell Of Wöhlenbach” a contraption developed by Nazi scientists at the end of World War II, designed to travel through time.
The most skeptical assumed that the Nazis never managed to make The Bell work. The most daring fantasized about the possibility that the disappearance of U-515 would prove just the opposite:
The submarine vanished without a trace because it traveled back in time.
The hottest minds even suggest that Hitler himself was aboard U-515 and escaped to another era by activating the submarine’s “Bell”.
As you can imagine, the discovery of this submarine by the anglerfish AF-67 meant a jug of cold water for those who bet on the theory of time travel. But nevertheless…
When they recovered the monkfish AF-67, they rewarded their services by dissecting it for an autopsy, and found symptoms in its stomach and cells that it had been exposed to radioactive isotopes.
The kind of radiation that, according to physicists at the University of Pleanville, could release (always “in theory”) a device designed to alter space-time parameters.
Having these data, a rather suggestive hypothesis was considered: What if the crew of the submarine, once stranded at the bottom of the abyssal pit, in a desperate attempt to escape, decided to activate “La Campana”?
What if “La Campana” really traveled back in time?
To corroborate or disprove this madness, the Pleanville researchers thoroughly studied the writings of one of the most cryptic and prodigious scientists that our century has given, Ilja Mladenek: Serbian engineer, disciple of Tikola Tesla.
He worked designing advanced technology for the Nazis until the US government rescued him in the context of Operation Paperclip to benefit from his knowledge.
Mladenek was one of the architects of the Wöhlenbach Bell.
According to his research notebooks, the artifact was capable of moving through the fourth dimension, allowing any object within a radius of 8 meters from its epicenter to travel through time.
But according to Mladenek’s notes, that technology had limits. “The Bell was only capable of traveling to the past.”
The exact year Hitler intended to go back with The Bell also appeared in the notes of the Serbian engineer: 12,103 BC.
This initially led the Pleanville researchers to dismiss the idea that U-515 had traveled through time.
Why? Because in that case the submarine, when sinking into the abyssal pit, in addition to transporting “La Campana”, would have landed on top of it.
The Bell would have remained for millennia waiting for itself at the bottom of the sea. And the images of the monkfish did not show any other objects besides U-515.
It was Margaret Canker, Professor of Astrophysics at Pleanville University, who realized that they were making a small mistake.
They weren’t counting on the rotation of the Earth. “La Campana” travels in time, but not in space.
As it moves through the years and centuries, the planet rotates in the latitude corresponding to the Lanu-Rhino trench, at more than 1,000 kilometers per hour.
This speed of rotation has increased in recent centuries due to overcrowding. We have increased the mass of the planet significantly, and this implies that we no longer rotate as slowly as a few millennia ago.
As if that weren’t enough, the angulation of the Earth’s axis of rotation has also changed. In other words:
An object going back to 12,103 BC would not appear at the same geographic point where it began its journey.
Canker made the calculations taking into account the changes in the axis and speed of rotation over the last 14,021 years and came to the conclusion that “La Campana”, if it had gone back to the date for which it was programmed, would have arrived. here:
A hilly area of the Himalayas, almost 5,000 meters high, within what we know today as Tibet.
Pleanville University sent an express expedition to that area of Tibet. Did you find La Campana there? Of course not.
But they found metallic remains that could belong to it and even more important: radioactive isotopes identical to those of the monkfish AF-67.
Had La Campana reached its destination? Had anyone found it in those lands more than 14,000 years ago?
That would explain the references in the sacred Sanskrit scriptures to some gadgets that we have already talked about here on other occasions: The Vimana.
Mentions of the vimana in Hindu mythology baffle scientists to this day.
In other religious texts “chariots of fire”, flying creatures, etc. are mentioned. But the case of the vimanas is different. The ancients described them as machines.
A Nazi mission commanded by Dr. Ernest Schäfer traveled to Tibet in search of the origins of the Aryan race and ended up (perhaps) finding the remains of a vimana, or the technology that made them possible.
It is rumored that thanks to these findings, Third Reich scientists were able to build The Bell and other prototypes of warfare that looked suspiciously like flying saucers.
Did they use the technology of “La Campana” in the remote past, to develop those “flying ships” that ended up transcending under the name of “vimana”?
In that case, those who called themselves “Aryans” resorted to wisdom from the past to travel to that past, sow the myth of the “Aryan race” and leave there the instructions that would help them in the future to build the necessary tool to be able to close that circle.
That possibility raises two questions:
Did Hitler purposely sink that submarine at that point in the Indian Ocean? What has the United States been doing with all that technology since it seized it at the end of World War II? End.
We hope you liked this fictional story, because it is nothing more than a story created by Juanjo Ramírez, who is one of the great masters of tweet fiction.
Precisely one of his specialties is clinging to real elements to build a spectacular science fiction universe on top of them. And there is nothing that has inspired as many science fiction tales as so-called Nazi technology.
What could be more interesting than such a conspiracy? So we disconnect a bit from so much political shit these days that we seem to go crazy.
My previous article was titled: “The Space Brothers of the 1950s: Were They Russian Agents Promoting Communism in the U.S.?” It was a study of the possibility that the so-called “Space Brothers” of the 1950s were actually Russian agents and not aliens. Their goal: to try and advance communism in the United States – and to do it under what we might call a “UFO guise.” Today’s article follows on. The previous feature addressed such matters in the early years of the Cold War. This one, however, looks at the connection between UFOs, aliens and Russian agents in more recent times. With that said, read on. In 1999, Gerald K. Haines – in his position as the historian of the National Reconnaissance Office – wrote a paper titled “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90.” It’s now in the public domain, thanks to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.It can be read at the CIA’s website. Haines’ paper detailed the history of how, and why, the CIA became interested and involved in the phenomenon of UFOs. Although Haines covered a period of more than forty years, I will bring your attention to one particular section of his paper, which is focused on the 1970s-1980s.
Haines wrote something eye-opening: “During the late 1970s and 1980s, the Agency continued its low-key interest in UFOs and UFO sightings. While most scientists now dismissed flying saucers reports as a quaint part of the 1950s and 1960s, some in the Agency and in the Intelligence Community shifted their interest to studying parapsychology and psychic phenomena associated with UFO sightings. CIA officials also looked at the UFO problem to determine what UFO sightings might tell them about Soviet progress in rockets and missiles and reviewed its counterintelligence aspects.” The Soviets, then, were camouflaging their secret rocket tests by spreading false and fantastic tales of UFOs. Haines also said: “Agency analysts from the Life Science Division of OSI and OSWR officially devoted a small amount of their time to issues relating to UFOs. These included counterintelligence concerns that the Soviets and the KGB were using U.S. citizens and UFO groups to obtain information on sensitive U.S. weapons development programs (such as the Stealth aircraft), the vulnerability of the U.S. air-defense network to penetration by foreign missiles mimicking UFOs, and evidence of Soviet advanced technology associated with UFO sightings .”
Also on this issue of Russia and UFOs, there are the following words of long-time ufologist Bruce Maccabee: “After I spoke at a UFO conference near Washington, D.C. in February 1993, I was contacted by an assistant military attaché who was stationed at the Russian Embassy [italics mine]. He wanted to know how to obtain U.S. government files on UFOs. You can imagine my surprise and amusement when, about six months later, while I was at work I got a call from the ‘dreaded’ FBI. It became obvious to me that the agent didn’t know much about the UFO phenomenon and was amused to learn about the FBI files on the subject. But he was especially interested in my interactions with the military attaché.” Moving on…
Interestingly, there have been strange rumors to the effect that the controversial, so-called Majestic 12 documents might have played a role in all of this. One theory is that the Russians created the documents. Yes, I know: that sounds very strange, but read on. If the combined intelligence community found anything more about Majestic 12 documents in the late 1980s, then it is yet to appear under the FOIA. We do know something of deep interest though, thanks to a man named Richard L. Huff. He served as Bureau Co-Director within the Office of Information and Privacy. In correspondence with him, Huff informed me of the existence of an FBI “Main File” on Majestic 12, now in what is termed “closed status.” Not only that: I was told that the FBI’s file on the Majestic 12 papers was titled nothing less than “Espionage.” Author Howard Blum said the FBI’s reasoning for suspecting the Russians might have been at the heart of the Majestic 12 debate revolved around “…muddying the waters, creating dissension, spreading paranoia in the ranks – those were all the day-in, day-out jobs of the ruthless operation.” Soviet revenge against U.S. Intelligence for having spun their own UFO-themed operations during the Cold War.”
NASA's Curiosity rover finds evidence of an ancient 'megaflood' on Mars 4 billion years ago – raising the possibility that LIFE once existed on the Red Planet
NASA's Curiosity rover finds evidence of an ancient 'megaflood' on Mars 4 billion years ago – raising the possibility that LIFE once existed on the Red Planet
Researchers used data sent back to Earth by the NASA Curiosity rover on Mars
The team behind the study examined sediment data captured by Curiosity
They found evidence of giant ripples in the Gale crater similar to ones on Earth
These are caused by mass flooding events as the water washing over the surface
The team say a meteor impact likely caused the flooding 4 billion years ago
Floods of unimaginable magnitude washed through Gale Crater on Mars around 4 billion years ago, raising the possibility life once existed on the Red Planet.
Researchers from Jackson State University, Cornell University and the University of Hawaii worked with NASA to examine sediment data captured by the Curiosity Rover.
Dubbed a 'raging megaflood' by scientists, it was likely caused by an asteroid or comet hitting the planet, heating and unleashing ice stored on the Martian surface.
Water as much as 78ft deep raged across the crater at 32 feet per second, leaving behind gigantic ripples that are tell-tale structures familiar to scientists on Earth.
On Earth where water is found 'there is life', according to co-author Alberto G. Fairen, and on Mars four billion years ago microbial life may have developed, he said.
Dubbed a 'raging megaflood' by scientists, it was likely caused by an asteroid or comet hitting the planet, heating and unleashing ice stored on the Martian surface
This close up image of rocks on Mars show changes in the bed interval including rounded coarse sand and pebble fragments suggesting water once flowed through the area
The ripples created by flooding - also known as antidunes - are up to 30ft high and spread about 450ft apart, according to Ezat Heydari, co-author.
As is the case on Earth, geological features including the work of water and wind have been frozen in time on Mars for about four billion years - they convey processes that shaped the surface of both planets in the distant past.
This includes the occurrence of the giant wave-shaped features in sedimentary layers of Gale crater, often called 'megaripples' or antidunes.
In one instance that water entered Gale Crater, and when combined with water coming down from Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, produced gigantic flash floods
'We identified megafloods for the first time using detailed sedimentological data observed by the rover Curiosity,' said co-author Alberto G. Fairén.
'Deposits left behind by megafloods had not been previously identified with orbiter data,' Fairen explained.
The antidunes seen in data from NASA Curiosity are identical to the features formed by melting ice on Earth about two million years ago, Heydari said.
On Mars releasing the stocks of frozen water likely required a significant impact event that released carbon dioxide, methane and the ice as water vapour.
The water vapour and gases combined to produce a short warm and wet period that could have resulted in the development of life, researchers claim.
'The warm and wet climate persisted even after the flooding ended, but its duration cannot be determined by our study,' the team wrote in their paper.
The condensation from the heat generated by the impact likely formed clouds of water vapour which created torrential rain - possibly across the planet.
An earlier study, also using data from Curiosity, revealed evidence of storms that filled lakes and rivers with rainfall on the planet - about four billion years ago.
Curiosity sent back images and data for the research team to examine - including the bottom image showing flow direction of the water - along the yellow dotted line
In one instance that water entered Gale Crater, and when combined with water coming down from Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, produced gigantic flash floods.
This left behind deposits of gravel ridges surrounding the crater that can be seen on the Red Planet today - and helped the team work out the scale of the megaflood.
The Curiosity rover science team has already established that Gale Crater once had persistent lakes and streams in the ancient past.
These long-lived bodies of water are good indicators that the crater, as well as Mount Sharp within it, were capable of supporting microbial life.
Graphic showing the terrain studied by Curiosity and where layers and antidunes have been discovered - indicating areas of ripples and waves from a megaflood
These are images of the Gale crater showing the various topographic features including the mountains and ripples produced by activity on the planet over billions of years
'Early Mars was an extremely active planet from a geological point of view,' Fairén said. 'The planet had the conditions needed to support the presence of liquid water on the surface – and on Earth, where there's water, there's life.
'So early Mars was a habitable planet,' he said. 'Was it inhabited? That's a question that the next rover Perseverance … will help to answer.'
Perseverance, which launched from Cape Canaveral on July 30, is scheduled to reach Mars on February 18, 2021.
NASA MARS 2020: THE MISSION WILL SEE THE PERSEVERANCE ROVER AND INGENUITY HELICOPTER SEARCH FOR LIFE
NASA's Mars 2020 mission will search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet in a bid to help scientists better understand how life evolved on Earth.
Named Perseverance, the main car-sized rover is to explore an ancient river delta within the Jezero Crater, which was once filled with a 1,600ft deep lake.
It is believed that the region hosted microbial life some 3.5 to 3.9 billion years ago and the rover will examine soil samples to hunt for evidence of the life.
Nasa's Mars 2020 rover (artist's impression) is searching for signs of ancient life on Mars in a bid to help scientists better understand how life evolved on our own planet
The $2.5 billion (£1.95 billion) Mars 2020 spaceship launched on July 30 with the rover and helicopter inside - and landed successfully on February 18, 2021.
Perseverance landed inside the crater and will collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth for further analysis.
A second mission will fly to the planet and return the samples, perhaps by the later 2020s in partnership with the European Space Agency.
This concept art shows the Mars 2020 rover landing on the red planet via NASA's 'sky-crane' system
According to a new study, there was never a giant lake in the Gale Crater on Mars. This contradicts previous reports based on data collected by NASA’s Curiosity Rover that seemingly found evidence that the 96-mile-wide crater supported a massive lake about 3.7 billion years ago.
Michael Meyer, who is the Mars Exploration Program lead scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, stated back in 2014, “This lake was large enough it could have lasted millions of years — sufficient time for life to get started and thrive, sufficient time for lake sediments to build up and form Mount Sharp.” Mount Sharp is a large mound (about 3.4 miles or 5.5 kilometers in height) that rises up from the middle of Gale Crater.
Gale Crater imaged by Mars Odyssey’s THEMIS.
However, a new study has a put a damper on those claims as the researchers are claiming that the mudstone deposits found in the crater were likely brought in by volcanic activity or the Martian wind before acidic rain altered them. Joe Michalski, who is the deputy director of the HKU’s Laboratory for Space Research, told Space.com, “This is probably precipitation-driven chemical weathering of a soil-type environment.”
He went on to say that instead of one giant lake, there were probably several small lakes in the crater that only lasted at the most about a few tens of thousands of years each. If they are correct in their theory, this could be very damaging news in regards to life ever having lived in the Gale Crater. Their study was published in the journal Science Advances.
Was there one massive lake or several small ones in the crater?
Just last month, it was reported that X-rays conducted on clay samples found in the crater revealed that they contained a mineral called glauconite which is also found on our planet and could mean that there was once life in the Gale Crater as explained by Elisabeth Losa-Adams from the University of Vigo, Spain, “Glauconitic clays can be used as ‘a proxy’ for stable conditions,” adding, “The conditions under which these minerals form are friendly for the presence of life.”
With all of these conflicting reports, it’s hard to keep track of what experts are thinking in regards to life on Mars and how much water was actually on the planet. This is just the latest of many theories and I’m sure there will be much more to come.
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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.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
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