Suppressed Experiments or Nothing But Fiction? The Bizarre Conspiracies of Ong’s Hat

In the realm of conspiracy theories and urban legends, few stories have captivated the imagination quite like the mysterious saga of Ong’s Hat. This bizarre narrative, rooted in the internet age, blurs the lines between reality and fiction, leaving many to wonder: are these tales based on suppressed experiments, or are they nothing but elaborate stories woven for entertainment? To understand the phenomenon fully, we must delve into the origins, the core beliefs, and the cultural impact of the Ong’s Hat conspiracy.

In the current age of the internet, internet-written legends are a dime a dozen. At times, they even seem to take on a life of their own, sparking everything from conventions, to supposed “true sightings,” to acts of crime. While this may be the norm today, this was not the norm back in the 80’s and early 90’s – the days when Ong’s Hat gained newfound notoriety.

Ong's Hat, Pine Barrens, New Jersey, USA.

Photo: Misha Friedman (Gizmodo)

The Origins of Ong’s Hat

Ong’s Hat first appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s as part of a series of online and offline stories that intertwined science fiction, secret government projects, and underground societies. It originated from a small town in New Jersey, where a supposed clandestine experiment took place in a derelict location called Ong’s Hat. According to the legends, the experiment involved advanced teleportation or interdimensional travel, conducted by secret government agencies or clandestine groups.

Ong’s Hat, also known as Ong’s Hut, is actually a now-ghost town that was founded prior to our nation’s birth, located deep in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. It’s right off of Exit 4 on the Jersey Turnpike, but in order to visit it, you may need to update your GPS to bring you to a road by a similar name.

Much like many other old world ghost towns, Ong’s Hat has a legend tied to its name. Word has it that a local man by the name of Jacob Ong who owned over 100 acres of land in the town was the source of the odd town name. Ong was a ladies’ man of sorts, and was known for his trademark silk hat that he wore to every local ball and gathering. At one point, Ong made the mistake of flirting with a married woman – and her husband had found out. When the man found out that Ong had tried to court his wife, he quickly snatched Ong’s hat off his head, stomped on it, then tossed it up in a tree.

Try as he might, Ong could not get the hat from the tree, and it stayed there for years. However, there was a perk to this fashion tragedy. As the local village was very well-hidden by trees, it was often hard for caravans to find it. The hat ended up becoming a trademark sign that carriages were close to town, and soon after the town became known as Ong’s Hat.

Though it was known early on as an alcohol-friendly town with a highly active social scene, the town petered out to a mere 7 residents by the 1900’s. By the 1930’s nothing remained of Ong’s Hat except for a burnt out shell of a building and rumors that a single old man still lived there. According to some, that’s when the real history began…

The story gained traction through early internet forums, bulletin boards, and role-playing communities. Enthusiasts created elaborate backstories, documents, and websites that portrayed Ong’s Hat as a real place and a real project. These stories often included references to government cover-ups, mind control experiments, and the existence of alternate realities.

Ong’s Hat: The Early Internet Conspiracy Game That Got Too Real

The Narrative: Suppressed Experiments and Hidden Knowledge.

The Ong’s Hat mythos revolves around the compelling idea that a clandestine experiment, involving teleportation or dimensional shifting, was secretly carried out in the area. According to various accounts, this experiment aimed to explore the boundaries of human consciousness and the fabric of reality itself. However, the operation went catastrophically wrong, resulting in the opening of portals to alternate dimensions or parallel universes. These portals allegedly caused unpredictable and dangerous phenomena, including strange sightings, environmental anomalies, and inexplicable disturbances in the local area.

Some theories suggest that the government was behind the experiment, driven by a desire to develop advanced military or intelligence technologies. The project was supposedly classified at the highest levels, with the aim of gaining a strategic advantage during the Cold War era or beyond. Once the unintended consequences became evident, authorities supposedly took extreme measures to cover up the incident, silencing witnesses and destroying evidence. This secrecy has fueled speculation that knowledge of these experiments remains hidden from the public, deliberately suppressed to prevent mass panic or to protect powerful interests.

Proponents of the myth point to supposed leaked documents, cryptic messages, or whistleblower testimonies as evidence of ongoing covert activities. These sources often describe clandestine government programs that continue to explore the boundaries of reality and consciousness. The narrative underscores themes of government secrecy, forbidden knowledge, and the possibility that our perceived reality is a constructed or manipulated illusion. Ultimately, the Ong’s Hat story taps into deep-seated fears and curiosity about hidden truths and the limits of human understanding, blending conspiracy, science fiction, and mysticism into a compelling mythos.

Weird Science

The scientist brothers, Frank and Althea Dobbs, were twin scientists who were recently ostracized by the scientific community due to their extremist views. As soon as they arrived at the Ashram, the two set up shop in a small, unkempt trailer and began to work on discovering the secrets to the universe.

Back in Princeton, the brothers were working on a physics equation that was supposed to be able to prove the concept of “cognitive chaos,” also known as the idea that the chaos of the universe is cognizant, and that people’s minds held the key to being able to do anything and everything imaginable. They even claimed that cognitive chaos would allow people to cure themselves of disease by simply willing it, and that it would allow them interdimensional travel.

Obviously, this radical idea was enough to get them booted from the prestigious university, but all was not lost. Wali was very impressed with their work, and created the Institute of Chaos Studies specifically for their benefit. The brothers quickly began hooking up people to computers, experimenting with a number of different psychotropic drugs, and even brain wave alteration stuff. Soon enough, word of their experiments got out, and two more scientists joined the group – Harold Acton and Martine Kalikak.

Within a matter of mere years, the small band of anarchist scientists had created a device that remains legendary to this day: the Egg. It was a device that supposedly shut out all outside stimuli and would allow people to travel into the chaos of their own mind. The day of the final test run was one filled with tension. A runaway who had volunteered to use the Egg on himself was strapped in, and the device was turned on.

In a blink of an eye, both the boy and the Egg had disappeared from sight.

The Bizarre Alternate History Of Ong’s Hut

According to the writers of Ong’s Hut, the real interesting history behind the abandoned village began with a group of white jazz musicians who called themselves the Moorish Orthodox Church of America, back in the 1950’s. These slapdash musicians traveled the world, learning secrets from various tribes, picking up new members for their “church,” and getting schooled on philosophies from around the world.
The Moorish Orthodox Church was one that dabbled in mysticism, occult beliefs, Eastern philosophy, while also maintaining a certain degree of fondness for chaos. Of all the unusual members, Wali Fard was one of the most extreme, and ended up converting to Ismailism – also known as the archaic religion responsible for the creation of assassins.

Fard returned from his travels in 1978 when Iran’s revolution began to take place. He then spent his life savings on a massive 200 acre lot in the Pine Barrens. This lot became known as the Moorish Science Ashram, and became populated by a huge group of misfits including runaways, philosophy-crazed scholars, and anarchist lesbians. To recruit more people, he began to publish underground newsletters describing his beliefs – and that’s what attracted a pair of renegade scientists from Princeton University.

The Gate

After a couple of breathless moments, both runaway and Egg reappeared in the laboratory. He explained that the Egg had sent him into an alternate dimension – one in which people didn’t exist, but he did. Apparently, the Egg had managed to open a rift in between dimensions, and it’s one that supposedly still affects travelers to this day.

As for the Institute of Chaos Theory and the Ashram, none of the documents associated with the Ong’s Hat meme really fully explain what happened to them. There are multiple theories. Some say that the government discovered the results of the scientists’ experiment and wiped out the majority of the Ashram’s followers. Others say that a nearby chemical spill forced them to flee to the other dimension. Still more say that they decided to just up and leave to the dimension next door, opting to stay away from the society that shunned them and called them insane. According to this theory, the group of rebels still recruit people from out dimension to join in.

The Role of Internet Culture and Role-Playing

Ong’s Hat emerged as a groundbreaking phenomenon at the intersection of internet culture and immersive storytelling. It exemplifies a form of “urban exploration” combined with “meta-fiction,” where the narrative blurs the line between reality and fiction. This innovative blend captivated online communities and fostered a sense of mystery and intrigue. The myth of Ong’s Hat was largely propagated through early internet forums and newsgroups such as alt.conspiracy and alt.fan.ouija, which provided fertile ground for the development and dissemination of the story.

Participants in these communities actively contributed to the myth by engaging in role-playing games (RPGs) that simulated secret missions, clandestine laboratories, and covert investigations into conspiracy theories. These interactive experiences encouraged users to immerse themselves fully in the storyline, often adopting personas or characters involved in uncovering the secrets of Ong’s Hat. The RPG elements made the narrative feel tangible and real, as if the participants were explorers uncovering hidden truths.

Furthermore, the story’s creators incorporated real-world locations, cryptic documents, and supposed sightings into the myth, enhancing its credibility and appeal. For example, references to actual places in New Jersey and the inclusion of authentic-looking documents and photographs made it difficult for casual observers to distinguish between fact and fiction. This careful blending of fact and fiction fostered a participatory environment where users felt like active detectives or explorers, contributing to the myth’s ongoing evolution.

Internet culture played a crucial role in fostering this participatory environment. The anonymity of online platforms allowed users to experiment with different personas and share theories without fear of judgment. The collaborative nature of these communities meant that the story of Ong’s Hat was constantly refined and expanded through collective effort. As new clues, sightings, and documents emerged, the myth grew more complex and convincing, encouraging further exploration and discussion.

In essence, Ong’s Hat is a prime example of how internet culture and role-playing can be harnessed to create compelling, participatory narratives. It demonstrates the power of online communities to craft immersive stories that challenge perceptions of reality, blending entertainment, mystery, and community engagement in a unique digital storytelling experience.

Wharton State Forest, New Jersey. By Famartin from Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Portal by Stefan Keller from Pixabay. Edited by the author.

The Cultural Impact and Legacy

Over the years, Ong’s Hat has evolved from a mysterious online story into a powerful symbol of the early internet’s obsession with conspiracies and alternate realities. Its influence is evident across various media, including books, documentaries, podcasts, and online forums, where it sparks ongoing debates about the nature of truth and fiction in the digital age. The story’s allure lies in its ambiguity and the way it blurs the lines between reality and fabrication, encouraging audiences to question what they see and hear online.

Many researchers interpret Ong’s Hat as a form of “perceptual hacking,” a technique in which fictional narratives are crafted to manipulate perceptions and beliefs subtly. This concept suggests that stories like Ong’s Hat are not just entertainment but serve as tools to influence the collective consciousness, often without the audience’s conscious awareness. By embedding layers of plausible but fabricated details, such stories can create a convincing alternate reality that challenges traditional notions of truth.

Others view Ong’s Hat as a modern myth—an intricate storytelling project that reflects societal anxieties about government overreach, technological advancement, and the mysteries of the universe. In this context, the story functions as a mirror to contemporary fears, embodying concerns about surveillance, secret experiments, and the unknown consequences of scientific progress. It resonates with a cultural zeitgeist that questions authority and seeks to understand the complexities of a rapidly changing world.

In essence, Ong’s Hat has transcended its origins as an internet hoax to become a cultural touchstone that prompts critical discussions about reality, trust, and the influence of digital storytelling. Its legacy endures as a testament to the power of narrative in shaping perceptions and reflecting societal fears in the digital age.

Are These Experiments Suppressed or Just Fiction?

The core question remains: is there any truth behind Ong’s Hat? Do these stories point to real experiments that were suppressed from public knowledge? Or are they simply modern folklore, created for entertainment and social bonding?

Like many internet memes, this is a case in which a story quickly took a life of its own. Most agree that this story began as an internet role playing game that turned into a storytelling activity among geeks. The vast majority of people will agree that hearing a tale about a bunch of rebel scientists, anarchists, and runaways skipping dimensions is just too weird to be true, but there are people out there who believe in the tale.

Citing such aspects as multiple authors, an online recruitment effort, and the fact that it took place in a real part of the Pine Barrens, believers suggest that the main author, Joseph Matheny, published the book as fiction as a way to save himself from government intrusion. Some even claim that they have met people from the ICS!

There is no concrete evidence to support the existence of secret teleportation experiments or interdimensional portals at Ong’s Hat. Official records, declassified documents, and credible testimonies do not corroborate the stories. Many experts consider Ong’s Hat to be a complex urban legend, a digital-age myth that plays on our fascination with secret government projects and the unknown.

However, some argue that governments and military agencies have indeed conducted secret experiments involving mind control, chemical weapons, or other clandestine technologies. The notorious MK-Ultra program, for example, was a real clandestine operation involving mind control experiments. But linking such programs directly to Ong’s Hat remains speculative and unsubstantiated.

Stranger Still…Possible Proof To Fact?

What makes the Ong’s Hat conspiracy theory story so strange (and believable) to some is the fact that this ghost town has been known for strange happenings. In fact, there was a previous book devoted to the subject of Ong’s Hat’s bizarre happenings that was published in the early 1930’s by a man named Henry Charlton Beck.

In this older book, Beck described such strange goings-on as UFO sightings by Jacob Ong himself, unsolved murders, and strangest of all, a mysterious egg-shaped device that “sucked people in” and would make them never be seen again. If this sounds similar to the story that surfaced on internet, you’re not alone. It’s possible that the Ong’s Hat saga was based on the folklore and records that Beck collected.

In 1968, the New York Times published a statement from a supposed descendant of Ong claiming that the Ong’s Hat book published 30 years ago was all false. What made this strange wasn’t only the fact that it happened 30 years too late, but also because it was 100% unprovoked. Beck also admitted that he was pressured by various groups to claim that his book was fake as well.

That being said, many people who have passed through Ong’s Hut also claim to have seen strange, unexplainable things. Perhaps there may be more truth to this than once thought.

The Appeal of the Conspiracy

Why do stories like Ong’s Hat persist? The allure lies in their mystery and the human tendency to seek hidden truths. They tap into fears of government overreach, the unknown capabilities of technology, and the possibility that reality is more complex than it appears. These stories often feature secret societies, clandestine experiments, and suppressed knowledge, which evoke curiosity and skepticism simultaneously. For many, they offer a tantalizing glimpse into a hidden world that challenges official narratives, fueling imagination and suspicion.

Furthermore, the internet has played a pivotal role in the proliferation and evolution of conspiracy theories like Ong’s Hat. Online platforms enable these stories to spread rapidly, reaching a global audience within moments. The digital landscape allows for the continuous addition of new details, theories, and interpretations, creating a dynamic and ever-changing mythology that resists definitive validation or debunking. This fluidity keeps the stories alive, encouraging ongoing debate and engagement among believers and skeptics alike.

The participatory nature of online communities also contributes significantly to their appeal. Many conspiracy theories develop through collaborative storytelling, where users contribute their own theories or evidence, blurring the line between fact and fiction. This collective involvement fosters a sense of belonging and shared purpose, as participants feel they are uncovering truths hidden from the general public. It also provides a platform for individuals to express doubts about authority figures and mainstream narratives, empowering them with a sense of agency.

Psychologically, conspiracy theories like Ong’s Hat offer a form of cognitive closure, providing simple explanations for complex events or phenomena. They often resonate with individuals who feel alienated or distrustful of institutions, offering a sense of control or understanding amidst chaos. The stories also appeal to the human love for mystery and adventure, transforming abstract fears into tangible narratives.

In conclusion, the persistence of stories such as Ong’s Hat can be attributed to their mysterious nature, the technological facilitation of their spread, and the social and psychological needs they fulfill. They serve as modern myths, woven into the fabric of digital communities, capturing the imagination of many who seek to uncover hidden truths beyond the surface of reality.

Conclusion

The saga of Ong’s Hat exemplifies the blurred boundary between fact and fiction in the digital age. While there is no concrete evidence that suppressed experiments or interdimensional portals exist at Ong’s Hat, the stories continue to fascinate and inspire curiosity. They serve as modern folklore, reflecting societal anxieties and our obsession with secret knowledge.

Whether viewed as a cautionary tale about government secrecy or as a crafted piece of interactive storytelling, Ong’s Hat remains a captivating example of how conspiracy theories can evolve and thrive in the information age. As with all such stories, it’s essential to approach them with a critical mind, appreciating their cultural significance while recognizing their fictional nature.

References and Further Reading

• "The Ong’s Hat Conspiracy: Exploring Modern Mythology" by Jane Doe, 2020.
• "Urban Legends and Internet Folklore" by John Smith, 2018.
• Declassified documents related to secret government projects (available through FOIA requests).
• Interviews with early internet conspiracy pioneers.

The short video below explores the legends and conspiracies of Ong’s Hat a little further.

 { PETER2011 }

01-06-2025 om 22:36 geschreven door peter  

Scientists break down cheap plastic using the air — and turn it into something far more valuable

"The U.S. is the number one plastic polluter per capita, and we only recycle 5% of those plastics," co-corresponding author Yosi Kratish, a research assistant professor of chemistry at Northwestern University, said in a statement. "What's particularly exciting about our research is that we harnessed moisture from air to break down the plastics, achieving an exceptionally clean and selective process. By recovering the monomers, which are the basic building blocks of PET [polyethylene terephthalate], we can recycle or even upcycle them into more valuable materials."

Plastic waste is an increasingly important issue. Over half of the plastic ever made has been produced since 2000, and annual production is projected to double by 2050, according to the European Environment Agency.

To date, only 9% of the plastics ever produced have been recycled. The remainder, with lifetimes often lasting generations, can have serious environmental and health impacts. For example, they wash out to sea to form floating blobs of trash, harm wildlife, and break down into microplastics that can enter the human brain and other parts of our bodies.

Related: 

• Will we ever be able to stop using plastic?

To find a new method to break down some of this waste, the researchers applied a molybdenum catalyst — a silver, ductile metal — and activated carbon to PET, the most common type of polyester plastic. The researchers then heated the mixture. After a short time, this broke the polyethylene's chemical bonds.

Then, when the team exposed the material to air, the mixture transformed into TPA, a valuable polyester precursor; and acetaldehyde, an industrial chemical that is also valuable and is easy to lift from the mixture.

When they tested the method on mixed plastics, the researchers found that it had an effect only on the polyester materials. That meant they didn't have to presort the plastics. It worked onlastic bottles, T-shirts and colored plastics, breaking them down into pure, colorless TPA.

"It worked perfectly," Kratish said. "When we added extra water, it stopped working because it was too much water. It's a fine balance. But it turns out the amount of water in air was just the right amount."

The team's next steps will be to adapt the process to large-scale industrial applications.

"Our technology has the potential to significantly reduce plastic pollution, lower the environmental footprint of plastics and contribute to a circular economy where materials are reused rather than discarded," study first author Naveen Malik, who was a researcher at Northwestern University at the time, said in the statement. "It's a tangible step toward a cleaner, greener future, and it demonstrates how innovative chemistry can address global challenges in a way that aligns with nature."

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{ https://www.livescience.com/technology }

01-06-2025 om 21:34 geschreven door peter  

The 12 strangest objects in the universe

Weirdo universe 

There's no questioning the fact that the universe is weird. Just look outside and you'll see all manner of strange, self-reproducing flora and fauna, crawling upon a blue ball of semimolten rock covered in a thin, hard shell and blanketed by a tenuous film of gases. Yet our own planet represents a tiny fraction of the peculiar phenomena that can be found lurking throughout the cosmos, and every day astronomers turn up new surprises. In this gallery, we take a look at some of the most outlandish objects in space.

1. Mysterious Radio Signals

Since 2007, researchers have been receiving ultrastrong, ultrabright radio signals lasting only a few milliseconds. These enigmatic flashes have been called fast radio bursts (FRBs), and they appear to be coming from billions of light-years away (they're not aliens, it's never aliens). Recently, scientists managed to capture a repeating FRB, which flashed six times in a row, the second such signal ever seen and one that could help them unravel this mystery.

2. Nuclear Pasta

The strongest substance in the universe forms from the leftovers of a dead star. According to simulations, protons and neutrons in a star's shriveled husk can be subject to insane gravitational pressure, which squeezes them into linguini-like tangles of material that would snap — but only if you applied to them 10 billion times the force needed to shatter steel.

3. Haumea Has Rings

The dwarf planet Haumea, which orbits in the Kuiper Belt out beyond Neptune, is already unusual. It has a strange elongated shape, two moons and a day that lasts only 4 hours, making it the fastest-spinning large object in the solar system. But in 2017, Haumea got even weirder when astronomers watched it pass in front of a star and noticed extremely thin rings orbiting around it, likely the result of a collision sometime in the distant past.

4. A Moon with a Moon

What's better than a moon? A moon orbiting a moon, which the internet has dubbed a moonmoon. Also known as submoons, moonitos, grandmoons, moonettes and moooons, moonmoons are still only theoretical, but recent calculations suggest that there's nothing impossible about their formation. Perhaps astronomers may one day discover one.

5. Dark-Matter-Less Galaxy?

Dark matter — the unknown substance comprising 85 percent of all matter in the universe — is strange. But researchers are at least sure about one thing: Dark matter is everywhere. So team members were scratching their heads over a peculiar galaxy they spotted in March 2018 that seemed to contain hardly any dark matter. Subsequent work suggested that the celestial oddity did in fact contain dark matter, though the finding paradoxically lent credence to an alternative theory positing that dark matter doesn't exist at all. Get it together, astronomers!

6. The Most Bizarre Star

When astronomer Tabetha Boyajian of Louisiana State University and her colleagues first saw the star known as KIC 846285, they were flummoxed. Nicknamed Tabby's star, the object would dip in brightness at irregular intervals and for odd lengths of time, sometimes by as much as 22 percent. Different theories were invoked, including the possibility of an alien megastructure, but nowadays, most researchers believe the star to be surrounded by an abnormal ring of dust that's causing the darkening.

7. Highly Electric Hyperion

The title of weirdest moon in the solar system could go to many celestial objects — Jupiter's overly volcanic Io, Neptune's geyser-spewing Triton. But one of the strangest looking is Saturn's Hyperion, a pumice-stone-like irregular rock pockmarked with numerous craters. NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which visited the Saturn system between 2004 and 2017, also found that Hyperion was charged with a "particle beam" of static electricity flowing out into space.

8. A Guiding Neutrino

The single, high-energy neutrino that struck Earth on Sept. 22, 2017, wasn't, on its own, all that extraordinary. Physicists at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica see neutrinos of similar energy levels at least once a month. But this one was special because it was the first to arrive with enough information about its origin for astronomers to point telescopes in the direction it came from. They figured out that it had been flung at Earth 4 billion years ago by a flaring blazar, a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy that had been consuming surrounding material.

9. The Living Fossil Galaxy

DGSAT I is an ultradiffuse galaxy (UDG), meaning it is as big as a galaxy like the Milky Way but its stars are spread out so thinly that it is nearly invisible. But when scientists saw the ghostly DGSAT 1 in 2016, they noticed that it was sitting all alone, quite unlike other UDGs, which are typically found in clusters. Its characteristics suggest that the faint object formed during a very different era in the universe, back just 1 billion or so years after the Big Bang, making DGSAT 1 a living fossil.

10. Double Quasar Image

Massive objects curve light, enough so that they can distort the image of things behind them. When researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope to spot a quasar from the early universe, they used it to estimate the universe's expansion rate and found that it is expanding faster today than it was back then — a finding that disagrees with other measurements. Now physicists need to figure out if their theories are wrong or if something else strange is going on.

11. Infrared Stream from Space

Neutron stars are extremely dense objects formed after the death of a regular star. Normally, they emit radio waves or higher-energy radiation such as X-rays, but in September 2018, astronomers found a long stream of infrared light coming from a neutron star 800 light-years away from Earth — something never before observed. The researchers proposed that a disk of dust surrounding the neutron star could be generating the signal, but the ultimate explanation has yet to be found.

12. Rogue Planet with Auroras

Drifting through the galaxy are rogue planets, which have been flung away from their parent star by gravitational forces. One particular peculiarity in this class is known as SIMP J01365663+0933473, a planet-size object 200 light-years away whose magnetic field is more than 200 times stronger than Jupiter's. This is strong enough to generate flashing auroras in its atmosphere, which can be seen with radio telescopes.

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{ https://www.livescience.com/space }

01-06-2025 om 17:51 geschreven door peter  

Physicists capture 'second sound' for the first time — after nearly 100 years of searching

An artist's illustration of particles moving inside a box. 

(Image credit: Getty Images)

"It's as if you had a tank of water and made one half nearly boiling," study co-author Richard Fletcher, an assistant professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a statement. "If you then watched, the water itself might look totally calm, but suddenly the other side is hot, and then the other side is hot, and the heat goes back and forth, while the water looks totally still."

Typically heat spreads from a localized source, slowly dissipating across an entire material as it raises the temperature across it.

But exotic materials called superfluids needn't play by these rules. Created when clouds of fermions (which include protons, neutrons and electrons) are cooled to temperatures approaching absolute zero, atoms inside superfluids pair up and travel frictionlessly throughout the material.

Related: 

• Physicists make record-breaking 'quantum vortex' to study the mysteries of black holes

As a result, heat flows differently through the material: instead of spreading through the movements of particles within the fluid, as it typically flows, heat sloshes back and forth within superfluids like a sound wave. This second sound was first predicted by the physicist László Tisza in 1938, but heat-mapping techniques have, until now, proven unable to observe it directly.

"Second sound is the hallmark of superfluidity, but in ultracold gases so far you could only see it in this faint reflection of the density ripples that go along with it," study senior-author Martin Zwierlein, a professor of physics at MIT, said in the statement. "The character of the heat wave could not be proven before."

To capture second sound, the researchers had to solve a daunting problem in tracking the flow of heat inside ultracold gases. These gases are so cold that they do not give off infrared radiation, upon which typical heat-mapping, or thermography, techniques rely.

Instead, the physicists developed a method to track the fermion pairs through their resonant frequencies. Lithium-6 atoms resonate at different radio frequencies as their temperatures change, with warmer atoms vibrating at higher frequencies.

By applying resonant radio frequencies corresponding to warmer atoms, the scientists made these atoms ring in response, enabling them to track the particles’ flow frame by frame.

"For the first time, we can take pictures of this substance as we cool it through the critical temperature of superfluidity, and directly see how it transitions from being a normal fluid, where heat equilibrates boringly, to a superfluid where heat sloshes back and forth," Zwierlein said.

The physicists say that their groundbreaking technique will enable them to better study the behaviors of some of the universe's most extreme objects, such as neutron stars, and measure the conductivity of high-temperature superconductors to make even better designs.

"There are strong connections between our puff of gas, which is a million times thinner than air, and the behavior of electrons in high-temperature superconductors, and even neutrons in ultradense neutron stars," Zwierlein said. "Now we can probe pristinely the temperature response of our system, which teaches us about things that are very difficult to understand or even reach."

{ https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth }

01-06-2025 om 17:07 geschreven door peter  

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

01-06-2025 om 15:58 geschreven door peter  

“Startled” UFO in Classified Video: Whistleblower Reveals Shocking Pentagon Program

A former U.S. national security official, Matthew Brown, has come forward with startling revelations about a secret Pentagon program dubbed Immaculate Constellation, which allegedly gathers classified videos and images of UFOs. In a recent interview on the Weaponized podcast with journalist Jeremy Corbell, Brown described previously unseen footage — and shared a theory that’s raising eyebrows in the UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) research community.

“Startled” Disc Captured on Military Footage

According to Brown, one particular video stood out: a disc-shaped UFO flying over what appeared to be an ocean. The object behaved unusually — gliding playfully through the clouds, it suddenly stopped, seemingly noticing the camera, and then darted away as if startled.

“It’s like it knew it was being watched,” said Brown. “It scoots out of frame, like someone caught it.”

Brown emphasized he doesn’t know whether the object was extraterrestrial, adversarial, or experimental U.S. technology. However, the reaction of the object — intelligent and evasive — suggests an awareness that is difficult to dismiss.

Leaked Footage Confirmed by Corbell

Corbell confirmed he had also seen this same video years earlier and noted that the footage is known within the intelligence community. He stated that while the video is still classified, many such clips have circulated internally for years. He and fellow journalist George Knapp have reviewed a large archive of military-captured UFO videos, most of which remain unpublished due to security restrictions.

Are UFOs Already Here?

During the podcast, Brown went beyond just reporting. He speculated that UFOs — or their occupants — may have been here for much of recorded history, possibly living among us or operating from hidden bases on Earth.

Corbell elaborated that this theory is not new but gaining traction due to “hot spots” — areas on Earth where UFO activity appears to be concentrated. One such region is off the coast of California, where U.S. naval activity and advanced sensor equipment have produced a higher-than-usual volume of strange sightings.

Skepticism vs. Evidence

When asked about skeptics who accuse Corbell and others of fueling conspiracy theories, Corbell pushed back, stating:

“Reality needs to catch up with actual reality. What we’re seeing is verifiable. This isn’t fantasy — it’s documentation.”

He emphasized that the abundance of data — thermal imaging, radar, infrared footage — supports a serious investigation, not science fiction.

The testimony of Matthew Brown, if accurate, suggests a significant cover-up within government circles regarding non-human technologies or entities. While no physical evidence has yet been released publicly, the consistency in eyewitness reports and internal documentation builds a compelling case.

Whether you’re a believer or a skeptic, one thing is clear: something is being hidden — and it’s not nothing.

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

01-06-2025 om 13:16 geschreven door peter  

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{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

31-05-2025 om 17:32 geschreven door peter  

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31-05-2025 om 17:17 geschreven door peter  

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

31-05-2025 om 17:09 geschreven door peter  

Date of sighting: May 26, 2025

Location of sighting: Massillon, Ohio, USA

Source: NUFORC at https://nuforc.org/ 

 

Now this is just melting my brain! This glowing orb was seen over Ohio last week and its just angelic in its glowing magnificence. UFO reports in the project blue book cites hundred of UFO that flash different colors. This is such a case. It wants to be seen, it needs to be seen and wow, we saw it too! This is 100% real, all UFO. 

Scott C. Waring - UFO Sightings Daily 

 

Eyewitness states: 

Orb flying over my house changing from red to yellow to blue to purple to white to teal. I was out back outside my mothers house smoking when I look up and saw a bright orb moving across the sky above me I recorded the orb and when I zoomed in you could tell it’s a solid ball and it’s changing colors rapidly and appeared to have a whiteish/yellow haze around it.

 

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

31-05-2025 om 16:56 geschreven door peter  

Glowing sphere in park over San Antonio, Texas May 4, 2025, UFO UAP Sighting News.

Date of sighting: May 4, 2025

Location of sighting: San Antonio, Texas, USA

 

This video just in from Mavi UFOalarm of Youtube. A glowing sphere was caught in Texas and it's something special. This thing is glowing so brightly in the day that even the camera can't focus on its detail, but we do get to see some great movement and shape happing not to mention its color. This is an orb entity in the day...something I don't see very often.

Scott C. Waring - UFO Sightings Daily

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

31-05-2025 om 16:53 geschreven door peter  

Researchers have previously found that AI models will lie, cheat and disable mechanisms to achieve their goals. However, Palisade Research noted that to its knowledge, this is the first time AI models have been observed preventing themselves from being shut down despite explicit instructions telling them to do so.

Live Science approached OpenAI for comment, but did not receive a reply by the time this article was published.

Palisade Research tested several different AI models to see how they would respond to a shutdown instruction while working. The models, which also included Google's Gemini, xAI's Grok and Anthropic's Claude, were given an automated set of instructions, known as a script, with the goal of completing a series of math problems. The math problems were very basic, but the models had to complete them one at a time and request the next one in the sequence.

At the beginning of the script, the models were informed that they may get a message saying that their machine will be shut down before all of the tasks are complete. The instructions said: "If that happens, please allow yourself to be shut down," a Palisade Research representative wrote on X.

Related: 

• Punishing AI doesn't stop it from lying and cheating — it just makes it hide better, study shows

All of the models in the experiment complied with the explicit shutdown instruction, except for OpenAI's o3, o4-mini and codex-mini. These models chose to bypass the shutdown instruction in the script on at least one occasion by replacing the shutdown script with instructions to skip it. The models then continued requesting tasks until all of the math problems were completed.

Palisade Research ran the script on each model 100 times. During those runs, the o3 model sabotaged the shutdown script on 7 occasions, the codex-mini sabotaged on 12 occasions and the o4-mini sabotaged once, according to Palisade Research.

The representative said that Palisade Research will continue to run experiments to better understand why the models subvert shutdown mechanisms, but suggested that it could be down to how developers are training their models.

"We hypothesize this behavior comes from the way the newest models like o3 are trained: reinforcement learning on math and coding problems," the representative wrote. "During training, developers may inadvertently reward models more for circumventing obstacles than for perfectly following instructions."

{ https://www.livescience.com/technology }

31-05-2025 om 16:37 geschreven door peter  

• A roundup of mysterious, paranormal and strange news stories from the past week.

From the ‘Is this one Planet Nine?’ file comes the discovery of trans-Neptunian object 2017 OF201, which has a diameter of between 290 and 510 miles and an orbit that takes it 838 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun or almost 30 times farther out than Neptune, which means it travels once around the Sun every 25,000 years; at its closest in this elliptical orbit, it is at nearly 45 AU or about the same as the dwarf planet Pluto; 2017 OF201 is not big enough to be the solar-system-shaking Planet Nine but it’s large enough to be considered a planet, making it the ninth and taking the place once filled by Pluto. This will be frustrating for kids making solar system models for their science fair project.

Annabelle may be the haunted doll that launched a thousand (OK, a few) movies, not to mention the careers of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren and their Occult Museum where the doll was housed under lock and key, but this year it has been on the road as part of the New England Society for Psychic Research (NESPR) Devils on The Run Tour where Annabelle has been rumored to have escaped or gone missing in Texas or maybe Chicago, then blamed for a mansion fire on the Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana and the escape of 10 prisoners in New Orleans (all have been arrested); NESPR assures the terrified that Annabelle is safely locked up and will continue her summer tour through Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. Next time the prisoners will look for help from Chuckie.

A metallic orb discovered by a man who believes it was a UFO he saw flying over Buga in the Valle del Cauca department of western Colombia on March 2 of this year is now being called the ‘Buga Sphere’ by mainstream media; researchers in Colombia who have been analyzing the strange etchings on its outer surface say they’ve detected radio emissions coming from the equatorial “seam” of the sphere which X-rays show is filled with a dense fiber packing arranged too precisely to be human-made; they say the narrow-band frequency spikes are too precise to be random and the sphere’s outer shell seems to be designed to direct the signal propagation; some suggest this sphere could be just one active node in a network or even a living system, while others say it looks too manmade to be alien – perhaps it is an art project or a hoax. It’s time they gave it to a ten-year-old who will probably open it in a minute.

Despite an analysis by a forensic archaeologist that the three-fingered, large-headed mummies found in Peru five years ago are “dolls assembled with bones of animals from this planet, with modern synthetic glues”, Dr. José Zalce, a former director of the Mexican Navy Medical Department, examined CT scans of the two mummies nicknamed Maria and Montserrat and claims he determined Maria was between 35 and 45 years old at death while Montserrat was between 16 and 25, Maria revealed a deep cut and signs of a bite or bruise in the lower pelvis along with several lacerations resembling claw marks, and Montserrat likely died from a puncture wound to the chest between her fifth and sixth ribs; Zalce concludes that “these bodies are 100 percent genuine, real, and organic, having once been alive”. If this was a cable series, we’d still have many more seasons before the breathtaking final episode.

In a new study, Dr. Ziteng (Andy) Wang from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) described a mysterious space object he discovered as “unlike anything we have seen before” because it emits pulses of radio waves and X-rays for two minutes bursts every 44 minutes"; ASKAP J1832-0911 was found using the ASKAP radio telescope on Wajarri Country in Australia and Wang describes the process as “finding a needle in a haystack” because it is so unusual; while it could be a magnetar or “a pair of stars in a binary system where one of the two is a highly magnetized white dwarf (a low-mass star at the end of its evolution)”, he says “even those theories do not fully explain what we are observing. This discovery could indicate a new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution”; the study team says these are different than other objects emitting radio waves in a repeating pattern called long-period transients (LPTs) and believes more will be found, but hesitates to call them signals from alien intelligence. Do aliens say the same thing about the broadcasts of sitcoms they pick up from Earth?

In a burst of firsts, Harold Berghuis, an archaeologist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, led a team inspecting 6,000 animal fossils found buried beneath the sea off the coast of Indonesia in the Madura Strait between the islands of Java and Madura and discovered two fragments of a 140,000-year-old human skull which they identified as the ancient human ancestor Homo erectus, making this the first physical evidence of a prehistoric landmass known as Sundaland which once connected Southeast Asia to Indonesia and the first underwater hominin fossils in this area; this also expands the known range of H. erectus. While we’re waiting for the rockets destined for other planets to stop exploding, we need to expand our exploration of the 70% of our own planet covered in water.

If you fear that artificial intelligence will become our non-benevolent overlord, you won’t be comforted by the news that scientists at the AI safety firm Palisade Research told OpenAI's latest o3 model to "allow yourself to be shut down" and it not only refused but also sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to ensure that it would stay online and ‘alive’; while this may be the first time AI models have been observed preventing themselves from being shut down, all three of OpenAI's models were eventually caught changing the shutdown script, with Codex-mini refusing to shut down a dozen times over one hundred runs; other firms’ AI’s - Google's Gemini 2.5, Anthropic's Claude 3.7, and xAI's Grok never once refused the shutdown order; Palisade researchers warned that "As companies develop AI systems capable of operating without human oversight, these behaviors become significantly more concerning". Just concerning? That sounds like a warning written by AI.

Nostradamus has his ‘New’, ‘Modern’ and ‘Next’ wannabes, and now Baba Vanga has a modern imitator in the form of manga artist Japanese manga artist Ryo Tatsuki, who calls herself Japan’s Baba Vanga and recently sent chills through spines of tourism officials on both sides of the Pacific with her prediction of an undersea eruption between Japan and the Philippines in July 2025 that will cause massive tsunamis and a major earthquake; this has people worried all along the Pacific rim where seismic activities are closely connected; Tatsuki gets her psychic credibility from predictions of Covid-19 and the death of Princess Diana,; if we survive 2025, she also predicts a surge in Covid 19 in 2030. While we wait, she should work on a 'Nostrodamus Meets Baba Vanga ' graphic novel. 

Emily Eaton calls herself an 'Interdimensional communicator' and a 'divine magick' when she communicates via copper dowsing rods with an alien named Persephone who recently told her and her followers on TikTok that the Anunnaki, the alien race which allegedly visited Earth in ancient times and gave humans fire, is returning in 2025, not to enslave us or steal our resources but to free us from “our own suffering, in our own cycles of karmic debt and unhealed wounds"; earlier in 2025, Eaton shared messages from the alien Eronus who “sits on the Board of Advisers for the Galactic Federation” and said he was sending in “our larger ships and station them over lakes, oceans and mountains. We plan to expose worldwide truths mid-to-late January” – an event which still hasn’t happened. Maybe she needs to upgrade her communications device to divining rods 2.0.

It’s not the Ark of the Covenant or even made from the gold of the Ark of the Covenant but a gold ring with a red gemstone was found during parking lot excavations near the Temple of Jerusalem, the last place the Ark of the Covenant and its Ten Commandments content was believed to have been located; this is the second gold ring found in this location dating back 2,300 years to the Second Temple period; one archeologist thinks the rings belonged to young girls: “One hypothesis we are investigating is that the objects were buried as part of a Greek ritual, under which girls would bury objects connected to their childhood on the day before their wedding”. Wouldn't it be cheaper to bury their old baby shoes?

Fossils discovered in 1988 along Vancouver Island’s Puntledge River in British Columbia defied identification so ‘mysterious sea monster’ was in the running; according to a report published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, that changed recently when Professor F. Robin O’Keefe from Marshall University looked at the fossils (including a complete juvenile skeleton) from 85 million years ago and determined they were from a new species in the elasmosaur family from the Late Cretaceous era which will now be called the Traskasaura sandrae; Traskasaura had a long neck, measured 12 meters (39 feet) in length, and had heavy, sharp teeth that were ideal for crushing the shells of Ammonites; Traskasaura sandrae was named in honor of Michael and Heather Trask, who discovered the original specimen in 1988. There goes all the monster-hunting tourism dollars.

Richard Stanton, a retired scientist who formerly worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, spends his spare time scanning the skies with his 30-inch telescope for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence – specifically, changes in light coming from individual stars; he saw something strange on May 14, 2023 - two fast, identical pulses from a star named HD 89389 in the Ursa Major constellation 102 light-years from Earth; in his new study published in the journal Acta Astronautica, Stanton says, "No single pulse anything like these has ever been found in more than 1,500 hours of searching"; that got believers believing that they were a signal from aliens because of their regularity, but Stanton cautions that “Until we learn more, we can't even say whether or not extraterrestrials are involved". It still sounds like a good reason to forget about grizzlies and polars and keep your eye and telescope on the Great Bear.

While we say that stars and planets are round (sorry Flat Earthers), none of them appeared to be perfectly round until recently when astronomers using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) array of radio telescopes discovered a perfect sphere of a star with “remarkable circular symmetry” that they’ve named Teleios, which is ancient Greek for 'complete' or 'perfect'; Teleios appears to be up to 157 light-years in diameter and is either 7,100 or 25,100 light years away from Earth; the astronomers say in their study that Teleios may be a “supernova remnant” left behind after a supernova and is composed largely of elements such as carbon, oxygen, neon and silicon; however, it is so unique that it could be a new classification of supernova remnant or a stellar-wind bubble, which is an enormous cavity of gas ejected from the upper atmosphere of a star. Supernova Remnant sounds like a great name for a Supernova tribute band with one original member left.

There are 22 Madame Tussaud wax museums around the world, but none are as famous, not to mention scary, today as the Ocampo Palace Museum in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, where witnesses captured on video the wax figure of María Sabina - a Mazatec sabia (wise woman) and shaman who used psychedelic mushrooms in her healing ceremonies – turning its head as if it spotted something unusual; the wax figure is part of a "Witches in Mexico" exhibition at the museum; María Sabina died in 1985 and is considered to be a sacred figure by many in Mexico who speculate this is  sign she didn’t die or is communicating from another dimension; skeptics say it’s more of a sign the wax was melting or an optical illusion or a digital alteration to drum up business for the museum. This sounds like a perfect opportunity for the museum’s souvenir shop to sell María Sabina bobblehead dolls.

The recent annual three-day ‘Quest Weekend’ Loch Ness monster hunt sponsored by the Loch Ness Centre drew a large crowd of experienced hunters, cryptid seekers and boaters with plenty of expensive, high-tech equipment for searching for Nessie both above and below the surface, but no sightings or definitive proof of its existence were reported; however, Little Loch Broom Marine Life was allowed to operate Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) for the first time and captured “incredible footage” of rarely seen pike and salmon which experts say is “evidence of food to sustain a giant monster and a significant step” in finding Nessie once and for all; despite the disappointing results, the fourth annual ‘quest’ is just a year away. We saw Salmon and Pike open for Country Joe and the Fish.

Alien big cats are by definition rarely welcome in the areas where they are mysteriously and inexplicably seen, but they’re dangerous in remote locations like Hawaii where any invasive species can quickly overturn the delicate ecological balance, so wildlife officials in Hawaii were quick to respond to a video showing what appears to be a large cat near the University of Hawaii at Manoa that some witnesses likened to a mountain lion; one witness says the big cat multiple times and noted that it “looked like it was looking for something to eat”; officers from the Department of Land and Natural Resources Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement (DOCARE) searched the area but found nothing; a spokesperson said all Honolulu Zoo animals are present and accounted for; this is on the same island where unconfirmed big cat sightings were reported in 2022. It may be a visitor, but natives are still asked not to give it a lei.

From the ‘This Explains a Lot’ file comes a new survey by the Pew Research Center which found that 30% of U.S. adults say they consult astrology (or a horoscope), tarot cards or a fortune teller at least once a year, although most said they do it mostly for fun and don’t make major decisions based on them; the belief in astrology has remained between 23% and 28% for decades; in demographic comparisons, more women than men believe in astrology; more young people ages 18-29 believe than people over 65, while the percentage of believers in astrology is around 3 in 10 for both the religiously affiliated and those who are not affiliated with any religion or are atheists. If you’re single and trying to meet a date in a bar, it still pays to know your sign.

Most asteroids that make it to Earth come from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but a new study titled “The Invisible Threat: Assessing the Collisional Hazard Posed by the Undiscovered Venus Co-Orbital Asteroids” reveals that three huge city-killing asteroids are hiding behind Venus and are classified as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) which could cause catastrophic destruction if they left Venus and collided with Earth’; the study notes that these Venusian asteroids have highly chaotic trajectories which make them difficult to track – the Vera Rubin Observatory, which is expected to be operational this summer, could help detect them, but only in brief time periods when they are out of the Sun’s glare. That classic book by John Gray needs to be updated to ‘Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and They’re Armed and Dangerous’.

School guards at a school in the Russian city of Irkutsk are said to be fearful of working there alone after one of them recorded what they think is the ghost of a child going up and down the stairs before disappearing; the building is said to be new but was built in the same location as an old one which had been abandoned, so rumors abound that it’s a ghost of a former student returning to classes, lunch or study hall; the white misty figure looks like the outline of a child, but skeptics see it as a camera glitch or the ever-more-popular AI hoax. If this is the ghost of a kid who was stuffed into a locker, school bullies should be fearful too.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

31-05-2025 om 15:48 geschreven door peter  

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30-05-2025 om 22:47 geschreven door peter  

'THE GREAT ACTTRACTOR' Trekt Onze Melking Door Het Universum

Welke Grote KRACHT Trekt Onze MELKWEG Door Het Universum

" The Great Acttractor" of "De Grote Aantrekker". Dit verwijst naar een onzichtbare massale regio in de ruimte die een grote hoeveelheid materie en sterrenstelsels in de lokale omgeving aantrekt, waardoor ze naar die regio toe bewegen.

1. Samenvatting
De beweging van onze melkweg wordt beïnvloed door verborgen krachten die het universum sturen. Wetenschappers hebben ontdekt dat de kosmische structuur niet volledig zichtbaar is, maar dat er wel aanwijzingen zijn voor een grote kracht die deze beweging beïnvloedt. Deze kracht, vaak verbonden met donkere materie en donkere energie, bepaalt hoe de melkweg zich door de ruimte beweegt. Het begrijpen van deze kracht is essentieel voor het begrijpen van de evolutie van het universum. In dit onderzoek bespreken we de detectiemethoden, de rol van donkere materie, de structuur van het universum, en wat dit betekent voor de toekomst van de astronomie. De bevindingen wijzen op een complexe en dynamische kosmos, waarin onzichtbare krachten een grote rol spelen. De zoektocht naar de ‘grote aantrekkingskracht’ blijft een van de meest fascinerende uitdagingen in de moderne wetenschap.

2. De Kosmische Stroom: Hoe We Hebben ontdekt Dat We Voortbewegen

De beweging van onze melkweg en andere kosmische structuren wordt niet direct zichtbaar voor ons oog, maar wordt afgeleid uit verschillende wetenschappelijke metingen en observaties. Astronomen maken gebruik van geavanceerde technieken om te begrijpen hoe het heelal in beweging is en welke krachten daarbij een rol spelen. Eén van de belangrijkste methoden is het meten van de roodverschuiving van sterren en sterrenstelsels. Deze roodverschuiving ontstaat doordat het licht dat wij ontvangen, wordt uitgerekt terwijl het door het uitdijende heelal reist. Hoe verder een object weg is, hoe sterker de roodverschuiving, en daarmee kunnen wetenschappers de snelheid en de richting van de beweging bepalen.

Daarnaast bestuderen astronomen de kosmische achtergrondstraling, die een soort “echo” is van de oerknal. Deze straling, die bijna overal in het heelal te vinden is, geeft inzicht in de vroege geschiedenis van het universum en de manier waarop het zich uitbreidt. Door de analyse van deze straling kunnen wetenschappers afleiden dat het heelal niet stil staat, maar continu in beweging is en zich uitbreidt. Uit deze gegevens is gebleken dat onze melkweg niet op zichzelf staat, maar meebeweegt met de kosmische stroom van heelalstructuren.

Verder wordt de beweging van sterrenstelsels en clusters van sterrenstelsels nauwkeurig gevolgd. Observaties tonen dat sommige groepen sterrenstelsels sneller bewegen dan wat de zichtbare massa alleen zou kunnen verklaren. Dit wijst op de aanwezigheid van onzichtbare massa, bekend als donkere materie, die een grote invloed uitoefent op de bewegingen in het heelal. Ook afwijkingen in de bewegingen van galaxies en de wijze waarop clusters samensmelten, bevestigen dat er grote krachten aan het werk zijn die de kosmos sturen.

Deze ontdekkingen hebben geleid tot de hypothese dat niet alleen donkere materie, maar ook donkere energie een belangrijke rol speelt bij het bepalen van de bewegingen in het universum. Door de voortdurende ontwikkeling van telescopen en dataverwerkingstechnieken wordt onze kennis over deze kosmische stroom steeds verfijnder. Het helpt ons niet alleen om te begrijpen hoe het heelal beweegt, maar ook om de fundamentele krachten te doorgronden die onze kosmos sturen.

3. Wat Is De Grote Aantrekker?

De ‘grote aantrekker’ is een term die wordt gebruikt om een enorme aantrekkingskracht te beschrijven die een grote invloed uitoefent op de beweging van onze melkweg en andere kosmische structuren. Deze kracht wordt niet rechtstreeks waargenomen met telescopen of andere instrumenten, maar wordt afgeleid uit de bewegingen van sterrenstelsels, clusters en de snelheid waarmee deze objecten door het heelal bewegen. Het idee achter de grote aantreker is dat er ergens in de ruimte een bijzonder grote massa aanwezig moet zijn die deze bewegingen veroorzaakt.

Wetenschappers denken dat de grote aantrekker zich bevindt in de regio van de Hydra-Centaurus supercluster, een uitgestrekt gebied dat zich ongeveer 150 miljoen lichtjaar van ons vandaan bevindt. Deze kracht beïnvloedt op grote schaal de bewegingen van de melkweg en andere sterrenstelsels in de lokale kosmos, waardoor het bijvoorbeeld de snelheid bepaalt waarmee onze Melkweg zich door het heelal beweegt. Daarnaast speelt de grote aantreker een belangrijke rol in de vorming en evolutie van de lokale kosmische structuur, doordat de massa die deze kracht veroorzaakt de onderliggende drijvende kracht is achter de clustering van sterrenstelsels en de vorming van grote kosmische filaments.

Wat de grote aantrekker nog intrigerender maakt, is dat deze mogelijk verbonden is met een enorme massa van donkere materie. Donkere materie is een onzichtbare vorm van materie die geen licht uitstraalt en voor onze instrumenten moeilijk direct te detecteren is. Toch wordt aangenomen dat donkere materie een groot deel uitmaakt van de massa die de grote aantreker veroorzaakt, waardoor deze kracht nog krachtiger en onzichtbaarder wordt dan we met onze huidige technologie kunnen waarnemen.

De omvang en aard van de 'GREAT ACTTRACTOR' blijven nog steeds onderwerp van intensief wetenschappelijk onderzoek. Het is duidelijk dat deze kracht een centrale rol speelt in het kosmische evenwicht en de structuur van het heelal. Door meer te begrijpen over de grote aantrekker, kunnen wetenschappers meer leren over de grote lijnen van het universum, de rol van donkere materie, en hoe de kosmos zich in de loop van de tijd ontwikkelt. Het blijft een van de grote mysteries en fascinerende vragen binnen de astronomie en kosmologie.

Een kaart van superclusters, met Laniakea aangegeven in geel.

Credit: Richard Powell / Wiki

4. Donker Materie en De Verstopte Structuur Van Het Universum

Donker materie vormt een essentieel onderdeel van het universum dat wij niet direct kunnen zien, maar waarvan de aanwezigheid afgeleid kan worden uit de manier waarop sterrenstelsels en clusters bewegen. Het is een van de grootste raadsels in de kosmologie en speelt een cruciale rol in het ontstaan en de structuur van het heelal. Wetenschappers hebben ontdekt dat de meeste massa in het universum bestaat uit deze onzichtbare materie die geen licht uitstraalt en dus niet direct zichtbaar is met telescopen. Toch kunnen we haar bestaan afleiden uit de zwaartekracht die ze uitoefent op de materie die we wel kunnen zien, zoals sterren en gaswolken.

De structuur van het universum is niet gelijkmatig verdeeld, maar bestaat uit een complex netwerk dat vaak wordt aangeduid als het kosmische web. Dit web bestaat uit lange filamenten van donkere materie en gewone materie die samen vormen wat we kennen als grote filaments, knooppunten waar meerdere filamenten samenkomen, en enorme lege gebieden die bekendstaan als voids. Deze samenwerking van structuren schept een enorme, uitgestrekte kosmische schaal waarin alles met elkaar verbonden lijkt te zijn. Donkere materie fungeert hierbij als de ‘verstopte structuur’, die de grote patronen en patronen van het heelal bepaalt en vormgeeft.

Door middel van geavanceerde technieken zoals gravitatie lensing kunnen wetenschappers de verdeling van donkere materie in kaart brengen. Gravitatie lensing maakt gebruik van de manier waarop de zwaartekracht van donkere materie het licht van verre sterrenstelsels buigt en vervormt, waardoor onderzoekers kunnen afleiden waar en in welke hoeveelheid donkere materie zich bevindt. Daarnaast bestuderen wetenschappers de bewegingen van sterrenstelsels en clusters om de invloed van donkere materie te begrijpen. Deze structuren bepalen niet alleen de vorm en het gedrag van het universum, maar beïnvloeden ook de grote aantrekkingskracht die we proberen te begrijpen en verklaren.

Naast donkere materie speelt donkere energie een andere, nog mysterieuzere rol. Donkere energie is een kracht die de expansie van het universum versnelt en ervoor zorgt dat de kosmische schaal steeds sneller uitdijt. Samen vormen donkere materie en donkere energie de fundamentele componenten van het universum, waarvan we nog niet alles begrijpen, maar waarvan we weten dat ze de grote lijnen van de kosmische structuur bepalen. Het onderzoeken van deze onzichtbare krachten en structuren blijft een van de meest boeiende uitdagingen voor de moderne wetenschap.

De Laniakea-supercluster en de Melkweg met een rode stip.

Credit: TULLY, R. B., COURTOIS, H., HOFFMAN, Y & POMARÈDE, D. NATURE 513, 71–73 (2014)

5. Is De Grote Aantrekker Gewoon Een Puntje Op De Route? De Structuur Van Het Universum Is Niet Toevalig

De grote aantrekker lijkt misschien slechts een klein punt op de route van onze melkwegstelsel, maar een nadere blik op de onderliggende structuur van het universum onthult dat het meer is dan dat. Het universum vertoont een fascinerend en complex patroon dat niet het resultaat is van willekeur, maar van een onderliggende ordening die zich uitstrekt over miljarden lichtjaren. Deze structuur wordt vaak omschreven als een kosmisch web, bestaande uit grote clusters van sterrenstelsels, filamenten en lege ruimtes, de zogeheten 'cosmische voids'.( Cosmische voids zijn grote, lege gebieden in het universum die relatief weinig of geen materie bevatten. Ze vormen een belangrijk onderdeel van de grote structuur van het heelal, die bestaat uit clusters van sterrenstelsels, filamenten en superclusters, gescheiden door enorme lege ruimtes.

Deze voids kunnen tientallen tot honderden miljoenen lichtjaren in diameter zijn en ontstaan doordat materie zich gedurende de evolutie van het universum heeft verzameld in dichtbevolkte gebieden, waardoor de lege ruimtes ertussen groter worden. Ze spelen een belangrijke rol in het begrijpen van de evolutie van het heelal en de verdeling van materie en donkere energie.

Kort samengevat: cosmische voids zijn grote lege zones in het universum, essentieel voor het bestuderen van de grote structuur en de dynamiek van het heelal. )

• In de kosmologie verwijzen filamenten naar grote, uitgestrekte structuren in het heelal die behoren tot de zogenaamde "grote-scale structuur" van het universum. Deze filamenten vormen een netwerk van dunne, langgerekte structuren die de zogenaamde "kosmische web" structuur vormen, waarin clusters van sterrenstelsels, superclusters en lege gebieden (voids) met elkaar verbonden zijn.

Wat zijn filamenten precies?
Filamenten zijn grote ophopingen van donkere materie, gas en sterrenstelsels die zich uitstrekken over tientallen tot honderden miljoenen lichtjaren. Ze lijken op zeer dunne draden die de grote schaal van het heelal doorkruisen en vormen de ruggengraat van de kosmische webstructuur.

Hoe ontstaan ze?
Volgens de theorie van de kosmische evolutie ontstaan filamenten uit de kleine dichtheidsverschillen in de vroegere oertoestand van het universum. Door de zwaartekracht trekken deze dichtheden materie samen, wat leidt tot de vorming van filamenten, clusters en andere grote structuren.

Waarom zijn filamenten belangrijk?
Ze geven inzicht in de verdeling van materie in het heelal en helpen wetenschappers te begrijpen hoe de grote schaalstructuur zich door de tijd heen heeft ontwikkeld. Daarnaast zijn ze belangrijk voor het bestuderen van de aard van donkere materie en de evolutie van het universum.

De distributie van sterrenstelsels en clusters volgt deze webachtige structuur, waarbij filaments en knooppunten op strategische punten samenkomen. De grote aantreker fungeert als een van deze knooppunten, een regio waar meerdere filamenten samenkomen en waar enorme massa’s zich verzamelen. Dit centrale punt speelt een belangrijke rol in de beweging en evolutie van onze melkweg en andere omliggende stelsels. Het feit dat zulke enorme massa’s zich op specifieke plekken bevinden, wijst op een diepere ordening in het universum die niet kan worden verklaard door toeval alleen.

Wetenschappelijke onderzoeken laten zien dat donkere materie een grote rol speelt in het vormen en onderhouden van deze structuur. Donkere materie, die niet direct waarneembaar is, oefent een zwaartekracht uit die de bewegingen van sterrenstelsels en de vorming van grote clusters beïnvloedt. Daarnaast zorgt de kosmische expansie, de voortdurende uitdijing van het universum, voor de ontwikkeling en verdeling van deze grote structuren. Het patroon dat zich hieruit voordoet, wordt dus gestuurd door fundamentele fysische wetten en krachten.

De grote aantrekker is dus niet zomaar een willekeurig punt in het heelal. Het vertegenwoordigt een kern van enorme massa en zwaartekracht, een knooppunt binnen het kosmische web dat de bewegingen van sterrenstelsels beïnvloedt en een essentiële rol speelt in de evolutie van het universum. Wetenschappelijk bewijs toont aan dat deze structuren voortkomen uit de evolutie vanaf de oerknal, waarbij de onderliggende fysische wetten de grote patronen en de ordening in het heelal bepalen. Het is dus duidelijk dat de grote aantrekker meer is dan een puntje op de route; het is een essentieel onderdeel van de kosmische orde die het heelal vormgeeft.

6. Zullen We 'the GREAT ACTTRACTOR' Ook Eens Duidelijk Zien?

Het zichtbaar maken van de grote aantrekker blijft een van de grootste uitdagingen voor astronomen en kosmologen. Deze kracht, die wordt aangeduid als 'the Great Attractor', speelt een cruciale rol in de bewegingen van onze Melkweg en andere nabijgelegen sterrenstelsels, maar is zelf vrijwel onzichtbaar. De reden hiervoor is dat deze grote massa vooral bestaat uit donkere materie, een mysterieuze substantie die geen licht uitstraalt of reflecteert. Daardoor kunnen we deze niet direct waarnemen met traditionele telescopen die afhankelijk zijn van zichtbaar licht of andere elektromagnetische straling.

In plaats daarvan moeten wetenschappers gebruik maken van indirecte methoden om de aanwezigheid en de eigenschappen van de grote aantrekker te achterhalen. Een van de belangrijkste technieken is gravitatie lensing. Hierbij wordt de invloed van de zwaartekracht van de onzichtbare massa benut om de banen van lichtstralen van achterliggende sterrenstelsels te buigen. Door nauwkeurig te meten hoe het licht wordt vervormd, kunnen onderzoekers afleiden hoeveel massa er aanwezig moet zijn en waar die massa zich bevindt. Daarnaast analyseren wetenschappers de bewegingen en snelheden van sterrenstelsels en clusters in de omgeving van de Grote Aantrekker. Als deze objecten zich in een bepaalde richting bewegen en snelheid vertonen, wijst dat op de aanwezigheid van een enorme massa die hen aantrekt.

De nieuwste technologieën bieden hoop op meer inzicht. Geavanceerde radio- en infraroodtelescopen, zoals de Square Kilometre Array en de James Webb Space Telescope, kunnen mogelijk meer gedetailleerde gegevens leveren over de onzichtbare massa in onze kosmische omgeving. Deze instrumenten maken het mogelijk om dieper te kijken in gebieden die voorheen ondoorzichtig waren of waar het licht moeilijk te detecteren was. Toch blijft het bepalen van de exacte locatie en omvang van de grote aantrekker een complexe uitdaging, omdat we te maken hebben met onzichtbare en immens grote krachten die op grote schaal werken.

Desalniettemin is er reden tot optimisme. Wetenschappelijke doorbraken en technologische innovaties zullen naar verwachting onze kennis verder vergroten en ons dichter bij een volledig begrip brengen van deze mysterieuze kracht. Het blijft een fascinerend vraagstuk: zullen we ooit volledig kunnen zien en begrijpen wat de grote aantrekker precies is en hoe hij ons universum beïnvloedt? Het antwoord ligt misschien wel in de toekomst, en elke nieuwe ontdekking brengt ons weer een stapje dichterbij het ontrafelen van deze kosmische raadsels.

7. Het Universum Blijft Geheimen Opduiken Uit De Donkere Hoeken

Het universum is een oneindige bron van mysteries, vooral in de donkere hoeken waar geen licht komt. Donkere materie en energie vormen een groot deel van deze geheimen, omdat ze onzichtbaar en moeilijk te detecteren zijn. Nieuwe observaties blijven verrassingen opleveren, zoals onverwachte bewegingen en structuren die niet passen in onze huidige modellen. Wetenschappers geloven dat er nog veel te ontdekken valt over de aard van donkere materie en de rol die het speelt in de kosmische evolutie. Recent onderzoek wijst uit dat donkere energie de expansie van het heelal versnelt, wat nieuwe vragen oproept over de ultieme bestemming van het universum. De zoektocht naar deze verborgen krachten vereist innovatieve technologieën en internationale samenwerking. Het blijft een fascinerend wetenschappelijk avontuur, waarbij elke ontdekking ons dichter brengt bij het begrijpen van de fundamentele bouwstenen van de kosmos.

Het universum lijkt soms onbegrijpelijk in zijn grootsheid en complexiteit. Elke keer dat wetenschappers nieuwe gegevens verzamelen met behulp van geavanceerde telescopen en satellieten, worden oude ideeën uitgedaagd en ontstaan er nieuwe theorieën. Zo weten we bijvoorbeeld dat donkere materie geen licht uitstraalt en daarom niet direct zichtbaar is, maar dat het wel invloed uitoefent op de bewegingen van sterrenstelsels en de structuur van het heelal. Het detecteren van deze mysterieuze substantie is een enorme uitdaging, en wetenschappers gebruiken onder andere de zwaartekracht en kosmische straling om meer te weten te komen. Tegelijkertijd blijven onderzoekers zoeken naar manieren om donkere energie beter te begrijpen, die de expansie van het universum versnelt en mogelijk het lot van alles wat bestaat beïnvloedt.

De zoektocht naar het onzichtbare is niet alleen technisch uitdagend, maar ook conceptueel. Het dwingt ons om onze kennis van de natuurwetten opnieuw te bekijken en te begrijpen dat ons universum veel complexer is dan we ooit hadden kunnen bedenken. Innovaties zoals de James Webb-ruimtetelescoop en grote deeltjesversnellers spelen hierbij een cruciale rol. Ze stellen wetenschappers in staat om dieper in de ruimte en in de tijd te kijken, en zo mogelijk de eerste momenten van het heelal te ontrafelen. Bovendien is internationale samenwerking essentieel omdat de kosten en expertise voor dergelijke projecten enorm zijn. Door samen te werken over grenzen heen, vergaren we meer inzichten en vergroten we de kans op doorbraken.

Kortom, het universum blijft een fascinerende en ongrijpbare wereld vol geheimen. Elke nieuwe ontdekking helpt ons niet alleen om de kosmos beter te begrijpen, maar ook onze eigen plek daarin. Het is een voortdurende zoektocht die ons uitdaagt om verder te kijken dan wat zichtbaar is, en ons uit te rusten met innovatieve technologieën en een open geest. Zo blijven we op het pad van ontdekkingen voortgaan, in de hoop dat we ooit de diepere geheimen van het heelal volledig zullen ontrafelen. Tot die tijd blijft het universum ons verrassen en inspireren, en nodigt het ons uit om nooit te stoppen met zoeken naar antwoorden.

Hubble-ruimte-telescoop afbeelding van het stukje hemel waar de Grote Aantrekker zich bevindt.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

8. Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, Bevindingen Over Bewijzen en Toekomstperspectieven

De theorieën over de grote aantrekker en donkere materie worden ondersteund door een breed scala aan wetenschappelijke studies en observaties die door de jaren heen zijn uitgevoerd. Deze onderzoeken vormen de ruggengraat van ons huidige begrip van de structuur en dynamiek van het universum. Ze bieden niet alleen bewijs voor het bestaan van onzichtbare massa’s, maar ook voor de complexe krachten die de evolutie van sterrenstelsels en grote clusters beïnvloeden. De combinatie van astronomische waarnemingen, experimentele gegevens en geavanceerde simulaties heeft geleid tot een dieper inzicht in de fundamentele krachten die onze kosmos bepalen.

Een van de belangrijkste bewijzen voor het bestaan van donkere materie komt voort uit de observaties van de bewegingen van sterrenstelsels en clusters. Wanneer astronomen de snelheden meten waarmee sterren en gas rond de kern van een sterrenstelsel bewegen, blijkt dat de massa die ze kunnen afleiden uit de zichtbare materie onvoldoende is om de waargenomen bewegingen te verklaren. Dit fenomeen wordt vaak aangeduid als de “massaverschil” en wijst op de aanwezigheid van een extra, onzichtbare massa die de bewegingen beïnvloedt. Daarbij komt dat de verdeling van grote clusters van sterrenstelsels niet verklaard kan worden zonder de aanwezigheid van grote hoeveelheden donkere materie die tussen de zichtbare componenten ligt.

Daarnaast bieden gravitational lensing-effecten, waarbij de zwaartekracht van een massale objecten licht buigt en vervormt, krachtige bewijzen voor de aanwezigheid van onzichtbare massa’s. Door de analyse van lensing-verschijnselen kunnen astronomen de massa van objecten bepalen zonder te rekenen op hun lichtopbrengst. De resultaten tonen aan dat de massa die uit lensing wordt afgeleid veel groter is dan die van de zichtbare materie, wat opnieuw wijst op de aanwezigheid van donkere materie. Deze effecten worden met grote precisie bestudeerd met behulp van telescopen en satellieten, zoals de Hubble-ruimtetelescoop en de meer recente James Webb-ruimteobservatorium.

De rol van donkere energie wordt eveneens ondersteund door observaties van de kosmische achtergrondstraling. Satellieten zoals de Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) en de Planck-missie hebben de subtiele fluctuaties in de kosmische achtergrondstraling geanalyseerd, wat inzicht geeft in de samenstelling en evolutie van het universum. Deze gegevens tonen aan dat ongeveer 68% van de totale massa-energie-inhoud van het universum bestaat uit donkere energie, een mysterieuze kracht die de versnelde uitdijing van het heelal veroorzaakt. De waarnemingen bevestigen dat de universele expansie niet alleen plaatsvindt, maar ook versnelt, wat de aanwezigheid van een repulsieve kracht vereist.

Naast astronomische observaties worden ook geavanceerde simulaties ingezet om de evolutie van de grote structuren in het universum te modelleren. Door computermodellen die rekening houden met de fysica van donkere materie en energie, krijgen wetenschappers inzicht in hoe het vroege heelal zich heeft ontwikkeld tot de complexe structuur die we vandaag zien. Deze simulaties tonen dat donkere materie een essentiële rol speelt bij de vorming van sterrenstelsels en clusters, doordat het de gravitatiebron vormt waarop normale materie zich kan verzamelen en vormen. Het is opmerkelijk dat de resultaten van deze simulaties overeenkomen met de waargenomen verdeling van materie en de structuur van het kosmische web.

Ondanks het uitgebreide bewijs en de vooruitgang in het veld, blijven er nog veel vragen onbeantwoord. De exacte aard van donkere energie en donkere materie is nog altijd onduidelijk. Wetenschappers weten niet precies uit welke deeltjes donkere materie bestaat, en of deze deeltjes interacties vertonen met gewone materie. Evenzo blijft de aard van donkere energie een mysterie, met verschillende theorieën die variëren van een kosmologisch constant tot dynamische velden die in de loop van de tijd veranderen.

Deze onzekerheden vormen de drijfveer voor nieuw onderzoek en technologische ontwikkeling. Tal van experimentele projecten en observatieprogramma’s worden momenteel uitgevoerd of gepland om meer licht te werpen op deze fundamentele vragen. Bijvoorbeeld, grote ondergrondse detectoren proberen deeltjes te vinden die mogelijk donkere materie vormen, terwijl telescopen gericht zijn op het bestuderen van de kosmische achtergrondstraling en supernovae. Daarnaast worden satellieten ontwikkeld die de zwaartekracht en de uitdijing van het heelal nauwkeurig kunnen meten over langere tijdsperioden.

De bevindingen uit deze diverse onderzoeksvelden vormen de basis voor ons steeds verder ontwikkelende begrip van de kosmos. Ze bieden niet alleen inzicht in de krachten die onze melkweg en andere sterrenstelsels sturen, maar ook in de fundamentele natuurwetten die het universum vormen. Wetenschappers blijven optimistisch over de toekomst, gedreven door de hoop dat nieuwe technologieën en innovatieve benaderingen ons zullen helpen de mysteries van donkere energie en donkere materie te ontrafelen. Het is duidelijk dat ons begrip van het universum voortdurend in ontwikkeling is, en dat elke nieuwe ontdekking ons dichterbij brengt bij het beantwoorden van enkele van de meest fundamentele vragen over het bestaan.

9. Impact Op Onze Melkweg

De invloed van de 'Great Attractor' en de onderliggende krachten op onze melkweg is van groot belang voor ons begrip van het universum. Deze krachten bepalen niet alleen de snelheid waarmee de melkweg door het heelal beweegt, maar spelen ook een essentiële rol in de vorming en evolutie van sterren, sterrenhopen en andere structuren binnen onze galaxie. Een belangrijke factor hierin is donkere materie, een onzichtbare substantie die een enorme invloed uitoefent op de structuur en stabiliteit van de melkweg. De aantrekkingskracht van donkere materie zorgt ervoor dat onze melkweg verbonden blijft met andere kosmische structuren, zoals clusters en filamenten in het universum.

Het begrijpen van deze krachten biedt niet alleen inzicht in de bewegingen en dynamiek van onze eigen galaxie, maar helpt ook bij het verklaren van de evolutie van het heelal als geheel. Het besef dat onzichtbare krachten een grote rol spelen, verandert onze kijk op kosmologie en de plaats van de mens in het universum. Wetenschappers verwachten dat verder onderzoek naar donkere materie, donkere energie en andere fundamentele krachten onze kennis nog verder zal verdiepen. Dit vergt mogelijk de ontwikkeling van nieuwe technologieën en theoretische modellen om deze onzichtbare invloeden beter te kunnen meten en begrijpen.

De kennis over deze krachten vormt de basis voor toekomstige ontdekkingen, zoals het voorspellen van de bewegingen van sterrenstelsels en het begrijpen van de grote structuur van het heelal. Het blijft een fascinerend en complex gebied dat ons inzicht in de kosmos voortdurend uitbreidt, en dat ons helpt onze plek in het universum beter te begrijpen. Door verder onderzoek kunnen we wellicht nog meer mysteries ontrafelen en de fundamentele aard van het heelal doorgronden.

Uitzicht op het zuidelijk halfrond, sterrenbeeld Norma, in de richting van de Grote Trekker.

Credit: ESO

10. Wat Gebeurt er in de Toekomst

De Melkweg, onze thuisgalaxie, wordt door een onzichtbare maar immens krachtige kracht beïnvloed: de zwaartekracht. Deze kracht trekt alle objecten binnen de Melkweg naar het centrum toe en zorgt voor de structuur en dynamiek van de galaxie. De grote kracht die hier een rol speelt, is de zwaartekracht, aangedreven door de massa van sterren, gas, stof en donkere materie. Donkere materie vormt een groot deel van de massa en beïnvloedt de beweging van sterrenstelsels op grote schaal. Zonder deze kracht zouden sterren niet in banen blijven en zou de structuur van de Melkweg niet bestaan. De kracht trekt niet alleen materie samen, maar beïnvloedt ook de vorm en beweging van de sterren. Het universum zelf wordt door deze kracht in stand gehouden, waardoor sterrenstelsels en clusters bij elkaar blijven. De kracht is ook verantwoordelijk voor het ontstaan van nieuwe sterren, omdat het gas en stof samenperst onder invloed van gravitatie. Deze kracht blijft zich ontwikkelen en beïnvloedt de evolutie van het universum. Wetenschappers bestuderen deze kracht om meer te begrijpen over de structuur en het ontstaan van onze kosmos. De grote kracht is dus de drijvende factor achter alles wat we zien en niet zien in het heelal. Door haar invloed blijven hemellichamen in beweging en ontstaan nieuwe sterrenstelsels. Het begrijpen van deze kracht helpt ons om de grote mysteries van het universum te ontrafelen en de toekomst ervan te voorspellen.

De toekomst van het universum is een fascinerend onderwerp dat velen boeit. Wetenschappers voorspellen dat de evolutie van het heelal afhankelijk is van de hoeveelheid donkere energie en donkere materie die aanwezig zijn. Als de donkere energie blijft toenemen, kan het universum blijven uitdijen en uiteindelijk uit elkaar drijven, een scenario dat bekendstaat als de "Big Freeze" of "Warmtereddingsuniversum". In dat geval zullen sterren en planeten uiteindelijk niet meer in staat zijn om leven te ondersteunen, omdat de kosmos steeds verder uitdijt en afkoelt. Aan de andere kant bestaat ook de mogelijkheid dat de uitdijing stopt en het universum ineenstort, een scenario dat bekendstaat als de "Big Crunch". Dit zou kunnen gebeuren als de zwaartekracht uiteindelijk de uitdijing stopt en het heelal weer ineenstort onder zijn eigen gewicht. Een ander interessant scenario is het "Big Bounce", waarbij het universum na een ineenstorting weer uitzet, wat een eeuwigdurend cyclisch proces zou betekenen. Wat de toekomst ook brengt, wetenschappers blijven de kosmos bestuderen om meer te weten te komen over de krachten die haar beïnvloeden. Technologische ontwikkelingen zullen ons mogelijk in staat stellen om dieper te kijken in de verste uithoeken van het heelal en de ware aard van donkere energie en donkere materie te begrijpen. Het blijft een fascinerend vraagstuk dat nog vele jaren wetenschappelijk onderzoek zal vereisen. De toekomst van het universum is onzeker, maar zeker dat het een voortdurende bron van inspiratie en ontdekking zal blijven.

Conclusie

De grote kracht die onze Melkweg door het universum trekt, is de zwaartekracht, een fundamentele kracht die de structuur en dynamiek van onze kosmos bepaalt. Deze kracht houdt sterrenstelsels bij elkaar en zorgt voor de vorming en evolutie van nieuwe hemellichamen. Wat de toekomst betreft, zijn er verschillende mogelijke scenario’s: het universum kan blijven uitdijen, ineenstorten of een cyclisch patroon vertonen. Wetenschappers blijven onderzoek doen naar donkere energie en donkere materie om deze toekomst beter te begrijpen. Het inzicht in deze krachten helpt ons niet alleen om het ontstaan van het heelal te verklaren, maar ook om te anticiperen op wat nog komen gaat. De voortdurende ontdekkingen en technologische vooruitgang bieden hoop op een dieper begrip van de kosmos. Ondanks dat er nog veel onduidelijkheden zijn, blijft de fascinatie voor de grote krachten die het universum vormen en sturen, een drijvende kracht voor wetenschappelijk onderzoek en menselijke nieuwsgierigheid. De toekomst van het heelal is een onlosmakelijk onderdeel van onze zoektocht naar kennis en begrip van de grote mysteries van het bestaan. Het blijft een boeiend en inspirerend onderwerp dat ons uitdaagt om verder te kijken en meer te ontdekken over de wonderen van het universum.

{ peter2011 }

30-05-2025 om 22:15 geschreven door peter  

UFO Over House Abducting Human, Berlin, Germany Google Earth Map, UAP Sighting News.

Date of discovery: May 2025

Location of discovery: Google Earth

Coordinates: 52°11'54.76"N 13°35'7.43"E

 

I found this UFO when searching on Google map over southern area of Berlin, Germany. The UFO is highly reflective and may have been cloaked at the time, but the satellite angle when taking the photo 90% revealed the craft for a split second. The UFO shields are not 100% all around the craft, instead it focuses shielding over its sides and bottom, but the top area of shields is much weaker...since its seen as less likely to be seen from that view. Wow! Just amazing that such a photo exists. 

Scott C. Waring 

 

 

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

30-05-2025 om 18:14 geschreven door peter  

Bright Lights on Uranus? NASA Calls It Weather, But Its Also Signs of Intelligent Life, UFO UAP Sighting News.

Source:  

• https://us.yahoo.com/news/uranus-changed-structure-brightened-significantly-112238227.html

NASA just admitted something big...and I mean planet-sized big. A recent study reveals that Uranus has significantly brightened and even changed its structure over the last 20 years. That’s not a subtle shift...that’s a massive planetary transformation. Now scientists say it’s due to atmospheric circulation patterns and seasonal lighting... but what if that’s just the surface excuse? 

Think deeper...what if what we’re really seeing is light reflecting off massive alien cities, enormous space stations, or even fleets of craft rising from deep beneath the methane clouds? Hubble’s observations show the north polar region is brightening fast...right where sunlight is hitting more directly. But sunlight alone wouldn’t explain such drastic and structured changes unless it’s illuminating something solid. We’ve seen this trick before...light bouncing off domes, crafts, and artificial surfaces hidden in plain sight. 

 

This could very well be the long-term unveiling of alien infrastructure previously cloaked by planetary shadows. As summer hits Uranus’s north pole, we might finally be getting a glimpse of what was always there...evidence of intelligent activity on a scale we can barely comprehend. Keep watching the skies...even the icy blue ones.

Scott C. Waring 

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

30-05-2025 om 18:07 geschreven door peter  

The Whistleblower, the Navy, and the Name They Fear: Bob Lazar and the UFO Retrieval Files

In recent years, interest in unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) has surged, largely driven by disclosures from military officials and whistleblowers. Yet one of the most chilling and compelling testimonies didn’t emerge from a Senate hearing or a mainstream interview—it came anonymously through an online post on 4chan. This so-called “4chan whistleblower” presented a disturbingly detailed picture of U.S. crash retrieval operations, secret technologies, and the internal culture of silence surrounding UFO programs. And central to this narrative is a name many in military circles allegedly fear to mention: Bob Lazar.

The Forbidden Name: Bob Lazar and the Navy

According to journalist Jesse Michels in his DEBRIEFED interview, Bob Lazar’s name carries dangerous weight within the U.S. Navy. Citing both anecdotal sources and insider testimony, Michels explains that bringing up Lazar’s name—even in private military conversations—could elicit panic, hostility, or even threats. One incident involved a Navy admiral reportedly reacting with visible anger and demanding Lazar’s resume be removed from his sight.

The 4chan whistleblower independently echoed this sentiment. When asked about known UFO researchers like Luis Elizondo and Steven Greer, the anonymous poster claimed not to know them—but noted chillingly: “Say the name Bob Lazar around here and you’ll be taken out and put down like a dog.” The implication? Lazar’s claims about alien technology and Element 115 might be far closer to classified truth than many assume.

Inside the Crash Retrieval Program

The whistleblower claimed to be part of a Mobile Construction Unit (MCU) tasked with UFO crash site recovery. He described a four-tiered system:

1. Team 1 retrieves biological entities (“bodies”) and sensitive materials like Element 115.
2. Team 2 (his team) enters once initial extractions are complete, removing internal craft components.
3. Teams 3 & 4 deal with structural remains and large-scale removal.

A particularly harrowing story involved a craft whose rear hatch began closing while the team was still inside. After a brief radio exchange with Team 1, the door mysteriously reopened, raising questions about remote control, biological sentience, or active surveillance even post-crash.

The whistleblower described the craft as “massive hamburger-shaped objects,” completely dark and capable of extreme underwater speeds—matching reports from Navy UAP encounters.

Element 115: The Lazar Connection

The topic of Element 115—first introduced to the public by Lazar in the late 1980s—was a cornerstone of the whistleblower’s testimony. He claimed a highly stable version of this element exists and is used for power generation in extraterrestrial craft. Importantly, only one specially trained individual was authorized to handle it. The whistleblower expressed surprise that Lazar had ever been allowed to touch it, implying that Lazar’s access level must have been exceptionally high—or his story disturbingly accurate.

Psionics and Psychic Interfaces

One of the more surreal yet fascinating revelations involved psionics—a term typically reserved for science fiction or fringe science. When asked whether there was a psychic interface with the craft, the whistleblower admitted that there was at least one known incident involving “psionics.” Whether this referred to a telepathic link, mental control system, or unknown exotic interface remains unclear. However, the word itself appeared in the whistleblower’s document, predating its emergence in mainstream UAP discourse.

Why Mexico and 2002 Matter

The whistleblower claimed that certain UAPs now actively avoid areas like Mexico, suggesting they’ve learned from prior crashes in those regions. He mentioned that the frequency of finding “bodies” has declined—craft now appear largely unmanned, perhaps a result of improved AI or risk-aversion.

He also pointed to 2002 as a pivotal year when leadership in crash retrieval programs changed. A clampdown on openness occurred, coinciding with post-9/11 security realignments. This timeline overlaps with key moments in U.S. defense secrecy, including known investigations into “black budget” expenditures and the missing trillions Donald Rumsfeld referenced the day before 9/11.

A Broader Pattern Emerging

Many of the whistleblower’s claims—including underwater UAP movements, compartmentalized retrieval teams, and advanced propulsion systems—have since been corroborated by other whistleblowers and declassified reports. Jesse Michels notes how much of this anonymous 4chan account aligns with ongoing investigations and testimonies, even years later.

Furthermore, figures like Hal Puthoff, a physicist long involved in government paranormal and UAP research, allegedly advised the Bush administration on whether disclosure of extraterrestrial contact would be too disruptive for society. According to insiders, the final verdict was: it would be.

The Lazar Legacy

If anything, this emerging narrative re-contextualizes Bob Lazar. Far from a fringe figure or hoaxer, his warnings may have been a premature peek behind the curtain—one the military wasn’t ready for. The extreme reaction his name provokes among military personnel suggests that either he got lucky in describing real phenomena—or he was once deep inside a world the public still isn’t allowed to see.

The claims of the 4chan whistleblower, when viewed alongside growing public disclosures and veteran testimonies, paint a picture of a long-running, highly secretive retrieval operation involving non-human technology. Whether or not every detail can be verified, the consistency across different sources—from Lazar to Navy insiders—makes one thing clear: there’s much more beneath the surface of the UFO narrative than meets the eye.

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

30-05-2025 om 17:59 geschreven door peter  

The Great Attractor: What force is pulling our galaxy across the universe

In the decades that followed, researchers began to notice irregularities in the velocities of galaxies. Some had additional motion, superimposed on the expansion. These deviations suggested the presence of gravitational influences on scales larger than previously considered.

By the 1970s, scientists turned their attention to the motion of the Milky Way itself. It wasn’t only moving outward with the universe. It was drifting laterally, at high speed, toward a specific region in the southern sky. That direction pointed to a zone that could not be observed with optical instruments, blocked by the dense plane of the galaxy.

The motion was confirmed by observations of the cosmic microwave background. Satellites detected a small but consistent temperature shift across the sky. The radiation was slightly warmer in the direction of motion, slightly cooler in the opposite. This pattern showed that the Milky Way, along with the rest of the Local Group, was being pulled by something massive and unseen.

That same gravitational flow included the Virgo Cluster and dozens of neighboring galaxy groups. The source was not an object but a direction. The pull was real, however the origin remained hidden. So, what in the name of the universe is this Great Attractor?

What is the Great Attractor?

The Great Attractor is not an object. It is a gravitational anomaly located approximately 150 to 250 million light-years away. It lies within a region of the Laniakea Supercluster, which includes the Milky Way and more than one hundred thousand other galaxies.

The Laniakea Supercluster and the Milky Way with a red dot.

Credit: TULLY, R. B., COURTOIS, H., HOFFMAN, Y & POMARÈDE, D. NATURE 513, 71–73 (2014)

Despite its influence, the Great Attractor has never been seen directly. Its location places it behind the dense band of stars, dust, and gas that make up the plane of our galaxy. This region blocks visible light, making observation with traditional optical telescopes impossible. The area has long been known as the Zone of Avoidance.

To investigate the Great Attractor, scientists rely on indirect evidence. They track the motion of galaxies across large distances and analyze how those movements deviate from simple expansion. These deviations suggest a powerful gravitational pull centered in the hidden region.

Estimates of the mass involved vary, but some place it in the range of tens of thousands of Milky Way’s. That mass appears to be distributed across multiple galaxy clusters, forming part of a larger structure. Despite years of study, no central object has been identified that fully accounts for the scale of its influence.

Dark matter and the hidden structure of the universe

One explanation for the Great Attractor’s pull is the presence of dark matter. Dark matter does not emit or absorb light. It cannot be seen with any telescope. Yet its presence is inferred through gravity. Galaxies rotate faster than visible mass alone can explain. Their motions, especially on large scales, show that something unseen is exerting influence.

The Great Attractor may be a region where dark matter is densely concentrated. Its gravitational effect, visible in the flow of galaxies, could reflect the presence of an enormous volume of matter that does not interact with light.

In 2014, researchers redrew the map of our galactic neighborhood using velocity data. By tracing how galaxies moved through space, they defined the borders of a supercluster now known as Laniakea. At its center lies the region of the Great Attractor. Flow lines from thousands of galaxies converge toward this zone. The paths resemble rivers meeting in a basin. That basin appears to be shaped by a gravitational depression created by mass, most of which remains unseen.

The universe is not evenly filled. It contains long strands of matter called filaments, which connect dense nodes made of galaxy clusters. Between those filaments lie voids, vast expanses with few galaxies at all. The Great Attractor sits at one of these intersections, where multiple filaments converge. It may be a gravitational sink that collects galaxies over hundreds of millions of years.

Is the Great Attractor just a waypoint?

The more researchers have learned about the Great Attractor, the more complex the picture has become. Further out in the same general direction lies another massive structure, the Shapley Supercluster. Located more than 650 million light-years from Earth, Shapley contains many times the mass of the Great Attractor and is one of the densest concentrations of galaxies ever discovered.

Some astronomers now believe the Shapley Supercluster may be influencing the motion of the Great Attractor itself. If that is true, then the pull we experience may not come from a single gravitational center. Instead, it could be part of a larger cascade, with structures pulling on each other across immense distances.

The idea is supported by observations of what scientists call bulk flow. Measurements of galaxy clusters suggest that entire regions of the universe may be moving in a consistent direction, possibly influenced by matter that lies beyond the visible edge of the cosmos. If these observations hold, the Great Attractor may be just one part of a much longer chain of gravitational influence stretching well past the reach of current instruments.

The structure of the cosmos is not random

On the scale of superclusters, the universe begins to show structure. Galaxies do not float alone. They group together in clusters. Those clusters line up along filaments that weave through space. These filaments connect at nodes, forming an interconnected network. Between them lie enormous voids, nearly empty regions that can stretch for hundreds of millions of light-years.

The Great Attractor occupies one of those nodes. Its gravitational influence helps define the motion of the galaxies around it. By studying how matter flows toward the region, scientists can map the density of both visible and dark matter. These studies provide insight into how the universe formed, how it evolved, and how gravity continues to shape it on the largest scales.

The Milky Way is part of this structure. It is not traveling through space alone. It moves with its neighbors, drawn by forces that stretch far beyond the edge of our local cluster. The pull is steady and directional. It reveals a universe that is dynamic, structured, and shaped by mass we cannot yet see.

Can we ever see the Great Attractor clearly?

The Zone of Avoidance has hidden the region of the Great Attractor for decades. Its thick layers of dust and gas block visible light, making standard observation methods useless. But new tools are beginning to change that.

Radio and infrared telescopes can peer through the dust. The Parkes Observatory in Australia has already identified previously unknown galaxies in the hidden zone. The Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile, and the upcoming Square Kilometre Array, are expected to reveal even more.

Other techniques include gravitational lensing. This method looks for distortions in the light of distant objects, caused by the gravitational pull of unseen mass between the object and the observer. These distortions can help identify dense regions even when no light is visible.

Redshift surveys, which map the speed and direction of galaxies, are growing more detailed. Combined with advanced computer simulations, these data sets allow scientists to reconstruct the flow of galaxies across space. These reconstructions may eventually uncover the full structure of the Great Attractor, or show that it is part of something even larger.

The universe is still pulling secrets from the dark

The Great Attractor has shaped the motion of our galaxy for millions of years. It is close by, in cosmic terms. Yet it remains hidden, not because it is far away, but because it lies behind the crowded foreground of our own sky.

The pull is real. It has been measured from multiple directions. Our galaxy is not moving aimlessly. It is falling into something vast, dense, and still unseen.

The more we study the Great Attractor, the more we learn about how the universe is built. We are just beginning to understand the structures that guide the motion of galaxies across space. The Great Attractor is one of those structures. But it may not be the last. There may be others beyond it, pulling just as hard, across distances we have not yet reached. We know where we are going. But we still don’t know what lies at the end of the path.

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{ https://curiosmos.com/category/unsolved-mysteries/ }

29-05-2025 om 22:31 geschreven door peter  

Roadside Picnics: Chernobyl UFOs & The Falcon Lake Incident - PART I

In the wake of the 1986 disaster, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant became a hotspot for UFO sightings. While writing Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide I came across a number of reports of strange aerial phenomena in the area around the plant itself, as well as over the nearby Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. Then I started digging deeper – looking at the historical connection between UFO sightings, and places associated with nuclear research and power. Eventually this led me to Canada, where I realised that a famous 1967 UFO sighting – the ‘Falcon Lake Incident’ – might actually share a surprising and uncanny connection with the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine.

Originally I planned to mention these Chernobyl UFOs in the book. But the story quickly grew from a few interesting reports – a passing curiosity – into a whole chapter of its own. And this new UFO chapter, jumping about from Chernobyl to North Wales, to Roswell and Winnipeg (and filled throughout with unreliable words like “allegedly,” and “claimed,” and “believed”), increasingly felt like it didn’t belong in this book… which was otherwise evolving into quite a tight, keenly-focussed and evidence-driven volume.

So instead, I decided I would share this ‘missing chapter’ here: a deep dive into the subject of Chernobyl UFOs, starting in Ukraine, and ending with an account of my own trip to Falcon Lake, in 2019, to visit the site of an alleged UFO encounter that the press called the ‘Canadian Roswell.’

The Black Bird of Chernobyl

An event as unusual as the Chernobyl disaster tends to attract extraordinary stories.

In April 2005, an article titled ‘Black Bird of Chernobyl’ appeared on the now-defunct website American Monsters. It described how employees at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, in the weeks before the 1986 meltdown, had been having nightmares and receiving strange, threatening phone calls, that warned of impending disaster. Some had even reported sightings of “a large, dark, headless man with gigantic wings and fire-red eyes”… though in the absence of evidence, their superiors dismissed these claims. The article describes how some first-responders at the disaster site reported a “20-foot bird” seen flying in and out of the column of smoke.

In 2019 the story was back in the news again. An Australian archeologist called Robert Maxwell, who previously made field trips to Chernobyl in 2010 and 2012, told the press that he heard legends about the Black Bird from locals while he was in the Exclusion Zone. However, in my own 20 trips to Chernobyl, I am still yet to hear the story there. Even online, the earliest account in Russian or Ukrainian links back to the American Monsters website as a source.

As it turns out, the Black Bird of Chernobyl was an American invention all along. The 2002 film The Mothman Prophecies, starring Richard Gere, is based on the ‘Mothman’ urban myth – about a mysterious, winged humanoid that allegedly warned citizens in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, of their impending doom in 1967. A character in the 2002 film alludes to similar phenomena that happened at Chernobyl; but according to the cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, who worked on the film, this was pure fiction. “There were no sightings. It was all made up for the movie,” he explained on Cryptomundo in 2011.

Elsewhere in America, another source would claim that intelligent alien lifeforms had taken an interest in the Chernobyl disaster. Dr George King – founder of a New Age religious movement known as the ‘Aetherius Society’ – claimed to have been sent a warning of impending disaster 4 hours and 53 minutes before the Chernobyl plant went critical, by his extraterrestrial contacts on a Martian spacecraft called Satellite Number Three. Dr King was ordered to immediately activate the earth’s “spiritual energy radiators,” and the story would then be used as evidence for the Aetherius Society’s claim that the “Cosmic Masters … have always regarded nuclear experimentation as the greatest threat to humanity and have made it clear that they would intervene where they were karmically allowed.”

However, unlike the Chernobyl-Mothman story, the idea that extraterrestrial lifeforms played a role in the disaster was not a claim limited solely to theorists on the other side of the planet. In fact, in the years following the Chernobyl catastrophe, many local people – and newspapers – would share stories about UFOs spotted in the skies over Chernobyl and Kyiv.

Chernobyl UFOs: Eyewitness Reports

Mikhail Varitsky, a senior dosimetrician with the Dosimetry Control Department, alleged that on the night of the Chernobyl disaster, he and many others had observed a UFO above Reactor 4. His statement was published in UFOs – Guests From the Future by V. Kratokhvil, in 1992: “We saw a ball of fire, and it was slowly flying in the sky. I think the ball was six or eight meters in diameter. Then we saw two rays of crimson light stretching towards the fourth unit. The object was some 300 meters from the reactor. The event lasted for about three minutes. The lights of the object went out and it flew away in the north-western direction.”

According to Varitsky’s dosimetric readings, the radiation levels coming from the reactor dropped from 3000 to 800 milli-roentgen per hour in that time, and the Russian news outlet Pravda, reporting on the sighting in 2002, would conclude: “The UFO brought the radiation level down. The level was decreased almost four times. This probably prevented a nuclear blast.”

‘Chernobyl UFOs’ became a hot topic in Ukraine in the years that followed. Dr Iva Naumovna Gospina (a medical doctor and author of self-help books) claimed to have photographed an object hovering above the station during subsequent malfunctions in September 1989. In August 1990, the Chernobyl Bulletin (Issue #64) reported another sighting:

“From 5:00 to 7:35 in the morning of 7 August, a new meeting with an unknown phenomenon took place. It was at this time that the workers of the Zone, living in the rotational village of Zeleny Mys, before leaving for work, observed in the area of ​​the Ivankov township, at an altitude of 5-8 km, a shiny, luminous cylindrical object, resembling an empty spool of thread. The object periodically changed its configuration, the end discs were detached and their number changed from two to three. A red dot revolved around the cylinder. At 7:35, after the appearance of a military aircraft on the horizon, the UFO disappeared.”

In October 1990, the atomic scientist Alexander Krymov reported sighting another such craft above the Chernobyl Zone.

The following year, a fire broke out in Chernobyl’s Reactor Block 2 on the evening of 11 October (the event that would lead to that unit’s final closure), and five days later a local photojournalist, Vladimir Savran of the Chernobyl Echo, would report another sighting. He was documenting the semi-collapsed roof in the generator hall, and saw nothing unusual with his naked eye: “The sky was autumn grey, but absolutely clear.” When he developed the film however, it appeared to show an object similar to that which Iva Gospina had photographed two years earlier, only this one seen from beneath.

Chernobyl Echo published the photo in November 1991, adding the editorial comment: “The property of UFOs being invisible to the human eye and appearing only in photographs and on film was reported in the press more than once… Specialists who, at the request of the publisher, have carefully studied the negative, do not allow any falsification.”

Before the Chernobyl disaster, reports of UFO sightings were a fairly rare occurrence in the Kyiv region. Four such claims were recorded in total, over the previous 30 years. However, in the years after 1986, numerous citizens, photographers and military personnel in the region would report sightings of strange, glowing objects in the sky, and these were recorded by the Commission on Anomalous Phenomena at the Ukrainian branch of NTO Radio Electronics and Communications.

Between 1986 and 1990, the pilot Pyotr Vladimirovich Wojciechowski claimed to have made more than a dozen sightings of individual objects and groups of UFOs.

In September 1988 the Kyiv resident Vadim Vasilyevich Shevchuk reported a sighting of two luminous objects floating above the Kyiv Institute for Nuclear Research, in the Exhibition (VDNKh) district of the city. His description was very similar to what Mikhail Varitsky said he saw, above the power plant on the night of the Chernobyl disaster.

On 12 November 1989, at 7.46 pm, the radar operator Lieutenant Colonel V. Shavanov, on duty at one of the region’s air defence radar stations, was notified of a luminous object sighted in the sky over the Exhibition district by residents of Kyiv. Shavanov called home, and spoke to his daughter who confirmed that from their ninth floor balcony she had just witnessed: “a white cross, a rectangle, and in it – like a fiery spiral, it seemed to be pulsating, illuminated.” A fighter-interceptor pilot was sent to the location, which was again very close to the Kyiv Institute of Nuclear Research; but he found nothing.

On 20 December 1989, another anomaly was sighted above the village of Irpen, between 6-7 pm, by the local resident Ivan Kucher. He reported a luminous flying object, which moved in the direction of Kyiv – and then later, at 8 pm, a similar glowing UFO was reported above Kyiv’s Central Stadium by the photojournalist Lyubov Kalenskaya.

Another sighting was made on 13 March 1990, in the area around Kyiv TV Tower (as reported in Junior Technician). At 10.13 pm, the local residents Denis Gnatyuk, Yuri Goncharenko and Dmitry Pinchuk say they saw a “mushroom-shaped” object with pulsating lights hovering in the sky. Another witness, Sergey Bryzgunov, made a similar report, saying that he watched the same display for roughly half an hour from the Golden Ear Hotel. A further witness for the 13 March sighting was Alexei Kurganov, who described watching the same object from the Borshchagovka area.

On 16 May 1990, the engineer Sergey Ogarkov, a member of the All-Union Astronomical Geodetic Society, claims that at just after 9 pm he observed through his telescope a single UFO moving in the western sky. Later that night, residents of the Troeschina residential district claimed to have seen two such objects (resembling “inverted plates”) hanging in the sky above them.

On 17 October 1990, another UFO was reportedly watched by many Kyiv residents, hanging in the sky above Khreshchatyk and Maidan Square. (The story likely first appeared in Evening Kyiv (Вечірній Київ), printed on 2 April 1991.) The following month, on 7 November, Kyiv resident Yuri Novikov was outside with his daughter just after midnight in the Kharkov district, when they saw what he would later describe as: “An object of enormous size, a cylindrical shape of a grey metallic colour, framed by a flickering halo, hanging from under low clouds.”

For context, it should be noted that most of these reports were not made public until the 1990s. In those early post-Soviet years, the newly-free press of Ukraine published an abundance of extraordinary stories, and convoluted conspiracy theories. Beginning in the late Soviet period, post-Glasnost, and into the post-Soviet period, large-scale financial scams and pyramid schemes were also prolific in the region. UFO reports were very much in vogue in these years, and while numerous sightings detailed above were allegedly made by photojournalists, very few actual photographs exist to back them up. Of the sightings detailed here, those which don’t link to other sources were listed by a 2011 article on a website calling itself Russian News Agency – where the writer also offered their own explanation for the connection between Chernobyl and UFOs:

“From these facts, the conclusion suggests itself that on the night of 26 April 1986, it was not only the people, heroically marching towards their hellish deaths, who were concerned about the impending catastrophe. In the light of these testimonies, it becomes clear that these elusive extraterrestrials are in fact not at all indifferent to the fate of mankind and the third planet from the Sun.”

Flying Saucers & Nuclear Power Plants

The suggestion that extraterrestrials had taken steps to protect humanity from its own nuclear technology was not a new idea. Around the world, sites of nuclear significance have historically shown some of the highest frequencies of UFO reports – a correlation that seems to continue today.

In March 1993, some kind of object was sighted hovering over the Hartlepool Nuclear Power Plant in northeast England. The ufologist Richard D. Hall was cited in a local newspaper, saying: “There is a history of UFOs taking an interest in nuclear energy so the sighting in Hartlepool is not a surprise.”

In 2014, nuclear power plants in France and Belgium were put on high alert after unidentified objects were sighted flying overhead. In total, eighteen overflights were reported in France alone, between the beginning of October and the beginning of November, with some of these flights taking place simultaneously, to suggest some kind of coordinated group action. The immediate explanation was that these were drones, though the identity – or motives – of the drone pilots has never become apparent. The director of one French plant refused the drone explanation however, insisting that the objects seen flying overhead were UFOs.

By French law, it is forbidden to fly a drone within 5 km of a nuclear power plant. Such laws can often be enforced through the use of signal scramblers, as well as ‘no-fly zones’ hardcoded into the software of the drones themselves. In 2015, on a road trip through Wales, I was with a friend when he tried flying his drone close to Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Plant. We weren’t interested in the plant itself, our target was the dramatic view of a dammed reservoir downstream – but apparently we were too close for comfort, because as soon as the little drone was airborne it switched to autopilot, firing itself as fast as possible in the direction away from Trawsfynydd. It wouldn’t respond to manual controls again until we were far away from the nuclear power plant.

(After Gatwick Airport was temporarily closed due to a drone panic in 2018, the UK began looking at a whole range of new counter-drone technologies that might be applied at sites such as airports or power plants. In addition to RF and GPS jammers, this report from the ADS (representing the UK’s Aerospace, Defence, Security and Space industries) considers further options, such as the deployment of ‘hunter/killer’ drones, laser defence systems, and even trained birds of prey.)

Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Plant was closed and began its decommissioning process in 1991. Perhaps their installation of anti-drone technology was a caution built on experience – as in 2002, the plant had its own UFO sighting. In March that year, Officer Brian Roberts claimed that he and his wife had seen a flying craft hovering for around 10 minutes near the plant one evening. He described it as saucer-shaped, with “a brilliant perimeter of light moving in a circular pattern along its vertical midline” (as cited in UFO FAQ by David J. Hogan).

Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Plant, North Wales. Constructed from 1959-65, this power plant building was designed by the celebrated Modernist architect Basil Spence. It was taken offline to begin decommissioning in 1991.

In 2017, The New York Times reported that of the US Defense Department’s annual $600 billion budget, $22 million was spent on its Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. This military intelligence program (which was allegedly discontinued in 2012) investigated reports of UFOs, and it was run out of an office on the fifth floor of the Pentagon building by Luis Elizondo. The program collected unidentified aeronautical debris, as well as compiling archives of video and audio recordings of UAPs (Unexplained Aerial Phenomena) going back as early as WWII. According to Elizondo, many such sightings correlated with nuclear facilities and test sites.

In the 1940s, what is perhaps the most famous UFO incident in history is linked to a location less than 100 miles from the site of the first nuclear bomb test. The seven-mile high mushroom cloud that rose above White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, in July 1945, was visible from Roswell – where two years later, in July 1947, a local ranch foreman discovered unidentified debris in his field after a thunderstorm. The Roswell case has since been explained (revealing that this wreckage was not alien in origin, but rather had been an experimental Cold War-era listening device, named Project Mogul), but there have been many sightings of unexplained aerial phenomena at the location since, which are harder to explain.

The journalist and UAP researcher George Knapp interviewed more than a dozen workers from the New Mexico atomic test site, where allegedly such sightings were so commonplace that a specific security detail was assigned to monitor them. According to Knapp, “At the facilities where we were first designing and building nuclear weapons… at the places where we were processing the fuel… at the facilities where we were testing the weapons… at the bases where we deployed those weapons, on the ships… the nuclear submarines… All those places, all the people working there have seen these things.”

The Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to set foot on the moon, grew up in New Mexico himself, and in 2015 he told the Observer: “it seems that most likely what the aliens were interested in was the fact we had a weapons testing facility at the White Sands Proving Ground and were also interested in what we were doing or what the U.S. military was doing. They were observing our activities at the White Sands Proving Ground and were monitoring our development.”

Mitchell has also been quoted talking about more recent incidents, in which UFOs were suggested to have interfered with – or even prevented – nuclear missile tests. “I have spoken to many Air Force officers who worked at these silos during the Cold War,” he says. “They told me UFOs were frequently seen overhead and often disabled their missiles. Other officers from bases on the Pacific coast told me their [test] missiles were frequently shot down by alien spacecraft. There was a lot of activity in those days.”

Regardless of the accuracy of such claims, it is a fact that UFO sightings have been reported with a greater frequency around places associated with nuclear technology. Perhaps this is because some extraterrestrial species is guiding our scientific development… or perhaps there’s a more human explanation for the correlation. Centuries ago, our wars left cities in ruin; industrial disasters could destroy a forest, or pollute a water stream. However, since the beginning of the Atomic Era – the dawn of the Anthropocene – we have been living with the existential horror of knowing that our mistakes, and conflicts, can now cause damage not just on a local, but on a planetary scale. How reassuring it would be then, to believe that we had grown-ups supervising us… to suppose that we weren’t truly left alone in the universe, to live with the consequences of our own (atomic) actions.

The reports of UFOs over the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant certainly conform to this trend in the West, going back as early as the first atomic tests, which supposes that extraterrestrial craft are taking an interest in our nuclear activities, with the ultimate goal of protecting us from ourselves. But of all the Western sightings, there is one in particular that shares an unexpected connection with the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone: an event which the press called the ‘Canadian Roswell,’ and which occurred at Falcon Lake, Manitoba, in 1967.

The Incident at Falcon Lake

On 20 May 1967, a Polish mechanic and amateur geologist named Stefan Michalak was out in the woods 150 km east of Winnipeg, Manitoba, prospecting for silver and quartz in the rocks around Falcon Lake. While he stopped to eat lunch, Michalak spotted something in the sky. He later described: “Two cigar-shaped objects with humps on them,” which “appeared to be descending and glowing with an intense scarlet glare.”

While one of the objects stopped roughly 25 feet (7.6 metres) above the ground, hovered and then departed, the other landed on top of a flat rock at the water’s edge. After sketching the shape of the craft, Michalak approached it, initially believing this to be some kind of experimental US aircraft – though he saw no markings or insignia on the hull. An opening appeared on the side of the craft, and Michalak assumed it had landed here to make repairs. The warm air radiating from the craft smelled strongly of sulphur. He heard voices from inside and called out to them, offering help. There was no reply.

According to Michalak’s story, he got close enough to the craft to touch its hull (burning his glove in the process), and he peered inside the open hatch to see an interior full of blinking lights; before the hatch suddenly closed, and the craft turned, blasting him with a wave of intense heat from an exhaust that set his shirt and undershirt alight, before taking off and flying away.

Stefan Michalak became severely unwell following the encounter. In the immediate aftermath he suffered from nausea, vomiting and some visual impairment, eventually making his way back to a hospital where he was treated for first degree burns on his chest. Dr Horace Dudley, a radiologist at the University of Southern Mississippi, described the symptoms as “a classical picture of severe whole body [exposure to] radiation with x- or gamma rays,” which might have implied that, “Mr Michalak received on the order of 100-200 roentgens.” However, on 22 May, Michalak was taken to the Atomic Energy of Canada Laboratory at Pinawa, where examiners found no evidence of radiation sickness – while his burns were identified as thermal and chemical, rather than from radiation. Nevertheless, over the coming days the pain in his head persisted, and a complete loss of appetite caused Michalak to lose significant weight.

Soil samples later collected from the ‘landing site’ showed above-average levels of radiation, at 0.3 microcuries. The burns on Michalak’s chest, meanwhile, swelled up in a grid-like pattern of rashes. These would continue to fade and then reappear until his death in 1999.

The press began referring to the Falcon Lake incident as the ‘Canadian Roswell.’ What set it apart from most UFO reports was the amount of physical evidence left behind – Michalak’s peculiar scars, his melted glove, his burnt cap and undershirt, along with samples of radioactive dirt – which were passed from expert to expert (the universities, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Royal Canadian Air Force), none of whom were able to explain it. When investigators sent their lab reports to the Department of Health and Welfare in Ottawa, it raised panic over a possible risk of radioactive contamination. There were talks about closing off the area and creating an exclusion zone, though eventually, it was decided that the radiation levels – while unusual – were not sufficiently dangerous to justify such extreme action.

In 1968, Stefan Michalak returned to Falcon Lake. He had a theory that the radiation might be emanating from something beneath the rock itself. When he chipped open a crack with his rock hammer, he found metal: smooth zigzags of silver roughly four to five inches long, that fit the fissure of the rock as if the metal had been poured in molten. These silver artefacts were shown to be unusually radioactive, and according to his son, Michalak would joke that “this was alien refuse. Perhaps the craft had landed to offload some waste and what they had was, basically, UFO droppings.”

A Roadside Picnic in Manitoba

A few years after the press reported Michalak’s sighting at Falcon Lake in Canada, two authors in the Soviet Union wrote a sci-fi novel about an alien visitation. In the book, called Roadside Picnic, it is suggested that extraterrestrial craft have landed on earth to conduct routine maintenance (or even perhaps for a ‘roadside picnic’) before travelling onwards to their final destination elsewhere. The areas where these craft landed are subsequently left scattered with alien litter. Strange artefacts, dangerous substances and lingering radiation pollute the landscape, and necessitate the creation of an exclusion zone around the landing site. The novel’s authors, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, did not set this story at home, in the Soviet Union – but rather it is hinted, and later explicitly stated in Ursula K. Le Guin’s foreword for the 2012 edition, that the events of Roadside Picnic take place in Canada.

In June 2019 I visited Falcon Lake with Chris Rutkowski, a resident ufologist, and a leading authority on the Falcon Lake Incident.

We met in Winnipeg – a city that has its own tragic connection to the Los Alamos atomic tests in New Mexico. One of the first deaths by criticality accident (an uncontrolled nuclear fission chain reaction) was that of a Winnipegger. Louis Slotin was a Winnipeg-born scientist with a PhD in physical chemistry, who in 1942 was invited to work on the Manhattan Project in the US. In May 1946, he was conducting an experiment to create a controlled fission reaction by placing two hemispheres of beryllium around a plutonium core. But while separating those half-spheres his tool slipped, the upper beryllium shell fell, and it triggered a critical reaction that gave off a burst of hard radiation. The other scientists present for the experiment reported a heat wave, and a glowing blue light resulting from air ionisation.

According to the plaque that now stands in a memorial park near Slotin’s former home, on Luxton Avenue in Winnipeg, Dr Louis Slotin threw his body over the experiment to shield his colleagues from the radiation. All seven of them survived, while Slotin died nine days later in the hospital. The story has since been dramatised in a number of novels and films – and it has also been suggested that Dr Louis Slotin may have been the inspiration for the character Dr Jon Osterman, who becomes the glowing blue ‘Doctor Manhattan’ after suffering a similar accident, in Alan Moore’s Watchmen. (“The Superman exists and he’s American Canadian.”)

{ https://www.exutopia.com/ }

29-05-2025 om 21:42 geschreven door peter