With the advancement of technology, drones have become quite popular and very useful. One example is that Ordnance Survey has introduced a solar-powered mapping drone that will be able to fly for 90 straight days and will take high quality pictures of Earth. This new unmanned aircraft will travel at a height of 67,000 feet which is twice the height of a commercial airliner.

Ordnance Survey (a mapping firm) owns 51% of Astigan, which is a firm based in Bridgwater, Somerset, England. Astigan is also the name that was given to the unmanned solar-powered aircraft that is scheduled to complete the last of its endurance tests before the end of this year. Brian Jones, who is Astigan’s managing director, said, “By the end of 2019 we aim to be completing endurance flight testing, building up to 90 days non-stop, which is the operational capability we’re striving for.”

The aircraft, which is controlled remotely, weighs 330 pounds with a wingspan of nearly 130 feet. According to Mr. Jones, the mobility of this aerial vehicle makes it much cheaper and a lot more flexible than using satellite imagery. “It’s incredibly exciting that the UK has developed this kind of technology, delivering satellite capabilities, unparalleled flexibility and improved efficiency, all at a vastly reduced cost,” he explained.

• Click here to see a picture of this unmanned aerial vehicle.

In other news, the Colorado sky has been lit up with giant light paintings of Pokemon characters, the Batman symbol, and a large cube, just to name a few. An artist and photographer named Russell Klimas attached a powerful LED light called Lumecube to his drone and created bright white streaks in the sky which formed several images. In order to map out a detailed flight plan for his drone to make the images in the sky, he used Google Earth as well as a navigation app named Litchi. The images took him less than fifteen minutes to create in the sky. Now that’s definitely a unique and eye-catching way to show off one’s artistic talents.

“A few months ago I was inspired to try and see what shapes I could create while attaching a Lumecube to my drone,” Klimas said. He then explained the process involved in making these images by manually drawing in waypoints one at a time in order to create more detail in the images. “A shape can consist of a few waypoints or hundreds to thousands,” adding, “My current record when writing this article is 633 for Santa and his reindeer but you can definitely have much more.”

Click here to see pictures and a video of the images created by the drone, as well as the article written by Russell Klimas himself on how he created them.

There are extra pictures by clicking here of the Batman and cube images that Klimas created in the sky.

The Cold War may be over (or not), but Space War I is clearly heating up as the world’s major superpowers continue to appear to be scrambling to get as many weaponized satellites and secret space drones into orbit as they can before the other sides do the same. We cannot afford a killer satellite gap!

Many nations are now believed to have some type of “killer satellite” in orbit.

The latest development to suggest we’re heading towards a war in space comes in the form of a new Pentagon publication which was quietly released this week. The 46-page report is titled Challenges to Security in Space and was published by the Defense Intelligence Agency. According to the document, the Pentagon believes “some foreign governments are developing capabilities that threaten others’ ability to use space” and “developing jamming and cyberspace capabilities, directed energy weapons, on-orbit capabilities, and ground-based anti-satellite missiles that can achieve a range of reversible to non-reversible effects” on other satellites and spacecraft. Clearlyit’s only the other guys doing these things, too; the US wouldn’t be up to the same shenanigans, no way!

“Oh that X-37B? It’s merely a weather balloon.”

One of the threats the document cites is a new laser technology China is developing which it claims is intended to zap space debris. Orbital pollution is becoming a serious issue after all, one which threatens every nation’s ability to conduct safe operations in orbit around Earth. While China’s anti-debris lasers certainly seem like they could clean up space if they wanted to, the Pentagon notes (as I did last year when the technology was unveiled) that these seemingly peaceful technologies could easily also function as full-on space weapons:

These systems could include payloads such as kinetic kill vehicles, radio frequency jammers, lasers, chemical sprayers, high-power microwaves, and robotic mechanisms. Some of these systems, such as robotic technology for satellite servicing and repair and debris removal, have peaceful uses but can also be used for military purposes.

The document outlines several technologies the People’s Liberation Army is known to be testing which could pose a threat to other nations’ space-based defense and surveillance capabilities. It makes you wonder what type of reports the Chinese and Russians are publishing concerning the same types of technologies being developed here in the West.

It sure is looking more and more like the next major conflict between superpowers will look like something straight out of the science fiction of the mid-20th century. Space lasers, space-to-surface missile strike capabilities, cyberwarfare conducted by artificial intelligence constructs – nothing is off the table for the oncoming struggle over Earth’s dwindling natural resources. Who will come out on top?

Other than the irradiated super-cockroaches, that is.

“No animal is more elusive. Nobody I knew had ever seen one in the wild and I never thought that I would either.”

Figures from May 2018 show that over 170 million people worldwide saw the blockbuster movie “Black Panther.” Figures from the past 100 years show that no one has seen an actual black panther (also called a black leopard) in Africa and has a movie or photo to prove it … until now. UK photographer Will Burrard-Lucas revealed stunning images of a live black panther he photographed in Kenya, not far from the mythical land of Wakanda, home of the ‘other’ Black Panther. How cool is that? (The images can be seen here.)

Slinking through the darkness, these stunning images show an ultra-rare black leopard in action. The mythical creature was captured by British wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas, 35, while it was prowling around Laikipia in Kenya in the dead of night

Its wide eyes can be seen looking eagerly for prey, while leopard-like spots can vaguely be seen on its dark coat, which is the result of melanism

Working in collaboration with biologists in the area, Burrard-Lucas went about installing camera traps. These were placed in areas the black leopard was rumoured to frequent

Nicholas Pilfold PhD, a biologist with San Diego Zoo Global who is currently researching leopards at the Loisaba Conservancy and helped Burrard-Lucas with his photography project, confirmed that the recent on-camera sighting was extremely rare

Summing up the black leopard in three words, Burrard-Lucas said: 'They are truly stunning, beautiful and elusive'

Dr Pilfold said: 'We had always heard about black leopard living in this region, but the stories were absent of high quality footage that could confirm their existence.' This grab from San Diego Zoo's video shows the black leopard clambering over rocks. The video footage was shot over a period of a year

“We had always heard about black leopard living in this region, but the stories were absent of high quality footage that could confirm their existence. This is what Will’s photos and the videos on our remote cameras now prove, and are exceptionally rare in their detail and insight.”

A normal African leopard

(Wikipedia)

The black panther or African leopard (Panthera pardus pardus) was suspected of living somewhere in the Loisaba Conservancy, a 57,000 acre wildlife conservancy and working ranch located in Northern Laikipia, Kenya, by Nicholas Pilfold PhD, a biologist working there for the San Diego Zoo Global. According to his study published in January 2019 in the African Journal of Ecology, Pilford’s video cameras captured a young female black panther five times in February, March and April of 2018. (A video can be viewed here.) Those sightings brought photographer Burrard-Lucas to the area with his specially-designed camera traps using wireless motion sensors, high-quality DSLR cameras and multiple flashes. Despite Pilford’s videos, he wasn’t certain he could capture sharp photographs of the black panther.

“I can’t believe it really. I think when I started this project I didn’t actually think I was going to be able to achieve a shot of a black leopard in Africa but that it is exactly what is here on the back of my camera. Just the most stunning, spectacular creature I think I’ve ever photographed!”

Pilford shared with National Geographic some of the mythology behind the black (or melanistic, which is the opposite of albino) panther, whose last known photograph had been taken in 1909.

“These are the first confirmed images of a panther in Africa in nearly 100 years. Almost everyone has a story about seeing one, it’s such a mythical thing. Even when you talk to the older guys that were guides in Kenya many years ago, back when hunting was legal [in the 1950s and ‘60s], there was a known thing that you didn’t hunt black leopards. If you saw them, you didn’t take it.”

The juvenile female was traveling with an older normal female believed to be its mother, so Pilford thinks its color was not a problem with the rest of the cat’s family, even though melanism is extremely rare in African big cats.

Or is it?

Shortly after the photographs were released, researchers at the Ol Ari Nyiro Conservancy 30 miles west of Loisaba unveiled another high-quality photograph of a black leopard reported to have been taken in 2007. Are there more hiding in drawers around Kenya and Africa? Are there more black panthers than the experts believe to exist there? Will this revelation put them in danger?

Will this be in the sequel?

Could lightning have literally been the ‘spark’ which ignited all life here on Earth? New bizarre-sounding research published by scientists at Tel Aviv University has found that lightning may give off a unique type of extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic field which actually serves to protect the cells of living organisms. While these fields are quite weak and difficult to detect, scientists think they already have enough data to show the lightning may be one of the key factors which allowed or helped life to flourish on our mysterious planet.

Lightning is known to create what are known as Schumann resonances, a phenomenon in which the Earth’s electromagnetic field resonates at very low frequencies due to the lightning activity worldwide. According to Professor Colin Price of Tel Aviv University’s Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, this new study is among the first to find a connection between lightning and the electromagnetic fields of living things:

It is the first study that demonstrates a link between global lighting activity and the Schumann Resonances and the activity of living cells. It may explain why all living organisms have electrical activity in the same ELF spectral range, and it is the first time such a connection has been shown. This may have some therapeutic implications down the line, since these ELF fields appear to protect cells from damage, but this requires further research.

Researchers found that environmental electromagnetic fields can actually protect cells under stress conditions such as a lack of oxygen. Cells in these stress states seem to respond to the types of electromagnetic resonances given off by lightning activity in ways that suggest these fields can help reduce the damage cells experience while under stress.

While on one hand this study provides one more fascinating hint that all things living and non-living on Earth may be more connected than we know, it also may foreshadow future therapies which harness these mysterious effects of electromagnetic fields. It’s already suspected that the electromagnetic fields given off by today’s telecom devices may be affecting living things in harmful ways, so it makes sense that natural electromagnetic fields may likewise be able to affect living cells. Much more data is needed before definitive conclusions can be drawn about this phenomenon, but if confirmed, it may demonstrate that electromagnetic energy plays a vital role in the natural processes of living things. Could lightning be a vital part of life on Earth?

I’m also left to wonder if perhaps ancient cultures were aware of this phenomenon given some of the claims made about the pyramids and electromagnetic radiation. Could the pyramids have been healing centers?

This could be the plot of a new movie … or the start of a sci-fi-becoming-reality revolution. A gang of chimpanzees at the Belfast Zoo took advantage of some fallen branches to build a ladder and scale the wall around their living quarters. Is this an accident, a lesson … or a warning?

“I was petrified, obviously, having the kids, and I tried not to show fear but inside I was a bit like: what happens if it attacks us or tries to take the kids or runs over?”

What happens if it begins speaking, demands that the rest of the animals be released and calls for an end to meat-eating or the big kid gets peeled like a banana … which they don’t like anyway despite what you filthy humans think? A better movie, but fortunately (maybe) not what happened this past weekend after four chimps found trees knocked down by a storm, leaned them up against a wall and climbed them to freedom. Cue the triumphant John Williams score.

Well done!

“Don’t escape, you bad little gorilla.”

That’s not exactly an expression of terror, Mister Screenwriter, but it’s what a little girl commented in the video of the escape (see the video and photos here) which was posted on social media, much to the chagrin of Belfast Zoo officials who experienced their second escape in just two weeks. A red panda bolted when an electrical fence was disabled during a power failure. That creature was captured after roaming the streets of Belfast – possibly trying to convince stupid humans that it was not related to pandas at all but in fact is a rare and endangered species. Perhaps this is the escape that should be made into a movie, since it follows another red panda escape in 2017 from a zoo in Norfolk, Virginia. Should the defiant Ailurus fulgens (“don’t call us pandas”) and angry chimps (“don’t call us monkeys”) join forces next time?

Do I look like a bear?

“They’re intelligent primates and know they’re not supposed to be out of their enclosure, so got back in themselves.”

That’s what Belfast zookeeper Alyn Cairns hopes local residents believe – that the chimps knew they did something wrong and returned to their prison rather than realizing they did something right and upped their demands. It’s not that farfetched – in 2018, researchers discovered white-faced capuchins in Panama using stone tools as hammers to open nuts and shellfish, and another group in Japan taught chimpanzees how to play the human game rock-paper-scissors. Have primates entered their own Stone Age? Are we accelerating their evolution? Isn’t that a violation of the Prime Directive? Should we be mixing movie metaphors?

“But we just had to stay calm. It may have been a different story if it had been aggressive but it absolutely wasn’t. It made us feel at ease. We just walked past it and it was absolutely grand.”

Cue the sinister music as the humans dance and sing about how superior they are while the chimps tap messages to each other in their dark cages and plot their next move.

Are these escapes, coupled with the new evidence of primate intelligence, a sign that maybe it’s time we put an end to zoos and instead returned some of the land we’ve taken back to our fellow Earth creatures?

Or are they a warning of something worse?

Next time we take hostages.

The site of one of America’s most legendary and mysterious encounters with the unknown has recently changed hands and is now under new private ownership. A 78-acre ranching property located in Lincoln County, New Mexico 75 miles northwest of Roswell has been sold to Dinwiddie Cattle Co. LLC for an undisclosed amount. The parcel of land is only part of a larger land transaction, but it’s what happened on this particular parcel that makes this real estate transaction so noteworthy – and potentially depressing for those of us who need to know the truth about what happened in Roswell.

The property sold in this transaction contains the lands that were once the J.B. Foster ranch, home to the 1947 crash of an object recovered by the U.S. Army Air Forces. The crash and ensuing investigation would become one of the most disputed and researched UFO incidents of all time and in many ways contributed the modern fascination with UFOs.

The site has changed hands several times in the decades since the infamous 1947 Roswell Incident but has remained exclusively privately owned, making investigations of the alleged crash site difficult. The previous owners, Bogle Ltd. Co. of Dexter, eventually allowed tours of the site last year in what was the first public access to the site in nearly 70 years. The new owners, however, so far seem nonplussed with the whole UFO crash thing.

“I just don’t know a whole lot about it,” new owner Tommy Dinwiddie told the Roswell Daily Record. “The guy who is running the ranch over there for me knows quite a bit about it, and after we kind of get our feet on the ground running it, we will do some more talking about it and figuring out what we want to do.” 

Other countries have made public monuments or parks out of the sites of famous UFO incidents. Is the Roswell property remaining in public hands in order to discourage study of the site, or is all of this merely much ado about a wayward weather balloon and an empty stretch of desert?

Members of the Armed Forces get to witness or participate in all sorts of secret activities and events that the public is never told of. There’s a good reason a lot of the military’s activities stay under wraps, though. Now that the world’s superpowers have the ability to wipe out all life on Earth several times over, it’s far better to let people sleep at night by keeping things on a need-to-know basis.

But I need to know. I really need to know. Like a lot of us who read this site, I need to know what’s in the secret bunkers and hangars. I need to know what those strange lights and triangles in the sky are, and I need to know what types of secret apocalyptic weapons are being tested in remote missile ranges in the desert. Or do I? Maybe ignorance is bliss, particularly for those of us who have children.

Maybe those ostriches are on to something.

At any rate, we were given a small glance behind the curtain of terrifying military secrecy this week when a retired US Air Force spy plane pilot recounted his now-declassified experience witnessing a secret and long-rumored Russian technology known as the “dome of light.” Robert Hopkins shared his chilling experiences with Tyler Rogoway at The Warzone, and I’m once again genuinely creeped out about what this story may suggest about what the Russian military may possess that we don’t yet know about.

Hopkins witnessed the event while flying a US spy plane originating from the remote Shemya Air Force Base on the Aleutian Island chain near Alaska. At the time, the Soviets were conducting tests of intermediate-range ballistic missiles nearby, and US spy planes were there to keep an eye on their adversary’s missile capabilities. That’s when things got super weird.

Shemya Air Force Base was a key part of America’s missile defenses and intelligence operations during the Cold War .

According to Hopkins, both he and his copilot witnessed what can only be described as a “dome of light” moving through the air. At nearly the exact moment a Soviet missile launched, the pair saw a “translucent, milky white wall” moving outward from the launch site towards the Northern Pacific Ocean. The wall of light spanned from the ground to as far as Hopkins and his copilot could see and crossed directly over their aircraft, leaving only the night sky in its wake. The pair were mystified by the event but nonetheless continued their mission as planned.

Afterwards, both Hopkins and his copilot confirmed that they witnessed the same phenomenon, but neither one could explain what the saw. The two eventually reasoned that it was likely some type of atmospheric event like an aurora – until the pair witnessed the exact same phenomenon again prior to another Soviet missile launch.

The two pilots’ sightings would eventually spark the interest of US intelligence agencies and government officials. The Warzone provides a comprehensive breakdown of all that is publicly known about the “dome of light” phenomenon including several mentions by US Senators and intelligence review publications. I highly encourage readers to head over to The Warzone and read the full article -that is, readers who weren’t planning on sleeping tonight.

Was this some type of superweapon like Nikita Khrushchev alleged the Soviet Union possessed, a surveillance countermeasure, or something far weirder? Some of Nikola Tesla’s stranger research even touched upon or hinted at technologies which sound eerily similar to what US spy pilots witnessed during these “dome of light” events. To this day the rumored “dome of light” technology remains a mystery.

Numerous eyewitnesses in Flintshire county, Wales reported seeing a strange blue flash on the morning of Thursday, February 7. Welsh social media channels were inundated with posts and pictures of the event taken from dash cameras and cellphones along with a wide range of speculation about what could have caused the event. While industrial causes are suspected, some Flintshire residents aren’t so sure.

The flash occurred around 6:30 am and momentarily lit up a large portion of the early morning sky with a mysterious blue glow. A police officer based in Hawarden, Flintshire caught the glow on his cash cam, posting it to Twitter. As speculation began to veer into the “ALIENS!” direction, a spokesperson for the Hawarden Police helicopter team suggested the anomalous flash could have been the result of ball lightning.

Ball lightning is one of the most mysterious natural phenomena reported throughout history.

WHAT CAUSES BALL LIGHTNING? 

Ball lightning is a little understood atmospheric electrical phenomenon often cited as an explanation for UFO or ghost sightings. There have been hundreds of eyewitness accounts and anecdotal reports over the centuries of fast-moving, luminous balls of electricity travelling along electrical conduits, down the sails of ships, running along the ground, in submarines or airplane cockpits, or even flying straight through people’s houses with no explanation. Ball lightning has even been reported to explode and leave behind a sulfur smell. Ball lightning is suspected to be behind the reports of “foo fighters” pilots witnessed during World War II.

“Sacré bleu! Un globe de feu!”

While the blue flash in Wales very well could have been caused by ball lightning, it would have had to have been a very large occurrence in order to light up such a large area of the early morning sky. According to local news reports, a high-voltage power line was severed by a fallen tree not far from where most of the reports of the blue flash came in. There are many accounts of ball lightning occurring in the vicinity of electrical infrastructure, so it may be that the two events are related. Unfortunately, most instances of ball lightning only last for a few seconds and rarely leave behind any physical evidence. Was this blue flash merely an electrical explosion due to a fallen line, or could it have indeed been one of the rarest natural phenomena on Earth? This one will likely remain a mystery.

Two geologists who were on a field trip to study volcanic rocks in Namibia came upon another huge discovery – Africa once had ice streams. Graham Andrews and Sarah Brown, who are geologists at West Virginia University, were exploring the South African desert country when they noticed an odd land formation.

The land consisted of flat desert along with hundreds of steep, long hills. The landscape was shaped by drumlins which are hills that are commonly found in areas that once had glaciers. Needless to say, glaciers – even ancient ones – are not what one would expect in the desert.

Andrews explained that they knew exactly what they were looking at, “We quickly realized what we were looking at because we both grew up in areas of the world that had been under glaciers, me in Northern Ireland and Sarah in northern Illinois.”

Once Andrews returned home from the trip, he did some research on the drumlins in Namibia but found out that nobody had ever studied them. He said, “The last rocks we were shown on the trip are from a time period when southern Africa was covered by ice,” adding, “People obviously knew that part of the world had been covered in ice at one time, but no one had ever mentioned anything about how the drumlins formed or that they were even there at all.”

That’s when he partnered up with Andy McGrady, who is a geology senior at West Virginia University, and they used morphometrics to measure the shapes of the drumlins to see if they could find any regular patterns from when they were carved by the ice.

Normal glaciers don’t move a lot, but they discovered that there are big grooves in the drumlins that indicate that the ice must have been fast-moving in order to create the grooves. Those large grooves indicate that there was in fact an ice stream in the southern part of Africa around 300 million years ago during the late Paleozoic Age.

“The ice carved big, long grooves in the rock as it moved,” Andrews explained, “It wasn’t just that there was ice there, but there was an ice stream. It was an area where the ice was really moving fast.”

What they discovered shows that the southern part of Africa was over the South Pole during that time period. “These features provide yet another tie between southern Africa and south America to show they were once joined,” Andrews confirmed.

They published their paper in the Public Library of Science’s PLOS One journal which can be read by clicking on the link.