Yesterday, we outlined thirteen reasons to take recent reports of UFOs and extraterrestrial life seriously, including a chat with former Senate majority leader Harry Reid about the government’s research into the topic. Here, an extended version of that conversation.

Hi, this is Eric Benson from New York Magazine.
Hi, Eric. Why do you want to talk to me?

Well, because of the New York Times article and the program that you helped bring about.
Well, I’m happy to talk to you. Just let me preface this by saying this, if we’re here to talk about little green men or stuff that you want to look at that was found in New Mexico or something, I’m not interested. If you’re here to talk about science, I’m happy to do that. I’m really glad to do that. I’m glad somebody is interested, because it’s a subject that is being terribly neglected, so I’m happy to talk to you.

Great. Well, I don’t want to talk to you about little green men.
Okay.

One thing I am curious about, though, is just where your interest in this subject comes from.
That’s pretty easy. When I first got out of law school many, many years ago, in the mid-’60s, I worked with three other lawyers. A big case we had was a case involving a bunch of rich Las Vegas businessmen. They went into L.A. International Airport, tried to take off, and the plane crashed and killed them all. It was a very interesting case. It went to Supreme Court, a mistrial declared, hung jury, went on for years.

One of the people who was killed in that plane crash was a guy by the name of Bigelow. He was not as wealthy, but he was a wealthy man in Las Vegas who ran a carpet company, Bigelow Carpet. His son was 18 years old when that crash occurred. He’s a central figure in all this. I didn’t know him, but when he was a young man, he heard a story from his grandparents about driving down from Mt. Charleston — that’s a 12,000-foot mountain just ten miles out of Las Vegas — where they saw something in the air. This so-called flying saucer, for lack of a better description. It piqued his curiosity.

He became a very wealthy man. I mean extremely wealthy. During the time that he had some money, he said, “I would like to know more about this.” He would have, several times a year, at his big office here in Las Vegas — knew how to make money buying and selling real estate. He would pay for these seminars, these conferences, and he would bring in scientists, academics, and a few nut cases. That’s a bad way of talking about some people, but, you know — people who were really, in my opinion, kind of on the fringes.

Probably the No. 1 TV journalist in Nevada was a guy by the name of George Knapp. He and I were friends. He had known me for years. He said to me one day, “Hey, I know this guy Bigelow, he’s interested in a subject, I don’t know if you have any interest in it all, but you should get to know him. He’s got a lot of money. He’s kind of an interesting guy. I’ll introduce you. You’ll go to one of those little deals and spend a few hours with him.”

I did that. It was really fascinating quite frankly because there were people trying to figure out what all this aerial phenomenon was. Bigelow knew I was interested.

I’ve always been a voracious reader. I blinded myself in one eye — I used to read really, really fast, and I can still read fairly fast with only one eye; not nearly as fast as I used to. Just a little side note: I took the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics course here in Las Vegas, and I was told I was the fastest reader they ever had in Nevada. I can read so fast.

How fast are you? Is there a number that represents —
I don’t know. I don’t know. But anyway, to make a long story short, he started sending me tons of stuff. I mean tons of stuff. I read it. A lot of it was nothing that interested me. It was, they reexamined and examined and reexamined the crash in New Mexico that happened down there that everybody knows about that knows anything about this subject. It was repetitive, and I didn’t care. But there was some stuff that interested me. Mainly what interested me is so many people had seen these strange things in the air. That was interesting to me.

I’m in the Senate now and one day was joined by John Glenn, who I thought was just such a wonderful human being. I said to John, “Hey John, I’ve been reading all this stuff, do you have any interest in it?” He said, “I’ve always had an interest in it.” You get the picture so far, right?

Yeah.
I’m in Washington in the Senate and Bob Bigelow called me — I kept in touch with him over the years. He called me and he said, “I got the strangest letter here. Could I have a courier bring it to you?” I said, “Sure.” He didn’t want to send it to me over the lines for obvious reasons.

I read the letter. The letter was from a federal national-security agency. Okay? The letter said, “I am a senior, longtime member of this security agency, and I have a Ph.D.” — I can’t remember in what, in physics for sure, maybe math also. “And,” the letter said, “I’m interested. I’m interested in talking to you, Mr. Bigelow. I have an interest in what you’ve been working on. I want to go to your ranch in Utah.”

Bigelow had bought a great big ranch, a 70-, 100-acre ranch in Utah that was in a basin for more than a century.

Was that the Skinwalker Ranch?
Yeah, that’s it. I called Bigelow back and said, “Hey, I’ll meet with the guy.” I called the guy. He said, “I don’t want to meet at my office, I don’t want to meet at your office. Where can we meet?” I said, “Come to my home.” The two of us met and I was terribly impressed with him. Very low-key scientist. He told me of his interest. I called Bigelow and I said, “This guy, I’ve checked him out and he seems like a pretty nice guy and his credentials are as he says.”

He went, met Bigelow, and after I don’t know how much time went by, he came to me and said, “Something should be done about this.
Somebody should study it.” I was convinced he was right. I said, “Well, if you were me, what would you say to people in power in the United States Senate who have huge control over the spending of defense money?” And here’s what he said: “What I will do is prepare something for you that anyone can look at it that wants to, it’s strictly science.” He put it in scientific language — what the study should consist of.

I, at the time, was the leader of the Senate, and I called two of my friends who for many, many years were like brothers. One a Democrat, one a Republican. They controlled for quite a number of years the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. It was Stevens and Inouye.

As I said in the New York Times article, it was the easiest meeting I ever had. I walked in and I knew so much and Ted Stevens interrupted me and said, “I’ve heard enough.” He said, “Since I was a pilot in World War II, I’ve been tremendously curious, concerned about stuff that we don’t know anything about.” He said, “I was in my airplane alone and off to my left was an object. I could see it. It was so close to me. I would veer up, down, sideways. Wherever I went, it was there. I was starting to get low on fuel, went and landed, and went to the air-traffic controller. I said, ‘Was there anybody up in the air with me?’ The guy said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’”

That’s why it was an easy sell for him. He, Ted Stevens, when he was in the military, didn’t go to his superior and say, “I saw the damnedest thing in the air.” Why? Because the work we did, pilots would almost refuse to report this stuff. Why? Because it would hurt them in their promotions and make them look like goofballs.

What we decided to do — it would be black money, we wouldn’t have a big debate on the Senate floor over it. They would put in their defense appropriation bill, 11 million bucks. The purpose of it was to study aerial phenomena. The money was given, a directive was given to the Pentagon, to put this out to bid, which they did.

People may be inquisitive: “How did Bigelow win that bid? Why?” Because he had spent his own money first. For two years, the federal government helped him. Thousands of pages were gathered, just like I told you, of things that had happened. There was no central location where all this stuff was gathered — that’s what he did. He built his building for it. For two years, when we got financial help — but there was a change in leadership and it didn’t work. So the federal government dropped out of the project.

As you’ve heard from a few people since this story came out, Luis Elizondo, for example, he quit, because they wouldn’t do anything seriously. He was terribly interested in this. They’re all mad because the federal government has done nothing. The guy that came to me, his job was in jeopardy because he tried to do something he felt was appropriate. He said to me first time we met, “I don’t know why we’re not doing anything.” He said, “I’ll bet the Chinese are.” He said, “I’ll bet the Russians are. I’ll bet the Japanese are. Why aren’t we doing anything?”

That’s the story. You’ve got in a nutshell, that’s how I got involved in this.

Great. I’m curious: Before you met Bigelow and went to his conferences, probably in the 1990s, were you a science buff? Were you just interested in things like space and aeronautics?
Zero. I’ll give you a couple of facts to support that. I took a math class in high school, geometry. I had to go beg the teacher to give me a D so I could play football. That’s not my strong suit, math and science. But that doesn’t take away the fact that I’m terribly interested. Some of my friends were really interested in science fiction. It bores me. I was never interested in it. Just didn’t care.

Not even the Mercury program, Apollo program? Was that something —
Zero. I mean I read the news. I saw it. That was nice, but it never piqued my curiosity about how they got a rocket into space, that kind of stuff. That was never my interest.

After it became something you were interested in and you got to Congress and the Senate, was it something you discussed with other members, other than Senator Glenn?
No, no, no. Because, Eric, you have to understand, this is a subject people are interested in, but they’re all … how to say this … they’re all afraid of the issue just like the pilots who won’t report these strange things. They’re afraid somebody will think they’re some kind of a wacko. With me, everybody always knew I was a wacko anyway. I didn’t care. I felt everybody knew who I was and it was something I was interested in. If you, or members of the press, want to criticize me, I didn’t care. I found this true because I felt I was doing something for our country.

What was different about talking with Senator Glenn about it?
Hey, listen, this is an ace in World War II and Korea. He’d already been into space, was a wonderful human being. I just cared so much about him. He was truly an American hero.

I traveled with him when I was a relatively new senator. Take, for example, we had to go over the Iron Curtain to Czechoslovakia, and the train stops at the border, and we get out of the train, the whole delegation. They have dogs, and they search us. With Glenn, two of the Russians, or they were Czechs or whatever they were, asked if they could have his autograph. He was a world-famous man.

I felt totally at ease, and he was interested. Did he say to me, “Let’s sit down sometime and have a long talk about this?” Neither of us had time to do that. But he was interested, and that was good enough for me. It helped me not feel like I was some kind of a goofball.

Yeah. Did he recount anything from his astronaut career?
No, he did not go into detail like Stevens did.

You know something interesting? Here in Las Vegas is an Air Force pilot — Joe Biden mentions him in his book, his name is Flynn. He was a colonel in the Air Force. I had gotten to know him. He’s a super-nice guy. I said, “Hey, you ever seen any of these things?” He said, “Of course.” You know, people just don’t talk about them.

I read somewhere, and I don’t know if this is really true at all, that you talked to President Clinton about aerial phenomenon and UFOs during his presidency.
Yes, I did. I did do that. Of course, you could talk to Bill Clinton about oranges. He had such an overwhelming curiosity that he would talk to you about oranges. This was a very passing conversation, but he was interested, of course. That’s just who he was. As you know, one of his No. 1 staffers, John Podesta, who worked for him at Walmart, has publicly supported all this stuff.

Have you talked with John Podesta about this?
Oh sure, he’s called me. Of course he has. He’s glad I did it.

Yeah. Just since the Times article publicized it, or was this something you talked about before?
We had talked about it before.

Why, if you want these things to be more public and more accepted now, why did you feel the need [for it] to be kept secret then? 
Because I wanted to get something done. I didn’t want a debate that no one knew what the hell they were talking about on the Senate floor.

Makes sense. When the program was running, was this something that you would be briefed on frequently? Were you briefed on it ever?
No, I left everybody alone. Nope.

You were never briefed?
That’s not my style, nope.

You just weren’t, in terms of reading the reports that they compiled or visiting the facilities?
Let me give you something that the press has totally failed and conjured. We have hundreds and hundreds of papers, pages of paper, that have been available since this was completed. Most all of it, 80 percent at least, is public. You know something? The press has never even looked at it. Not once. That’s where we are. I wanted it public, it was made public, and you guys have not even looked at it.

So, in short, it’s my belief you guys kind of want to be spoon-fed. You don’t want to do any work on your own. I’ve been around you guys my whole adult life, and on something this big, it’s too bad that the press has been so hammered and don’t have the staff they once had that somebody can be assigned to this. If they give you six months to work this, come back with some work on it. Nobody does anymore. They don’t have the resources, I think.

If the press did read those reports … Let me put it this way, I saw you tweeted “we don’t know the answers but we have plenty of evidence to support asking the questions.” To you, what’s the most compelling evidence to support asking a question?
Read the reports. Read the reports. We have hundreds. Eric; two, three weeks ago, maybe a month now, up in Montana, they had another strange deal at a missile base up there. It goes on all the time.

The sightings, those —
There are reports that are in writing that talk about all of this.

Do you know things about this program that you can’t discuss publicly?
Yeah, but there’s plenty that can be discussed publicly, and I’ve tried to do that. I’m interested only in research. I’m interested in science, and in helping the American public understand what the hell is going on. You know at this stage in the reports, we have thousands of people who have seen this stuff. Not hundreds — thousands.

*A version of this article appears in the March 19, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

{ http://nymag.com/selectall }

24-03-2018 om 01:04 geschreven door peter  

Humanity has contended with rising seas before — and it didn’t go well for us

BY ALEXANDRU MICU

Some 7,600 years ago, human civilization in Southeastern Europe suddenly came to a halt. New research sought answers as to why this happened, and the findings paint a stark reminder of the toll rising seas can inflict on our society.

Coccolithophore Emiliana huxleyi.

Image credits Jörg Bollmann.

The Neolithic revolution was the first major transformation humanity had paused — the transition foraging to farming. Spreading out from the Middle East, this wave of change took peoples used to hunt and forage wherever they pleased and tied them down, hoe in hand, to sedentary — but oh so lucrative — farms and fields.

Can’t till the sea, though

Around 7,600 years ago, however, the revolution paused — no new agricultural settlements seemed to pop up in Southeastern Europe around the time, existing communities declined, and the progress of civilization as a whole came to a standstill. Up until now, we didn’t have any inkling as to why this happened, but new research from the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, the Goethe University in Frankfurt, and the University of Toronto sheds some light on this mysterious period.

According to their findings, this lull in progress was due to an abrupt rise in sea levels in the northern Aegean Sea. Evidence of this event was calcified in the fossils of tiny marine algae preserved in seafloor sediments.

The impact this event had on societal dynamics and overall development during the time highlights the potential economic and social threats posed by sea level rise in the future, the team says. Given that climate-change-associated changes in sea level are virtually unavoidable, the team hopes their findings will help us better prepare for the flooding ahead.

“Approximately 7,600 years ago, the sea level must have risen abruptly in the Mediterranean regions bordering Southeastern Europe. The northern Aegean, the Marmara Sea and the Black Sea recorded an increase of more than one meter. This led to the flooding of low-lying coastal areas that would have been ideal areas for settlement,” says lead author Professor Dr. Jens Herrle.

The findings are based on a sediment core retrieved from the sea floor of the northern Aegean Sea. Herrle and his team used this core to reconstruct salinity levels in this part of the Mediterranean from 11,000 and 5,000 years ago. However, the core was also rich in tiny, calcified fossils of Emiliania huxleyi, a coccolithophore (a species of photosynthesizing plankton that’s ubiquitous even today).

Analyzing them under a scanning electric microscope, the team observed significant size changes in these algae — which indicate a change in the salinity of surface water in the Aegean during their lifetime.

“These calcifying algae evidence two rapid decreases in the salt content, at approximately 8,400 and again 7,600 years ago, which can only be explained by the fact that a higher volume of low-saline surface water flowed from the Black Sea into the northern Aegean at these times,” Herrle explains.

Such a rapid rise in sea levels would need a source, and the team says, surprisingly, it can be traced back to North America:

“The source of this may have been Lake Agassiz in North America. This glacial meltwater lake was enclosed in ice and experienced a massive breach during this period, which emptied an enormous volume of water into the ocean.”

The evidence supports a link between the two timeouts in the Neolithic revolution and the flooding events. The event 8,400 years ago coincides with archaeological findings suggesting that settlements in low-lying areas were under significant hardship from encroaching seas and other associated climatic changes. The renewed rise just 800 years later likely amplified these communities’ woes, keeping them from making the transition to agriculture.

Past fluctuations in sea levels have already had a significant effect on human history during the early days of agriculture, the authors note, warning that it would be unwise to dismiss the challenges it will place in our path in the future.

“Due to climate change, we expect global sea levels to rise by up to one meter over the next 100 years,” Herrle adds. “Millions of people could thus be displaced from coastal regions, with severe social and economic consequences.”

The paper “Black Sea outflow response to Holocene meltwater events” has been publishedin the journal Scientific Reports.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

23-03-2018 om 20:40 geschreven door peter  

Kim Wilde claims UFO sighting inspired her to return to music

By Kathleen Joyce | Fox News

Kim Wilde said an encounter with a UFO in 2009 inspired her to make a music comeback.  

(YouTube)

“Kids in America” singer Kim Wilde said an encounter with a UFO in 2009 was one of the reasons she decided to return to music and make a comeback.

Wilde told the BBC after leaving the music business she got married and raised her children. However, two events pushed her to come back and give music a second chance.

Wilde claims she had an encounter with a UFO in 2009. She said she was sitting in the garden at her home with a glass of wine when she saw something.

"Then I looked up in the sky and saw this huge bright light behind a cloud. Brighter than the moon, but similar to the light from the moon,” she said.

"I said to my husband and my friend, 'that's really odd,' so we walked down the grass and looked to see if there was any source. All of a sudden it moved, very quickly, from about 11:00 to 1:00. Then it just did that, back and forth, for several minutes,” Wilde recalled.

"Whenever it moved, something shifted in the air - but it was silent. Absolutely silent."

The singer said she thinks about the moment every day and it gave her an idea for her new album, “Here Comes the Aliens.”

She sings on the album that maybe the aliens will “save us from the apocalypse.”

"Perhaps that's completely naïve," she laughs. "Why wouldn't they be angry with us and fling us off this beautiful earth that we're ruining? I can't deny we haven't been a terrible disappointment,” Wilde said.

She said her career started to flatline in the 1990s when she became older and felt she could not keep up.

"I'd been in it since I was 20, then I was 36 and everyone, I felt, was doing it a lot better than I was. They had the ambition that I didn't have any more. When Madonna came along, I didn't feel I could compete, so I said, 'You know what? You're best off being who you are, and that's going to have to be enough,’” Wilde told the BBC. "Sometimes it was, and a lot of the time it wasn't."

Wilde announced she would be starting her comeback tour on March 30. 

{http://www.foxnews.com/ }

23-03-2018 om 19:51 geschreven door peter  

23-03-2018 om 19:32 geschreven door peter  

Tiny Mummy’s ‘Alien’ Appearance Finally Explained

23-03-2018 om 18:35 geschreven door peter  

Pentagon’s New Arms-Research Chief Eyes Space-Based Ray Guns

BY PATRICK TUCKERTECHNOLOGY EDITOR READ BIO

Neutral-particle beams, a concept first tried in the 1980s, may get a fresh look under Michael Griffin.

The next thing in space-based weapons could be decades old, according to Michael Griffin, the first defense undersecretary for research and engineering.

“Directed energy is more than just big lasers,” Griffin said. “That’s important. High-powered microwave approaches can effect an electronics kill. The same with the neutral particle beam systems we explored briefly in the 1990s” for use in space-based anti-missile systems. Such weapons can be “useful in a variety of environments” and have the “advantage of being non-attributable,” meaning that it can be hard to pin an attack with a particle weapon on any particular culprit since it leaves no evidence behind of who or even what did the damage.

Like lasers, neutral-particle beams focus beams of energy that travel in straight lines, unaffected by electromagnetic fields. But instead of light, neutral-particle beams use composed of accelerated subatomic particles traveling at near-light speed, making them easier to work with (though the folks that run CERN’s hadron collider may disagree). When its particles touche the surface of a target, they takes on a charge that allows them to penetrate the target’s shell or exterior more deeply.

This all makes neutral-particle beams attractive as space-based anti-missile systems. Over the years, various defense companies have released mockups of proposed designs that seem to come out of an issue of Popular Mechanics circa 1950.

The Pentagon first tested the concept in the late 1980s as part of a program called the Neutral Particle Beam, or NPB. According to a 1990 writeup that military scientists sent to lawmakers, it explored the possibility of a space-based weapon that could “kill missiles and reentry vehicles in the boost, post-boost, and mid-course portion of an ICBM trajectory as well as discriminated objects during the midcourse phase” — meaning a defensive system that could  knock out missiles as they were leaving the launch pad or flying in space toward their target.

{ http://www.defenseone.com/}

23-03-2018 om 12:28 geschreven door peter  

My wife and I have made watching Saturday Night Live a ritual in our home. Say what you will about the quality of SNL today in relation to the ‘good old days,’ the show still has its finger on the pulse of American culture. As we sat on our couch this last Saturday night, beers in hand, host Bill Hader, and the SNL cast put on a sketch about alien abduction. My wife and I realized at that moment, when our eyes met, our perception of anything related to the subject of aliens or UFOs was no longer passive, and that SNL was playing a role in establishing this active participation.

Neither my wife nor I have ever had a strange paranormal experience. We have never seen a UFO, let alone been aboard one. We have never seen aliens or ghosts or Bigfoot. My personal and scholarly interest is that of the UFO community, the individuals who form the subcultural collective which engages with the UFO phenomenon and attached discourse. My wife, who has stood by me by some curious miracle, quietly, and with great patience, tolerates my Ufological interests. Yet, by association alone, or her polite way of listening to me talk about the latest UFO scandal or phone call I had to make to a UFO witness, the cultural impact of UFOs seems to have rubbed off on her.

When Roger, the Reiki healer, played by Bill Hader, explains why a tourist couple visiting Sedona should not hike up to the top of Spirit Rock because of extraterrestrial visitors, we both sat quietly through the entire sketch. While the sketch itself was a bit of a dud, compared to Kate McKinnon’s internet-breaking alien abduction sketch with Ryan Gosling, we both had the exact same question on our minds, but were being polite and refrained from hitting ‘Pause’ on the PVR.

Sedona, Arizona

You can view Hader’s sketch here.

Hader’s Roger, playing to a fairly common Ufological paradigm, goes on to explain that he often climbs to the top of the mountain to meditate and connect with his spirit and body. It all went south one night, however, when “she revealed herself…an alien lady with a head shaped like Mr. Peanut.” The alien “initiates intercourse…because they needed DNA for their little babies.”

However, due to the alien’s unfamiliarity with human anatomy, she flipped Roger over, “spread [his] cakes and blasted [his] Raisinette with a turkey baster.” Roger awakes in his bedroom after the experience with his pants on backwards, and on his pillow is a mint with a little note that read, “Great Job!” When the tourist couple inquires as to why they probed him, obviously pointing out the whole anatomy issue, Roger responds by saying, “I guess they had to figure out the lay of the land.” The sketch continues on with strange lights hovering from above, one of the SNL cast being beamed up to a UFO, and Roger getting to hold his new alien baby.

Mysterious lights in the sky, or just some clever photography?

When the sketch concluded, I managed to speak first, “Is there more UFO stuff on TV, or are we just noticing it more?”

My wife responded with,

“I think we just notice it more. We are prone to noticing it more because it is now a part of our lives; I notice it more. When people talk about UFOs or aliens or something paranormal, I usually stop and listen. I’m tuned into it more, as if it is starting to matter to me. This is your fault.”

Saturday Night Live is a cultural institution. As one journalist put it,

“with its weekly live broadcasts, the show can swiftly distill and cement public perceptions of current events.”

From a pop culture standpoint, it still has significant cachet no matter how “good” or “bad” the sketches or cast are. In regard to its coverage of UFOs and aliens, the show usually sticks to the usual and simple fare, however, it does make some interesting ideological claims. Furthermore, it puts the UFO debate into the pop culture realm, but in an approachable way.

Four years ago, Hader was in a sketch featuring actor Jon Hamm in which he was an alien poorly disguised as a sports announcer named Greg. The sketch featured Greg ‘infecting’ various others and turning them into aliens in order to invade the planet.

I previously mentioned the famous Kate McKinnon and Ryan Gosling sketch, that aired on December 5^th, 2015, which involves three alien abductees being interviewed by Pentagon staffers concerning their experiences. On September 30^th, 2017, Gosling returned to SNL to reprise his role with McKinnon to be interviewed again by Pentagon staff due to the lot of them being abducted a second time. Coincidently, the famous New York Times article concerning a secret Pentagon program which looked into “advanced aerial threats,” in other words, UFOs, was published on December 16^th of the same year.

It seems that the writers of SNL sketches do play to the conspiracy paradigm present in UFO discourse. The interviewers in both sketches are NSA agents and have been tasked with getting to the bottom of “three confirmed cases” of alien abduction. Furthermore, the abductees in both sketches have vastly different experiences. Ryan Gosling and Cecily Strong’s characters both enjoy peacefully divine interactions with the beautiful aliens bathed in light, while McKinnon’s character is on a different part of the ship, the lower decks perhaps, where little alien grays poke and prod at her, steal her pants, and stare at her while she pees in a bowl. As McKinnon puts it, she didn’t think she was “dealing with the top brass.” This is another common experiencer narrative; the stark difference between those who are contacted for some prophetic or higher purpose, and those who experience horrifying and frightening abductions.

They’re here…

This most recent alien sketch involving Hader plays upon the alien-human hybrid plot, which arguably gained great fame when Dr. David Jacobs published his book, The Threat, in 1997. While stories of breeding programs and the harvesting human ovum and sperm existed in the 1960’s, Jacob’s work showcased many individuals who claim to have taken part in such a program, and were continuously ‘re-abducted’ to see, hold and bond with their hybrid children, or to undergo more sexual acts.

More recently, the story of David Huggins hit the news cycle in mid-2017. Huggins claims to have engaged in sexual intercourse with a female extraterrestrial for the purpose of having a hybrid child, and a recently released documentary entitled Love and Saucers tells his story.

While many within the UFO community may get upset with SNL for turning these often frightening and heartbreaking experiences into a joke, the purpose of the show is to point to our collective cultural landscape and make fun of it. When SNL targets White House staff or some current cultural issue, we take it for granted. It is truly a right of passage for every American President to have one of the SNL cast to play him or her (soon hopefully). George W. Bush had Will Ferrel, Barack Obama had Fred Armison and Jay Pharoah, and Donald Trump has Alec Baldwin. Before every popular cultural event such as the Super Bowl, The Academy Awards, and St. Patrick’s Day, the cast and writers of SNL put it through the ringer, and ensure we see the humor in our common traditions, ideologies, paradigms, and assumed truths. The purpose of parody and farce is to satirize, to allow us to giggle at something truthful and even scary.

I am not suggesting that Saturday Night Live is some Ufological savior. Nor am I suggesting that the butt of their jokes, the UFO community and the countless people who have had strange paranormal experiences, should relax and laugh a little. I think we need to appreciate that, for better or worse, we are becoming more comfortable with the realization that the “truths” we used to hold dear are beginning to shift and change. If the show is a cultural mirror, a silly twisted mirror, but a mirror none the less, with every UFO related sketch, our reflection becomes a little more otherworldly. With every UFO sketch that we laugh at, it is also informing the broader popular culture that UFO phenomenon is something worth talking about. Perhaps SNL is unknowingly normalizing the UFO phenomenon; if we laugh about it, we can also talk about it.

Perhaps the more we engage with the UFO phenomenon, the more it seems to show up in our regular lives on Saturday nights. Regardless of whether you are a fan of the show or not, SNL continues to question and poke fun at UFOs and aliens. In some way, it normalizes the strange in its various sketches and turns UFOs and the related phenomenon into approachable.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org }

22-03-2018 om 22:13 geschreven door peter  

What’s a fallstreak hole? A rare cloud phenomenon that was just spotted over Ladera Ranch

Rachel Carlsen was outside her son’s school in Ladera Ranch the morning of Tuesday, March 20 when she noticed something strange in the sky.

“It looked like a tear in the cloud,” Carlsen, 35, said. “I didn’t know what I was looking at, but I knew I’d never seen anything like it before.”

She snapped a photo with her iPhone and later Googled the phrase “hole in cloud.” It turned out that she’d captured a rare instance of a fallstreak hole, a phenomenon where a large circular gap appears in a high-altitude cloud.

Also known as a “hole-punch cloud,” this rare formation appears when water droplets in the cloud cool to temperatures below freezing — but don’t freeze over. If there’s a disturbance to the cloud — such as a plane — it triggers the rapid formation of ice crystals. The crystals fall out of the cloud in streaks, leaving behind an expanding gap.

“It’s not something you see in Orange County every day,” Carlsen said.

The winter storm approaching Southern California this week is said to be opening up an “atmospheric river” of subtropical rain clouds ahead of a cold front, according to forecasts. Rain is expected to fall starting Tuesday afternoon.

{ https://www.ocregister.com/ }

21-03-2018 om 23:52 geschreven door peter  

For your next intergalactic voyage: a weather station by MB&F and L’Epée 183

MB&F L'Epee The Fifth Element horological weather station - Baselworld 2018

{ https://journal.hautehorlogerie.org/en }

21-03-2018 om 22:55 geschreven door peter  

Fact Check: Did Stephen Hawking Become A Catholic After A Blessing From Pope Francis?

According to a controversial Facebook post, in a time-honored sacred ritual, Professor Hawking became a Catholic just before passing away.

But did Stephen Hawking really turn to Christianity before his death?

The world-renowned astrophysicist passed away at the age of 76, leaving behind a great scientific legacy. And when it came down to religion and God, Hawking wasn’t really someone who was religiously motivated, nor did he believe in the existence in god as he claimed, on numerous occasions, how God had no role in creating the universe.”

Now, as news about Hawking’s death has quickly spread among all social networks and news agencies, posts about Stephen Hawking have become very popular, after all, he was one of the most popular scientists of the 21st century.

On 14 March 2018, a Facebook Post published by a Page called „Catholics Online“ posted an image of Professor Stephen Hawking and Pope Francis with a caption reading: Before he died, ‘Stip’h ‘Hawkins’ (apparently the author didn’t even manage to spell Hawking’s name accurately) who did not believe in God requested to visit the Vatican. “Now l believe” was the only statement he made after the Holy Father blessed him.

Before he died, Stiph Hawkins who did not believe in God requested to visit the Vatican. "Now l believe" was the only statement he made after the Holy Father blessed him.

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However, we all know that Professor Hawking was an atheist, and saw no place for God in the universe.

Hawking often discussed the origins of the universe and his views about a Creator suggesting that the universe had no need for such a divine being.

As the Washington Post documented after his death, Hawking told the Guardian in 2011 that he did not believe in an afterlife or heaven:

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

Furthermore, in his Book “The Grand Design,” which was co-written with American physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says according to a new series of theories, it is superfluous to think of a creator of the universe.

“The universe began with the Big Bang, which simply followed the inevitable law of physics,” Hawking wrote. “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.”

“The universe didn’t need a God to begin; it was quite capable of launching its existence on its own,” said Hawking explained in his book, The Grand Design.

In today’s world, where new theories emerge reapply, physicists are constantly adapting new ideologies and theories to new discoveries in their respective fields.

In 2010, he told ABC News: “One can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, but science makes God unnecessary.”

But despite the fact that Hawking was an atheist, he was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, appointed to it by Pope Paul VI in 1968.

As noted in an article written by the Catholic Herald, the academy said he told four popes he wanted to ‘advance the relationship between Faith and Scientific Reason’.

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which Pope Pius IX established in 1847, tweeted, “We are deeply saddened about the passing of our remarkable Academician Stephen #Hawking who was so faithful to our Academy.”

“He told the 4 Popes he met that he wanted to advance the relationship between Faith and Scientific Reason. We pray the Lord to welcome him in his Glory,” @CasinaPioIV, the academy, tweeted March 14.

It is precisely there, from where the Facebook Page Catholics Online created their little contribution to Fake News.

View image on Twitter

Casina Pio IV@CasinaPioIV

Francisco saluta a Hawking che è contento, soddisfatto e sofferentemente per la malattia che lo imprigiona

2:10 PM - Mar 15, 2018

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They used an image of Pope Francis and Stephen Hawking when he delivered his presentation on “The Origin of the Universe” at the academy’s plenary session on science and sustainability in 2016.

But despite the fact that Professor Hawking did not believe in God, he was greatly appreciated and respected in the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and the Catholic Church in General.

Curiously, Vatican astronomer Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, who has studied both physics and philosophy, told Catholic News Service in 2010 that “the ‘god’ that Stephen Hawking doesn’t believe in is one I don’t believe in either.”

“God is not just another force in the universe, alongside gravity or electricity,” he added. “God is the reason why existence itself exists. God is the reason why space and time and the laws of nature can be present for the forces to operate that Stephen Hawking is talking about.”

Source:

Featured image credit: Vatican Media.

• Stephen Hawking was a longtime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
• Casina Pio IV‏ ‘I’m not afraid’: What Stephen Hawking said about God, his atheism, and his own death

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

20-03-2018 om 23:55 geschreven door peter  

What is a Supervolcano?

BY MIHAI ANDREI

As the name implies, a supervolcano is an extremely large volcano, capable of ejecting over 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles) of deposits. There are six known supervolcanoes and twelve known super-eruptions.

Graphic scale of known volcanic and supervolcanic eruptions. Image in public domain.

1. What is a supervolcano

If we want to see what makes a supervolcano, we need to first understand what a volcano is — and what makes it ‘super’.

The Earth’s internal structure is layered in three spherical shells: an outer solid crust(everything we see and walk on), a viscous mantle, an outer core that is much less viscous than the mantle (often considered liquid), and a solid inner core. A volcano is a rupture in the crust that allows material from the asthenosphere to reach the surface in the form of lava, volcanic ash, and gases.

You can think of volcanoes as vents through which molten rock escapes to the surface.

Most volcanoes appear because the Earth’s crust is fractured into rigid plates called tectonic plates. These plates “float” on a hotter, softer layer in its mantle. When pressure from gases within the molten rock becomes too great, an eruption occurs, but in order for this to happen, a volcano must first gather magma in a magma chamber.

A magma chamber is like a cauldron of molten rock, put under great pressure, that gradually fractures the other rocks around it, as it tries to reach the surface in order to release its pressure. These magma chambers lie deep inside the earth, generally at around 1-10 km deep.

A depiction of the Yellowstone magma chamber. Yellowstone is a known supervolcano. Image via NPS.

When an eruption takes place and material is ejected from the magma chambers, they sometimes form features called calderas: large circular or oval depressions, more than 1 km (0.6 miles) in diameter. Calderas appear because the magma was supporting the weight above it, and when the magma is ejected through the volcano, the whole thing can collapse under its own weight. For this reason, calderas can somewhat resemble craters.

But sometimes, the magma can’t push through to the surface, so it gathers in the magma chamber, building up the pressure. As the magma pool gets bigger and bigger, the chamber grows, reaching ungodly pressures — and when it does it erupt, it’s an enormous eruption; you could say, a super-eruption.

That’s right: supervolcanoes form when they gather enough magma and pressure for a gargantuan explosion. In more formal terms, geologists classify supervolcanoes as having a “VEI” of 8. The Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) is a relative measure of the explosiveness of volcanic eruptions, devised by researchers from the United States Geological Survey. The largest possible VEI magnitude is 8 — so, in other words, a supervolcano is the largest possible volcano.

VEI and ejecta volume correlation — note that the VEI is a logarithmic scale, meaning that each degree of magnitude is ten times larger than the previous one. Tephra is the material produced by a volcanic eruption regardless of composition or fragment size.

3. What are the supervolcanoes?

Thankfully, there aren’t that many supervolcanoes on Earth. It’s not entirely clear just how many super-eruptions there have been in Earth’s history (we’ll use that term even though it’s not quite proper). Some research has found evidence of 60 super-eruptions, while other studies report 47 such events, with the most recent one being the Oruanui eruption of New Zealand’s Taupo Volcano, 26,500 years ago. The Oruanui eruption was a highly unusual one, with a complex interplay of ejection and pyroclastic flows, covering New Zealand’s North Island with ignimbrite (a type of hardened tuff) up to 200 meters (660 ft) deep. The same volcanic area caused two other super-eruptions, 340,000 and 1,080,000 years ago respectively.

Another famous eruption is Lake Toba, which occurred some 74,000 years ago (it’s rather unusual to have two super eruptions in such quick geological succession). The eruption of Toba led to a volcanic winter (a drop in global temperatures caused by volcanic ash and droplets of sulfuric acid and water which obscure the Sun) with a worldwide decrease in temperature between 3 to 5 °C (5.4 to 9.0 °F), and up to 15 °C (27 °F) in higher latitudes. This had catastrophic consequences for the planet’s wildlife — including early humans. It killed most of the humans living at the time, creating a population bottleneck in central east Africa and India, which affects the genetic makeup of the human worldwide population to this day.

An incomplete map of supervolcanoes around the world. Red is VEI 8 and orange is VEI 7.

However, without a doubt, the most famous supervolcano is Yellowstone.

4. The Yellowstone supervolcano

Unlike most volcanoes, which emerge at the boundary of tectonic plates, Yellowstone (in Idaho, US) is a hotspot. Hotspots are pockets of unusually hot magma. It is thought that these hotspots are fed by the underlying mantle. Intriguingly, their position is not influenced by plate tectonics — as the plates move, the hotspot stays in the same place, because it lies beneath the crust. This can create a so-called hotspot trail, which leads to the illusion that the hotspot is moving — it is, in fact, the surface of the Earth that is moving above the hotspot. There is a lot of scientific debate around the nature and development of hotspots, but let’s get back to Yellowstone, shall we?

Remember how we said hotspots can leave a trail behind them? That’s exactly what the Yellowstone hotspot did. So it has not one, but several calderas (including the Island Park Caldera, the Henry’s Fork Caldera, and the Bruneau-Jarbidge caldera). The current hotspot lies beneath the Yellowstone Caldera.

The calderas of Yellowstone.

Image credits: NPS.

The largest eruption at Yellowstone took place 2.1 million years ago and had a volume of 2,450 cubic kilometers. However, it had several smaller eruptions. Volcanism at Yellowstone seems to happen periodically — there was an eruption 1.3 million years ago, and another one approximately 630,000 years ago. Much smaller eruptions (not super-eruptions) have happened as early as 2,270 years ago.

A Yellowstone eruption would be a catastrophic scenario. Thankfully, that’s not likely to happen.

Image credits: NPS.

6. Should we worry?

Not really. Studies have found that super-eruptions are extremely rare — on the basis of volcanic activity during the past 13.5 million years — there’s a 1% chance of an eruption of this scale in the next 460–7,200 years. Statistically, there are about 1.4 supervolcano eruptions every million years, so that would mean there is at least a 75% probability of a VEI 8 eruption in this timeframe.

La Garita Caldera is a large volcanic caldera in the San Juan volcanic field. It took place around 28 million years ago and it is among the largest known volcanic eruptions in our planet’s history.

Image via Wikipedia.

So while these eruptions can be extremely damaging, they’re so rare that the time-averaged impact really isn’t that big. However, here’s the thing: VEI 7 eruptions occur much more frequently (10-100 times), so that means that on average, we should be more worried about these VEI 7 eruptions than the supervolcano eruptions.

Supervolcanoes are some of the most impressive features on our planet, capable of ungodly eruptions which would send the entire planet into disarray. But as it so often happens, it’s not the big sword that’s threatening, but the thousand smaller cuts.

8. Bonus: A super-super volcano

Interestingly, a 2004 study reports evidence of a VEI 9 eruption, responsible for the Fish Canyon Tuff.

Wait a minute — I thought you said VEI 8 was the maximum possible eruption?!

Well, yes, but scientists found evidence of an eruption with a mass of >10¹⁶ kg and a magnitude of 9.2. So while VEI 8 is technically the largest classification, the Fish Canyon Tuff eruption was more than 10 times larger what would be necessary to classify as a supervolcano.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

20-03-2018 om 22:55 geschreven door peter  

BY MICHELE DEBCZAK

ISTOCK

Aliens have been depicted countless times in cinema, from Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon (1902) to James Cameron's Avatar (2009). But despite the advancements in special-effects technology over the past century, most aliens we see on screen still share a lot of similarities—mainly, they look, move, and interact with the world like humans do. Vox explains how the classic alien look came to be in their new video below.

When you picture an alien, you may imagine a being with reptilian skin or big, black eyes, but the basic components of a human body—two arms, two legs, and a head with a face—are likely all there. In reality, finding an intelligent creature that evolved all those same features on a planet millions of light-years away would be an extraordinary coincidence. If alien life does exist, it may not look like anything we've ever seen on Earth.

But when it comes to science fiction, accuracy isn't always the goal. Creating an alien character humans can relate to may take priority. Or, the alien's design may need to work as a suit that can be worn by human performers. The result is a version of extraterrestrial life that looks alien— but not too alien—to movie audiences.

So if aliens probably won't have four limbs, two eyes, and a mouth, what would they look like if we ever met them person? These experts have some theories.

[h/t Vox]

{http://mentalfloss.com/ }

20-03-2018 om 21:52 geschreven door peter  

Tom McKay

YouTube Kids, the supposedly child-friendly version of YouTube that’s been shown to often play host to troves of slop content and disturbing videos, apparently was showing videos from British conspiracy theorist David Icke, a guy who believes reptilian aliens secretly control the world and are responsible for the Holocaust.

According to a Saturday report in Business Insider, searching for the term “UFO” on YouTube kids turned up a video purporting “to show a UFO shooting at a chemtrail.” The suggested followups for that video featured a number of Icke’s clips, including a nearly five-hour lecture on how aliens built the pyramids and secretly run the planet through a ruling class extraterrestrial-human hybrids. The video also delves into a number of other conspiracy theories, including claims Freemasons indulge in human sacrifice and President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by his own government.

According to Business Insider, “Two other conspiracy theory videos by Icke appeared in the related videos, meaning it was easy for children to quickly go from watching relatively innocent videos about toys to conspiracy content.

Searching for the term “moon landing” also resulted in a number of conspiratorial videos emerging, including one making the claim that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider had opened a portal to another world that an unfortunate employee then vanished in. While YouTube removed 25 videos specifically flagged by Business Insider, the site reported conspiracy content remains widely available on YouTube Kids and watching some of the videos resulted in others showing up in the app’s recommended video queue.

While the regular version of YouTube has its own problems with propaganda and disinformation (some of which, like videos blasting mass shooting survivors as “crisis actors,” have repeatedly made the site’s top page), YouTube Kids is ostensibly supposed to be totally free of this kind of content. It’s also likely that many parents are letting their kids watch it unattended, which may be ill-advised on the parents’ part, but is clearly part of the site’s business model.

YouTube has previously promised to clear out this kind of content, and shut down a number of channels featuring inappropriate videos starting last year. It’s debatable whether it’s actually possible to ensure this stuff doesn’t begin creeping in, though, since there are millions upon millions of videos intended for children available on both the main site and YouTube Kids, and YouTube and its parent company Google tend to rely first and foremost on algorithms to police this sea of content rather than human moderators. When it began paying attention in November 2017, YouTube demonetized at least two million videos and 50,000 channels with disturbing content aimed at kids, suggesting the scale of the problem whichever app is used.

In a statement to Business Insider, YouTube even alluded to how solutions to this problem rely on its “human trained systems” rather than actual humans:

The YouTube Kids app is home to a wide variety of content that includes enriching and entertaining videos for families. This content is screened using human trained systems. That being said, no system is perfect and sometimes we miss the mark. When we do, we take immediate action to block the videos or, as necessary, channels from appearing in the app. We will continue to work to improve the YouTube Kids app experience.

In any case, prior advice stands: Don’t let YouTube babysit your childrenunless you want them watching disturbing Spiderman-bikini girl mashups, videos of Peppa Pig being fed bleach, or apparently, elderly British men telling them that the government is secretly staffed by alien lizard monsters wearing human skin.

[Business Insider]

{ https://gizmodo.com/ }

20-03-2018 om 21:40 geschreven door peter  

A few years ago, an April Fool’s piece in the Daily Mail referred to “the U.S. Military’s supposed research into using microwaves as a mind control weapon”. For many people, however, the subject is no joke. Machines designed to tamper with a victim’s thoughts are, according to those who know about such things, employed on a routine basis by governments and other agencies. What few people realize, however, is that reports of such devices have a long history that stretches back more than two hundred years.

Until relatively recently, belief in mind control machines was automatically assumed to be a sign of madness. The first detailed study of the subject was an article entitled “On the Origin of the Influencing Machine in Schizophrenia”, written by the Austrian psychoanalyst Viktor Tausk in 1919. From a study of various psychiatric patients, Tausk concluded that a relatively common form of delusion involved what he referred to as an “influencing machine” (or in the original German, Beeinflussungs-apparat): a device that “produces, as well as removes, thoughts and feelings by means of waves or rays or mysterious forces which the patient’s knowledge of physics is inadequate to explain”.

If such beliefs are symptomatic of mental illness, then according to Mike Jay “Patient Zero” was an English businessman named James Tilly Matthews. In 1797, after accusing the government of treasonous conspiracy, Matthews was incarcerated in the Bedlam lunatic asylum in London. It was there that he developed his theory of the “Air Loom” – the progenitor of all future influencing machines and mind control devices. To quote from Jay’s article:

Matthews was convinced that outside the grounds of Bedlam, in a basement cellar by London Wall, a gang of villains were controlling and tormenting his mind with diabolical rays. They were using a machine called an Air Loom, of which Matthews was able to draw intimate technical diagrams, and which combined recent developments in gas chemistry with the strange force of animal magnetism, or mesmerism. […] Its discharges of magnetic fluid were focused to deliver thoughts, feelings and sensations directly into Matthews’ brain. […] To facilitate this process, the gang had implanted a magnet into his head. As a result of the Air Loom, Matthews was tormented constantly by delusions, physical agonies, fits of laughter and being forced to parrot whatever nonsense they chose to feed into his head.

The Air Loom

In an article about the Air Loom in the May 2003 issue of Fortean Times, Mark Pilkington described how subsequent delusions evolved to keep pace with the latest developments in science: “patients were quick to grasp new technologies in their attempts to rationalize what was happening to them”. In 1886, soon after the invention of the telephone, one doctor observed that his patients would now complain “that people use these instruments to torment them”. In 1897, the Swedish author August Strindberg wrote in his autobiography that “the idea that I was being persecuted by enemies who employed electricity began to obsess me”. By the time Tausk came to write his famous paper in 1919, the situation had evolved still further:

The schizophrenic influencing machine is a machine of mystical nature. The patients are able to give only vague hints of its construction. It consists of boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries, and the like. Patients endeavour to discover the construction of the apparatus by means of their technical knowledge, and it appears that with the progressive popularization of the sciences, all the forces known to technology are utilized to explain the functioning of the apparatus. All the discoveries of mankind, however, are regarded as inadequate to explain the marvellous powers of this machine, by which the patients feel themselves persecuted.

Despite their technical sophistication, the mind control devices – from the days of the Air Loom to the early 20th century – were always the work of human beings. Sometimes the shadowy operators were members of a criminal gang, in other cases they were agents of the government – but no-one imagined they were anything but human. Then Richard Shaver came onto the scene, and everything changed.

On the face of it, Shaver was a science fiction writer. The bulk of his output was published in Amazing Stories magazine, under the editorship of Ray Palmer, between 1945 and 1949. But Shaver maintained that his writings were based on the truth, and Palmer went along with this – presenting the stories in the guise of a neo-fortean “Shaver Mystery”. Central to the Shaver Mystery was the idea of a vast, unknown subterranean world populated by ancient, degenerate creatures known as “deros”. According to David Hatcher Childress, writing in Lost Continents and the Hollow Earth:

The deros have special beam weapon rays that they use to create as much trouble with the outside world as possible. The dero secretly foster wars, crimes and disasters while working among surface people or using their “controlling rays”. These rays can create solid-looking illusions, nightmares, hypnotic compulsions and urges to commit a crime.

This is remarkably close to the widespread belief in clandestine government activities that can be found on the web today – not just mind control on an industrial scale, but the deliberate creation of wars and “natural” disasters.

So was Shaver telling the truth? Many people will have difficulty with the concept of subterranean deros… but if he had talked about aliens, or an alliance between aliens and the government, his ideas would still meet with approval in many quarters today. This begs the question: were Shaver’s deros really aliens who created the illusion of a vast underground world in his mind?

And that brings us up against the Catch-22 of mind control. If Shaver was lying, or deluded, then of course we can’t believe a word he said. But if he was telling the truth – and he really was the victim of systematic mind control – then… well, we still can’t believe a word he said, can we?

Dero, from Amazing Stories June 1947

Andrew May

Mind control history channel

{http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

20-03-2018 om 15:17 geschreven door peter  

We all want to be a little smarter, a little more effective and skilled.  Some people exercise and take vitamins, some people do jigsaw puzzles, and some of our Silicon Valley overlords micro-dose themselves with LSD every morning.  Now an Australian company has developed a new tool in our eternal quest for perfection. HUMM Tech recently announced the Edge V One, a wearable device—a headband, to be precise—they claim can boost brain power by up to 20%, but some experts worry that this headband of intellect could be hacked to mind control the person wearing it.

The Edge V One works by reading the electrical signals produced by the brain and delivering a small jolt of electricity approximately equivalent to the power of an electric toothbrush to parts of the brain that are not performing at optimum levels. CEO of HUMM Tech Iain Mcintyre described it like this:

What we’re doing is artificially connecting parts of the brain and letting those parts of the brain talk to each other better.

Our understanding of consciousness and the human brain is being upended all the time. Recently, we’ve learned that about the role of brain waves in consciousness, and we have a better picture of what the mind looks like. This brain boosting headband seems to fall in line with many other current discoveries.

Studies show that the mind looks like a wave of electricity through the brain. This device can, allegedly, redirect that electricity to boost brain power.

HUMM Tech says that their headband is the “beginning of a revolution,” that will lead to direct human interfacing with machines. They did, however, agree that there was a risk to the technologies. Asked if the tech was a type of mind-control, HUMM Tech co-founder Dr. Tim Fiori said it was “kind of mind-control.” Iain Mcintyre also agreed that, if the technology was abused, it might be possible for bad actors to hack the brains of those who wear this device.

Perhaps we should be concerned with this potential mind control technology falling into the hands of companies who have already admitted efforts to manipulate populations getting their hands on it. Facebook is currently working on similar technologies, as is Elon Musk, and as our own Brent Swancer recently examined, government research into mind control is a well established tradition.

Iain Mcintyre described the potential applications of machine interfacing technologies in a way that sounds like a dream come true for Facebook, and many Facebook users:

“Instead of needing to type on your phone, your brain can send the word to the person you want to message.”

So, machine enabled telepathy. Telepathy filtered through the corporate service providing it. Yikes. Will we soon see targeted ads based on our dreams and private thoughts?

This is what the zombie apocalypse looks like.

Of course, none of this is a new idea. Transhumanism has been around for a long time, but it’s only now that the first wave of technologies are being released to the civilian population. Should we run for the hills?

That’s up to you. Every technological revolution carries with it new and weird risks that were impossible to conceive of before it was invented. As our capability for incredible and amazing feats of progress increases, so too does our capability for exciting new ways to do terrible things to each other. So it goes.

At least this headband might let you savagely beat your friends at video games before Facebook completely zombifies you.

The Edge V One will be released on Kickstarter later this year.

{http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

20-03-2018 om 15:05 geschreven door peter  

Mysterious Loch Ness like sea creature washes up on South Georgia Beach

A mysterious sea creature washed ashore in St. Simons Island and it has beachgoers scratching their heads.

Credit images: News4Jax and Jeff Warren.

Jeff Warren and his son were at Wolf Island National Wildlife Refuge just north of St. Simons Island in Georgia Friday when they came upon the creature on a barrier island.

Warren thought it was a dead seal, but said when he got a closer look it resembled more of the Loch Ness monster.

Warren sent the photo to News4Jax and said the creature was about 4 to 5 feet long with two fins.

Credit images: News4Jax and Jeff Warren.

A local writer and novelist contacted News4Jax saying he believes the mysterious sea creature looks exactly like the legendary Altamaha-ha, a river monster of the Altamaha River located just west of Wolf Island and could be a survivor of the Mesozoic Era.

  

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

20-03-2018 om 10:00 geschreven door peter  

Here Are Five Ways Stephen Hawking Predicted The World Could End

Not long ago, the great Stephen Hawking left us to travel among the stars.

The last great scientists on Earth died aged 76, and the news shocked the scientific world. But before leaving on his eternal trip, professor Hawking left us a lot to think about.

The Earth will disappear and become a massive ball of fire. By that time, 600 years from now, humanity must have colonized another planet. These warnings would not be given credit were it not because they came from famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, one of the voices that have spoken the most about the end of the world.

Hawking argued that the Alpha Centauri star system could be the most viable option for humanity, reason why he worked on the Breakthrough Starshot project, so future spacecraft could travel to this planet in the next 20 years using small spaceship that could travel at the speed of light.

Resumed, professor Hawking was THE scientist who made science more appealing and exciting to the general public. He Loved science, and science loved him back.

Dubbed as one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century, professor Hawking had become famous not only for his intelligence but also for his status as a celebrity, being one of the few people who had survived amyotrophic lateral sclerosis for so many years.

From the Big Bang theory to studies on black holes, his contributions to these fields will forever remain in the analogs of science, and his legacy will live on.

However, the British physicist was not only a great scientist, but he was also very concerned about our planet, our civilization, and the future that awaits us.

In this article, we take a look at five of the most worrying future predictions made by Hawking.

1. A deadly Virus destroying mankind

In 2001 Stephen Hawking warned that a virus would end the human race in this millennium. According to the researcher, “it will be a virus and not an atomic bomb” that will bring Earth’s population to its knees. However, the scientist offered a solution to the problem; establishing colonies in space.

2. Nuclear war and climate change

Stephen Hawking and other scientists announced in 2007 that Doomsday Clock was set at five minutes before midnight. Since 1947, the board of directors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists of the University of Chicago, of which Hawking is a member, manage to Doomsday clock as a symbol that represents how close we are to the end of civilization because of a nuclear war. In 2018 the clock was set two minutes to midnight. The failure of world leaders to deal with looming threats of nuclear war and climate change. This is the clock’s closest approach to midnight, matching that of 1953.

On the effects of climate change, Hawking has warned that “the worst scenario for the Earth would be to become something like its sister planet, Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees and rain of sulfuric acid.”

3. Alien Invasion

Like many other scientists, Professor Hawking was convinced there’s life elsewhere in the universe. However, Professor Hawking believed that these beings might have exhausted resources and become space nomads in search of new planets and resources. “If aliens visited us, the result would be similar to when Columbus arrived in America, which was not very good for Native Americans.”

4. Artificial Intelligence

Like many other futurists and researchers, professor Stephen Hawking too warned of the dangers of Artificial Intelligence.

“Unless we learn to prepare for the potential risks and avoid them, Artificial Intelligence could be the worst event in the history of our civilization” the astrophysicist has stated on more than one occasion.

For Hawking, humans must be aware of the dangers posed by robots, identify them and prepare for their consequences in advance. In addition to Hawking, Elon Musk also spoke out about the potential dangers Artificial Intelligence poses for humans.

5. Humans, and our need for another world

The constant increase in the world population and the abusive consumption of resources and energy are too much for our planet to handle. Our civilization seems to be losing its grip on reality, and we are abusing our planet, bringing it to the limit.

Professor Hawking has warned that if we are to survive as a species, we must look for other planets other than Earth, and colonize them as soon as possible.

Hawking argued that the best option, perhaps, is the Alpha Centauri star system, which is the closest to our solar system.

The Breakthrough Starshot project, in which the physicist was involved, is precisely looking for the way to reach this system in 20 years through the development of spacecraft capable of traveling at the speed of light.

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

20-03-2018 om 00:48 geschreven door peter  

Film crew records me all day for their UFO mystery TV show, March 18, 2018

Did my first ever interview for a Japanese film crew that wanted to make an entire show about me. Started at 10am Sun and finished about 7PM that night. They covered my job, my family, my life in general, living here in Taiwan, at my work place, home, street, restaurant, the full package. Anyways, here is a small clip of them in my classroom only. Kids had a lot of fun. Its cool when people appreciate the work you do. 
Scott C. Waring

{http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

19-03-2018 om 16:14 geschreven door peter  

Photos of Triangle Shaped Antigravity Craft over Orlando, Florida

The video shows close ups of the craft in the photos and how similar it is to a 2004 patent design for a triangle shaped spacecraft.

{ https://www.disclose.tv/ }

19-03-2018 om 01:25 geschreven door peter  

Photos of Triangle Shaped Antigravity Craft over Orlando, Florida

The video shows close ups of the craft in the photos and how similar it is to a 2004 patent design for a triangle shaped spacecraft.

{ https://www.disclose.tv/ }

19-03-2018 om 01:25 geschreven door peter