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

By J.S. GORDON (1946-2013)—

Mainstream orthodox (or ‘physical’) science contains as many paradigms as it does supposed facts, if not more; but it still tends to treat the former as largely substantiated facts. However, a paradigm – as the dictionary confirms – is merely a model, involving one or more assumptions. In fact, it is representative of the seemingly best functional theory or hypothesis available with accessible data in the face of ignorance of the true facts, which may in fact be quite different. That then, along with all the rest, is then presented to the world as ‘scientific knowledge’.

This, however, presents us with a problem because physical science sees itself as technology based, due to the need for reliably consistent reproduction of accurate data in the face of man’s own psychological and sensory inconsistency. Problematically, physical technology is itself based on paradigmatic assumptions and the associated limitations of then available sub-technology. So where does that put us in relation to the wider human experience which takes into consideration states of existence beyond the physical and even treats these as more real than the physical?

Alternative (or more accurately, sequentially parallel) states of existence have been discussed in openly allegorical or hermeneutic (structured) terms for thousands of years by both mystics and more metaphysically orientated philosophers, by virtue of their own actual experiences through self-experimentation. Those experiences were of course subjective in nature (because other states can only be accessed in such a manner) and it is therefore assumed by critics that they lacked the objectivity necessary to achieve any real degree of reliable accuracy. But this assumption is itself based on the highly questionable hypothesis that laboratory methods and/or modern academic forms of presentation and substantiation are the only reliable ones when these are themselves largely un-natural. So where do we go from here?

Over the last three centuries there has developed a growing belief that the objective physical world and the ‘subjective’ states of existence are or can be inter-connected and can thus directly affect each other. This started with the phenomenon of mesmerism in the eighteenth century and continued with human ectoplasmic manifestations in spiritualistic séances in the nineteenth (although spiders have been producing ectoplasm to form their webs since time immemorial). Subsequent to this, the new science of psychology began to show the subjective worlds of human thought and feeling as having a real consistency of internal dynamics if and when viewed on their own terms. Furthermore, quantum physics in the twentieth century seemed to confirm that physical experiments could be phenomenally affected by the psychological attitude of the observer. Yet we now appear to stand at something of an impasse.

Physical science has accepted that consciousness has to be considered a fundamental part of the equation of existence but it still sees consciousness as a merely electrical phenomenon generated (by extension at the physical level) by aggregations of base atomic and then molecular matter forming itself into organisms. Yet it is unable to answer the question of how it is that organic life can somehow emerge from apparently ‘dead’ matter – or why it should do so. Esoteric philosophy, on the other hand, has always taken the view that there is no such thing as ‘dead matter’; that there is in fact only one principle in the omniverse and that this is Life itself, manifesting as a homogeneous substance called, for want of a better term, ‘spirit-matter’ and appearing in a vast spectrum of qualitatively based states, each with its own potential polarity and apparent fields of progression or limitation, thus giving rise to a sympathetic sense of inter-connectedness, which we call consciousness. Furthermore, esoteric philosophy has always seen the universal spectrum of Life as the manifestation of a single, Universal Consciousness possessing an infinite range of memory and intelligence. Deists call more remote aspects of this by the name ‘God’ and try to give it a sort of humanly interactive personality. However, philosophers say that it is not only inconceivable in all respects, but that it is also approachable only by a progressively expansive understanding of what it is not.

This, of course, is not acceptable to a science which states that everything must have a testable rationale. However, in adopting that stance, science again makes an erroneous assumption. Esoteric philosophy (if properly followed) is itself based on the understanding of a rational approach to the existence of progressive fields of consciousness; but its technique is necessarily both subjective and objective. Subjectivity is necessary for direct experience by self-experimentation and selection; objectivity (which, problematically, is also subjective) is necessary to rationalise and understand the effects in due context. However, these have to be used in tandem by an intelligence specifically trained in their simultaneous use – one that has itself developed the capacity not to merely react to experience. In other words, one that is self-consciously aware but which has also passed beyond the stage of a reactive self-association which is usually based on a mere mixture of like and dislike.

The science and art of true esoteric faculty involves a fundamental detachment of consciousness from that which is being observed. That is to say, one must learn to use a higher quality of consciousness to observe a lesser quality of consciousness in action and thereby understand its qualitative status and its modus operandi. We have to develop an adult perspective based on our own prior experience before we can really understand the motivation and actions of a child. There is no short cut. A child cannot understand the motivations of an adult because he/she does not have the experience and has thus not yet learned of the associated limitations by virtue of which we progress through such experience to a wider perspective of understanding.

Plato made the point that “All is recollection.” In other words, there is nothing new in Universal Nature; but it is up to us to access it. Yet the first thing we have to understand is that memory is organised and works in progressive sequences, each involving its own essential field of limitation. But the progression is not linear. The Ancients tell us that the universe is concentrically organised and so each memory is part of a greater one. So, we have to first explore the plenum of one idea (or field of ideas) before we can break through its field of limitation into a yet greater one. This is the way in which the intelligent development of consciousness works. Thus it is that we first need to establish where a limitation exists (or potentially exists) before we can set out to go beyond it and thus achieve a greater perspective. Otherwise we shall merely go around in chaotically confused circles, merely re-exploring the past over and over again, thereby wallowing in a sea of superficiality. This, sadly, is what many people tend to do throughout their adult lives and it is the cause of needless frustration. Instead, we need constantly to move forward. That is why we have ideals to pursue.

Curiously, science – despite its incessant materialism – is moving in the right direction, albeit grudgingly. It accepts the fundamental principle that a theory has to be fully and carefully examined before it can be accepted for further and wider usage. It also accepts that theories (paradigms) are all ultimately disposable, even though it currently chases the ultimate march hare of a supposed Grand Unified Theory which fails to take consciousness into account. However, many ‘New Age’ theorists are as much at fault in that they comprehensively tend to avoid the rigorous approach to consideration of both esoteric and scientific principles, substituting instead their own off-the-cuff theories, which cannot even be called paradigms because most of them are based on either partial perceptions or even pure wishful thinking. That is why physical science, with all its questionable paradigms, is so suspicious of ‘New Age’ thought. But as they say, “It takes one to recognise one.”

That, however, brings me to one or two examples of mis-orientated scientific thinking (which I have highlighted in my recently published book The Rise & Fall of Atlantis) which may perhaps be of interest to readers of this magazine. The first of these involves the relationship between the core of the Earth and the planet’s surrounding ionosphere. The modern geological orthodoxy is that the core is composed of solid or liquid iron, or a combination of both, this providing the basis of the planet’s gravitational magnetism. However, this idea is based on the supposition that the Earth, originally part of the Sun and thus composed of plasma, was to begin with a superheated mass which cooled down, thereby allowing the heavy element of iron to sink towards the centre. But the supposition that the Sun’s plasmic mass is actually superheated (rather than electrically superactive) in the first place is also pure assumption. My suggestion is that it is not – and also that the core of the planet is still a plasmic mass, which responds to the fluctuations of solar energy coming our way as a result of voltage changes in our ionosphere. Interestingly, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in the USA has already noted that the Earth’s core appears to rotate at a different speed to the crust. Present concepts of the Earth’s core fail to provide any suggestion as to how this could possibly occur.

Now the ionosphere surrounding our planet at a distance of some 60 kilometres from the crust is itself an electrified field of matter whose voltage necessarily fluctuates because of the incessant variations in energy received from the Sun. As that occurs, so it must expand and contract. But this will itself produce a sympathetic response in the Earth’s plasmic core, which must also expand and contract in fluctuation, thereby causing huge changes in the magma sea under the crust. As the magma expands, it must necessarily generate internal pressure in the geological fields which contain it, thereby inducing volcanic activity and localised crustal expansion. Correspondingly, as it contracts, so the magma will cool and recede, thus causing the Earth’s crust to shrink back again, which will in turn lead to earthquake activity. Now the first effect of this different perspective is that it calls into question the paradigm theory of plate tectonics.

The basis of plate tectonics (which was first suggested in 1915 and cast out through general scientific disapproval for some fifty years after that) is that all the visible landmasses were once gathered together as one gigantic continent called Gondwanaland, or Pangaea. For some inexplicable reason this then supposedly split up like a jigsaw puzzle into various continental landmasses, which began cruising around the globe on top of the supporting magma sea, and then started bumping into each other like ‘dodgem cars’ at the fairground. The next part of the theory then has some of the landmasses literally crawling over others and down the other side, this experience however, amazingly leaving both masses looking geographically pretty well just the same. The ‘proof’ behind this idea is that the eastward Brazilian projection of South America supposedly fits geographically very neatly under the westward projection of the African continent, thereby confirming the original, broken jigsaw puzzle theory.

Proponents of the plate tectonic theory also draw attention to what is called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the fragmented central area of the Atlantic seabed which we can see on bathyspheric maps. All along this ridge are to be found hydrothermal vents (sometimes known as ‘black smokers’) which are chemically based extrusions, often several metres in length, pumping out volcanic gases from within the crust. These, we are told, are clear evidence that the Atlantic seabed is splitting, so pushing South America and Africa gently even further apart. However, there is no actual proof of such a split.

Now, as is pointed out in my book – citing evidence provided by others far more knowledgeable in the field than I – the idea that continental landmasses can just cruise around in the manner suggested is absurd. It takes inconceivably huge expenditure of energy to shift large geological landmasses – energy levels which scientific measurement itself has proven the planet just does not begin to possess in sufficient capacity to motivate the landmasses in such a manner. Furthermore, the idea that landmasses could somehow slide over each other without damaging their geographic identity is altogether ludicrous. Even more unanswerably, new landmasses are constantly being created by the acre every year (as for example in Hawaii) by the spread of volcanic lava, or destroyed by gradual erosion or cataclysm. So how can plate tectonics work in the face of all these various facts?

Geologists have used their theories to ‘prove’ that the profile of the Atlantic seabed confirms why the ancient idea of a mid-Atlantic continent (aka Atlantis) could not possibly have existed. However, my suggestion (my own paradigm, if you will) as previously explained, provides a very clear indication as to how and why huge masses of the Earth’s crust could indeed be deformed by expansion and contraction generated by electromagnetic pressure from the planet’s core. However, that is not the whole story behind the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Its peculiarly twisted shape tells us of another influence – this time an astrophysical one.

The Ancients described our planet as being suspended in Space between two great magnets. But this does not sound so absurd when one takes into consideration that the indentation of the ionosphere at both poles effectively means that the true poles are in fact to be found far above the Earth’s surface, not on it as is commonly imagined. However, the ionosphere itself is like a giant squeezable crystal – indeed the ancient Egyptian god Ptah was described as containing the planet within a crystal globe which he fashioned. When I suggest that it is ‘squeezable’ I mean to draw attention to the idea that it behaves piezo-electrically. I am suggesting, in other words, that during certain stages of the solar cycles which our planet goes through, it is necessarily forced through much more powerful electrical fields in Space, which cause its biosphere to contract because of the corresponding electrical hypertension generated in the ionosphere.

As the ionosphere is thus ‘squeezed’ centripetally inwards, at both poles, so the plasmic core of the Earth is forced to respond by centrifugal expansion. At a particularly critical point, these two antagonistic forces will literally cause the magma under the planetary crust to generate a coreolis effect, resulting in the upper and lower crustal hemispheres twisting in opposite directions. If you now look closely at a map of the world you will see that the volcanic ridges along the oceanic beds follow an interestingly parallel pattern which could only be achieved, I suggest, by such a twisting in different directions of the upper and lower hemispheres. The nett effect of this, of course, is that the crust in the tropics would be subjected to such terrible force that any geologically ancient landmass in the area would literally crack up and fall apart.

This, I further suggest, is precisely what happened to Atlantis and, as I have described in my book, it is also very probably what caused the almighty cataclysm in the Gulf of Mexico mentioned in the Troano Codex to the Mayan sacred book, the Popol Vuh, as having taken place some 8,060 years before the author’s time, thus killing some sixty million people in the space of one or two days. Just consider the probable extent of the central American landmass before this cataclysm, which itself appears to have coincided historically with the submergence of Plato’s Atlantean island of Poseidonis in the north-eastern Atlantic, plus a variety of other events, such as the sudden raising of the Andes to the south.

Furthermore, this same historical time seems to coincide not only with what my friend Robert Bauval has shown as the Egyptian period of Zep Tepi (the ‘First Time’) but also with the celestial solstice generated by the 25,920 year cycle which we moderns call the ‘precession of the equinoxes’ – which was known to the Ancients as ‘the Great Year of the Pleiades’. It would take too long to describe the importance of the Pleiades in this paper (it is described at some greater length in my book); but suffice it to say that there appears to have been seen a pivotal (cyclic) association between it, our solar system and the seven stars of the circumpolar constellation, Ursa Major, leading to the very appearance of an originally spiritual, proto-human-kind on this planet, literally millions of years ago.

Most astronomers and astrophysicists will of course just laugh at this as the products of ancient superstitions. But then many of our modern scientists – not finding themselves able to credit the possibility of spirit-matter in the first place (notwithstanding their as yet hypothetical ‘dark matter’ and ‘quantum fluid’) – would hardly be likely to consider the possibility of the massed spirit-organisms of humankind (i.e. souls, not human beings per se) perhaps originating in another but kindred celestial system. I hasten to add that this can in no way be considered in terms of UFO activity. Spirits – organised as cellular groups of souls – would not need spacecraft if an astrologically and astronomically helpful period of relative proximity were cyclically available to enable a fluid transmission of celestial consciousness between greater and lesser star systems, which ancient tradition holds to be repositories of such consciousness. But is this not perhaps the origin of the very ancient idea of Man having ‘fallen’ from a superior state of ‘Grace’? Is this not perhaps also why the ancient Egyptians were so focused on spiritual development leading the highest initiates or Piru (not the pharaoh, as Egyptologists fondly imagine) back to the circumpolar stars?

In The Rise and Fall of Atlantis I have quite deliberately addressed the hitherto cloudy issue of spirits and souls in relation to the hugely ancient origins of humankind on this planet and its continued evolution of culture through civilisation. In doing so, I recognise the immediately apparent dangers of being treated as just another New Age nutcase. However, I have gone to some considerable lengths to show that Darwinism and Creationism not only do not work, but are also not the only (or even most viable) alternatives. When consciousness is itself brought into the equation as inherent in all the kingdoms of Nature, in concert with the concept that there is no such thing as dead matter, it will immediately be seen why the universe in toto has to be considered as a psychologically based organism (with a wide spectrum of intelligence) within which spirit and matter are qualitatively polarised aspects of one and the same principle. It will then be understood why astrologically timed and astro-physically organised insemination (or withdrawal) of different qualities of intelligence from any celestial body or system (as an organism) must itself be a quite natural function in universal Nature.

I hope that my book will be seen as providing a logically reasoned, alternative perspective for public discussion, rather than as merely another book on Atlantis and its geographic whereabouts. The sub-title to it – “The Mysterious Origins of Human Civilisation” – should be enough to suggest that there is far more inside it to chew on than one would normally find in a book on the subject. May I therefore wish my readers many happy hours of further discovery.

Interested in forgotten civilisations and secrets of the past? Then be sure to check out New Dawn Special Issue Vol 7 No 1.

If you appreciate this article, please consider a digital subscription to New Dawn.

Bibliography

H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (Los Angeles, Theosophical Publishing House, 1947)

M. Cremo & R. Thompson, The Hidden History of the Human Race (Bhaktivedanta Book Publ., 2000)

C. Darwin, The Descent of Man (London, Penguin Classics, 2004)

J.S. Gordon, The Rise & Fall of Atlantis (London, Watkins Publishing, 2008)

B. Greene, The Elegant Universe (New York, Random House, 2000)

F. Hoyle & C. Wickramsinghe, Evolution from Space (London, Paladin Books, 1983)

R. Milton, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Vermont, Inner Traditions, 1997)

Plato, Timaeus & Critias (London, Penguin Classics, 1965)

P. Russell, The Awakening Earth (London RKP, 1982)

G. Santillana & H. von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill (Boston, D.R. Godine, 1992)

D.E. Scott, The Electric Sky (Portland, Oregon, Mikamar Publishing, 2006)

Sir W. Scott, Hermetica (England, Solos Press, 1993)

S. Wolinsky, Quantum Consciousness (Bramble Books, 1993)

JOHN GORDON (1946-2013) held a master’s degree in Western Esotericism from the University of Exeter and was a senior fellow of the Theosophical Society of England, where he lectured on ancient history and metaphysics. Known for his in-depth knowledge on the ancient Egyptian mystical tradition, he wrote several books, including The Path of Initiation and Land of the Fallen Star Gods.

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Humans have made a staggering amount of scientific and technological progress over the past century. We’ve created technology that has transformed our society; scientific advances have helped us answer fundamental questions about who we are and the world that we inhabit. And, yet, mysteries persist.

Why are we compelled to sleep every night? Why are we still not able to “see” dark matter? And where the heck are all the aliens?

People have debated questions like these for decades — sometimes centuries. Fortunately, our unfaltering will to uncover the world’s mysteries has brought us closer to some answers than ever before. Here are six mysteries that still keep scientists up at night, and how close they are to solving them.

1. Why Do We Need Sleep?

Why do we need sleep? This may seem like a straightforward question, but the answer is far more complex than you might think. There have been countless attempts to find a definitive reason as to why humans need to sleep every night, but scientists are still unable to offer a single, definitive answer.

Findings in sleep science have shed some light on the intricacies of sleep stages and brain activity, but ultimately, they have merely offered pieces to an ever-growing, incomplete puzzle. It doesn’t help that we don’t have much to compare ourselves to — as sleeping patterns and brain activity in other animals often deviate significantly from those of humans, further mystifying our understanding of sleep.

Jerry Siegel, a psychiatry professor at UCLA’s Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior, has been studying the sleeping habits of animals to understand why humans need to enter a hibernation-like state every night.

“Our understanding and orientation [of sleep] is different than in any other animal because most of us would like to stay awake 24 hours a day. But in the natural world, animals that use a lot of energy are not going to survive,” Siegel tells Futurism. Nature values inactivity — for instance, winter hibernation allows certain animals to recover and store energy when it is not needed. “Across species, energy savings is the main evolutionary impulse for sleep,” Siegel explains. African elephants, for example, only sleep for two hours a day in the wild, likely because they need the rest of that time to feed in order to give their large bodies enough energy to function.

The energy saving theory is one of several that scientists use to explain why we sleep. As scientists have created tools that can track brain activity during the act of sleep, they have come closer to finishing the puzzle and uncovering all of sleep’s mysteries.

For example, the brain has mechanisms in place allowing it to purge itself of unnecessary information during sleep. “Sleep is the price we pay for learning,” Giulio Tononi, a psychiatry professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison tells New Scientist. Tononi and his team conducted experiments on sleeping mice and found that, after sleep, synapses were significantly smaller than those before sleep.

Tononi’s team concluded that the brain needs to allow this activity to diminish in order to solidify information it gathered while it was awake. The brain is bombarded with information during the day, and it reinforces it with strong neural connections. To mix the new information in with all of the existing information, those connections need to weaken to “absorb” it. In other words, sleep allows the brain to make new information pliable enough to fit in with all of the old.

While this theory elegantly describes the brain’s process of making new information stick during sleep, Tononi and other neuroscientists have yet to prove that sleep is actually required for this to happen.

To fully understand sleep, sleep scientists need a better sense of the neurobiological processes of the brain during both wake and sleep cycles. For instance, how come some of us are able to sleep through extremely noisy environments, and some of us can’t? Once we are able to measure exactly how awake or asleep the human brain is, it will bring us even further to knowing all there is to know about sleep.

But one thing has remained clear as ever: Without sleep, we are far worse off. “We know that, if you are sleep-deprived, you have lapses in attention that are actually correlated with intrusions in sleep,” Siegel says. Not getting enough sleep has a direct affect on how much attention you can pay to the world around you. “Certainly when you are driving, losing alertness just for two seconds can be lethal.”

2. What Is Dark Matter, And Why Can’t We See It?

We don’t know what it looks like. We can’t see it. But it makes up more than 26 percent of the matter in the known universe. Since Dutch astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn hypothesized its existence in 1922, we have come to know it exists because of how it interacts with the matter we can observe, but dark matter is still mysteriously invisible to us.

Most of the matter that’s visible to us is made of neutrons, protons, and electrons. But dark matter does not adhere to these classifications. It’s made up of different types of particles we haven’t yet been able to categorize and that interact with light and matter in a completely different way. Dark matter does not absorb, reflect, or emit light. But its gravitational influence does bend light as it passes nearby — that kind of observation is how scientists know that dark matter exists.

Researchers have been studying this phenomenon, trying to unravel its mysteries, almost since its inception. More recently, the Large Hadron Collider at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) has brought us closer to actually doing so — researchers there are working to identify the invisible material by accelerating tiny particles and then studying the energy and momentum involved in their movements when they collide at high speeds.

Recent studies suggest that gravitational wave detectors could allow us to “see” dark matter for the first time. But the truth of the matter (so to speak) is that we are still very much in the dark about one of the most abundant entities in our universe.

3. How Was the Universe Created?

We are inching closer to piecing together the earliest moments of the universe, but its true origin is still a mystery. “Any theories or models of ‘creation’ are incredibly speculative at this point,” Paul Sutter, an astrophysicist at Ohio State University and chief scientist at the Center of Science and Industry, tells Futurism.

Perhaps the best-known theory about the beginning of the universe is the Big Bang theory, in which the universe expanded from an extremely hot and dense singularity around 13.8 billion years ago. But people misunderstand if they think that matter simply exploded into being from nothing, Sutter says. “The Big Bang happened everywhere in the universe simultaneously; it’s not an explosion in space but an explosion of space.” Yet, the exact process of what caused this (and of course, what was there beforehand) remains unknown.

“The earlier we go in the history of the universe, the less we understand,” Sutter says. While we have caught brief glimpses of the universe when it was only 300,000 years old, scientists are still speculating about the extreme forces at play during the universe’s first moments.

Like all good mysteries, a question that seems simple yields more questions that must be solved before we can find the answer to the initial question. “We’re prevented from knowing the very earliest moments (like, less than 10^-40 seconds) because we don’t fully comprehend the quantum aspects of gravity,” Sutter says.

To this end, to fully understand the creation of our universe, we will need to have a comprehensive understanding of the laws of physics that govern matter and antimatter. This is a bit of a problem, as CERN recently confirmed that the Standard Model of particle physics may have to be turned on its head, as it doesn’t account for the majority of the matter the Big Bang produced.

Once we have fully understood the nature of antimatter and how it interacts with matter, we won’t have a final answer to the origin of the universe, but we will come much closer to understanding how it came to be.

4. Where is Planet Nine?

Beyond the Kuiper belt, a mysterious cluster of objects is orbiting the Sun. They orbit even more distant from the Sun than Neptune, but some of the objects’ trajectories don’t seem to fit the expected pattern. Most of them circle around Neptune, kept in the planet’s orbit by its powerful gravity. But a handful of these objects seem to be pulled out of place by something with much greater mass.

Konstantin Batygin, assistant professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology, believes that these peculiarities are at least partially caused by the existence of Planet Nine — a yet-to-be-discovered ninth planet in our solar system.

Think of the solar system as a giant disc. The orbits of these strangely behaving objects seem to bend the disc upwards at its edge. Planet Nine needs to be massive to have this kind of influence — a bigger mass than Earth, even. However, despite its apparent mass, we have not yet been able to prove its existence. In part, this is because we only just started looking for it; scientists first started theorizing about its existence in 2014.

However, that’s not the only reason that the planet remains undiscovered. “We haven’t found it yet because it is staggeringly dim,” Batygin says. “With the best telescopes around, we could just barely detect it, we think.” Infrared analysis is out of the question because the instruments are simply not sensitive enough. That forces astronomers to look for reflected light — an even more challenging task than infrared analysis. This is because any light that Planet Nine reflects has to travel from the Sun to the far reaches of the solar system, bounce off Planet Nine, and then arrive back to Earth. Reflected light diminishes exponentially as it crosses a distance; the properties of reflected light are stacked against us finding Planet Nine.

However, with advancements in technology, a more sensitive telescope may be able to register light reflected from it, once and for all confirming Planet Nine’s existence. Astronomers are also using computer simulations to estimate its orbit to get a better sense of where it will be and when. It’s possible that Planet Nine may be simply at a point in its orbit that makes it too distant to be observed.

5. Why Do These Sounds Make My Brain Tingle?

You might have encountered them on YouTube: thousands of videos narrated in hushed voices and accompanied by soft sounds, like massaging a textured piece of fabric or the faint hum of a hair clipper. A specialized microphone gives you the sensation that you are there. For some people, the sound creates the sensation of a scalp massage.

The result of this experience: a relaxing, tingling sensation in the brain in about 90 percent of the population. But why it happens, and why it doesn’t work for everyone, is still unknown.

Craig Richard, a professor of biopharmaceutical sciences at Shenandoah University and founder of ASMR University, has been studying this peculiar sensation since 2013. “We are at the very beginning of unraveling the science behind ASMR,” Richard tells Futurism. While past biological studies have shown that functional connectivity (regions of the brain that light up on a fMRI) is different in brains that experience ASMR than in those that don’t, ASMR remains a mystery. Why is it that only a certain percentage of humans experiences it? Why does it even exist? “I don’t think there will ever be one explanation that satisfies everyone,” he says.

6. Where Is Intelligent Alien Life?

The universe is billions of years old. Considering the age and sheer vastness of our cosmos, it’s hard to comprehend why we haven’t found other signs of intelligent life. Basic probability indicates that we should have found extraterrestrials by now, so where are they?

Astronomers and physicists have put forth many theories in their attempts to explain. One theory suggests there is a great cataclysmic event that stops any civilization from ever making contact, while another proposes that aliens are trapped beneath thick layers of ice and roc k on distant moons.

If extraterrestrial life does exist in our solar system, researchers suggest that it is likely microbial, as opposed to intelligent alien life. These alien organisms are thought to be on small, icy planets, such as the moons of Saturn or Jupiter. Scientists at NASA have conducted studies to investigate the composition and state of the large oceans on these moons because, they predict, the presence of abundant water might allow alien life to thrive. But so far, these are only educated guesses based on findings of NASA’s Galileo satellite and extensive scanning and observation. NASA is planning to get a closer look by traveling to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa within the next decade.

But even if we did find alien life, would we be able to recognize it? Looking for familiar carbon-based lifeforms that use water as life support might limit us in our quest to find alien life. Scientists must be able to fully distinguish alien messages from all the other noise in space — and even that is far from simple. What if their message is indistinguishable from other frequencies? What if they don’t want to be found?

In any case, the search is far from over. In fact, in many ways, the search is only just beginning.