Tag: Carl Sagan

Is the Media Taking UFO Sightings Seriously?

Article by Dani Di Placido                                               May 17, 2021                                                                     (forbes.com)

• It wasn’t long ago that the biggest media platform a ufologist could hope for was The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. But now, with UFO footage and eyewitness accounts being discussed in mainstream outlets like the New Yorker, the NYTimes, and 60 Minutes, there has been a dramatic tonal shift in how the subject is being treated. It’s an exciting time to be a UFO enthusiast.

• The timing isn’t coincidental. UFO enthusiasts are eagerly anticipating a declassified report on UFOs by the Director of National Intelligence and the Pentagon is due to be handed over to the Senate Intelligence Committee in June.

• On a recent 60 Minutes episode, CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker delved into US government efforts to uncover the truth behind the UFO phenomenon, motivated by national security concerns. Whitaker interviewed Luis Elizondo, who ran a Pentagon UFO program called Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) back in 2010. When asked if he believes that UFOs are real, Elizondo said, “The government has already stated for the record that they’re real. I’m not telling you that. The United States government is telling you that.”

• Elizondo is not saying that intelligent extraterrestrials have visited Earth. While according to astrobiologists the likelihood of extraterrestrial life is almost a certainty, there is no evidence that extraterrestrial life has visited Earth. Skeptic UFO investigator Mick West sees the unidentified flying blobs in those grainy videos taken by Navy pilots – in an era where most people carry HD cameras in our pockets – as mundane (tricks of photography or common objects such as balloons). With the frequency of UFO sightings, crystal-clear footage of a gleaming alien spacecraft should have emerged somewhere on the internet by now.

• Many of us ‘want to believe’, and there’s no reason not to keep an open mind. But we should heed the wise words of Carl Sagan, that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” And unless the Pentagon is going to provide extraordinary evidence in June, those extraordinary claims have little merit.

• [Editor’s Note]   Anyone who is not convinced that extraterrestrial beings and their craft have frequented the Earth for millennia is trying very hard to ignore the multitude of evidence. Skeptics like Mick West will never be convinced, even when extraterrestrial beings land, get out of their craft, walk up to West and said, “Hello, we are from the Alpha Centauri star system.  Nice to meet you.” These media trolls would rather abide by sort of foreign invasion scenario than to accept that we have benevolent extraterrestrial cousins in our galaxy who would like to see the Earth join their space-faring ranks.

While the best UFO photos have been sequestered by governments (see ExoArticle: “British Military Has UFO Videos and Must Release Them”), there are still many great photos of UFOs out there. Of course, skeptics will always deny their authenticity. The US government is only providing the grainy photos at this time because they want a maddingly slow drip of UFO disclosure. They want to dominate the narrative with the ‘threat’ that UFOs may pose to our national security. Mainstream writers of articles such as this one are more than happy to go along with a limited threat narrative disclosure. And when the deep state government follows-up this threat narrative with a false flag ‘alien invasion’, these writers will dutifully go along with that as well – because the mainstream media has become a propaganda tool of the deep state, not a reporter of facts and truth.

And let’s not forget that the “wise” Carl Sagan, who demanded “extraordinary evidence”, was himself a member of the pseudo-governmental UFO overlord group known as Majestic-12 whose function is to suppress and ridicule all evidence of UFOs.

 

                        Luis Elizondo

“We have tackled many strange stories on 60 Minutes, but perhaps none like this,”

     ‘tic tac’ UFO off of San Diego in 2004

CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker said on Sunday night’s special, which investigated sightings of “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAPs, commonly known as UFOs.

The special focused on publicly released footage of UFOs recorded by Navy pilots, interviewed eyewitnesses, and delved into U.S. government efforts to uncover the truth behind the phenomenon.

‘transmedium’ (air/underwater) UFO off of San Diego in 2019

Whitaker interviewed Luis Elizondo, who began running a Pentagon program called Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) back in 2010, tasked with studying “the national security implications of unidentified aerial phenomena documented by U.S. service members.”

the cognatively dissonant skeptic, Mick West

When asked if he believes that UFOs are real, Elizondo stated: “I think we’re beyond that already. The government has already stated for the record that they’re real. I’m not telling you that. The United States government is telling you that.”

  UFO community traitor, Carl Sagan

Elizondo, of course, is not saying that extraterrestrial life has visited Earth, but simply confirming the fact that there are regular sightings of unidentified objects in the sky, and that the U.S. government seeks an explanation, motivated by national security concerns.

Regardless, there has been a dramatic tonal shift in how the media discusses UFO footage and eyewitness accounts – it’s certainly an exciting time to be a UFO enthusiast. It wasn’t long ago that the biggest media platform a ufologist could hope for was The Joe Rogan Experience; now, the New Yorker, the NYTimes, and 60 Minutes have made efforts to seriously examine the phenomenon.

The timing isn’t coincidental – a declassified report from the directorate of national intelligence and the Pentagon is due to be handed over to the Senate Intelligence Committee in June, which UFO enthusiasts (along with everyone else) hope will shed some light on the mystery.

But perhaps the public shouldn’t get their hopes up – the likelihood of extraterrestrial life is, according to astrobiologists, almost a certainty – but there is no evidence that extraterrestrial life has visited Earth, or even has the ability (or motivation) to do so.

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China Opens the World’s Largest Radio Telescope to International Scientists

Article by Chelsea Gohd                                     December 18, 2020                                         (space.com)

• Following the collapse of the historic Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, China has opened the biggest radio telescope in the world up to international scientists. “Our scientific committee aims to make ‘FAST’ increasingly open to the international community,” Wang Qiming, the chief inspector of the telescope’s operations and development center. China will accept requests in 2021 from foreign scientists looking to use the instrument for their research.

• In Pingtang, Guizhou province of China stands the massive 1,600-foot dish of the Aperture Spherical Telescope (“FAST”) (pictured above). The largest radio telescope in the world, FAST began full operations in January of 2020. “We drew a lot of inspiration from its [Arecibo’s] structure, which we gradually improved to build our telescope,” Wang said. The Arecibo Observatory had been the largest radio telescope for decades, although the FAST is three times more sensitive than Arecibo. FAST is also surrounded by a 3-mile (5 kilometers) “radio silence” zone in which cellphones and computers are not allowed.

• Researchers may use FAST to not just explore the universe but also to study alien worlds. Radio telescopes like FAST use antennas and radio receivers to detect radio waves from radio sources in the cosmos, like stars, galaxies and black holes. These instruments can also be used to send out radio signals and even reflect radio light from objects in the solar system (like planets) to see what information might bounce back, as SETI did in 1974 at Arecibo. An interstellar radio message was sent to the globular cluster M13 in hopes of reaching an extraterrestrial civilization there. The message was co-authored by Carl Sagan and helped to popularize Arecibo and radio astronomy in general.

 

collapsed Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico

Following the collapse of the historic Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, China has opened the biggest radio telescope in the world up to international scientists.

In Pingtang, Guizhou province stands the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), the

         Guizhou province of China

largest radio telescope in the world, surpassing the Arecibo Observatory, which stood as the largest in the world for 53 years before the construction of FAST was completed in 2016. Following two cable failures earlier this year, Arecibo’s radio telescope collapsed in November, shutting down the observatory for good. Now, FAST is opening its doors to astronomers from around the world.

“Our scientific committee aims to make FAST increasingly open to the international community,” Wang Qiming, the chief inspector of FAST’s operations and development center told the news agency AFP during a visit to the telescope, according to the French news site AFP.

China will accept requests this upcoming year (2021) from foreign scientists looking to use the instrument for their research, according to the report.
With its massive 1,600-foot (500 meters) diameter dish, FAST is not only larger than the now-destroyed Arecibo telescope, but it’s also three times more sensitive. FAST, which began full operations in January of this year, is also surrounded by a 3-mile (5 kilometers) “radio silence” zone in which cellphones and computers are not allowed.

“We drew a lot of inspiration from its [Arecibo’s] structure, which we gradually improved to build our telescope,” Qiming said.

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Why Do People Lie About Alien Encounters?

Article by Matthew Rozsa and Keith A. Spencer                                   December 10. 2020                                         (salon.com)

• Every year, thousands of stories of alien abduction or interstellar communication emerge from people around the world. Just about all of them are dismissed by the scientific community outright for lack of evidence. While most stories of alien abduction emerge from those who are either mentally ill or desirous of attention, occasionally someone with political clout makes such claims — as did the former head of an Israeli space agency, Haim Eshed, last week when he told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot that extraterrestrials from a “Galactic Federation” have been in contact with human beings but do not want the public to know as they feel our species is not ready yet, according to NBC News.

• Eshed also claimed that President Trump had planned on revealing the extraterrestrials’ existence but was asked to not do so in order to prevent “mass hysteria”; that there is an “underground base in the depths of Mars” where American astronauts and extraterrestrials interact; that the US government signed a contract with aliens allowing them to do experiments here; and that the extraterrestrials are seeking to learn about “the fabric of the universe.”

• Astronomers and physicists are so accustomed to outrageous claims of extraterrestrial sightings that the phrase “it’s never aliens” has become a motto. Carl Sagan famously quipped, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Scientists still apply his lesson to claims of alien sightings. Recent fast-moving objects observed by the US Defense Department, for instance, went viral over public speculation that they might be alien craft. Yet human engineers are perfectly capable of producing such fast-moving drone craft right here on Earth. Occam’s Razor suggests a human origin is far more likely.

• But what about when someone with political power, influence and credibility makes such obviously bogus claims? Someone like Eshed, or astronaut Edgar Mitchell, or former Canadian defense minister Paul Hellyer?

• “Without further information, it is impossible to know what psychological factors might underlie these claims from Haim Eshed,” says Christopher C. French, a British psychologist who specializes in the psychology behind people claiming to believe in or have experienced the paranormal. The connection between mental illness and claims of alien abduction is common enough that there are entire psychology studies devoted to the subject. French noted that Eshed could be telling the truth, although “given the outlandish nature of his claims and the lack of any direct evidence to support them” French agreed it was “extremely unlikely.”

• A more likely possibility is that Eshed genuinely believes what he is saying, despite it being false. “Has he seen any actual evidence or is he basing his claims on reports from others?” asks French. “If the former, is the evidence convincing? If the latter, are these others credible? What are they basing their claims upon? Is it possible that Eshed is delusional? This is certainly a possibility.”

• Finally, it is possible that Eshed and his ilk are deliberately lying? He is promoting a book about UFOs so he has a financial incentive to lie. “He will no doubt become the latest ‘darling’ of the UFO community and be invited to address UFO conferences, not to mention appearances on talk shows, and so on,” says French. “Maybe it’s all a practical joke and he is laughing all the way to the bank?”

• “Mr. Eshed’s background as a space security official serves as a reminder that outlandish views are not limited to uneducated people,” says Glenn C. Altschuler, a historian at Cornell University. “We know …that when presented with evidence that seems to debunk their beliefs or conspiracy theories they often hug them ever more tightly, exhibiting what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’. …[I]t is important to understand that many people fervently believe that what they are saying is true. They may interpret attention as validation. If they are telling a story for material gain, of course, all bets are off.”

• “The problem here is that these claims will fuel conspiracy beliefs of all kinds,” says French. “After all, if the US government are lying about this, what else are they lying about? Maybe the COVID vaccination program really is just a cover to inject us all with microchips to control our minds? This way lies collective madness — and thousands more unnecessary deaths.” “If Eshed has any solid proof to support his claims, he should tell the world what it is. Until he does so, we should feel no more obliged to believe him than we would any other conspiracy theorist.”

• [Editor’s Note]  This article’s writers, and the “experts” whom they cite, outrageously use mental illness to explain the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve reported UFO sightings and extraterrestrial encounters. However, they themselves are in the exact mental state that they project upon believers – a cognitive dissonance that clings to the circular logic that ‘extraterrestrial UFOs are not real because they don’t exist’. They will focus on a current ET or UFO report and completely ignore centuries of supporting evidence.

These professional debunkers love to quote Carl Sagan’s “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” line, but refuse to look at the extraordinary evidence that has been out there for decades. It is very likely that these UFO/ET deniers are doing the bidding of their deep state financiers, just as Carl Sagan did as it turns out. (see previous ExoArticles: “Carl Sagan, “Fudged” Evidence of Extraterrestrial Beings”; “Carl Sagan knew UFOs are real”) It has been revealed that from 1976 to 1989, Sagan himself was a member of Majestic 12, which is a secret deep state government panel created during the Truman administration, just after the Roswell crash in 1947, specifically to manipulate the public’s disbelief in the UFO/ET phenomenon. (see previous ExoArticle: “MJ-12 Document Exposing Extraterrestrial Contact is Authentic”) It is this institutional cover-up of the existence of extraterrestrials that has caused the deep state-controlled media and academia to continue to deny and debunk the extraterrestrial reality to this day.

The truth of a long-standing extraterrestrial presence will soon be disclosed in a manner in which the global population can no longer deny it. This will be a glorious day for the principle of truth and will mark the beginning of a new era of human civilization on Earth. But we cannot simply forget all of these pernicious writers and ‘experts’ who have actively concealed the truth from us for so long. When this happens, all of these people must be called out and exposed for their treachery and betrayal of humanity, and relegated to the contemptible scrap heap of history where they belong, never to be heard from again. I’m calling you out Matthew Rozsa, Keith Spencer, Christopher French and Glenn Altschuler. Your day is coming.

 

                          Haim Eshed

Astronomers, astrophysicists, and nonprofits like the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute have

article co-author Matthew Rozsa

been scouring the skies for signs of intelligent life for decades, and have thus far come up blank. Every year, thousands of stories of supposed alien abduction or interstellar communication emerge from citizens around the world, though just about all of them are dismissed by the scientific community outright for lack of evidence. Yet while most stories of alien abduction emerge from those who are either mentally ill or desirous of attention in some regard, occasionally someone with political clout makes such claims — as the former head of an Israeli space agency did last week when he announced that human beings have made direct contact with extraterrestrials.

Haim Eshed, who used to lead Israel’s Defense Ministry’s space directorate, told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot that extraterrestrials from a “galactic federation” have been in contact with human beings but do not want the public to know as they feel our species is not ready yet, according to NBC News. He also claimed that President Donald Trump had planned on revealing the extraterrestrials’ existence but was asked to not do so in order to prevent “mass hysteria”; that there is an “underground base in the depths of Mars” where American astronauts and extraterrestrials interact; that the U.S. government signed a contract with aliens allowing them to do experiments here; and that the extraterrestrials are seeking to learn about “the fabric of the universe.”

    article co-author Keith Spencer

“They have been waiting until today for humanity to develop and reach a stage where we will understand, in

British psychologist Christopher C. French

general, what space and spaceships are,” Eshed said of the supposed galactic federation.

Astronomers and physicists are so accustomed to outrageous claims of extraterrestrial sightings that the phrase “it’s never aliens” has become a motto of sorts, repeated in Twitter memes and college course titles. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” popular astronomer and science educator Carl Sagan famously quipped. Sagan was fond of pointing out that skepticism formed the crux of the scientific method, and scientists still apply his lesson to claims of alien sightings. Recent fast-moving objects observed by the US Defense Department, for instance, went viral over public speculation that they might be alien craft; yet human engineers are perfectly capable of producing such fast-moving drone craft right here on Earth. Occam’s Razor suggests a human origin is far more likely.

Hence, an attention-hungry loner or a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic person reporting alien sightings is common enough as to not be newsworthy. That is because the public does not expect this type of person to be credible, and such people generally don’t provide evidence that would make their claims so.

deep state stooge Carl Sagan

But what about when someone with political power, influence and credibility makes such obviously bogus claims?

 historian Glenn C. Altschuler

Someone like Eshed, or astronaut Edgar Mitchell, or former Canadian defense minister Paul Hellyer?

“Without further information, it is impossible to know what psychological factors might underlie these claims from Haim Eshed,” Christopher C. French, a British psychologist who specializes in the psychology behind people claiming to believe in or have experienced the paranormal, wrote to Salon.

Notably, there are psychological disorders that commonly lead to their sufferers believing that they are under the influence of aliens. The connection between mental illness and claims of alien abduction is common enough that there are entire psychology studies devoted to the subject. A 1983 paper published in The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, titled “Psychoses and unidentified objects,” studied six subjects who claimed to have communicated with aliens who had given them missions to protect humanity. The study’s two co-authors concluded that “five of them suffered from a paranoid delusional state often akin to paraphrenia,” a mental condition characterized by paranoid delusions and hallucinations.

French speculated as to the possible psychological explanations for Eshed’s claims, explanations that apply to other prominent alien-seers like Hellyer and Mitchell. French noted that he could be telling the truth, although “given the outlandish nature of his claims and the lack of any direct evidence to support them” French agreed it was “extremely unlikely.”

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Carl Sagan’s Thoughts About Aliens and Life on Other Planets

August 15, 2020                          (explica.co)

• The author of ‘Cosmos’ (1980), Dr Carl Sagan (pictured above) believed that life was not a unique condition on Earth, and that the Universe was a place brimming with life. Arguably the most popular science ‘popularizer’ in history, Sagan reasoned that, among the billions of galaxies and the immeasurable number of suns and orbiting worlds, the Earth was unlikely to be the only place that harbors life.

• Seeking extraterrestrial life was something that Sagan was passionate about until the end of his days. He based his research on objective criteria, such as the ingredients necessary for life, organic matter, and the possibilities of an extraterrestrial evolutionary development completely different from that on Earth.

• Sagan insisted, however, that the first signs of life would not arrive in a spaceship. He believed that the confirmation of extraterrestrial life would come with the discovery of alien microorganisms. Sagan was the first to point to the clouds of Venus as one of the most promising sites for extraterrestrial life. In a study published in 1967, Sagan speculated that from the biochemical composition of the Venusian clouds, it would be possible to have simple life forms floating above them.

• In a 1985 Chicago public radio interview with writer Studs Terkel, Sagan said, “It is inevitable that humans project their hopes and dreams into the cosmos” while Hollywood portrays aliens as “red creatures with claws and fangs, pointed heads and unsavory character. Steven Spielberg has taken an important step to show the possibility of benign aliens, but even in this case, aliens appear as slight variations from human beings when the evolutionary history is clear that aliens would be very different from us.”

• Sagan was the promoter of the SETI programs (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) through the use of radio telescopes to search or send signals deep into space. Sagan assumed that “if we got a message, it [couldn’t] be from someone less capable than us, because someone less capable couldn’t communicate in the least. It would have to be someone much more (technologically) advanced than us…” The scientist considered that among the rest of the civilizations of the Milky Way, ours would be one of the most backward. After all, we’d only invented the radio telescope in 1937.

• Sagan considered the union of space, organic matter and time as an almost infallible recipe for life. “There are a huge number of planets, a whole range of planetary systems around nearby stars. So there are many potential abodes for life.” “Then there’s organic matter – carbon-rich composite molecules that are essential to the kind of life – (which) we know are fantastically abundant in the Universe. We see them in asteroids, comets, on moons in the outer Solar System, and even in the dark cold spaces between the stars, so the substance of life is everywhere.”

• Sagan continued: “And then there is the time. There are millions of years for biological evolution on all these worlds (to develop) and there are many worlds much older than ours.” “So if we put together many places, a lot of organic matter and a lot of time, it seems very difficult to believe that our ridiculous little planet is the only one that is inhabited.”

• [Editor’s Note]   During his lifetime, Dr Carl Sagan positioned himself as the modern scientist, maintaining a fealty to mainstream scientific principles while allowing for the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrials. The ‘scientific’ reasoning was that in universe so vast, there must be another extraterrestrial civilization out there – somewhere. But the only thing we would ever likely find would be extraterrestrial microbes… because the universe is so vast. This became the scientific approach for modern scientists and deep thinkers.

But we have recently learned that Sagan was actually a member of Majestic 12, the group of a dozen scientists, military brass and intelligence chiefs that was created during the Truman administration following the 1947 Roswell crash for the sole purpose of debunking and covering up the UFO/extraterrestrial presence. Looking at Sagan now, through this lens, gives us a better understanding of Sagan’s motives. Rather than deny that extraterrestrials exist, Sagan reformed the modern scientific viewpoint to allow that they may exist somewhere in the universe, but the chances of us ever coming across them are remote to impossible. This became the ‘enlightened’ theory that science would cling to, and still clings to today, all carefully orchestrated by the deep state MJ-12.

Under Sagan’s reformation, astronomers and scientists interested in extraterrestrials would need to focus on alien microorganisms and radio transmissions from distant stars. Microorganisms required the organic building blocks of life. So scientists ought to focus on planets having the greatest likelihood of containing these organic compounds and the explicit conditions for them to thrive, using the Earth as the template. But at the same time, Sagan adduced that intelligent life springing from similar conditions as on Earth would have nothing in common with humans. With such remote chances of finding any intelligent extraterrestrials and the possibility of not even recognizing them as intelligent beings, why pursue finding them?

Finally, Sagan promoted the continued search for extraterrestrial intelligence through the radio telescopes of SETI which began in 1960. This accomplished both instilling the idea that any intelligent civilization would be incredibly far away – beyond our ability to reach – and that nevertheless, our best and brightest minds are diligently searching for them.

These propaganda measures, which Sagan promoted, placated the public with the assurance that if there were any intelligent ETs out there, we are doing the best we can to find them. It also served the deep state’s agenda of hiding from the public the fact that the universe is absolutely teeming with intelligent extraterrestrials, many of whom the US government has been working with since at least WWII to provide the deep state government with incredibly advanced technologies that allow elite secret space programs to colonize the solar system, traverse the galaxy, and benefit from amazing technologies that offer free energy, unlimited food and resources, and an end to disease and suffering.

In short, the celebrated Carl Sagan was a master at disinformation for the deep state.

 

The author of ‘Cosmos’ believed that life was not a unique condition on Earth and thus imagined aliens. Carl Sagan thought of the Universe as a place brimming with life.

The most popular science popularizer in history started from a cosmic perspective to doubt that, among the billions of galaxies that exist in the observable Universe and the immeasurable number of suns and worlds that orbit around it, the Earth was the only place that harbors life.

Seeking extraterrestrial life the author of “Pale Blue Dot” (1994) was passionate about until the end of his days, but unlike ufologists and enthusiasts of the UFO phenomenon, the scientist based his research on objective criteria, such as the ingredients necessary for life, the organic matter and the possibilities of an extraterrestrial evolutionary development completely different from that of Earth.

What are aliens like according to Carl Sagan?

Despite his overwhelmed optimism about the search for extraterrestrial life, Sagan assured that the first signs of life were from Earth they would not arrive in a spaceship, nor would they be similar to Hollywood-style characterizations. Instead, he considered that the confirmation of extraterrestrial life would be much more humble, with the discovery of microorganisms.

Sagan was the first to point to the clouds of Venus as one of the most promising sites in the Solar System in the search for extraterrestrial life. In a study published in 1967, the author of ‘Cosmos’ (1980) speculated that from the biochemical composition of the Venusian clouds, it would be possible to have simple life forms floating above them.

In a 1985 Chicago public radio interview with writer Studs Terkel, Carl Sagan shared his views on the subject extensively: “It is inevitable that humans project their hopes and dreams into the cosmos: common Hollywood attempts portray aliens as red creatures with claws and fangs, pointed heads and unsavory character.”

“Steven Spielberg has taken an important step to show the possibility of benign aliens, but even in this case, aliens appear as slight variations from human beings when the evolutionary history is clear that aliens would be very different from us.”

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FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. ExoNews.org distributes this material for the purpose of news reporting, educational research, comment and criticism, constituting Fair Use under 17 U.S.C § 107. Please contact the Editor at ExoNews with any copyright issue.

UFOs Deserve Scientific Investigation

Article by Ravi Kopparapu and Jacob Haqq-Misra          July 27, 2020                 (scientificamerican.com)

• UFOs have been back in the news because of “unidentified aerial phenomena” videos officially released by the Pentagon. But the UFO phenomenon is a worldwide occurrence. Scientists in several other countries have studied them. Shouldn’t American scientists choose to investigate and curb the speculation around them? An interdisciplinary scientific investigation is needed, while discarding the taboo surrounding this phenomenon.

• Such unexplained UFO cases drew interest by scientists during the 1960s. As a result, the US Air Force funded a scientific group at the University of Colorado, headed by physicist Edward Condon, to review UFO cases from 1966 to 1968. The resulting ‘Condon Report’ concluded that further study of UFOs was unlikely to be scientifically interesting. Concerns over the inadequacy of the methods used by the Condon Report culminated with a debate sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1969, with participation by scholars such as Carl Sagan, J. Allen Hynek, James McDonald, Robert Hall and Robert Baker.

• Regarding the 1969 scientific debate, Sagan wrote of the “strong opposition” by scientists who feared that AAAS sponsorship of the debate would lend credence to ‘unscientific’ ideas. While Sagan himself dismissed the extraterrestrial hypothesis, he still claimed that the UFO subject was worthy of scientific inquiry.

• We, as scientists, should be cautious of outright dismissal of the UFO phenomenon by assuming that every instance has a “scientific” explanation. We must let scientific curiosity be the spearhead of understanding such phenomena. But these recent Navy pilots’ accounts of UFO sightings have failed to generate similar interest among the scientific community.

• Why should astronomers, meteorologists, and planetary scientists care about these UFO events? Because we are scientists. Curiosity is the reason we became scientists. UFOs represent observations that are waiting to be explained, just like any other science discovery. A systematic investigation is essential in order to bring the phenomena into mainstream science. Collection of hard data is paramount to establishing any credibility to the explanation of the phenomena. A rigorous scientific analysis is sorely needed, by multiple independent study groups.

• The transient nature of UFOs, and the unpredictability of when and where the next event will happen, is one of the main reasons why UFOs have not been taken seriously in science circles. But how can one identify a pattern without systematically collecting the data in the first place? In astronomy, the location and timing of gamma-ray bursts, supernovae and gravitational waves are similarly unpredictable. By meticulously collecting data from each occurrence and systematically observing them, we now recognize these as natural phenomena arising from stellar evolution. Similarly, gathering UFO data with tools such as radar, thermal, and visual observations would be immensely helpful. Not every case is a classified military aircraft or strange weather formation.

• As Sagan concluded at the 1969 debate, “scientists are particularly bound to have open minds; this is the lifeblood of science.” We do not know what UFOs are. This is precisely the reason that we as scientists should study them.

• [Editor’s Note]   Back in the 1960s, the Condon Report didn’t stand a chance of seeing the light of ‘scientific curiosity and impartiality’. The deep state jackels had just gotten away with assassinating a sitting US President, and they felt invincible. The 1969 Condon Report was a set up, just like the Warren Commission. Even Carl Sagen, who played the role of the open-minded advocate of scientific curiosity, was later revealed to be an actual member of the top-secret Majestic 12 deep state UFO government debunking committee.

The question is, has the deep state lost its absolute control over the modern scientific community to a point where there are, in fact, some independent scientists who would make an impartial inquiry into the UFO phenomenon and reveal their objective findings to the public? Or will these scientists continue to bow to the deep state governmental authorities and private foundations that provide the funding for their work, and thus their livelihood?

 

UFOs have been back in the news because of videos initially leaked, and later confirmed, by the U.S. Navy and officially released by Pentagon that purportedly show “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP) in our skies. Speculations about their nature have run the gamut from mundane objects like birds or balloons to visitors from outer space.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to say what these actually are, however, without context. What happened before and after these video snippets? Were there any simultaneous observations from other instruments, or sightings by pilots?

Judging the nature of these objects (and these seem to be “objects,” as confirmed by the Navy) needs a coherent explanation that should accommodate and connect all the facts of the events. And this is where interdisciplinary scientific investigation is needed.

The proposal to scientifically study UAP phenomena is not new. The problem of understanding such unexplained UAP cases drew interest by scientists during the 1960s, which resulted in the U.S. Air Force funding a group at the University of Colorado, headed by physicist Edward Condon, to study UAP from 1966 to 1968. The resulting Condon Report concluded that further study of UAP was unlikely to be scientifically interesting—a conclusion that drew mixed reactions from scientists and the public.

Concerns over the inadequacy of the methods used by the Condon Report culminated with a congressional hearing in 1968 as well as a debate sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1969 with participation by scholars such as Carl Sagan, J. Allen Hynek, James McDonald, Robert Hall and Robert Baker. Hynek was an astronomy professor at the Ohio State University and led the Project Blue Book investigation, while McDonald, who was a well-known meteorologist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and AAAS, performed a thorough investigation of UAP phenomena. Sagan, a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, was one of the organizers of the AAAS debate. He dismissed the extraterrestrial hypothesis as unlikely but still considered the UAP subject worthy of scientific inquiry.

Recent UAP sightings, however, have so far failed to generate similar interest among the scientific community. Part of the reason could be the apparent taboo around UAP phenomena, connecting it to the paranormal or pseudoscience, while ignoring the history behind it. Sagan even wrote in the afterword of the 1969 debate proceedings about the “strong opposition” by other scientists who were “convinced that AAAS sponsorship would somehow lend credence to ‘unscientific’ ideas.” As scientists we must simply let scientific curiosity be the spearhead of understanding such phenomena. We should be cautious of outright dismissal by assuming that every UAP phenomena must be explainable.

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ET Life as We Don’t Know It

 

Article by Wade Roush                           April 7, 2020                            (scientificamerican.com)

• This blog article’s writer, Wade Roush, has written a book entitled Extraterrestrials which attempts to explain why, after sixty years, SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has never found a hint of advanced extraterrestrial life. At its inception in the 1960s, SETI assumed that the best way to discover ET was by monitoring radio and optical frequencies. But as Nathalie Cabrol of the SETI Institute wrote, “[S]o far, in our quest to find ET, we have only been searching for other versions of ourselves.” The flaw in SETI’s approach is that it has been too ‘Earth-centric’ and ‘human-centric’.

• SETI’s focus has been on exoplanets within the “habitable zone” of a star system, where water remains in liquid form. But we didn’t understand how adaptable life can be. We’ve found life in places with crushing pressures and scalding temperatures, and even inside nuclear reactors where living organisms feed on radiation.

• In 1985, when Roush was a college journalist, he was ‘star-struck’ while covering a Harvard symposium inaugurating the Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay (or META), which was attended by his heroes Carl Sagan and Steven Spielberg. It felt like the launch of a voyage that would finally turn science fiction into science reality. If you’d told the assembled scientists that 35 years would go by without SETI, META, or any of its successors detecting even a hint of an ET signal, they’d have reacted with disbelief.

• It’s time to move beyond the idea that extraterrestrials would think like us or use technologies like ours. We should continue to listening for technosignatures and look for industrial biosignatures on exoplanets, but we should also expand the search beyond familiar sun-like stars and red dwarfs. Beings who evolved in exotic environments might have very different sense organs and neural systems. We need to get outside of our own heads and think more like aliens. We need new observing and filtering systems that look for the kinds of messages that exotic beings might be sending.

• [Editor’s Note]  Now that SETI has wasted sixty years’ worth of funding searching in vain for extraterrestrial signals, scientists are preoccupied with debating ‘why’. There is no doubt that SETI is funded and run by the deep state. Carl Sagan himself was a member of deep state UFO control group, Majestic 12. So, from the perspective of its cabal overlords, SETI’s perfect record of finding and reporting absolutely no sign of intelligent extraterrestrial life for six decades has been an unmitigated success. For sixty years, they’ve been trying NOT to find ET life in the galaxy as part of the deep state’s objective of convincing the public that extraterrestrials do not exist. They don’t want the public knowing that the deep state government routinely works with alien beings, utilizing alien technology exclusively for the benefit the cabal ‘elite’. And ‘journalists’ like Wade Roush are either naïve and uninformed, or they are compromised deep state puppets.

 

In 1985, when I was a baby journalist writing my first college newspaper story, I covered a symposium at Harvard inaugurating the Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay (META), a computer system designed by physicist Paul Horowitz to sift through millions of narrow radio channels for signals from other civilizations.

Carl Sagan was on hand that weekend to represent the Planetary Society, which had helped fund the project. So was Steven Spielberg, who’d written a

                Wade Roush

$100,000 check. Having grown up on Sagan’s Cosmos and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, I was star-struck. But I was also thrilled to witness what felt like the launch of a voyage that would finally turn science fiction into science reality.

No one at the symposium was rash enough to predict whether or when Horowitz’s project would succeed. But if you’d told the assembled scientists that 35 years would go by without META or any of its successors detecting even a hint of a signal, they’d have reacted with disappointment and disbelief. The aliens ought to be out there; they ought to be broadcasting; we ought to be able to hear them. But a 2020 Astronomical Journal paper detailing a search of 1,327 nearby stars at the highest sensitivity to date found zero candidate signals. So how is it that the Great Silence—to use the title phrase from astronomer Milan Ćirković’s 2018 book— continues?

Well, having just written my own book about the history of that question (Extraterrestrials, MIT Press, April 2020), I’ve come to suspect that there’s something missing in our approach to the search for off-world intelligence. This search is built around the hope that if technological societies are out there, they’re communicating (1) using the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum we can most easily scan from Earth’s surface, namely radio and optical frequencies, and (2) using encoding schemes such as pulse modulation that we can easily recognize. Those assumptions made sense in the early days of SETI in the 1960s, when the field was still a quirky offshoot of radio astronomy.

But today they seem fatally Earth-centric and human-centric. As Nathalie Cabrol of the SETI Institute wrote in a paradigm-busting 2016 Astrobiology paper, “[S]o far, in our quest to find ET, we have only been searching for other versions of ourselves.”

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Now We’re Using AI to Interpret “Mysterious Space Signals”

Listen to “E74 8-22-19 Now We’re Using AI to Interpret “Mysterious Space Signals”” on Spreaker.
Article by Jazz Shaw                        August 13, 2019                        (hotair.com)

• Fast Radio Bursts (FRB’s) are very brief and “mysterious space signals” that originate from galaxies throughout our universe, though not from our own Milky Way galaxy. FRBs are composed of compact, complex radio waves, and are difficult to track and pin down. Many of the intense flashes have traveled billions of light-years across space.

• Now, according to the New York Post, a doctoral student at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia named Wael Farah has matched the Molonglo telescope in Canberra with an artificially intelligent machine-learning system that recognizes FRB signatures as they arrive to produce the finest records of FRBs yet. Farah’s research was recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

• FRBs have “mysterious structures, patterns of peaks and valleys in radio waves that play out in just milliseconds”, quite unlike what you’d expect to see from a massive collision or explosion that randomly happen throughout the universe. So what are they? Are they signs of intelligent alien civilizations? If so, they must be up to something pretty spectacular to produce enough energy to reach us with that much power from far off galaxies.

• Then the question is, is detecting aliens a good enough excuse to unleash even more Artificial Intelligence into the global web? Carl Sagan warned us long ago that alerting advanced extraterrestrial civilizations to our presence was probably a bad idea. Steven Hawking once warned that while AI doesn’t hold actual malice against humans, if the AI’s goals aren’t aligned with our own, we’re in trouble.

• So now we’re mixing the search for possible extraterrestrials with Artificial Intelligence. What could possibly go wrong?

 

While still being a bit on the frightening side, the science behind this story is still kind of cool and worth a look. The “mysterious space signals” referenced in the title are probably more familiar to those of you who follow such topics as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). They originate all over the universe, though not from our own Milky Way Galaxy (yet, thankfully), and are composed of compact, complex radio waves that don’t seem like the sort of thing you’d get from a normal spacial event like a supernova or the creation of a black hole.

      Wael Farah

The problem is, they are rare and very brief, so we’ve had trouble trying to track them and pin them down. Now a laboratory in Australia has worked out a way to use Artificial Intelligence to do just that.

(NY Post quote) Wael Farah, a doctoral student at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, developed a machine-learning system that recognized the signatures of FRBs as they arrive.

Farah’s system trained the Molonglo telescope in Canberra to spot FRBs and switch over to its most detailed recording mode, producing the finest records of FRBs yet.

“It is fascinating to discover that a signal that traveled halfway through the universe,” he said. The research was recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Many of the intense flashes have traveled billions of light-years across space.

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Efforts To Search For, Send Messages To Extraterrestrial Life Advance In Digital Age

by Molly McCrea and Juliette Goodrich                 April 25, 2019                   (sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com)

• In 1977, NASA scientists installed a golden record on two space probes that were part of the Voyager Mission. On each copy were dozens of images, sounds from nature, and multiple greetings in 55 different languages. The record also contained music from around the world, and included classical as well as a recording of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B Goode.” “This was a way of telling another civilization about us,” explained the legendary astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake.

• Drake and fellow astrophysicist, the late Carl Sagan, also wrote what’s known as the Arecibo Message in 1974, the first interstellar radio message sent from earth to a globular star cluster known as M13 in hopes that extraterrestrial intelligence could receive and decipher it.

• Drake and Sagan also designed what is known as the Pioneer plaques. These plaques were another kind of message from earth that scientists hoped would be intercepted by extraterrestrial beings from the 1972 Pioneer 10 and the 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft missions.

• In 2015, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner unveiled a project called the “Breakthrough Initiatives” to search for extraterrestrial intelligence over the span of at least 10 years. Part of the Initiatives program includes a $1M Breakthrough Message competition, where the task is to design a digital message to send to advanced civilizations. But no message has yet been sent. And some, such as Doug Vakoch who heads up: Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI), want to send the messages now and hear back from other civilizations. He explained that the messages would be sent by radio or in the near future, by lasers using very brief laser pulses.

• Not everyone agrees we should be rapidly concocting and sending messages. Stargazer Alicia Adams says, “I’ve seen Mars Attacks and that ended horribly!” Retired Professor of Astronomy Andrew Fraknoi says it’s a question over which space scientists are now grappling. “If we’re going to be deciding to advertise our presence to the universe, we should have a discussion with the rest of the world,” said Fraknoi. “Are we ready to signal out there that we on earth exist? We are barely getting along with each other. Are we ready to get along with aliens?”

• Drake thinks intelligent beings already know we’re here due to television and radio signals traveling in space. “It’s too late, folks. We’ve made our presence known big-time,” said Drake.

• A recent survey by Glocalities involving 24 countries found nearly half of all humans believe in extraterrestrials.

 

An ambitious new effort is underway to make direct contact with intelligent life beyond earth, improving upon 70s-era space missions which included attempts to bring messages from Earth to extraterrestrials.

For centuries, we’ve gazed up at the stars, and wondered are we alone? Some say it is time to move more aggressively and find out.

In early April, NASA’s newest planet hunter called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) discovered its first Earth-sized alien planet. A recent survey by Glocalities involving 24 countries found nearly half of all humans believe in extraterrestrials.

                Frank Drake

ETs are on our mind. At the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, an entire evening’s event was all about extraterrestrials. A special dance troupe performed to an eclectic mix of sounds. The sounds were excerpts taken from a famous golden record, intended for intelligent life in the universe. The 12-inch copper gold plated disk is known as the Pioneer Golden Record.

Artist Katerina Wong choreographed the performance and was thrilled to know its history.

“They were hoping if there was an opportunity to meet an ET, that they would get a little bit of understanding about what life on earth was like.” remarked Wong.

In 1977, NASA scientists installed a golden record on two space probes that were part of the Voyager Mission.

On each copy were dozens of images, sounds from nature, and multiple greetings in 55 different languages. The record also contained music from around the world, and included classical as well as a recording of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B Goode.”

According to NASA, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are exploring where nothing from Earth has flown before. Their primary mission was the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn in our own solar system but now, both probes are billions of miles away from earth – carrying a message from earth on these golden records. The hope was that somewhere beyond our solar system, intelligent life or advanced civilizations will find them and be able to decipher their contents.
“This was a way of telling another civilization about us,” explained the legendary astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake.

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Galaxy Simulations Offer a New Solution to the Fermi Paradox

by Rebecca Boyle                March 7, 2019                   (quantamagazine.org)

• The universe is filled with stars, nearly all those stars have planets, and some of those planets are surely livable. So where is everybody? This is the ongoing conundrum that is the Fermi Paradox, first presented by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950.

• In 1981, Carl Sagan and William Newman speculated that the answer to the paradox was that intelligent people were simply too far away from us to come here. But they may do so in time. Others reason that tech-savvy civilizations are rare and prone to self-destruction, or are avoiding the Earth on purpose. In 1975, the astrophysicist Michael Hart declared there simply are no other intelligence civilizations in the universe (a hypothesis recently revived by Oxford researcher, Anders Samberg).

• Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, an astronomer at the University of Rochester, has led another study, now under review by The Astrophysical Journal. Carroll-Nellenback says that it wouldn’t take very long for a space-faring civilization to spread across the galaxy because the movement of stars throughout the galaxy would “… spread life on time scales much shorter than the age of the galaxy” and help distribute life. “The sun has been around the center of the Milky Way 50 times.” According to simulations by Carroll-Nellenback and his colleagues Jason Wright, Adam Frank, and Caleb Scharf, natural variability will mean that sometimes galaxies will be settled, but often not — solving Fermi’s quandary.

• But the fact that no interstellar visitors are here now does not mean they do not exist, the study’s authors say. Civilizations do not last forever. Not every star is a destination, and not every planet is habitable. There’s also what Frank calls “the Aurora effect,” in which settlers arrive at a habitable planet on which they nonetheless cannot survive. When Carroll-Nellenback and his coauthors included these impediments in their model and ran simulations with different star densities, seed civilizations, spacecraft velocities and other variations, they found a vast middle ground between a silent, empty galaxy and one teeming with life. It’s possible that the Milky Way is partially settled, or intermittently so.

• Frank and Wright say that now we need to look for alien signals, which will be possible as more sophisticated telescopes open their eyes to the panoply of exoplanets and begin glimpsing their atmospheres. “We are entering an era when we are going to have actual data relevant to life on other planets,” Frank said. “This couldn’t be more relevant than in the moment we live.”

• [Editor’s Note]   The wrangling over Fermi’s Paradox continues among mainstream scientists who are groping for an answer to a flawed premise. When you take the premise that no interstellar beings have ever visited the Earth as “Fact A”, there’s nowhere to go. It becomes a perpetual debate on why there are no beings here besides us. But this is a falsehood from the start. Of course there are extraterrestrial beings all around us. We have real evidence that they have been here for thousands of years, and anecdotal evidence that they have been here for hundreds of millions or even a couple of billion years. This galaxy and the universe are teeming with intelligent life. All of the 52 star systems in our local star cluster have human-like civilizations very similar to our own. We are apparently the last to join this community. It is our time. The problem is that the powers that be, which control the Deep State government and the mainstream science community, have made it a priority to keep Earth humans completely ignorant and unaware of our true reality, often through silly “scientific studies” such as this one.

 

As far as anyone knows, we have always been alone. It’s just us on this pale blue dot, “home to everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of,” as Carl Sagan so memorably put it. No one has called or dropped by. And yet the universe is filled with stars, nearly all those stars have planets, and some of those planets are surely livable. So where is everybody?

The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was purportedly the first to pose this question, in 1950, and scientists have offered a bounty of solutions for his eponymous paradox since. One of the most famous came from Sagan himself, with William Newman, who postulated in a 1981 paperthat we just need patience. Nobody has visited because they’re all too far away; it takes time to evolve a species intelligent enough to invent interstellar travel, and time for that species to spread across so many worlds. Nobody is here yet.

Other researchers have argued that extraterrestrial life might rarely become space-faring (just as only one species on Earth ever has). Some argue that tech-savvy species, when they arise, quickly self-destruct. Still others suggest aliens may have visited in the past, or that they’re avoiding us on purpose, having grown intelligent enough to be suspicious of everyone else. Perhaps the most pessimistic answer is a foundational paper from 1975, in which the astrophysicist Michael Hart declared that the only plausible reason nobody has visited is that there really is nobody out there.

Now comes a paper that rebuts Sagan and Newman, as well as Hart, and offers a new solution to the Fermi paradox that avoids speculation about alien psychology or anthropology.

The research, which is under review by The Astrophysical Journal, suggests it wouldn’t take as long as Sagan and Newman thought for a space-faring civilization to planet-hop across the galaxy, because the movements of stars can help distribute life. “The sun has been around the center of the Milky Way 50 times,” said Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, an astronomer at the University of Rochester, who led the study. “Stellar motions alone would get you the spread of life on time scales much shorter than the age of the galaxy.” Still, although galaxies can become fully settled fairly quickly, the fact of our loneliness is not necessarily paradoxical: According to simulations by Carroll-Nellenback and his colleagues, natural variability will mean that sometimes galaxies will be settled, but often not — solving Fermi’s quandary.

The question of how easy it would be to settle the galaxy has played a central role in attempts to resolve the Fermi paradox. Hart and others calculated that a single space-faring species could populate the galaxy within a few million years, and maybe even as quickly as 650,000 years. Their absence, given the relative ease with which they should spread, means they must not exist, according to Hart.

Sagan and Newman argued it would take longer, in part because long-lived civilizations are likelier to grow more slowly. Faster-growing, rapacious societies might peter out before they could touch all the stars. So maybe there have been a lot of short-lived, fast-growing societies that wink out, or a few long-lived, slowly expanding societies that just haven’t arrived yet, as Jason Wright of Pennsylvania State University, a coauthor of the new study, summarized Sagan and Newman’s argument. But Wright doesn’t agree with either solution.

“That conflates the expansion of the species as a whole with the sustainability of individual settlements,” he said. “Even if it is true for one species, it is not going to be this iron-clad law of xenosociology where if they are expanding, they are necessarily short-lived.” After all, he noted, life on Earth is robust, “and it expands really fast.”

In their new paper, Carroll-Nellenback, Wright and their collaborators Adam Frank of Rochester and Caleb Scharf of Columbia University sought to examine the paradox without making untestable assumptions. They modeled the spread of a “settlement front” across the galaxy, and found that its speed would be strongly affected by the motions of stars, which previous work — including Sagan and Newman’s — treated as static objects. The settlement front could cross the entire galaxy based just on the motions of stars, regardless of the power of propulsion systems. “There is lots of time for exponential growth basically leading to every system being settled,” Carroll-Nellenback said.

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Astronomers Are Asking Kids to Help Them Contact Aliens

by Sigal Samuel                   February 21, 2019                          (vox.com)

• In 1974, scientists at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico used the 1,000-foot-wide radio telescope to send a carefully crafted radio broadcast into outer space – a message of zeros and ones meant to alert aliens to our existence for the first time. In honor of the 45th anniversary of that transmission, researchers at the observatory are pondering how to design a follow-up dispatch. Rather than asking their fellow experts, they’ve launched a global contest inviting youth, from kindergarteners to 16-year-olds, to create the New Arecibo Message.

• Says Abe Pacini, a researcher at Arecibo, “Sometimes the scientists are so focused on their topics and they can see stuff very deep but they cannot see very broad… Students know a little bit about everything, so they can see the big picture better. For sure they can design a message that is actually much more important.” Teams composed of up to ten students plus one mentor must register by March 20th. The more diverse the team is, the more points it gets. The contest guidelines recommend using social media to find possible teammates in other countries or regions. The Arecibo scientists will determine which, if any, message will be selected to represent Earth.

• The 1974 Arecibo message was authored by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan and provided basic information about us, like the position of Earth in our solar system, the size of the human population, the shape of the human body, and the double helix structure of DNA. (The information about the nucleotides in DNA has since been shown to be false.) The message was beamed at M13, a globular star cluster 25,000 light years away. (But these primitive radio waves would take 25,000 years for the message to get there.)

• Another determination that the scientists will make is the “risks of exposure” inherent in messaging alien civilizations. Scientists like the late Stephen Hawking and technologists like Elon Musk have warned that communicating with extraterrestrials could pose an existential threat to the Earth if the message is received by hostile aliens. In 2015, SETI researchers, Elon Musk, and others released a statement saying, “We strongly encourage vigorous international debate by a broadly representative body prior to engaging further in this activity.”

• Astronomer and science fiction author David Brin, one of the most vocal critics of an Arecibo Message, says that, “[M]ost of us are much more concerned about the arrogance these zealots are displaying by presuming to speak for a civilization of 8 billion people without ever exposing their assumptions to normal debate and risk assessment.” Brin also noted, “Their instrument (the Arecibo Telescope) is funded by the taxpayers.”

• Douglas Vakoch, an astrobiologist who worked at SETI before splitting off to found his own international organization, Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI), points out that “[A]ny civilization that could do us harm would already know we’re here from our accidental TV and radio leakage.” Vakoch says that the most important aspect of this communication may be our announcing to the galaxy that we are ready to make contact. Known as the ‘Zoo Hypothesis’, this is the idea that extraterrestrials may be keeping an eye on our planet but are waiting for us to indicate that we want to be in contact and that we’re sophisticated enough to merit attention.

• Neither a 1967 Outer Space Treaty ratified by dozens of countries and adopted by the United Nations which laid out an anti-weaponization framework for space, nor a SETI post-ET-detection protocol drafted in the 1980’s, addresses any protocol for actively sending out messages to other civilizations.

• For Brin, all this anxiety over interstellar communication seems like a reflection of our anxieties about communicating with one another. Underneath the question of how to talk to alien minds is a question that’s much closer to home: how to make ourselves understood to other minds right here on Earth.

• On a bulletin board at the Arecibo visitor center where kids were invited to post messages, one child’s misspelled missive was especially poignant: “Earth is destroying it self. Help us! Please help! Send better knowledg.”

• [Editor’s Note]   Sending radio waves into space is like traveling across the American continent in horse-drawn covered wagons. This is just another example of mainstream scientists pretending to be on the cutting edge of space exploration when, in fact, our secret space programs are hundreds of years more advanced in space technology. Also, this speculation as to what kinds of extraterrestrials are out there, and the hand-wringing at what hostile ETs might do to our planet if we are “found”, is just more disinformation. We already know that many, many types of ET beings have already been here throughout our human development on Earth, and have been actively interacting with Earth humans since WWII. All of this drama about searching for intelligent life in the cosmos is simply theater to placate a mind-controlled Earth populace.

 

The scientists at Arecibo Observatory, a gigantic radio telescope in Puerto Rico, are some of the smartest astronomers and physicists in the world. But they need help with their next big project — and for that, they’re turning to kids.
In 1974, scientists used the 1,000-foot-wide telescope to send a carefully crafted radio broadcast into outer space, a message of zeros and ones meant to alert aliens to our existence.

It was humanity’s first interstellar message intended to be picked up by aliens. We haven’t heard back from E.T. yet. But in honor of the 45th anniversary of that transmission, the researchers at the observatory are pondering how to design a follow-up dispatch. Rather than asking their fellow experts, they’ve launched a global contest inviting youth — from kindergarteners to 16-year-olds — to create the New Arecibo Message.

The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico

The grand prize? A chance to have your message broadcast into the stars, and to potentially become the first human being ever to communicate with aliens.

I asked Alessandra Abe Pacini, a researcher at Arecibo who helped generate the idea for the contest, why kids are the best people for the job. “Sometimes the scientists are so focused on their topics and they can see stuff very deep but they cannot see very broad,” she said. “Students know a little bit about everything, so they can see the big picture better. For sure they can design a message that is actually much more important.”

But designing messages to aliens is a tricky business, on multiple levels. How do you write a missive that an alien intelligence will be able to understand? Should you avoid including sensitive information about humanity, in case that emboldens aliens to come to our planet and annihilate our species? Should you avoid transmitting messages into outer space altogether, because even just alerting aliens to our existence is too risky?

These questions are at the heart of a long-running, and sometimes very heated, debate among scientists. There’s no consensus about any of them, or even about the meta-question of who gets to decide on the answers.

One thing is clear, though: The stakes are extremely high. As scientists like the late Stephen Hawking and technologists like Elon Musk have warned, communicating with extraterrestrials could pose a catastrophic risk to humanity. In fact, if we send out a message and it’s received by less-than-friendly aliens, that could pose an existential threat not only to the human species but to every species on Earth.

The Original Arecibo Message

When space scientists wanted to celebrate a huge upgrade that had been made to the Arecibo Observatory in 1974, two of their greatest minds stepped up to draft a memo to aliens. It would be broadcast from the telescope during a public ceremony. Frank Drake, who came up with the famous “Drake Equation” for estimating the odds that intelligent life exists in our galaxy, crafted the message with help from Carl Sagan, the astronomer and popular science writer who penned Contact and popularized the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) organization.

Written in binary code — a series of ones and zeros — the message was designed with the hope of being intelligible to any aliens who might be listening. It sought to give them some basic information about us, like the position of Earth in our solar system, the size of the human population, the shape of the human body, and the double helix structure of DNA. When you look at the message in pictogram form, you can see all these components and more.

But this interstellar postcard was directed at M13, a globular star cluster 25,000 light years away, which may help explain why we haven’t heard back yet — it’ll take 25,000 years for the message to get there and the same amount of time for any reply to get back to us. The scientists chose that destination partly because the star cluster was big and relatively close, and partly just because it was within the telescope’s declination range (the part of the sky it can target) at the time of the ceremony.

In other words, the scientists weren’t really aiming to communicate with an alien civilization in their lifetimes so much as they were trying to publicly showcase the fact that their telescope could now do something incredible: For nearly three minutes, it sent a cosmic hello from humanity into the sky, as the audience assembled on site was moved to tears.

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Why Saturn’s Moon Iapetus Could Have Been Artificially Made By Extraterrestrials

by Arjun Walia                   February 7, 2019                    (collective-evolution.com)

• Iapetus – Iapetus is a moon of Saturn that was discovered by Italian astronomer Giovaccini Domenico Cassini in 1671. What is so interesting about Iapetus is that there is a mountain-like ridge running around the moon’s equator that measures up to 20 kilometres tall, twice the size of Mt Everest, and approximately 200 kilometres thick. (Iapetus is pictured above)  It is actually the tallest mountain range in our entire Solar System. But the rest of the moon is flat. This would indicate that it is artificially constructed. A lot of prominent researchers and scientists say that the Earth’s Moon is also artificially constructed. Of course, they’re generally ignored by the mainstream. But most interesting is the fact that both our Moon and Iapetus’ moon are in a near perfect circular orbit, and one side always faces its planetary host, locked into position.

• The Moon – On more than one occasion, researchers have found strange and large artificial structures on the back side of the Moon. We have witness testimony from credible sources including high ranking intelligence and military people who have revealed structures on the Moon. Carl Sagan once pointed out that artifacts found on the Moon or other orbiting objects in the solar system might be stored there by previous [extraterrestrial] expeditions for use in successive visits to our star system, avoiding detection by Earthbound humans. The Deputy Manager for the 1995 Clementine Mission to the Moon said it was really a reconnaissance mission to check out the bases on the back side of the Moon. In 1962, NASA scientist Gordon MacDonald published a paper stating it’s more likely that the Moon is hollow than not. MIT’s Sean C. Solomon furthered this statement citing knowledge of the Moon’s gravitation field as evidence for the assertion. Multiple governments, including Russia, have been calling for an international investigation as to where much of NASA’s photographs, footage and even Moon rocks have disappeared.

• Mars – There is no doubt that life once flourished on Mars, with vast oceans, mountain ranges and greenery. There may have been a very intelligent civilization on Mars, and still might be within it. A recent paper in the Journal Scientific Exploration “hinted strongly at artificial surface interventions” in the Cydonia region on Mars where there are pyramids and ‘The Face on Mars’. NASA astronaut Dr. Brian O’Leary even accused Carl Sagan of covering up the fact that NASA knew the Face on Mars was artificial. Buzz Aldrin spoke about a monolith on a moon of Mars.

• Saturn – The pictures NASA got back from the Voyager mission to Saturn in 1980 were apparently so mind-altering that they locked them up, according to retired U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major Bob Dean. In his book “The Ringmakers of Saturn”, Norman Bergrun revealed a NASA secret that large spacecraft were “proliferating” around Saturn’s rings and moons, and that these extraterrestrial ‘vehicles’ were responsible for making artificial rings around Saturn. Photographs of Saturn show something luminous near the gas giant planet’s surface. Bergrun had to leave the country in order to publish the book, and today a copy of the book is so rare that it is worth thousands of dollars.

 

Our solar system is fascinating, to say the least, and there is still so much we don’t know about it. What makes one even more curious is knowing the organizations and people who operate at the highest levels of ‘security clearances’ probably know a whole lot more. That being said, if you’re independently curious, there are more than enough resources available to satisfy your curiosity, you will find a way to investigate. At the very least you could get access to the best telescope you have and stare at the other planets, our Moon, and the Moons of other planets.

Perhaps the best thing to do is simply sift through the literature and you will find no shortage of strange anomalies that have been discovered in space -there’s truly no shortage. It’s also likely you will come across the tremendous amounts of controversy that come with these discoveries as well. Strange findings have been subject to ridicule within the mainstream, but that hasn’t stopped hundreds, if not thousands, of researchers and insiders from all backgrounds from continuing their study and education.

The Face On Mars Example

The Face on Mars is a good example of anomalies and ridicule. It has been the subject of several published papers that clearly show a high chance of artificial construction. Carl Sagan was even accused by his colleague, physicist and NASA astronaut Dr. Brian O’Leary for covering up the fact that ‘they’ knew the Face on Mars was artificial.

Today, it’s a much different story, and it appears that there is no doubt that life once flourished on Mars prior to the massive climate shift which occurred there that made it what it is today. Not many people know that Mars was once very Earth-like, with vast oceans, mountain ranges and greenery. Little did we know that there may have been a very intelligent civilization there, and still might be, perhaps within in.

A paper published in the Jornal Scientific Exploration was one of the latest to examine the Cydonia region on Mars. As the authors point out, “it validates the earlier measurements obtained using the lower resolution NASA Viking images, which hinted strongly at artificial surface interventions.” The key word there is artificial surface interventions. There are pyramids and faces on Mars, similar and in some cases, larger than those found here on planet Earth.

Our Own Moon

Then we have the Moon, which has also been the subject of recent peer-reviewed research. On more than one occasion, researchers have found what appears to be strange, and large, artificial structures on the back side of the Moon, the side we can never see unless we send probes and astronauts around it. To compliment all of the information regarding the Moon, we have statements from a number of credible sources in the form of witness testimony, from high ranking intelligence and military people etc. It’s safe to say that something strange is happening on the Moon. I do believe we went there, but I also believe what we were shown and told was heavily sanitized. Let’s not forget about Buzz Aldrin being so outspoken about a “Monolyth on the (one of the) moon of Mars.”

Iapetus, Perhaps The Most Puzzling

Which brings me to the topic of this article, Iapetus, one of Saturn’s moons. What’s unique about it is the fact that it has what appears to be a huge mountainous ridge that measures up to 20 kilometres tall, twice the size of Everest, and approximately 200 kilometres thick. It can be seen running exactly along the equator for well over three-quarters of the moon’s entire circumference, but it’s safe to assume around the entire planet. It was discovered in 2004, early in the Cassini mission.

First, let me set the stage. Iapetus is bizarre in a lot of ways. It has a yin-yang surface of dark and bright material. It is unexpectedly flat pole-to-pole. It seems to have an excessive number of large impact basins. And it has a mountainous ridge, up to 20 kilometres tall, running exactly along its equator for well over three-quarters of its entire circumference. The existence of this ridge was revealed very early in the Cassini mission, in an encounter at the end of 2004. – Jim Mars, Our Occulted History

A number of prominent researchers and scientists have hypothesized that our own Moon is artificial in nature, as so they have done with other Moons, like Iapetus. That being said, we don’t hear much about these theories & the credibility of the people behind them. They’re completely ignored by the mainstream simply because they don’t fit within the mainstream narrative which is nothing more than a theory in itself.

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Humans Sent Aliens a Detailed, Gold-Plated Message About Earth

by Vishal Kawadkar                      December 7, 2018                      (gizbot.com)

• In 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 1 and 2 unmanned space probes (pictured above) in order to study the outer solar system. Both of these probes carried a 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record-type disc containing images and audio files which portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. Thus, the Voyager 1 and 2 became time capsules meant to communicate with extraterrestrials.

• The contents of the phonograph records were chosen by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan. They assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds like the ones made from surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. They also selected 90-minutes of music from different cultures and eras and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages. It also has printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim.

• Each record is kept in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a needle and a cartridge. It also includes symbolic language that depicts the origin of the spacecraft and indicates how the record is in audio.

• It will take forty thousand years for Voyager to approach to another planetary system. Carl Sagan noted, “[T]he launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”

 

The precursors of the Voyager – the Pioneers 10 and 11 both carried a metal plaque which provides information about their time and place of origin which will help other spacefarers that might find them in the future.

Taking cues from the Pioneers, NASA placed a more ambitious message on the Voyager 1 and 2, a kind of time capsule that is meant to communicate with the extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is contained in a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk that has images and audio files which portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.

The contents that will be saved on the record was handpicked for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University and his associates. They assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds like the ones made from surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals.

Additionally, they selected music from different cultures and eras and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages. It also has printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim.

“The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space.”

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The Order of the Dolphin: SETI’s Secret Origin Story

by John Wenz                October 10, 2018                     (discovermagazine.com)

• In 1960, Harvard PhD Frank Drake and his colleagues decided that rather than using the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia to determine the surface temperature of Venus or the radiation belts of Jupiter, they’d train it on two nearby stars to listen for signs of life from intelligent extraterrestrials. This was the beginning of the modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI.

• In the meantime, physician/philosopher John Lilly was trying to communicate with earth-bound intelligences. From apes to elephants to pig to octopus, these creatures seem to possess intelligent self-awareness. He found that the most intelligent were the dolphins and whales. Lilly also saw the experiments as a way to help efforts to contact extraterrestrial aliens. If we can crack the code of dolphin language, we might have a shot at decoding other alien communication.

• In 1961, a group of scientists met at green Bank to discuss the search for alien intelligence. They included Drake and Lilly, radio expert Dana Atchley, biochemist Melvin Calvin, optical astronomer Su-Shu Huang, computing pioneer Barney Oliver, Russian radio astronomer Otto Struve, and a young Carl Sagan. To begin with they wanted to get an idea of how many ET’s were possibly out there. They came up with what is no referred to as ‘The Drake Equation’.

• Lilly used this meeting to tell his colleagues about his dolphin research, pointing out that the dolphin’s brain was actually larger and more complex than the human brain. The dolphin was clearly an intelligent being. Lilly even heard signs of language and empathy in recordings of the dolphins.

• But after this 1961 meeting, Lilly began introducing substances such as ketamine and LSD in his research to assist in communicating with dolphins. Drake and some other scientists began to distance themselves from Lilly’s dolphin research, calling it “poor science” and “unreliable”. As a result, Lilly’s work has tainted subsequent attempts to understand the intelligence of dolphins.

• Still, this episode in the history scientific research spawned the SETI research of today. More resources than ever are pouring into SETI efforts, thanks in part to a $100 million project from Russian billionaire Yuri Milner called Breakthrough Listen. As we search for intelligent aliens in ‘habitable zones’, we also may discover life that existed in Mars’s past, or currently on the moons Enceladus, Europa, Titan or Triton.

• [Editor’s Note]   The advances in our knowledge of intelligent extraterrestrial life that we will see in the near future, and indeed, the existence of extraterrestrials on and around our own planet, will make these initial scientific explorations trivial, if not irrelevant. We are on the brink of an entirely new and exciting exo-scientific age.

 

In 1961, when UFOs were all the rage, a group of top scientific minds met in secret at a rural observatory in West Virginia. At the time, the Green Bank Observatory was the biggest, baddest telescope in the burgeoning practice of radio astronomy. While the list of meeting attendees now reads like a who’s who of the era’s luminaries, the reason they gathered covertly was because of the taboo nature of their topic of discussion. These scientists wanted to find, and talk to, aliens. They didn’t know it, but they were about to launch the modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI.

SETI First Steps

Let’s back up a moment. In 1958, a newly minted Harvard PhD named Frank Drake came to Green Bank. Usually he sought out typical radio astronomy targets — the Van Allen Belts around Earth, say, or the surface temperature of Venus, or the radiation belts of Jupiter.

But one day in 1960, Drake and his colleagues instead tuned into two nearby stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Their goal was simple: they were alien hunting, hoping to hear radio communications originating from intelligent extraterrestrials.

UFOs were popular then, but Drake’s research was legitimate, one of the first dedicated scientific searches for aliens. Drake had been spurred on by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, who the previous year had co-authored a Nature paper with the provocative title “Searching for Interstellar Communications.” It remains a foundational SETI text.

Much to Drake’s surprise, his team actually heard something in those first few experiments. Unfortunately, it ended up being just a high altitude plane. Project Ozma, as the research was called (after L Frank Baum’s fictional monarch of Oz), was both the first SETI experiment and the first SETI false alarm.

“We had failed to detect a genuine alien signal, it was true, but we had succeeded in demonstrating that searching was a feasible, and even reasonable, thing to do,” Drake wrote in his book Is Anyone Out There?, co-written with science writer Dava Sobel.

Talking to Dolphins

While Drake was launching some of the first SETI programs, John Lilly — a physician, philosopher, writer and inventor — was attempting to communicate with his own alien intelligence. He just wasn’t looking quite as far.

Humans are, in fact, surrounded by intelligence. Our fellow great apes understand the rudiments of language, and seem to possess highly organized social structures, tool-making skills and self-awareness. Creatures literally great and small — elephants and crows — have many of these qualities as well. (Alas, the pig is also remarkably intelligent; your bacon was likely self aware.)

Intelligent life isn’t isolated to land, either. The octopus brain is one of the most remarkable on Earth, and its close cousin, the cuttlefish, is no slouch either. But the superstars of the sea, to most humans, are marine mammals, especially dolphins and whales.

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Cosmic Cafe: The Biggest Story in 2018?

by Carol Mann                January 4, 2018               (planetjh.com)

• This commentary by Carol Mann is an invitation to begin adjusting ourselves to the far-reaching changes to everything we thought we knew and believed, which a confirmed E.T. presence will bring. The ability to expand our capacity for what’s true and to adapt, no matter how mind blowing, can spare individuals, communities and nations from excessive fear and mitigate serious personal and societal mental trauma as some of our long-held and/or foundational beliefs become obsolete.

• These revelations also introduce the extraordinary and challenging opportunity to step into becoming galactic citizens capable of leaning into and contributing the best of our unique humanness to the advancements, the complexities and the wonders of expanding beyond what we are able to imagine. Always keep in mind that every human being has a heart equipped with the ability to consciously access and share the highest love, creativity, and intelligence of the Cosmos. As this story unfolds, keep informed, keep your mind open and curious. And as consistently as possible, lead with an open heart.

 

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known…The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena…There are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions… it would be astonishing to me if there weren’t extraterrestrial intelligence.”
~ Carl Sagan

UFO DISCLOSURE

In the past couple of weeks, amid the holiday hustle and bustle, there has been an interesting, no-drama flurry of UFO related information, including camera footage, released by NASA, former Pentagon officials, and other high level sources to mainstream media. Articles and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, on the major television news broadcasts and in social media. The bottom line of all this is that highly placed people and government sources are gently letting us know that the evidence for non-terrestrials visiting the Earth is very compelling.

WHAT’S NOT SO NEW

The topic of extra-terrestrials and their influence on life here on Earth is not new. Peoples throughout history have attempted to tell us in the records of their art, written traditions, and even in nuggets of truth surviving in myths that contact with E.T.’s has been going on for untold thousands of years and is real. Ancient advanced civilizations all over the world have openly attributed their knowledge of everything from architecture, engineering and medicine to beings from the stars who came to Earth. The recognition of star beings is also true among indigenous cultures.

Currently, we have the eyewitness reports from astronauts, military personnel, police, scientists, and thousands of civilians who have witnessed UFOs and/or experienced “close encounters.” Recently we also have detailed testimony about secret space programs from credible experts and experiencers turned whistleblowers. There is an impressive selection of brilliantly researched books published on these E.T. and secret space program topics.

WHAT IS NEW

What is new is that when NASA and Pentagon government sources share previously secret information with mainstream media, when a recently retired head of a government UFO project speaks publically about findings, we can assume the timing of this is not random. These disclosures would likely be on purpose and with a purpose. This appears to be part of an on-going soft disclosure … aka a little bit at a time … perhaps slightly accelerated right now…about what’s been going on for the past seventy years or so related to extra-terrestrial research, exploration, technology retrieval and outer space discoveries.

ON THE EVENT HORIZON

This article is an invitation to be aware of what we are being shown is on the event horizon. This is not about promoting fear. This is intended as an opportunity to begin adjusting ourselves to the far reaching changes to everything we thought we knew and believed, which a confirmed E.T. presence will bring. The ability to expand our capacity for what’s true and to adapt, no matter how mind blowing, can spare individuals, communities and nations from excessive fear and mitigate serious personal and societal mental trauma as some of our long-held and/or foundational beliefs become obsolete.

IT IS WHAT IT IS

Inevitably there will be good guys and bad guys, noble agendas and destructive ones, things we will want to know and things we’d rather we didn’t know. The ability to see what is … without emotional reactivity … allows for mental clarity, emotional calm and the ability to discern what’s true to make informed choices. As more and more of what’s been kept secret related to UFOs, space exploration and ET technology is likely revealed, there will an appropriate mix of reactions … from shock, upset and despair to wonder, excitement and optimism, and everything in between.

BECOMING GALACTIC HUMANS

These revelations also introduce the extraordinary and challenging opportunity to step into becoming galactic citizens capable of leaning into and contributing the best of our unique humanness to the advancements, the complexities and the wonders of expanding what’s possible beyond what we are able to imagine. Always keep in mind that every human being has a heart equipped with the ability to consciously access and share the highest love, creativity and intelligence of the Cosmos. As this story unfolds, keep informed, keep your mind open and curious. And as consistently as possible, lead with an open heart.

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Ex NASA Astronaut & Princeton Physics Professor Says His Colleague, Carl Sagan, “Fudged” Evidence of Extraterrestrial Beings

by Arjun Walia         September 28, 2017        (Collective-Evolution.com)

• Dr. Brian O’Leary was a NASA astronaut in the 1960’s, met Carl Sagan, and became a respected astronomy and physics university professor.

• O’Leary said that Sagan colluded with NASA when he “fudged data”, claiming that the famous “face on Mars” was a natural formation and doctored the photo.

• O’Leary also said that Sagan colluded with the Brookings Institute in 1961 reasoning that the existence of ETs would need to be covered up because it would be too much of a culture shock to the people.

• “Through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” Former head of CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, 1960

• “There is a serious possibility that we are being visited and have been visited for many
years by people from outer space, by other civilizations.” Lord Admiral Hill-Norton, 5 Star
Admiral of the Royal Navy.

• “I have no idea who controls the flow of need-to-know (on UFOs) because, frankly, I was told in such an emphatic way that it was none of my business that I’ve never tried to make it to be my business since.” Senator Barry Goldwater, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, 1960’s.

• “Intelligent beings from other star systems have been and are visiting our planet Earth…this is not a matter of conjecture or wistful thinking.” Theodor C. Loder III, Phd, Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences, University of New Hampshire.

• “Decades ago, visitors from other plants warned us about where we were headed and offered to help. But instead, we, or at least some of us, interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after.” Paul Hellyer, Former Canadian Defense Minister.

• “My people tell of Star People who came to us many generations ago… brought spiritual
teachings, stories, and maps of the cosmos. They were kind, loving, and set a great example.” Richard Wagamese, Ojibway Author.

• “Yes there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered… We are not alone in the universe, they have been coming here for a long time. I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet, and the UFO phenomenon is real.” Edgar Mitchell, former U.S. astronaut.

 

It is a common occurrence for ‘UFO’s to be tracked on military radar, and more and more people are starting to believe that these objects are of extraterrestrial origin. One reason for this is the disclosure of evidence supporting such a hypothesis in recent years.

Apart from the congressional hearings on this subject and the fairly recent citizens hearing that took place, along with the release of official documentation, there has been a surge in people believing that ETs are real because of the work of scholars like Dr. Brian O’Leary.

Dr. O’Leary was a NASA astronaut and a member of the sixth group of astronauts selected by NASA in August of 1967. One year after, Carl Sagan recruited O’Leary to teach at Cornell University where he researched and lectured in the department of astronomy and physics. After Cornell, O’Leary taught physics, astronomy, and science policy assessment at various academic institutions, including the University of California Berkeley, Hampshire College, and finally at Princeton University from 1976 to 1981.

Dr. O’Leary went on to Washington, where he would become an advisor to various political leaders, presidential candidates, and the United States Congress. O’Leary was also a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as secretary of the American Geophysical Union’s Planetology Section. Furthermore, he was the team leader of the Asteroidal Resources Group for NASA’s Ames Summer Study on Space Settlements. He was a founding board member of the International Association for New Science as well as founding president of the New Energy Movement.

Dr. O’Leary passed away shortly after having a heart attack and a diagnosis of intestinal cancer. He had some interesting things to say about Carl Sagan during a live interview with Kerry Cassidy of Project Camelot. O’Leary and Sagan were close for a number of years, but had a little bit of a falling out when O’Leary decided to leave Cornell.

After he left, O’Leary started to examine some of Carl’s work. He said that the famous “Face” in Cydonia on Mars — photographed by Viking in 1975, this enormous formation (about a mile across) resembled a human face and created a major buzz at the time — was tampered with by Sagan before being released to the public:

“It was very, very disappointing to me, because not only was Carl wrong, he also fudged data. He published a picture of the “Face” in Parade Magazine, a popular article, saying that the “Face” was just a natural formation, but he doctored the picture to make it not look like a face.”

At this time, Sagan and O’Leary were arguably the world’s two leading experts on Mars, and they entered into many disagreements over that face. This rift was made clear in O’Leary’s publication in 1998, “Carl Sagan & I: On Opposite Sides of Mars.” It can be found in The Case for the Face: Scientists Examine the Evidence for Alien Artifacts on Mars, eds. Stanley V. McDaniel and Monica Rix Paxson. Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press.

In May of 1990, O’Leary released a paper titled “Analysis of Images of the Face on Mars and Possible Intelligent Origin” which only further demonstrated his skepticism. It was published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol.43 No.5.

O’Leary also went on the record and stated:

“I began to realize, just directly from the scientific point of view, not only hearsay, that this man was colluding with NASA, that there might be more to this than before. . . . Carl was on a committee with a number of notable people. There was a report issued by the Brookings Institution in 1961 — and that’s about when I knew Carl, during those years; the ’60s mostly was when I worked closely with him — that he and this other group said: Well, if any ETs ever showed up on the Earth, it has to be covered up. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to manage this, because if we can’t, then it would be too much of a culture shock.”

Quite a shocking statement from someone of Brian O’Leary’s stature, isn’t it? In the interview, he goes on to say that Carl and his colleagues recommended that the governments cover up the UFO phenomenon, and that he believes this provided justification for the ongoing cover-up.

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Carl Sagan knew UFOs are real – confidant reveals

ZNN – Renowned astronomer and astrophysicist Dr. Carl Sagan revealed to Dr. J. Allen Hynek that he believed UFOs were real but avoided any public statements to prevent the loss of academic research funding. Sagan’s once powerful influence on mainstream science to play-down the reality of UFOs is now in question.

In an interview with research journalist and author Paola Leopizzi-Harris she told ZlandCommunications:

“My recollection is that Hynek said it was backstage of one of the many Johnny Carson Tonight shows Sagan did. He basically said [to Hynek] in 1984, “I know UFOs are real, but I would not risk my research [College] funding, as you do, to talk openly about them in public.”

This startling revelation about Carl Sagan, one of this century’s most esteemed scientists and writers, has now been made public by Paola Leopizzi-Harris, a former associate of Dr. Allen J. Hynek who worked with him from 1980 to 1985.

Dr. J. Allen Hynek served as a civilian scientific consultant to the U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book from 1952 to1969, initially taking a very critical and skeptical position on anything related to the reality of UFOs. In one of his own reports he stated:

“I had started out as an outright ‘debunker,’ taking great joy in cracking what seemed at first to be puzzling cases. I was the arch-enemy of those ‘flying saucer groups and enthusiasts’ who very dearly wanted UFOs to be interplanetary.” Hynek, J. Allen. “The Hynek UFO Report”. Dell Publishing Co. 1977

After leaving Project Blue Book – the U.S. Air Force’s pseudo-investigatory public relations scheme on UFOs, Hynek later wrote:

“Now, however, documentation which puts the UFO- U.S. government controversy in quite a new light has become available. The [UFO] authors have made revealing use of documents released through the mechanism of the Freedom of Information Act and other data which have been made available to them” which show that the CIA and NSA protestations of innocence and lack of interest in UFOs are nothing short of prevarication.”

Hynek went on to say: “For the government to continue to maintain that UFOs are nonexistent in the face of the documents already released and of other cogent evidence presented in this book is puerile and in a sense an insult to the American people.”  “The UFO Cover-Up.” (Fireside books, Simon & Schuster 1984)

Hynek’s credentials are indeed impressive, having consulted on the Stephen Spielberg movie Close Encounters. As well he presented a paper on UFOs at the UN in 1978. (All Experts)

Sagan’s link to UFOs and possibly to Dr. Hynek occurred in 1966 when Sagan was a member of the Ad Hoc Committee to Review Project Blue Book. This committee concluded that the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book had been lacking as a scientific study, and recommended a university-based project to give the UFO phenomenon closer scientific scrutiny.

In scientific circles much of Sagan’s notoriety came from debates conducted under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 1969 he challenged J. Allen Hynek on whether investigations of unidentified flying objects should be considered serious. Hynek argued yes Sagan no. (NNDB)

Sagan was a prolific writer of some 20 books including “Contact“ eventually made into a movie staring Jodie Foster. Sagan also hosted the brilliantly crafted and highly popular series COSMOS: A Personal Voyage. In Episode 12: “Encyclopedia Galactica”, Sagan explored UFOs and alien abductions while also including “refutations” on UFOs.

In a statement at the 1968 Congressional Hearings before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics – U.S. House of Representatives Carl Sagan stated:

“As I understand what the committee would like from me, is a discussion of the likelihood of intelligent extraterrestrial life… clearly it is the hypothesis that unidentified objects are of extraterrestrial origin which the committee must have in mind. I’m delighted to tell about contemporary scientific thinking along these lines, but let me begin by saying that I do not think the evidence is at all persuasive, that UFO’s are of intelligent extraterrestrial origin…”

Sagan’s confidential conversation with Dr. Hynek in 1984 appears to not only contradict this statement to the House Committee in 1968, Sagan’s new found view – that UFOs were real – clearly did not play any role in Sagan’s later highly successful public work.

This revelation by Paola Leopizzi-Harris appears to raise serious scientific discrepancies concerning Sagan’s public verses private beliefs about the nature of UFOs and Extraterrestrial life.

It appears, therefore that Carl Sagan presumably embarked upon his many television appearances, consulting on major television and Hollywood feature productions as well as his own academic writing while professing one public scientific point of view, yet maintaining a significantly contradictory personal belie: “I know UFOs are real” – as told to Dr. J. Allen Hynek in 1984 according to Paola Leopizzi-Harris.

In later years Sagan also heavily promoted SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which discounts UFOs as an ET reality – advancing the theory that listening for signals from deep space may help locate intelligent ET civilizations. [Ed.note – SETI officials were contacted by ZlandCommunications for a comment on this matter – however at the time of publication no response had yet been received.]

It is unknown how long Sagan held this personal view or when and what changed his mind – future disclosures may reveal this. That Sagan presented much of his finest and most popular work outside the context of his personal belief that UFOs were real remains a salient incongruity for a man of Sagan’s stature, obvious integrity and celebratory contributions to humanity and science.

One can only speculate upon why, during the period between Sagan’s initial statement in 1968 and all during his now legendary writings and media productions, Sagan continued to espouse critical views on the reality of UFOs. Why did his views change so dramatically? Did funding issues alone motivate him not to come forward publicly to declare his change-of-mind?

This revelation made to Paola Leopizzi-Harris by a well-respected scientific figure like Dr. J. Allen Hynek alters if not the magnificent quality of Sagan’s work but re-constructs his considerable scientific influence on the mainstream scientific theories about the universe, the intelligent nature of UFOs and Extraterrestrial life.

How will mainstream science respond knowing now that a corner stone of modern science and one of its most revered members is now recognized as to have conceded – UFOs are real?

Two conclusions emerge –

  • One of the 20th Century’s most renowned space gurus and scientific leaders, appears to have inadvertently shattered the prevailing notion among the scientific community and the so-called experts, that UFOs are fictitious and that issue is does not merit further study.
  • The second conclusion – short of full disclosure by government of the UFO/ET reality, this revelation most assuredly represents the most serious damage yet to the wall of secrecy and the truth embargo surrounding the Extraterrestrial presence so ardently maintained by government officials and bolstered by mainstream science.

Notably this information also comes at a time when Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Minister of National Defence has publicly admonished another pillar of mainstream science, Professor Stephen Hawking, for contributing to misinformation about advanced Extraterrestrial civilizations. Hellyer’s admonishment is timely. It puts all scientists on notice that ponderous changes to their entrenched belief about the universe and Extraterrestrial life are about to occur.

The Sagan story also arrives on the eve of the X-Conference 2010, the largest annual American UFO/ET Disclosure event coordinated by Stephen G. Bassett Director of PRG – the Paradigm Research Group at the National Press Club in Washington DC, just down the street from the White House and a President that recognizes the need for grave global change.

When asked to comment PRG Director Stephen G. Bassett said, “Carl Sagan and J. Allen Hynek perfectly represent the intellectual and political dilemma faced by the human race during the second half of the 20th century. Both helped to radically change our view of the world. Yet one must be profoundly wrong on the most important historical event in human history.”

Ironically, a cloistered conversation between two academicians behind the curtain – backstage on the set of the Johnny Carson Show in 1984 – seems to have changed science and with it, the paradigm beliefs of an entire planet.  We are not alone.

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