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And so the British government has released more UFO files? So the UK, New Zealand, The U.S? Who else? Who hasn’t released UFO files?I think that there is something to UFOs. I would like to believe that all UFOs are fake, or are explainable, and every UFO can become an identified flying object, perhaps a secret American air craft or a child’s wayward balloon, but definitely not anything extra-terrestrial. But I suspect that all UFOs can’t be easily explained away, as something from this planet or from people’s imaginations..Among the UFO files that have been released, so far, are many reports of sightings that lend themselves to no explanation, other than that maybe, those UFOs are the products of something from beyond this planet. This new batch of files? More of the same.But does that which is released tell all that there is to tell? The governments which have released UFO files, have released files which provide no clear answers. Some of the files continue to raise the questions that have already been raised. First among the questions are: Could the release of UFO files be a clever ploy?;For years governments dismissed all talk of UFOs as rubbish and portrayed people who confessed to being eye-witnesses to UFO encounters as candidates for the loony bin. These acts of total suppression of facts and these denials only increased the ranks of the conspiracy theorists. Maybe the release of files that have a dab here and a dribble there of the true facts is a way of intentionally keeping the truth hidden. To hint that there might be something, while saying there probably isn’t, is to address the issue raised for years by people whom have sighted something. This could be good public relations scheme to get away with releasing nothing. These releases of files, could be a clever way to keep a very big secret. behind a steel curtain . And so the governments of the world release thousands and thousands more of UFO files, which tell us nothing?By releasing UFO files, governments seem so honest and open, and people have something to talk about other than wars and the world’s bad economyItem from ITN News — “The National Archives release thousands of files documenting UFO sightings. Former MoD investigator, Nick Pope gives his thoughts.” See the video. .

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On Sunday, February 20, 2011 a number of residents in Vancouver, WA sighted what they described as a “flying saucer.” Several people phoned 911 and were directed to the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle, but so far no official reports have been filed.The object was described as being extremely bright – bright enough to draw neighbors out of their houses to see what was causing it. It was also described as hovering soundlessly in the air, between 7 and 8PM. What was hovering over SW 192nd Street in the Clear Meadows neighborhood last Sunday night? It did not appear on airport radar, according to the FAA. It hovered roughly in one spot, although it made “occasional side-to-side movements.”Frankly, having seen the video, I suspected that it was an RC helicopter with a string of attached LED lights on the “Party” setting. One eyewitness even said of the saucer-shaped object that “it was almost like someone was controlling it from the ground.” The lights flashing on the object are dead ringers for the strips of lightweight LED lights which can be programmed to flash in pattern. Combing through the comments on the article in The Columbian, I noticed an interesting comment from someone who claimed to know the object’s identity. “A relative saw it from Fishers Landing, drove around and found the source, it was someone flying a kite with LEDs on it in a park in Fishers Landing.”Another commenter said that “it was a kite in Clearmeadows park… We watched it from our window during dinner.”Of course, comments on online newspaper articles are the third-lowest form of discourse available on the internet today. And these unverified assertions are coming from an essentially anonymous account, so who knows what the provenance is, there.Nevertheless, they do have the ring of truth. And certainly a kite decorated with a string of LEDs makes more sense than other theories which have been floated, including a mis-sighting of the planet Jupiter, and military helicopters.The kite explanation also addresses the most unusual aspect of this sighting, which is its silence, combined with its low height. It seems clear to me from the video that this is a smallish object hovering somewhere around treetop level. A Google search for “LED Kite” shows that these are a real thing, which you can buy online. You can either buy a fully-equipped kite, or you can buy the LED lights to attach to your own kite. Anyone interested in UFO phenomena should definitely acquaint themselves with these, because we’re sure to be seeing a lot more kite/UFO reports in the years to come!Photo: still image from “Led Kite Lights” uploaded by kiteworldevents

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Have you ever dreamed of lifting off into outer space? If so, Nasa is offering the 78th best thing – they will send a photo of your beautiful face with on the remaining few shuttle launches:STS-133 launches between 02/24/11 and 03/07/2011STS-134 launches between 04/19/11 and 04/29/2011You could have your face up there among the stars as early as tomorrow!”NASA wants to put a picture of you on one of the two remaining space shuttle missions and launch it into orbit. To launch your face into space and become a part of history, just follow these steps:First…Select the Participate button at the bottom of this page and upload your image/name, which will be flown aboard the space shuttle. Don’t have a picture to upload? No problem, just skip the image upload and we will fly your name only on your selected mission! Next…Print and save the confirmation page with your flight information. Later…Return to this site after launch to print your Flight Certificate – a commemorative certificate signed by the Mission Commander. You can also check on mission status, view mission photographs, link to various NASA educational resources and follow the commander and crew on Twitter or Facebook.”What have you got to lose? Your dignity? Please.

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The world was a very different place in 1859. There were no motorized vehicles, only horse-drawn carriages, trains pulled by coal-fired steam engines, and ships powered by coal-fired turbines. Airplanes were still a pipe dream. As far as electronics went, there weren’t any. Ben Franklin’s work at Menlo Park didn’t begin until 1876, and Nikola Tesla was only three years old in 1859. Long-distance communication happened by telegraph, when it happened at all.Which is why the Carrington Event caused only a minor stir, and has largely been forgotten by history. But were it to happen again, the results for us would be disastrous.The Carrington Event was a solar storm more powerful than any other storm in recorded human history. Throughout August and September, sky watchers noticed an astonishingly high rate of sunspots appearing on the face of the sun. The largest flare was observed on September 1 by a British astronomer named Richard Carrington, who recorded the flare for posterity.Carrington’s solar flare propelled a coronal mass ejection directly towards Earth. It was so powerful that it took only 18 hours to arrive, even though coronal mass ejections typically take 3-4 days to travel the distance between the sun and our planet.This coronal mass ejection caused a magnetic storm that bathed the Earth in electromagnetic radiation. At the time, the dawn of the industrial age, its most obvious effect was to cause the aurora to propagate across the entire planet. Although typically the aurora can only be seen from locations near the poles, the aurora on September 1st and 2nd were seen as far south as the Caribbean. The secondary effect was to cause the planet’s telegraph systems to go completely haywire. Telegraph wires were the only wires being strung in those days, and they conducted the electricity through to the telegraph machines – and even to the telegraph operators, some of whom received powerful shocks. Telegraph machines and poles threw sparks, and some telegraph machines spontaneously caught fire.Telegraph machines were essentially the only electrical infrastructure on the entire planet in 1859. Imagine what would happen if we were hit by another coronal mass ejection on that scale! In fact a smaller electromagnetic storm hit the Earth in 1989, causing Quebec’s power grid to crash. The effect of another Carrington Event would be similar to that of a global electromagnetic pulse. Anything electronic would be fried. Increasingly, everything around us is electronic – even our books! This doomsday scenario would resemble what some people were predicting for the millennium – airplanes falling from the sky, every automobile coming to a sudden halt at once, and a global blackout with no hope of restoring temporary power from a generator.Some people speculate that a Carrington Event may be what the Mayan calendar has predicted for the 2012 apocalypse. Ice core samples show that the Earth is hit with strong coronal mass ejections about every 500 years, which means that some time in the next 300 years we are likely to experience a solar storm.Photo credit: Flickr/Guide Gunnar – Arctic Norway

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NASA has done it again. Yesterday, Sunday, Feb. 6th, NASA released online of the first complete, panoramic view of the the whole sun, front and back simultaneously, the entire surface and atmosphere. The are pictures in stereo? and in 3-D. They were taken by the twin Solar TErrestrial Relations Observatory spacecraft. The crafts are on diametrically opposite sides of the sun, one hundred eighty degrees apart. One is ahead of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind.Why are these 3-D images of the sun important? Because they will help in forecasting solar weather: the development of intense magnetic activity on the sun, which produce sunspots, and the development of violent eruptions of solar matter, coronal loops, solar flares, and the coronal mass ejections, solar storms.Solar storms, solar winds, sunspots disrupt Earth communications, navigation, satellites and power grids. What NASA learns from this project will help in space navigation in the solar system.The NASA achievement is a good example of our tax dollars supporting excellent workItem from ITN News — “Two probes from Nasa’s Stereo mission have beamed back the first ever 360-degree panoramic images of the Sun.” See the video.

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The NASA orbiting telescope, the Kepler, has been at it for just a year, looking, at a small part of the Milky Way galaxy, in the search for alien life, and has found, not alien life yet, but 1,235 possible planets outside our solar system, of these 54, seemingly could be hospitable to life. These planets are, not too hot or too cold.The NASA Kepler project chief scientist William Borucki said, fifty-four possibilities is “an enormous amount, an inconceivable amount. It’s amazing to see this huge number because up to now, we’ve had zero.”NASA scientists are quick to point out that, “just because a planet is in the habitable zone doesn’t mean it has life. Mars is a good example of that. And even if some these planets are found to contain life, it may not be intelligent life; it could be bacteria or mold or some kind of life form people can’t even imagine.”The Associated Press reports that Yale University astronomer Debra Fischer, who serves as an outside expert for NASA, said the new find “gives us a much firmer footing” to hope that distant planets could harbor life. “I feel different today, knowing these new Kepler results, than I did a week ago,” Fischer said. She said Kepler “has blown the lid off of everything we know about extrasolar planets.”These planet finds are far away, and unreachable with today’s earth technology. Tomorrow? Who knows? Next week? Maybe the distant planets are unreachable with earth man’s technology, but we are not unreachable to them? Yes, THEM, ET’s using their technology?Item from the Associated Press — “An orbiting NASA telescope is finding whole new worlds of possibilities in the search for alien life, spotting more than 50 potential planets that appear to be in the habitable zone.” See the video.

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Item from ITN News — “Two different films have surfaced of a glowing ball hanging over the Dome of the Rock.” See the video.What is it? An UFO? A solid object? Or is it the just the creation of jokers running a gag? Doing a light show? Or is it a physical manifestation of a spiritual presence? Is it a sign? The sign? The return of the Holy Spirit?Whatever!Well, there is buzz on the Internet and believers will believe what they want. The image in the video could be a clever hoax devised by a clever lad or lass. It would be ET dropping in and flying about, on a visit. It could be a spy craft. Jerusalem is just the kind of space where everybody is spying on everybody. Which ever it is, the video is entertaining. Why? Because it is grabbing eyeballs and making heads wonder. Well, some heads.

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Dylan Ratigan on his show earlier this week explored the question: If aliens do exist will they be mean?Well, in so many words, famed physicist Stephen Hawking warned last year that we had better raise our Star Trek-like shields. Since we only have Star Trek-like shields in our fiction, we had better go dark, silent and quiet, and quit trying to contact aliens.From MSNBC, The Dylan Ratigan Show –“British Scientist Conway Morris wrote in a recent article, “If intelligent aliens exist they will look just like us and given our far from glorious history this should give us pause for thought.” Stephen Hawking said, “Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads looking to conquer and colonize. build more space ships so they could continue moving on.”Before everybody runs down to the gun shop and to the rifle range to get ready in case space aliens show up on ones door step, Dr. Michael Shermer of the Skeptic Society says wait up. If aliens do show up, they probably won’t look like us, and might not act like us, and since we are behaving better, that might not be a bad thing, if they do act like us. And the good doctor gets a little Pollyannish, he says that if aliens come to earth, they would be from an “intelligent, educated, sophisticated technological civilization,” and they wouldn’t be from a “sort of greedy selfish all-consuming all-destructive civilization. that won’t get you from planet to planet, ” and they wouldn’t be behaving like us, so there, don’t worry, if ET knocks on your door.My take on this: We need those StarTrek-like shields.Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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NASA announced last year that it plans to send people to the planet Mars in the near future, but because Mars is so far away, a trip to Mars would be so expensive, so that the best way to send people to Mars would be on a one way trip. Well, a few days ago ABC’s Ned Potter did a feature on settling the Red Planet. See the video. My take on a one way trip to Mars?  Question 1: Would I go?  Question 2: Do I think anyone should volunteer? To the question would I go? No.  To the question: Do I think anyone should volunteer? Well, if  a person owes the IRS and can’t afford to pay? Maybe?  If a person has no life on this planet? Perhaps. If a person has a condition that would improve on a planet with less gravity? Why not? Other than that, I wouldn’t recommend a one-way ticket to LA for anybody. Certainly not a one way ticket to Mars.

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While the incredibly odd conspiracy theorist might still believe that man never made it to the Moon, scientists are predicting that we might be able to send people to Mars in as little as twenty years.  Because of a number of complicated factors involving the high cost of such an adventure, any ideas of a trip to Mars have been thus far postponed. However, a new idea is being floated around that would solve many of the problems with a mission—sending astronauts to Mars with a one-way ticket only.   Sending astronauts to Mars without a return trip would cut down fuel costs and might make it possible for the dream of men walking on Mars possible in the near future. The astronauts would have the double-duty of being astronauts and space settlers.   When the article introducing the unusual idea in The Journal of Cosmology was first published as an article, the editors received as many as five hundred responses from “volunteers” eager for the opportunity to be colonists on the red planet. Because the response was so huge, The Journal of Cosmology is now actively recruiting volunteers for the “mission” itself. While a majority of the responses they’ve received have been serious, there have been a few joke responses as well. A few female respondents offered to send their husbands on the unusual mission.   “The one-way mission proposal, titled “To Boldly Go: A One-Way Human Mission to Mars,” is part of a book published by the journal that combines the work of more than 70 NASA scientists. “The Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet” is billed as a step-by-step “how-to” series on going to Mars.”   The authors of the paper are not thinking of a large-scale mission; instead, they are envisioning sending only four astronauts to the planet. In addition, they are claiming that the mission would not be a “suicide mission”, but rather a mission to Mars and an opportunity to “colonize” the planet. Once there, the astronauts/Mars colonizers would attempt to gather or harvest their own food, but would receive supplies from Earth in the interim. The NASA scientists hope that eventually the settlers would be able to become self-sufficient on Mars.   President Barack Obama took Bush’s Constellation program off the table last year—the initiative would have given funding for human-manned Mars missions by the 2030’s. The scientists are speculating that the cost of a trip to Mars could be as much as $150 billion.