Science Special News

[Rasputin]

Sleuth on the trail of UFO mystery at sea

As the well known X Files catchphrase goes; ' the truth is out there.' That is what UFO investigator Russell Kellett hopes to uncover on his saucer searching mission in Conwy.But without the help of Mulder and Scully, the full-time researcher from FIley, North Yorkshire, has spent eight years unfolding the details of a paranormal event, believed to have occurred in North Wales nearly 32 years ago.And Russell is hoping that a return trip to the Welsh hills and vales will unearth new supernatural soils, and conclude the mystery that he has named Dragon Lights.The story began when a group of four men were travelling home on the evening of January 23 1973. They were near a field in Llandrillo when they saw an unidentified object land on the ground. Arriving promptly on the scene, the army ordered the men to leave but not before they caught a glimpse of five humanoid creatures, two of which were in distress.



The military surrounded the area and told the men not to speak of what they had just witnessed, but the men later set up meetings to discuss their sightings.The plot began to thicken as more and more witnesses spoke out, and after years of research, Russell discovered that there had also been an earthquake that night.He said: “My investigation is very detailed and has a lot of background to it and I have documents and witness statements that really are mindblowing.“I believe that a military movement out at sea caused the raising of a UFO from underwater which later crashed in land.“My investigations so far have helped things to fall into place, this blows what happens on sci-fi TV right out of the water.

[Rasputin]

Experts clash over demise of the Dinosaurs

The giant impact that shook the Earth 65 million years ago is still sending out shock waves, triggering a scientific feud over whether the event really killed off the dinosaurs. Efforts to identify what wiped out the great creatures have been confused by evidence of massive volcanic activity in India at the same time, and a fossil record that suggests the dinosaurs disappeared gradually as the Earth's climate and geology changed over millions of years.Now a bitter row has broken out on CCNet, a scholarly electronic network, over a paper by Peter Schulte of the Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and colleagues in the journal Sedimentary Geology: they conclude that two cores drilled in Brazos, Texas, provide new support for the much-loved disaster movie scenario.With Robert Speijer, Hartmut Mai and Agnes Kontny, Mr Schulte concludes that the evidence is "unequivocal" that debris and "ejecta" sent out by the impact coincides with the timing of the mass extinction.Their work is the latest to back a remarkable hypothesis proposed in 1980 by the American father-and-son team Profs Luis and Walter Alvarez, who came to a cataclysmic conclusion after studying a thin layer of dirty sulphurous clay in Gubbio, Italy.This clay marked what scientists call the K-T boundary, the junction between rocks in which the fossils of dinosaurs are found, and those above, in which dinosaur bones have been replaced by more modern creatures.



From the chemistry of the clay, the Alvarezes deduced that there had been a giant impact 65 million years ago, now called the Chicxulub impact.The new paper, says the German team, "provides no evidence that Chicxulub predated the K-P (K-T) boundary and allows for unequivocal positioning of the K-P (K-T) boundary at the event deposit".Not so, say detractors on CCNet. Prof Gerta Keller of Princeton University accused the team of "ignoring scientific methods", making claims with "no basis in fact" and "circular reasoning" by assuming a K-T age for the Chicxulub impact when this age is in doubt and predates the mass extinction.

[Rasputin]

Did climate change trigger human evolution ?

It may be a threat to humans' long-term future on the planet, but climate change may have helped bring us into being in the first place, some scientists say. Some human-origins theories suggest that ancient climate changes acted as powerful evolutionary drivers, spurring our ancestors to stand tall on two legs, grow large brains, and develop other human traits. The evolution of early human species, so the theories go, was concentrated in periods marked by fluctuating environmental conditions. Other theories suggest that humankind emerged independently of climatic swings, with adaptations arising, for example, out of competition between or within species. While more evidence is needed to settle the debate, experts say the answer may lie at the bottoms of ancient African lakes.

The main challenge for researchers is to find out whether prehistoric shifts in climate coincided with key stages of development in the early human fossil record, writes ancient-biology expert Anna K. Behrensmeyer in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science. Behrensmeyer is a paleobiologist at Washington, D.C.'s National Museum of Natural History. Records of ancient global climate change come mainly from ocean sediments. These suggest cooler, drier, and more variable conditions kicked in some three million years ago.

[Rasputin]

KGB UFO documentaries intrigue UFOlogists

Russian TV stations recently aired two documentaries about UFO’s, a real treat for the Russian ufologists, a community of enthusiasts studying unidentified flying objects. The films are particularly notable for the UFO accounts by high-raking Soviet and Russian Navy and Air Force officers. Information relating to UFO’s was strictly classified in the USSR. Some of the enthusiasts who spread samizdat booklets with articles on the subject compiled from the foreign media were at times taken to the KGB for questioning. The funniest thing is that the KGB has allegedly had a special unit designed to gather and monitor all pieces of information regarding mystical and unexplained phenomena reported inside and outside the Soviet Union. An article published some time ago by a Madrid magazine Mas Alla probably indicates that the above allegations hold water. The magazine also published several stills from a film by U.S. TV station TNT affiliated with CNN. Both the magazine and film say that in 1968 the KGB supposedly took possession of an UFO, which had either crashed or been shot down by the Soviet air defense. The Soviet secret police were alleged to have obtained the body of a humanoid in the cockpit. The body was thoroughly examined in an anatomy department of the Semashko Medical Institute in Moscow.



The TV station claims that the film was based on a footage of the incident provided by one Pavel Klimchenkov, a former KGB officer. According to TNT officials, the documents are a deliberate “leak” to the media. Klimcheko flashed his allegedly genuine ID on camera as though he was proving that he really was a retired KGB officer. He did not elaborate on the “leak” and said nothing as to its purposes. Therefore, the mystical story should draw comments on the official level, according to the magazine. There has been no response from the Russian authorities so far.

[Rasputin]

Will we ever stop looking for the Holy Grail?

For 2,000 years the Holy Grail has drifted in and out of vision like a jewelled chimera, taunting generations to find it. Was the fabled cup from the Last Supper spirited from Jerusalem by Christian knights, or is it an unimaginable secret about Jesus himself? Why don't we ask a presenter of the BBC motoring programme Top Gear to find out? Richard Hammond and the Holy Grail, an hour-long BBC1 documentary, is the latest offering from the mini-industry spawned by The Da Vinci Code. The Holy Grail has long fascinated Christians, but the 30 million sales of Dan Brown's book have propelled the legend to stratospheric popularity. From spin-off books to TV and even £144 Da Vinci Code breaks from VisitScotland, everybody wants a slice of immortality. BBC1 has deeper pockets than the average tourist, so it sent Hammond on a 5,000 mile odyssey, crossing four countries, to find out. The result is what you could term "occultism lite" - Hammond is known for his cheeky-chappy style, so the BBC clearly didn't intend this to be a furrowed-brow exercise in academia. Hammond begins his quest with: "The BBC - bless 'em - have given me just two weeks to search for the Holy Grail so, er, I'd better get on with it."



He sets out the basics of the Grail story by flying to Istanbul, or Constantinople as it was once known. The city is significant as a kind of geographical crossroads, regularly used by crusaders heading east to the Holy Land or returning to Europe. Legend has it that the Grail, the cup drunk from by Jesus at the Last Supper before his crucifixion, was seen by pilgrims in the 5th century. However, it seemed to disappear from Palestine, apparently resurfacing in Constantinople in the 13th century. Constantinople was a clearing house for religious relics. At various times pieces of the one true cross, the crown of thorns, John the Baptist's bones and the lance that pierced the side of Christ are all supposed to have passed through there.

[Rasputin]

The darkness inside of everything

Studies of supernovas and the developing concept of dark energy have thrown theories on the nature of the universe and its future into free-fall, writes Katherine Kizilos. In 1998, an astronomer working with Brian Schmidt from the Australian National University published a paper about supernovas that, for those who understood it, revealed the universe to be more unfathomable than had previously been imagined.The supernova research led to a strange conclusion: that the universe is filled with a dark energy that is causing galaxies to move away from each other at an accelerated rate. It is now believed that dark energy makes up 73 per cent of the universe; the twist is that nobody knows what dark energy is. Not so long ago, physicists speculated that an all-encompassing Theory of Everything, describing the universe and all its wonders, was within mankind's reach. That is looking less likely now.When Schmidt began searching the skies for supernovas he had no clue that their behaviour would lead to revelations about dark energy. Supernovas are spectacular eruptions that occur at the end of a star's life. These massive blazes, which in some cases can rival the brightness of the surrounding galaxy, are rare events, and useful to astronomers.They use them as signposts (standard candles is the astronomical term) which help them calculate the size and age of the universe. Schmidt and his team were searching for type Ia supernovas, which burn with an intense light for about 100 years before their final collapse."We can see them three-quarters of the way across the universe," says Schmidt, "so they allow us to look back in time." The oldest supernova that has been observed is 9 billion light years from earth, which means that it exploded 9 billion years ago. (The universe is now believed to be about 13.7 billion years old, with a 5 per cent margin for error.) The team was searching for supernovas as a way of determining how the expansion of the universe has changed over time.The idea here is that geometry is destiny. It was believed that if the shape of the universe were known, astrophysicists would be able to predict how it would eventually end. If the shape was a plane, say, or an open curve - like a wide-mouthed letter C in which the two ends point away from each other - then the universe could, theoretically at least, expand forever. But if space was found to curve inwards, the universe could end in a final crunch; an event Schmidt calls the "gnaB giB", which is Big Bang backwards and an example of the little jokes astronomers like to tell.Since 1995, Schmidt and his team had been in a race with astronomers led by Saul Perlmutter at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who were also studying supernovas for the same reasons. By the end of 1997, Perlmutter's team had found more supernovas than Schmidt's team, but the type Ia supernova that Schmidt's team was looking for was yielding better results.What both teams discovered, independently of each other, was surprising and bizarre. (For the record, the Perlmutter team made the announcement first, but Schmidt's team was the first to publish a paper.) Each observed that the rate of the universe's expansion was not slowing, as expected, but speeding up. In Schmidt's words "the universe was behaving in a way that could not be explained".The expanding universe is sometimes compared to a currant cake rising in the oven, with the currants representing galaxies and the dough of the cake representing expanding space.

[Rasputin]

1.8 million year old skull unearthed

Archaeologists in the former Soviet republic of Georgia have unearthed a skull they say is 1.8 million years old, representing part of a find that holds the oldest traces of humanity's closest ancestors ever found in Europe. The Homo erectus skull was found this month in Dmanisi, an area about 60 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of the capital, Tbilisi, said Georgian National Museum director David Lortkipanidze, who took part in the dig. In total, five bones or fragments believed to be about the same age have been found in the area, including a jawbone discovered in 1991, Lortkipanidze said by telephone. The skull, however, was in the best condition of the five. It was unearthed on Sunday and sent to the museum for further study. "Practically all the remains have been found in one place. This indicates that we have found a place of settlement of primitive people," he said of the spot, where archaeologists have been working since 1939.



The findings in Georgia, which researchers said were a million years older than any widely accepted pre-human remains in Europe, have provided additional evidence that Homo erectus left Africa a half-million years or more earlier than scientists had previously thought.A well-preserved skull from the Dmanisi site would be "very important" in helping to track the development and migration of human ancestors, said Brian Richmond, a professor at the Center for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology at George Washington University in Washington.

[Rasputin]

Voodoo Day celebrated in Benin

Thousands of followers have gathered in Benin in the seaside town of Ouidah to celebrate National Voodoo Day. They met at a beach called the point of no return, where slaves left on ships for the Americas centuries ago, taking their religion with them. Followers of the once-banned religion have been dancing, drumming, praying as animals are slaughtered in ceremonies. Of Benin's seven million citizens, 65% believe in Voodoo. The day has been a national holiday for a decade. "There is little resembling the popular western imagination on show - no dolls with pins stuck in them and certainly no zombie-like creatures lumbering around," described the BBC's James Copnall, who is at the festival. "Instead there were speeches praising the religion, emphasising the positive impact it has on people's lives."



One of the many revellers who count their ancestors as slaves, Faith McDouglas, 37, a nurse from Nebraska in the US spoke of being, "very moved," explaining, "I've understood many things regarding my origins, because I'm a descendant of slaves." Voodoo followers believe that all life is driven by spiritual forces of natural phenomena such as water, fire, earth and air and that these should be honoured through rituals like animal sacrifices. Followers acknowledge the existence of both a supreme being and many smaller gods which can intercede with the supreme being on behalf of humans.

[gg666]

30 c is nothing...here temperture goes up to 55c in summer

[Rasputin]

China overtakes Canada in search for aliens

The Peoples Republic of China will give "life-on-other-planet" Canadians a run for their money on pushing the UFO agenda in 2006. Canada already has a welcoming committee at the ready to establish diplomacy with "ethical Off-Planet cultures now visiting earth".Since 1964, Canada has been home to the world’s first UFO landing pad in St. Paul, Alberta, a 130-ton concrete structure built as that city’s Centennial project. Boasted to be among the famed visitors who dropped by to see the UFO landing pad by its promoters were Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and Mother Teresa.The Canadian Exopolitics Initiative, presented by NGOs to a Senate Committee panel hearing in Winnipeg on March 10, 2005, proposes that the Government of Canada undertake a `Decade of Contact’ with extraterrestrials.The proposed document is "a 10-year process of formal, funded public education, scientific research, educational curricula development and implementation, strategic planning, community activity and public research concerning our terrestrial society’s full culture, political, social, legal and governmental communication and public interest diplomacy, with advanced, ethical Off-Planet cultures now visiting earth."If the idea of ETs already visiting earth is a mind stretch for some, the Decade of Contact initiative is supported by former Canadian Minister of Defense Paul Hellyer, among others.In 1938, an Orson Wells radio program claimed that a real time alien invasion was in progress. Now that they’ve got the money, China may get to ETs before Canada ever does."Government officials in Guiyang, capital of Guizhou Province, announced on Tuesday that they had received $20 million from a Taiwan-based company to build a UFO research facility in China."

[Rasputin]

Mystery baboon killed in Sierra Leone

Awareness Times has been authoritatively informed at a usual police weekly press briefing that a fierce looking baboon which has been terrorizing some parts of Pujehun has been killed in a joint operation of the police and youths in the township, on 29th January 2006. It could be noted that a few weeks ago, there were reports that a mysterious baboon was causing havoc in the Kpanga Kabonde chiefdom in the Pujehun district. According to police sources, the mysterious animal was notorious for terrorizing women and children, thus making the entire population to live in perpetual fear. Accordingly, the strange beast attacked and inflicted serious bodily harm on a number of people, some of whom taken for emergency treatment.



The killing of the said animal came as welcomed news to the entire inhabitants of the chiefdom.Amidst jubilation, some of the inhabitants expressed the view that they can now sleep in peace as their tormentor had been killed.Some even had the view that the animal was not ordinary.It could be noted that only three months ago, a similar strange animal was reported to have been killed in the Koinadugu district, after killing a number of people and cows.

[Rasputin]

Countdown to contact

The treasurer of a pensioners' campaign group has quit his full-time position to form an organisation dedicated to helping humanity establish contact with alien life forms. Phillip Snow, who will continue to assist the North Staffordshire Pensioners' Convention on a part-time basis, believes a rise in UFO sightings is a sign of the dawning of a new age.He is convinced this is a time when first contact will be established with extra-terrestrial beings.Ministry of Defence records show that 158 unexplained sightings were reported nationally in 2005, up from 86 in 2004 and 99 in 2003.Mr Snow, aged 60, of Betley Court, Betley, has set up the New Living group, which is dedicated to easing the public into an era when the prospect of alien sightings will no longer be a source of panic.It will raise awareness of its beliefs and offer advice to anyone concerned about other life forms.The group has no affiliation with the pensioner's convention.

Mr Snow is a devotee of the Mayan calendar, which is a series of prophesies and predictions left by the ancient indigenous people of Central America.Some people believe the Mayans were visited by aliens, who taught them the advanced understandings their race is famous for. Experts are still baffled as to how the Mayans were able to master mathematics, create accurate astrological calendars and build massive pyramids in the jungle.Some believe the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world in the year 2012 when the calendar - which started in 3115BC - draws to a close.

[Rasputin]

Scientists find 'lost world'

Submitted by Kratos & Trauma: Scientists have found a "Lost World" in an Indonesian mountain jungle, home to dozens of exotic new species of birds, butterflies, frogs and plants. "It's as close to the Garden of Eden as you're going to find on Earth," said Bruce Beehler, co-leader of the US, Indonesian, and Australian expedition to part of the cloud-shrouded Foja mountains in West Papua. Indigenous peoples living near the Foja range, which rises to 2200m, said they did not venture into the trackless area of 3000s km – roughly the size of Luxembourg or the US state of Rhode Island. The team of 25 scientists rode helicopters to boggy clearings in the pristine zone. "We just scratched the surface," Mr Beehler told Reuters. "Anyone who goes there will come back with a mystery." The expedition found a new type of honeyeater bird with a bright orange patch on its face, known only to local people and the first new bird species documented on the island in more than 60 years.



They also found more than 20 new species of frog, four new species of butterfly and plants including five new palms. And they took the first photographs of "Berlepsch's six-wired bird of paradise", which appears in 19th century collections but whose home had previously been unknown. The bird is named after six fine feathers about 10cm long on the head of the male which can be raised and shaken in courtship displays.

[Rasputin]

Lifting the lid on 'Operation Blackbird'

A West crop circle expert has lifted the lid on a previously long-forgotten chapter in the bizarre history of the West's 1990 crop circle mystery. Colin Andrews revealed to a coast-to-coast audience in America the goings-on under the cover of a summer night 15 years ago.Mr Andrews, who left his West home for the US a decade ago, said that, far from being an embarrassing flop, the three-week vigil on the hilltops of Wiltshire was an astounding and secret success.Listeners on US radio heard claims yesterday that the British Army watched and filmed a UFO making a ground-breaking crop circle near Silbury Hill while the world's media were camped 20 miles away.Back in 1990, it was the high point of the crop circle hysteria gripping the world.Dozens of volunteers, a host of foreign TV cameras, the world's foremost crop circle experts and the British Army launched a round-the-clock vigil from the famous white horse above Bratton, near Westbury, in a bid to spot a crop circle being made.And within days it appeared Operation Blackbird had been successful - night vision cameras spotted something in a field below, and, sure enough, a new crop circle could be seen as dawn broke.

For a few hours, the world reported the crop circle mystery as solved - but operation leader Colin Andrews soon realised he had been hoaxed and the figures on night-vision cameras were not aliens but local mischief-makers.According to Mr Andrews, however, across Wiltshire a more mysterious and sinister event was happening, which has remained top secret ever since.He said: "The public knew but half of what was going on at the time. While the media present at Operation Blackbird were looking at the right hand, they did not see what happened with the left.

[Rasputin]

UFOs: Seeing is believing ?

Nearly two centuries after a local man became the first American to report a close encounter in this country, we remain fascinated by mysterious objects we see in the sky. UFOs – those tin foil villains of vintage, late-night B movies – are alive and well in the high-tech age of in-the-know. Each year, the National UFO Reporting Center fields thousands of calls and e-mails from across the nation, including the commonwealth. Since online posting began eight years ago, Virginians have reported 506 UFO sightings – 95 in Hampton Roads.Locals filed 12 reports in 2005 alone. They told of strange triangles hovering over Suffolk; formations over Virginia Beach that switched directions on a dime; massive, glowing shapes that silently skimmed Peninsula tree tops. Hoaxes? A question of sanity? Perhaps sobriety? Famous, credible people claim to have seen UFOs: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Henry Ford III, a number of astronauts, John Lennon, even Christopher Columbus.

Virginia’s special place in ufology – as it’s called – has grown from that first Colonial encounter. After the much-rumored Roswell, N.M., crash of 1947, one military officer said that alien evidence was secretly shipped to Langley Air Force Base, with the base ultimately fingered in a book about the subject.