Tag: harvard

The alien hunter: has Harvard’s Avi Loeb found proof of extraterrestrial life?

Avi Loeb has a chip on his shoulder. For years, the Harvard astrophysicist has been trying to find aliens. He’s in the middle of trying to record the entire sky with an international network of telescopes and recently travelled to Papua New Guinea to find out if a meteor detected in 2014 was actually part of an interstellar spaceship. Meanwhile, academics and pundits snipe at him in the media, and he’s sick of it.

“I hear that the scientists say: ‘Why would you go to the Pacific Ocean? It’s a waste of time, waste of energy.’ And I say: ‘I’m not taking any of your research money; I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m doing the heavy lifting.’ Why would they be negative about it?” Loeb complains as he shows me around his mansion in Lexington, Massachusetts, one of the richest boroughs in the US. He’s busy rehearsing for a one-man show about his life and work, which he’ll perform in his attic tomorrow. Apparently, I’m the “only journalist to be invited”, apart from the camera crew filming a documentary.

Loeb, 61, has just finished a five-mile run, which he does every day at about 5am before knuckling down to work. Small, suited, bespectacled and well groomed, he looks a bit like Jeffrey Archer in a schoolboy uniform. After a very brief tour of his office – blink and you’ll miss it – we arrive in his immaculately tidy living room. He offers me sparkling water and a bowl of chocolates. Loeb is slender, but he loves chocolate, consuming 800 calories a day from it. “I cannot give up,” he says. “I’m addicted.”

Is he nervous about his show? “No, no,” he says. “Because I’m playing myself – there’s no difference.” Netflix will be filming it; in June documentary-makers accompanied him on his trip to Papua New Guinea where he recovered debris from a fireball that landed in the sea to the north of Manus Island. “There were over 50 film-makers and producers that wanted to document what I’m doing. They wanted to be on the ship, but I said I had a contract just with one.”

A distinguished scientist, Loeb has published hundreds of papers, as well as a bestselling book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. He’s the Frank B Baird Jr professor of science at Harvard, the director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Center for Astrophysics, and the director of the Galileo project at Harvard. But he was relatively unknown until a peculiarly shaped object zoomed through our solar system in 2017. Astronomers described it as having “extreme dimensions” and concluded it must be interstellar. Officially known as 1I/2017 U1, it was given the nickname ’Oumuamua – Hawaiian for “scout” or “first distant messenger” and pronounced like a child startled by a cow: Oh mooer mooer.

’Oumuamua was long, thin and flat, like a pancake. After further analysis, astronomers spotted more anomalies. They determined that before telescopes detected the object, it had accelerated while travelling past the sun. This is normal for comets, rocky icebergs that melt in the heat and release gases that act like booster rockets. This is what gives comets their signature tail, but this asteroid didn’t have one. According to Loeb: “No tail, no comet.” In a paper co-written with Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which investigates UFOs for the US Department of Defense, Loeb later hypothesised that ’Oumuamua could be a solar sail from an interstellar craft, using sunlight to accelerate through space. In other words, it belonged to aliens.

In what was a big year for UFO-hunters, 2017 was the year that the Pentagon admitted to investigating UFOs. The $22m budget was reportedly also used to investigate alleged UFO sightings and all manner of unexplained goings on. Loeb rode the wave of interest to international fame.

Keep reading

40 human skulls, other bones used as decorations found in Kentucky man’s home, authorities say

Human remains — including dozens of skulls — were found inside a man’s house in Kentucky, according to authorities.

In an affidavit, an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation noted approximately 40 skulls, as well as femurs, hip bones, and a Harvard Medical School bag, were discovered during a raid at 39-year-old James Nott’s home in Bullitt County Tuesday morning.

The skulls were decorated around the furniture. One skull had a head scarf around it. One skull was located on the mattress where Nott slept. A Harvard Medical School bag was found inside the Residence,” Special Agent Sara J. Cunning noted in the affidavit.

Cunning wrote that authorities also found a slew of weapons, such as an AK-47 rifle, a .38 special, Charter Arms, a revolver, ammunition, grenades, and plates for body armor.

The FBI, along with the Mt. Washington Police Department, executed a warrant in connection with a search for guns and trafficked human remains, which led to Nott’s arrest.

During the search, “an FBI agent asked Nott asked if anyone else was inside the residence,” the document noted. “Nott responded, ‘only my dead friends.'”

Nott, who is a convicted felon, as he was arrested on gun charges in 2011, was also linked to a nationwide trafficking ring in which several suspects were accused of purchasing and selling stolen human remains, some of which were tied back to the Harvard Medical School and a mortuary in Arkansas.

The FBI began looking into Nott after he had chatted with Jeremy Pauley, a man from Pennsylvania — who was also being investigated for his role in the trafficking ring.

Keep reading

Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he’s found fragments of alien technology

Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he may have found fragments of alien technology from a meteor that landed in the waters off of Papua, New Guinea in 2014.

Loeb and his team just brought the materials back to Harvard for analysis. The U.S. Space Command confirmed with almost near certainty, 99.999%, that the material came from another solar system. The government gave Loeb a 10 km (6.2 mile) radius of where it may have landed.

“That is where the fireball took place, and the government detected it from the Department of Defense. It’s a very big area, the size of Boston, so we wanted to pin it down,” said Loeb. “We figured the distance of the fireball based off the time delay between the arrival of blast wave, the boom of explosion, and the light that arrived quickly.”

Their calculations allowed them to chart the potential path of the meteor. Those calculations happened to carve a path right through the same projected 10 km range that came from the U.S. government. Loeb and his crew took a boat called the Silver Star out to the area. The ship took numerous passes along and around the meteor’s projected path. Researchers combed the ocean floor by attaching a sled full of magnets to their boat.

“We found ten spherules. These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic marbles. When you look at them through a microscope, they look very distinct from the background,” explained Loeb, “They have colors of gold, blue, brown, and some of them resemble a miniature of the Earth.”

An analysis of the composition showed that the spherules are made of 84% iron, 8% silicon, 4% magnesium, and 2% titanium, plus trace elements. They are sub-millimeter in size. The crew found 50 of them in total.

Keep reading

Harvard behavior scientist who studied honesty accused of fabricating data

A prominent Harvard behavioral scientist who undertook studies about honesty is under fire for allegedly fabricating papers that she worked on, according to a report.

Harvard Business School’s Francesca Gino allegedly chalked up phony results tied to studies, including one focused on honest behavior, the New York Times reported.

She’s been placed on leave, according to her business school web page, which the Times reported showed she was still on the job as recently as mid-May.

She has published 135 articles since 2007, according to the Chronicle for Higher Education.

In a blog, called DataColada, run by three behavioral scientists, it alleged fraud in four academic papers that Gino co-authored.

They said they presented evidence of fraud to Harvard in the fall of 2021 tied to a 2012 paper and another three papers she was a part of.

The 2012 paper relied on three separate studies, including one that Gino spearheaded.

The paper claimed that people who fill out tax forms or insurance documents are more honest if they attest to the truth of their responses at the top of the page instead of the bottom, the Times reported.

Keep reading

Harvard morgue theft ring stole body parts, sold human flesh to be used as leather, officials say  

Members of a macabre theft ring swiped human remains from the Harvard Medical School morgue in Boston and sold the body parts to a nationwide network of buyers, officials said Wednesday.

Indictments handed up by a grand jury in Scranton, Pennsylvania, targeted morgue manager Cedric Lodge, 55, and his wife, Denise Lodge, 63, who live in Goffstown, New Hampshire.

Katrina Maclean, 44, of Salem, Massachusetts, and Joshua Taylor, 46, of West Lawn, Pennsylvania, were also indicted. Maclean owns and operates a store called Kat’s Creepy Creations, officials said.

They’re all accused of conspiracy and interstate transport of stolen goods.  

“At times, Cedric Lodge allowed Maclean and Taylor to enter the morgue at Harvard Medical School and examine cadavers to choose what to purchase,” federal prosecutors said in a statement. “On some occasions, Taylor transported stolen remains back to Pennsylvania. On other occasions, the Lodges shipped stolen remains to Taylor and others out of state.”

Cedric Lodge “stole dissected portions of donated cadavers, including, for example, heads, brains, skin, bones, and other human remains, without the knowledge or permission of HMS,” according to the indictment.

He and his wife would reach out to buyers through websites and cellphones “regarding the sales of stolen human remains,” the court papers say.

The 15-page indictment doesn’t go into extended detail about what the body parts were purchased for, but it does mention that Maclean shipped human skin to a man in Pennsylvania “and engaged in his services to tan the skin to create leather.”

Keep reading

Harvard Researchers Expose Google Targeting and Manipulating the Minds of Children

With the curtain pulled back on the Twitter files this year, the gears of the debate machine have been grinding relentlessly on the topic of censorship and perceived liberal establishment bias within social-media behemoths like Twitter and Facebook. And while they’ve undoubtedly earned their place in the critical spotlight, the focus on them has allowed a far more devious predator to lurk largely unchecked in the shadows: Google. Recent revelations cast a disturbing light on the truth — it’s not just invading our privacy and appropriating our data — it’s aggressively targeting the impressionable minds of children.

Enter stage left, Harvard Ph.D., Californian Democrat, and research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein, who has dedicated the better part of a decade to illuminating the murky underbelly of Google’s Machiavellian manipulation strategies, sweeping up everything from newsfeeds to search results, and even YouTube suggestions. The insights gleaned from his pioneering research, which he recently shared with The NY Post, provide an unnerving look at the disturbing degree to which Google wields its power to manipulate the collective mindset and steer election results in a direction that conveniently aligns with its liberal corporate agenda.

Despite its continued denials before Congress, this trillion-dollar tech titan exploits its unparalleled monopoly in the search engine domain to inflate liberal ideologies, stifle conservative voices, and most alarmingly, manipulate the malleable minds of our children.

When we consider the facts, the grim reality of manipulation packs a powerful punch. Remember the controversial suppression of The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop stories by Twitter and Facebook? Well, that’s just the iceberg’s tip. Consider this: what about the jaw-dropping 6 million votes covertly swayed in Joe Biden’s favor during the 2020 election by Google via its calculated online content manipulation? Epstein points an accusing finger at Google, alleging it used biased algorithms to shape search results and slanted Get Out The Vote messages primarily to court Democrat voters.

Keep reading

Harvard and Pentagon Scientists Say “Highly Maneuverable” UFOs Appear to Defy Physics

Following several high-profile UFO sightings, which are now being investigated by the Pentagon, researchers are analyzing the data — and are finding that the numbers simply aren’t adding up.

Director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office Sean Kirpatrick and notorious Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb have turned their sights to “highly maneuverable” Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), or UFOs, for a recent investigation.

Their findings, published in a yet-to-be peer-reviewed study, are both eyebrow-raising and sobering.

While the paper spends quite a bit of time speculating how and why an extraterrestrial intelligence, or perhaps merely its self-propagating probes, would end up in our backyard, its more important takeaways are its conclusions on the physics involved in the sightings.

In short, Kirpatrick and Loeb looked at the friction that should’ve been created between a fast-moving UFO and the air and water surrounding it, like those famously depicted in the initial videos the Pentagon released that baffled the Navy airmen that spotted them.

Taken at face value, “highly maneuverable” UFO sightings indeed appear to not abide by the laws of physics, as a “bright optical fireball” should be created by the ensuing friction.

This fireball, in turn, should also leave a resulting radio signature detectable on radar — but none such signatures were ever spotted.

Keep reading

Harvard’s Kennedy School: Key Part Of The Military-Industrial Complex

Harvard’s Kennedy School’s denial of a fellowship to Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, because of his criticism of Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza is only the latest example of the corporate role played by Harvard’s most prestigious think tank on public policy.  Roth, who has spent the last three decades at HRW defending human rights around the world, was offered a senior fellowship at the School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.  It was quickly withdrawn.

The school’s dean, Douglas Elmendorf, blocked the appointment following pressure from donors and supporters of Israel and its apartheid policies.  Hundreds of Harvard affiliates have now called on Elmendorf to resign as Dean.  The critics of Elmendorf include former Harvard president Lawrence Summers.

As America’s leading human rights defender, Roth has criticized numerous governments that violated human rights, including Israel’s.  No one has been more aggressive in this area than Kenneth Roth, who has challenged all those who have abused their power and authority.  No one has ever suggested that Roth’s criticisms of Israel were based on racial or religious animus.

In view of the fact that there are so few defenders of human rights and that the new Israeli government is poised to further suppress the human rights of its minority Palestinian population as well as those Palestinians in the occupied territory, the Harvard decision becomes more shocking.  The fact that Roth’s parents were refugees from Hitler’s Germany, and that the Roth family lost members in the Holocaust makes Harvard’s decision even more ironic and unconscionable.  From both the standpoint of human rights and academic freedom, Harvard and its Kennedy School mark themselves as failures.

Keep reading

Investigators launch a search for possible UFO crash near the Australian coast

A controversial Harvard scientist says he is launching an expedition to retrieve a meteor that he believes is actually alien technology lying at the bottom of Pacific Ocean. 

In April, the US Space Command confirmed that a meteor that hit Earth in January 2014 did come from another solar system and is therefore the first known interstellar object.

US Space Command officials have said that the meteor, measuring just 1.5 feet across, ‘was indeed an interstellar object’.

Their confirmation means the famous interstellar object known as Oumuamua, discovered in 2017, is actually the second interstellar object to visit our solar system.

But Harvard physicist Avi Loeb claims that the object is instead a piece of alien technology. 

‘Our discovery of an interstellar meteor heralds a new research frontier,’ Loeb wrote in The Debrief.

‘The fundamental question is whether any interstellar meteor might indicate a composition that is unambiguously artificial in origin.

Keep reading

Harvard Tells Students: ‘Using Wrong Pronouns’ Constitutes ‘Abuse’

Welcome to Harvard!

“Fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” perpetuate “violence.” “Using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse.” And “any words used to lower a person’s self-worth” are “Verbal Abuse.” Those are just a handful of the things the school told all undergraduate students in a mandatory Title IX training session, according to materials reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

The online training, which all undergraduates were required to complete in order to enroll in courses, includes a “Power and Control Wheel” to help students identify “harmful” conduct. Outside the wheel are attitudes that “contribute to an environment that perpetuates violence,” a voiceover from the training states, including “sizeism and fatphobia,” “cisheterosexism,” “racism,” “transphobia,” “ageism,” and “ableism.”

Inside the wheel are behaviors that the school says constitute “abuse” and could violate its Title IX policies. “We all have an essential role to play in creating a community that cultivates gender equity and inclusion,” Harvard College dean Rakesh Khurana told students in a video introducing the training. “Completing this course is a critical step in establishing a shared understanding of the values here at Harvard College.”

Keep reading