Tag: nasa

NASA Launches New Study Tracking Clues of UFOs

NASA announced on Thursday they are putting a team together to examine unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), commonly known as UFOs. An official promised to share full findings with the public.

The move marks the latest efforts of federal agencies to identify and understand potential threats caused by objects with unexplainable propulsion.

The study, focusing on identifying available data and how best to collect and study future ones, will begin early in the fall and is expected to take about nine months to complete, according to the U.S. space agency.

An independent science and analysis team will be led by astrophysicist David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation and former department chair at Princeton University.

Given the “paucity of observations,” Spergel devoted to prioritize tracing clues of the most robust set of data from parties including civilians, government, non-profits, and companies.

“This report will be shared publicly,” said Daniel Evans, the assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, who will also orchestrate the study.

“All of NASA’s data is available to the public—we take that obligation seriously—and we make it easily accessible for anyone to see or study,” he said.

The latest statement follows the May 17 public congressional hearing into UFO sightings, the first in the United States in over 50 years, during which Pentagon officials on May 17 showed lawmakers two videos of UAPs recorded by U.S. military personnel.

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NASA Now Helping Pentagon Investigation Into UFOs

Reports are surfacing that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will lend a hand as the United States government searches for evidence of UFOs.

Earlier this month, the Department of Defense announced it would form a task force called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG) to investigate UFOs

“It’s going to be some sort of working group that will help support the DoD,” a source “affiliated with the U.S. government and familiar with NASA’s UAP research” told the Daily Mail.

“I suspect it will be a combination of efforts that will include perhaps firsthand eyewitness testimony of NASA employees and astronauts, and then perhaps a review of old archival footage to assess if there are some findings within the NASA archives that can help AOIMSG,” the source added.

The Pentagon’s UFO team has asked for footage from shuttle cameras attached to previous NASA flight missions, the source declared.

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Space Probe Launched in 1977 Begins Beaming Back ‘Impossible’ Data from Beyond the Solar System

You’re driving along and the “check engine” light flashes amber on your dashboard. Your engine is in no danger at the moment, but you have to get that examined before a real problem develops.

Imagine if your vehicle is nearly a half-century old. And is a spacecraft operating at the edge of the solar system.

Houston, we have a problem.

Or, more correctly, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California has one.

It’s because the space probe Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is sending data that’s not possible for it to originate, the UK’s Independent reports.

“A mystery like this is sort of par for the course at this stage of the Voyager mission,” according to NASA project manager Suzanne Dodd.

Essentially, all is well on Voyager 1 — commands are being performed when received (after a two-day interstellar space delay) — and apparently, the radio antenna is still properly aimed at earth.

But the probe is sending weird messages about its control systems that could not possibly show what’s actually taking place on board.

It looks like Voyager is happy with it, not having set off any systems for fault protection. It’s just sending out telemetry that apparently has been randomly generated.

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NASA may provoke alien invasion, scientists warn

Scientists at the UK’s Oxford University have reportedly sounded an alarm over plans by NASA to broadcast location data and other information into space, warning that the effort could have dangerous unintended consequences, including triggering an alien invasion.

At issue is the planned “Beacon in the Galaxy” (BITG), a broadcast of data by a NASA-led team of researchers with the aim of greeting “extraterrestrial intelligences.” The US space agency wants to beam the signal from the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope array in California and China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST). It would include such information as the biochemical composition of life on Earth, the Solar System’s time-stamped position in the Milky Way, digitized images of humans and an invitation for extraterrestrials to respond.

Anders Sandberg, a senior researcher at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), argued that such a broadcast could be risky. In the unlikely event that an alien civilization receives the message, he said, the response might not be just a friendly greeting.

The search for alien life has a “giggle factor” around it, Sandberg told the UK’s Telegraph newspaper in an article published on Sunday. “Many people refuse to take anything related to it seriously, which is a shame because this is important stuff.”

Another FHI scientist at Oxford, Toby Ord, has suggested that there should be public discussion before sending signals to aliens. Even listening for incoming messages could be dangerous, he added, as they could be used to entrap Earthlings. “These dangers are small but poorly understood and not yet well managed,” he said.

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Russia says it will not strand American astronaut in space despite media reports

Last week, a flurry of news reports worryingly claimed that Russia was threatening to strand an American astronaut on the International Space Station in direct response to sanctions placed on the country as it continues to invade neighboring Ukraine. But Russia’s state space corporation Roscosmos is trying to put those fears to rest, saying that it will bring home the astronaut as planned.

The NASA astronaut in question is Mark Vande Hei, who has been living on the International Space Station since April 2021. Vande Hei launched to the ISS on a Russian Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan, along with two cosmonauts. While living on the ISS, his stay was extended to a full year, and he is slated to return home in another Soyuz capsule on March 30th. When he returns home, he’ll have the record for longest continuous spaceflight by an American astronaut, at around 353 days.

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No signs of Martian life in meteorite found in Antarctica, study says

A spaced-out theory that claimed evidence of Martian life may have been debunked by scientists after a decades-long debate that alienated some skeptical researchers.

A 4-billion-year-old Martian meteorite found in Antarctica in the 1980s was said to contain evidence of ancient living things on the Red Planet but experts announced Thursday they had confirmed it showed no signs of extraterrestrial life.

A NASA-led team of researchers suggested in 1996 that the gray-green space rock appeared to have organic compounds left behind from living organisms, which was doubted by many scientists at the time and prompted decades of further research.

A team from the Carnegie Institution for Science, led by Andrew Steele, said in a study published in the journal Science that the compounds were not the result of living creatures, but by salty groundwater water flowing over the rocks for a long period of time.

The hunks of carbon compound on the rock were determined to have been from water while it was still on Mars’ surface. Researchers said that a similar process occurs with rocks on Earth, and could explain the presence of methane on Mars.

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NASA Enlists Priests To Assess How The World Would React To Alien Life

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is recruiting priests and theologians to assess how the world’s major religions would react to the news of discovering extraterrestrial life and advise the agency on how to quell civil unrest upon the revelation.

The agency has enlisted 24 religious experts to develop protocols for the discovery of alien life in its Center for Theological Inquiry program at Princeton University in New Jersey.

NASA provided CTI with a $1.1 million grant to create the program devoted to researching “the societal implications of astrobiology” in 2015.

According to its website, CTI “builds bridges of understanding by convening theologians, scientists, scholars and policymakers to think together — and inform public thinking — on global concerns.

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What really happened to Ronald Hunkeler, who inspired ‘The Exorcist’

Ronald Edwin Hunkeler was a NASA engineer who patented a special technology to make space shuttle panels resistant to extreme heat, helping the Apollo missions of the 1960s that put US astronauts on the moon in 1969.

But Hunkeler also had another claim to fame: He was the secret real-life inspiration for the demon-possessed kid in “The Exorcist.”

His identity has been kept under wraps since a series of exorcisms he underwent as a young teenager in Cottage City, Md., and St. Louis, Mo., in 1949.

For decades he was known only by the pseudonyms “Roland Doe” or “Robbie Mannheim.” His identity has been something of an open secret among the community of Jesuits who were close to the priests who participated in his exorcisms and a handful of academics and reporters who studied the phenomenon beginning in the mid-1970s.

But he lived in fear of more people finding out the truth.

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