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Malachi Smith's List: SPACE SCIENCE

American Chronicle | PART SEVEN -- On The Road To Roswell 2007: A Discussion With Dr. Tom Van Flandern

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van-flandern astronomer astronomy tom-horn roswell part-seven ufo gravity graviton wave mars face cydonia civilization planet-v catastrophe space on 2008-08-07
- 3, 4, and 5-sided pyramids are also rare.
- Yet many of these are found on Mars, but not on any other planet or moon yet examined in similar detail.
- 98 more annotations...
- - On the Elysium plains of Mars there may be an entire field of pyramid-shaped objects laid out in linear arrays.
  - HORN: I've also read about signs of present-day vegetation on Mars.
  - The “trees” have a central trunk-like shape with large, medium, and small branch-like appendages extending radially outward, and they cast shadows on the ground indicating a height of at least 50 meters.
  - VAN FLANDERN: Yes, we see objects that look very much like vegetation and trees in a few special places.
  - In at least some places, these objects change appearance with the seasons in patterns similar to terrestrial vegetation.
  - One color photo showed a predominately green coloration in the warmer months. The Martian atmosphere is supposed to be too thin and cold for vegetation. But on Earth, we have special places such as “hot springs” where warm liquid water can bubble up from underground and support vegetation in an otherwise hostile environment.
  - HORN: Describe the objects on Mars
    you called "glassy tubes".
  - VAN FLANDERN: From an examination of hundreds of these objects, we know that they are tube-like shapes typically 50-100 meters in diameter.
  - White bands wrap around the tube about every ten meters along its entire length. The material between bands is translucent, and we can faintly see the white bands on the underside through the tube.
  - When direct sunlight is available, it reflects from the tube in a mirror-like way instead of just scattering the light.
  - Where a boulder has damaged a tube, we often see a collapsed tube section, where broken white bands lie flat on the surface, and sharp, spine-like portions of broken bands jut out from an intact-but-torn tube section.
  - Tubes are visible mainly in fissures or where a flood has eroded away the topsoil. In some places, they can be traced underground in infrared images that can detect such things if they are not too far below the surface.
  - Some tubes cross one another (one above, one below) in perpendicular intersections, while others have junctions where one tube becomes two or vice versa. In a few places, many tubes come together in patterns suggestive of “terminals” for train stations.
  - HORN: What else is seen that might be of special interest?
  - VAN FLANDERN: In certain places on Mars, especially near the location of the former equator of the planet, we see “artistic imagery”, sometimes in abundance, although not always with distinct clarity.
  - Moreover, the shapes seen are not random, but depict familiar terrestrial images in organized groupings.
  - For example, in one region of Mars named “Cydonia”, we see an apparent mosaic scene showing impressions of sky, land, and water, with animal shapes organized in appropriate sections of the mosaic.
  - Amphibious creatures are in the water area, animals on the land area, and aviary creatures in the air area.
  - However, millions of years of dust storms and erosion have left many of the images more impressionistic than life-like. Had the images been as distinct as the words I must use to describe them, the shock waves from this discovery would have already traveled around the world.
  - HORN: What distinguishes the many artistic faces and other familiar shapes on Mars from faces and shapes seen in clouds and natural landscapes here on earth?
  - VAN FLANDERN: It is possible to see even very detailed shapes in random, noisy backgrounds. But some of the Martian shapes appear against flat, featureless backgrounds.
  - The context and relationship appropriateness is additional evidence these are not products of geology or random processes.
  - But the most compelling proof, to a scientist at least, is the fulfillment of what we call a priori predictions. For example, if you are dealt a 13-card hand and get all 13 spades, you might wonder if that was an accident or the result of a fixed deck because the odds against that happening by chance are 635-billion-to-one.
  - Yet every specific randomized deal of 13 unique cards had the same odds against happening by chance. So unlikely events, like unlikely card hands, can and do happen by chance.
  - Yet if I predicted that on the next deal, your hand would contain 13 spades, and it did, you could be sure at odds of 635-billion-to-one that was not a lucky guess but the result of a controlled process. That’s how the a priori principle works – through the power of predictions.
  - When the Viking spacecraft saw an apparent face on Mars in the Cydonia region, that was interesting but could easily have been a “trick of light and shadow”.
  - So scientists formulated tests to tell whether the object was natural (a product of geology and illusion) or artificial (a product of intelligences).
  - The first eight such tests initially gave a split decision, 5 to 3 in favor of artificiality.
  - Two of those tests were based on the fact that the Cydonia face-object cannot be seen from the ground but must be viewed from above, for example from an orbiting space station. So if artificial, it would logically be built on the equator of Mars and built upright.
  - But the Cydonia face was far from the equator (latitude 41 degrees north) and was tilted from upright by an angle of about 35 degrees. Those statistics favored a natural origin.
  - Then in 1996 we took a look at the pole shift of Mars to see where the face-like object was before the pole shift. The answer was exactly on the old equator and upright to within two degrees! The odds against that happening by chance were roughly 1000-to-one.
  - So if the builders were active before the cataclysm that tipped the pole of Mars (the explosion of the other moon 3.2 million years ago), then both these tests indicated an artificial origin. By the end of that year, all eight tests favored an artificial origin over a natural one.
  - As compelling as this conclusion was to any mind open to either possibility, it still needed conformation.
  - So in 1997, the Society for Planetary SETI Research (SPSR), an association of about 30 independent scientists, sent a few representatives to NASA to request priority imaging of the Cydonia face-like object by the high-resolution camera on the newly-arrived Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft.
  - SPSR then set down criteria for distinguishing artificial from natural well before any results were known. In brief, if and only if the object was artificial, the impression of a humanoid eye, nose, and mouth in the original images should be supplemented by secondary facial features in any detailed new image.
  - These specifically included an eyebrow over the eye socket, an iris inside the eye socket, nostrils at the large end of a tapered nose, and evidence of lips in the mouth feature.
  - Specifics were set down for the qualifying size, shape, location, and orientation of these features on the mesa. Moreover, the test required that no qualifying features appear in the background so that our minds could form apparent facial features from randomness, as our minds are prone to do.
  - This was like predicting a deal of 13 spades in advance, except that the combined odds against this happening by chance at Cydonia were 1000-billion-billion-to-one.
  - When the spacecraft images were returned to Earth in April 1998, every prediction was fulfilled.
  - That left no doubt in the minds of scientists familiar with the a priori principle that the Cydonia Face had to be an artificial structure.
  - HORN: Can you give another example of ruling out a natural origin for some of these artistic features?
  - VAN FLANDERN: Yes. One of the animal shapes elsewhere on Mars resembled a puma, but it wasn’t detailed enough to be persuasive and the edge of the spacecraft photograph left the hindquarters cut off and unseen. So the scientist who found the image, J.P. Levasseur, predicted that the image was artificial if and only if the missing hindquarters completed an animal hind-section and legs and contained a puma-like tail extending from the right place on the hindquarters.
  - Anything else from an unlimited number of possibilities would indicate a natural origin.
  - A few years later, the spacecraft (by request) took another image that included the hindquarters area, and showed the completion of an animal hindquarters and hind legs and a marvelous tail of the right proportions extending from just the right place.
  - HORN: So what is the connection between possible artifacts on Mars and the exploded planet hypothesis we were discussing earlier?
  - VAN FLANDERN: The explosion of the “water-world” body Mars was orbiting until 3.2 million years ago produced the most recent pole shift on Mars that moved the Cydonia Face from the equator to its present location, tilting it by 35 degrees. This tells us that the builders of these amazing surface features predated the explosion, and that their civilization was probably terminated by that explosion.
  - Moreover, we see no evidence of a primary civilization on Mars, making the exploded water world the most likely location for that civilization.
  - Indeed, that speculation makes sense on several levels. For example, if we project our own civilization ahead a few thousand years, trips to our Moon will by then be routine for tourists. The first thing such tourists will wish to do is board an orbiting space station to get a close-up overview of the entire Moon. It will then be a natural step for the many activities on the lunar surface – telescopes, mining operations, laboratories, communication centers, and all manner of commercial operations – to attract tourists and tourist dollars by building surface exhibits that can be seen from the orbiting space station.
  - So we can reasonably project that the future of our Moon will be not unlike what we are seeing today on Mars – surface exhibits that can be best viewed from an orbiting space station.
  - However, if that was the function of the artistic Mars images, that would imply Mars was the civilization’s moon, not its home world. And the latter was lost by explosion 3.2 million years ago – a date that is reliably determined from the orbital period of new comet orbits.
  - HORN: What is the significance of that connection for us here on Earth?
  - VAN FLANDERN: We are deep into the area of speculation now. However, it seems unlikely to be coincidence that the geoglyphs on Mars are so humanoid and terrestrial in appearance rather than alien.
  - And it seems also unlikely to be coincidence that the builder’s civilization on their home world ended about the same time as the dating of the earliest humanoid fossil on Earth, the “Lucy” find in Africa.
  - Both are dated to 3.2 million years ago. So it seems that one civilization was ending about the same time that another was beginning. When these findings are tied in with the most ancient “sacred” writings from cultures everywhere on Earth, the mind is compelled to wonder if those stories are perhaps preserving knowledge of human origins elsewhere in the solar system, and of a species transfer to Earth in an effort to survive the cataclysm.
  - Answering such questions may in the end turn out to be the most important knowledge for our species to acquire in our future as solar system explorers, more important even than the Copernican revolution when we learned that Earth was not the center of the universe.
  - HORN: We will need to do a part two at some point to focus more on the question of origins. Some of this sounds almost like a Star Trek episode where extraterrestrial civilizations need to escape their doomed planet in order to find a new home elsewhere.
  - Yet doesn't modern physics still hold that nothing can travel faster than light (186 thousand miles per second), so that touring the Galaxy in a human lifetime (as in "Star Trek") is impossible. Is that theory still valid?
  - VAN FLANDERN: No, it is not.
  - The geometric interpretation of Einstein’s general relativity theory appeared to require that the speed of light was an absolute upper speed limit. However, evidence has gone against the geometric interpretation in favor of the field interpretation favored by Einstein, Dirac, and Feynman, to mention just a few of the great physicists of the 20th century who weighed in on the matter.
  - For example, the force of the Sun’s gravity holds Earth in orbit. All six modern experiments that attempt to measure the speed of gravitational force propagation show that it must greatly exceed the speed of light. From that, we can now be sure that the speed of light is not a limiting speed in the universe.
  - So once our technology discovers “gravitons” and masters controlling them, we will not only be able to listen in on any Galactic conversations that may be occurring, but we will also be able to travel about the Galaxy within human life-spans.
  - HORN: Have scientists observed phenomenon propagating faster than light?
  - VAN FLANDERN: Yes, the strongest of the six experiments places a lower limit to the speed of gravity of 20 billion times faster than the speed of light. It also follows that the speed of electric (Coulomb) force is faster than light, and might be as fast as the speed of gravity.
  - Light waves (sometimes confusingly called “electromagnetic waves”) and gravitational waves (which have no more to do with gravity than light has to do with electricity) travel at the speed of light.
  - HORN: Is gravity a "push" or a "pull"? And what does this tell us about the origin and nature of gravity?
  - VAN FLANDERN: Traditionally, we have always thought of gravity as something within the Earth and all masses that pull us and other things toward themselves. But we now have a new understanding of the nature and origin of gravity that is quite different.
  - We think the visible universe is filled with innumerable, super-fast “gravitons” traveling in all directions, individually so tiny that they can usually fly through the atoms composing the entire Earth without hitting anything solid. But a small fraction of them does hit solid matter and gets scattered or absorbed.
  - For us standing here on Earth’s surface, we are not held down by anything from the Earth but by a graviton wind from space pushing us downward. That wind arrives from all directions. But the Earth blocks a small part of the wind trying to reach us from below.
  - So more gravitons strike us from above than from below, and we feel a net push downward. This is known as the theory of “pushing gravity”.
  - It predicts five new properties of gravity, and so far these predictions are in good accord with all observations and experiments. Pushing gravity is also the subject of a 20-author book by that title published in 2002.
  - HORN: How fast does gravity propagate?
  - Light takes 8.3 minutes to travel the 93 million miles from the Sun to Earth, but a graviton would make the same trip in under 25 nanoseconds (billionths of a second).
  - VAN FLANDERN: The experimental lower limit for the speed of gravity is 20 billion times faster than light.
  - Light takes about 30,000 years to travel from the center of our Galaxy to our location, but a graviton would make that trip in under a minute.
  - Light from the most distant galaxies we can see takes billions of years to get here, but gravitons would take less than one year.
  - HORN: Are these new ideas speculative, or are they now published and accepted?
  - VAN FLANDERN: “Accepted” is always a slow process. Physicist Max Planck once said “Science progresses one funeral at a time”, and that adage remains just as true today. The best new ideas can accomplish in the short term is to expose themselves to peer review and the toughest arguments opponents can muster.
  - If they survive that, get published, and silence the critics, the rest is just a matter of time for the word to spread and the resistance to die out.
  - A few challenge papers appeared, and all were rebutted. Then in 2002 I was joined by a senior physicist, the late J.P. Vigier (in whose honor four international symposiums have been held). We jointly published a comprehensive, 38-page paper in “Foundations of Physics” setting out the full story, including every challenge raised and how it is answered. There has been no further scientific criticism since that review paper appeared.
  - The gravity papers were first published in 1996, then more aggressively in 1999 in Physics Letters A.
  - HORN: What are the practical implications of faster-than-light travel for SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and interstellar communications?
  - VAN FLANDERN: Assuming gravitons exist and propagate billions of times faster than light, no advanced civilization in the Galaxy would be using radio waves to communicate because it takes too long (longer than normal life-spans). So under those assumptions, our SETI program is a waste of time.
  - Only when we can listen in to graviton signals will we start to hear the Galactic conversations that may be going on, and achieve direct communication with any stellar neighbors we might have.
  - HORN: What about the implications for UFOs and interstellar travel?
  - VAN FLANDERN: The same principles apply. To get around the Galaxy, one would need to use graviton propulsion systems. That is still far enough ahead of our civilization’s progress that it would appear magical to us.
  - Extraterrestrials and their vehicles could come and go without attracting our attention if they chose to do so. Many UFO reports don’t register on my personal plausibility meter because they envision vehicles that are barely more advanced than the most modern human flying craft, and are so klutzy that they are frequently rumored to crash.
  - HORN: The Roswell Incident. What do you think happened there in 1947?
  - VAN FLANDERN: I have never personally investigated that incident. But from the reports on both sides of the controversy I have seen, I think criticisms of the classified Mogul balloon explanation have seemed insubstantial, being based more on a distrust of government sources than on verifiable facts.
  - HORN: Will you be in Roswell this July? If so, will you be making a public appearance?
  - VAN FLANDERN: No. The charter of my sponsoring organization, Meta Research, covers everything from “40 km and up”, so UFOs usually remain a bit out of my field as a professional astronomer.
  - But occasionally they do come within it. I did investigate the reported anomalous object photographed by the Russian Phobos 2 spacecraft, and I investigated the alleged UFO sightings over Mexico during the 1991 total solar eclipse because I was there for the eclipse.
  - Neither of those incidents turned out to involve genuine UFOs.
  - Regrettably, the UFO field, always in need of support and supporters, is not as eager to publish explanations of famous cases as it is to publish unexplained aerial phenomena, which in turn hurts the field’s credibility with serious-but-open-minded scientists.
  - HORN: There is so much more I could ask you, which will have to wait for that part-two if we do it. Please tell people where they can learn more about you and your research.
  - VAN FLANDERN: Visit our web site at http://metaresearch.org for extensive samples of our research and articles. My book, Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets gives a nice overview of our Meta Science from the solar system to the whole universe, including why the Big Bang theory is wrong and the best bet to replace it.
  - For the latest developments, our quarterly publication, the Meta Research Bulletin, has just gone electronic and open source to begin its 16th year as the publication with the best track record for successful predictions in the field of astronomy.
  - We also offer a number of CDs with presentation materials and technical details about “Gravity”, “The Evolving Mars Story”, and “A Short Tour of the Universe”. See our web site store for more information about these items and a few books we recommend.
  - HORN: Thank you for taking time to be part of the special Road to Roswell series.
Bracing the Satellite Infrastructure for a Solar Superstorm: Scientific American

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1859 sunspot-activity northern-lights ionized-gas solar solar-storms magnetic-field usa europe electronics blackout cme august-28-1859 telegraph auroras maine florida cuba compass on 2008-08-09
- July, 2008
- Bracing the Satellite Infrastructure for a Solar Superstorm
- 31 more annotations...
- - A recurrence of the 1859 solar superstorm would be a cosmic Katrina, causing billions of dollars of damage to satellites, power grids and radio communications
  - By Sten F. Odenwald and James L. Green
  - As night was falling across the Americas on Sunday, August 28, 1859, the phantom shapes of the auroras could already be seen overhead.
  - From Maine to the tip of Florida, vivid curtains of light took the skies.
  - Startled Cubans saw the auroras directly overhead; ships’ logs near the equator described crimson lights reaching halfway to the zenith.
  - Many people thought their cities had caught fire.
  - Pat Rawlings/SAIC
    
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    Key Concepts
    
    The solar superstorm of 1859 was the fiercest ever recorded. Auroras filled the sky as far south as the Caribbean, magnetic compasses went haywire and telegraph systems failed.
    Ice cores suggest that such a blast of solar particles happens only once every 500 years, but even the storms every 50 years could fry satellites, jam radios and cause coast-to-coast blackouts.
    The cost of such an event justifies more systematic solar monitoring and beefier protection for satellites and the power grid.
    
    
  - Scientific instruments around the world, patiently recording minute changes in Earth’s magnetism, suddenly shot off scale, and spurious electric currents surged into the world’s telegraph systems.
  - In Baltimore telegraph operators labored from 8 p.m. until 10 a.m. the next day to transmit a mere 400-word press report.
  - Just before noon the following Thursday, September 1, English astronomer Richard C. Carrington was sketching a curious group of sunspots—curious on account of the dark areas’ enormous size.
  - At 11:18 a.m. he witnessed an intense white light flash from two locations within the sunspot group. He called out in vain to anyone in the observatory to come see the brief five-minute spectacle, but solitary astronomers seldom have an audience to share their excitement.
  - Seventeen hours later in the Americas a second wave of auroras turned night to day as far south as Panama.
  - Gold miners in the Rocky Mountains woke up and ate breakfast at 1 a.m., thinking the sun had risen on a cloudy day.
  - People could read the newspaper by their crimson and green light.
  - Telegraph systems became unusable across Europe and North America.
  - The news media of the day looked for researchers able to explain the phenomena, but at the time scientists scarcely understood auroral displays at all.
  - Were they meteoritic matter from space, reflected light from polar icebergs or a high-altitude version of lightning?
  - It was the Great Aurora of 1859 itself that ushered in a new paradigm. The October 15 issue of Scientific American noted that ‘‘a connection between the northern lights and forces of electricity and magnetism is now fully established.”
  - Work since then has established that auroral displays ultimately originate in violent events on the sun, which fire off huge clouds of plasma and momentarily disrupt our planet’s magnetic field.
  - The impact of the 1859 storm was muted only by the infancy of our technological civilization at that time.
  - Were it to happen today, it could severely damage satellites, disable radio communications and cause continent-wide electrical blackouts that would require weeks or longer to recover from.
  - Although a storm of that magnitude is a comfortably rare once-in-500-years event, those with half its intensity hit every 50 years or so.
  - The last one, which occurred on November 13, 1960, led to worldwide geomagnetic disturbances and radio outages.
  - If we make no preparations, by some calculations the direct and indirect costs of another superstorm could equal that of a major hurricane or earthquake.
  - The Big One
  - The number of sunspots, along with other signs of solar magnetic activity, waxes and wanes on an 11-year cycle.
  - The current cycle began this past January; over the coming half a decade, solar activity will ramp up from its current lull.
  - During the previous 11 years, 21,000 flares and 13,000 clouds of ionized gas, or plasma, exploded from the sun’s surface. These phenomena, collectively termed solar storms, arise from the relentless churning of solar gases.
  - In some ways, they are scaled-up versions of terrestrial storms, with the important difference that magnetic fields lace the solar gases that sculpt and energize them.
  - Flares are analogous to lightning storms; they are bursts of energetic particles and intense x-rays resulting from changes in the magnetic field on a relatively small scale by the sun’s standards, spanning thousands of kilometers.
  - So-called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are analogous to hurricanes; they are giant magnetic bubbles, millions of kilometers across, that hurl billion-ton plasma clouds into space at several million kilometers per hour.
MIT-led Team Discovers New Path of Earth's Meteorites

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meteors meteorites difference earth atmosphere strike asteroid-belt jupiter-mars yarkovsky-effect mit space scientists binzel theory nea on 2008-08-17
- August 15, 2008
- MIT-led Team Discovers New Path of Earth's Meteorites
- 20 more annotations...
- - A team from MIT and other institutions have solved the mystery that has nagged at astronomers the last few years: why the vast majority of asteroids that come near the Earth are of a type that matches only a tiny fraction of the meteorites that most frequently hit our planet.
  - Since meteorites are mostly pieces of asteroids, this discrepancy was
    hard to explain, but the team discovered that the smaller rocks that
    most often fall to Earth, come straight in from the main asteroid belt
    out between Mars and Jupiter, rather than from the near-Earth asteroid
    population.
  - The answer to the puzzle gradually emerged from a long-term study of
    the properties of asteroids carried out by MIT professor of planetary
    science Richard Binzel and his students, along with postdoctoral
    researcher P. Vernazza, who is now with the European Space Agency, and
    A.T. Tokunaga, director of the University of Hawaii's Institute of
    Astronomy.
  - By studying the spectral signatures of near-Earth asteroids, they
    were able to compare them with spectra obtained on Earth from the
    thousands of meteorites that have been recovered.
  - But the more they
    looked, the more they found that most NEAs -- about two-thirds of them
    -- match a specific type of meteorites called LL chondrites, which only
    represent about 8 percent of meteorites. How could that be, they asked?
  - "Why do we see a difference between the objects hitting the ground
    and the big objects whizzing by?" Binzel asks.
  - As the effect became gradually more and more noticeable
    as more asteroids were analyzed, "we finally had a big enough data set
    that the statistics demanded an answer. It could no longer be just a
    coincidence."
  - "It's been a
    headscratcher."
  - Why would the objects that most frequently hit us match the distant
    population better than it matches the objects in our own neighborhood?
  - That's where the idea emerged of a fast track all the way from the main
    belt to a crater on Earth's surface.
  - This fast track, it turns out, is caused by an obscure phenomena,
    called the Yarkovsky effect that was discovered long ago, but only
    recently recognized as a significant factor in asteroid patterns.
  - The Yarkovsky effect causes asteroids to change their orbits as a
    result of the way they absorb the sun's heat on one side and radiate it
    back later as they rotate around.
  - This causes a slight imbalance that
    slowly, over time, alters the object's path. An effect that acts much
    more strongly on the smallest objects, and only weakly on the larger
    ones.
  - "We think the Yarkovsky effect is so efficient for meter-size
    objects that it can operate on all regions of the asteroid belt,"
    Binzel says.
  - Binzel's study concludes that the largest near-Earth asteroids
    mostly come from the asteroid belt's innermost edge, where they are
    part of a specific "family" thought to all be remnants of a larger
    asteroid that was broken apart by collisions.
  - With an initial nudge
    from the Yarkovsky effect, kilometer-sized asteroids from the Flora
    region can find themselves "over the edge" of the asteroid belt and
    sent on a path to Earth's vicinity through the perturbing effects of
    the planets called resonances.
  - The new study is good news for protecting Earth. One of the biggest
    problems in figuring out how to deal with an approaching asteroid, if
    and when one is discovered on a potential collision course, is that
    they are so varied. The best way of dealing with one kind might not
    work on another.
  - But now that this analysis has shown that the majority of near-Earth
    asteroids are of this specific type -- stony objects, rich in the
    mineral olivine and poor in iron -- it's possible to concentrate most
    planning on dealing with that kind of object, Binzel says.
  - "Odds are,
    an object we might have to deal with would be like an LL chondrite, and
    thanks to our samples in the laboratory, we can measure its properties
    in detail," he says. "It's the first step toward 'know thy enemy'."
  - Posted by Casey Kazan, adapted from MIT news source.
Spacecraft flies by remote asteroid, camera stops - Yahoo! News

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mystery camera astroid fly-by malfunction europe nasa rosetta esa european-space-agency space-probe space deep-space comet on 2008-09-08
- Spacecraft flies by remote asteroid, camera stops
- By KATRIN SCHIEFER and GEORGE FREY, Associated Press Writers
  Sat Sep 6, 9:51 AM ET
- 25 more annotations...
- - DARMSTADT, Germany - The European deep space probe Rosetta successfully completed a flyby of an asteroid millions of miles from earth, but its high resolution camera stopped shortly before the closest pass, space officials said Saturday.
  - Rosetta caught up with the Steins asteroid, also known as Asteroid 2867, just after 8:45 p.m. (1845 GMT) Friday in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
  - The probe came within 500 miles (805 kilometers) of the asteroid — which turned out to be slightly larger than scientists expected.
  - Officials at the European Space Agency were not sure exactly what caused the camera to balk.
  - "The software switched off automatically," Gerhard Schwehm, the ESA mission manager and head of solar systems science operations told The Associated Press.
  - "The camera has some software limits and we'll analyze why this happened later."
  - Another wide angle camera was able to take pictures and send them to the space center, Schwehm said.
  - At a news conference, Uwe Keller, the principal camera investigator, said despite the camera turning off about nine minutes before its closest approach, it switched back on again later and was now working well. Keller said he did not expect the camera setback to affect the rest of the mission.
  - Craters of different ages were found on the surface of the gray-colored asteroid, showing a "rich collisional history," Keller said.
  - The probe recorded more than 23 craters over 200 meters wide, with the biggest being about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) wide.
  - According to measurements by the probe, the diamond-shaped asteroid turned out to be 3.1 miles (5 kilometers) in diameter, slightly larger than an earlier estimate of 3 miles (4.8 kilometers).
  - The Rosetta craft was launched in March 2004 from French Guyana, and is now about 250 million miles (402 million kilometers) from Earth.
  - Schwehm said the historic mission could give astronomers crucial clues to help them understand the creation of the solar system.
  - Rita Schulz, a Rosetta project scientist, said data from asteroids and comets was particularly valuable because they are made of galactic matter that helped create the planets in our solar system.
  - "Asteroids are a sort of memory, or the DNA, of the solar system," Schulz said.
  - Up until now, astronomers analyzing asteroids have had to work with limited data from brief flybys, such as when ESA's Giotto probe swept by Halley's Comet in 1986, photographing long canyons, broad craters and 3,000-foot (1000-meter) hills.
  - As planned, the Rosetta lost its signal to Earth for about an hour-and-a-half Friday night as engineers turned it away from the sun and the craft zoomed through space too fast for its antennae to transmit any signal.
  - At 10:15 p.m (2015 GMT) Friday the craft resumed transmission, signaling that the exercise was largely successful — news cheered by ESA engineers and technicians.
  - Yet there was another setback Friday night as data was sent to antenna stations far from Europe.
  - A NASA laboratory in Goldstone, California was having problems cooling one of its antennas in the summer heat and had to switch the ESA project to another antenna, delaying the analysis of some data by several hours.
    
    Rosetta data was also transmitted to an antenna in New Norcia, western Australia.
  - Data from its working camera was being processed Saturday at the Max Planck Institute in Lindau, southern Germany, while further infrared data collected by the probe was being analyzed at the Instituto Nacionale di Astrofisica in Rome.
  - The Steins asteroid was Rosetta's first scientific target as it enters the asteroid belt en route to its destination, the comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta is scheduled to reach the comet in 2014.
  - Between now and then it will perform some gravitational experiments before going into hibernation, Schwehm said
  - The European Space Agency is supported by 17 countries including Germany, France, Ireland and the Netherlands.
  - It cooperates with NASA, the European Union, European national space agencies and international partners. It's expected the ESA will become the European Union space agency in the near future.
FOXNews.com - Astronomers Baffled by Mysterious Light in Sky - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News

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space sky astronmers mystery object unidentified scientists february-2006 hubble telescope strange phenomena astrophysics on 2008-09-18 and saved by 2 people
- Astronomers Baffled by Mysterious Light in Sky
- Tuesday, September 16, 2008
- 10 more annotations...
- - It's not a supernova. Nor is it a galaxy, or a black hole.
  - In fact, astronomers have no idea what the mysterious object that in February 2006 suddenly flared up in an otherwise barren patch of sky might be, or even what it's made of.
  - Researchers working on something called the Supernova Cosmology Project had pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a very distant star cluster, 8.2 billion light-years away or more than halfway across the universe.
  - But they noticed something else — a point of light where there hadn't been one before.
  - Over the next three months, the object got brighter and brighter until it was 120 times its initial luminosity.
    
    Then it slowly got dimmer again, at about the same rate, until by the end of the year it was gone.
  - Astronomers led by U.C. Berkeley astrophysics grad student Kyle Barbary put the light coming from it through a mass spectrometer to see what it was made of — but couldn't get signatures for any known elements.
  - "Because we can't see anything we recognize in the spectrum, we can't tell if it's even in [our] galaxy or in another galaxy," Barbary told New Scientist magazine in an article posted Tuesday morning.
  - It's not a supernova, which would have flared up much more quickly, then died out even more quickly.
  - All the scientists know is that it's no closer to Earth than 130 light-years away — and no further than 11 billion light-years away.
    
    As Sky and Telescope magazine noted last week, "that leaves a lot of leeway."
  - "We are hoping someone else might have seen something similar," Barbary told New Scientist, "or might be able to shed some light on it."
Solar wind weakest since beginning of space age

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solar-wind space solar-system sun weak satellites radiation outer-space planets inner-planets exposed nasa end-time nature on 2008-09-25
- Solar wind weakest since beginning of space age
- Sep 24 03:32 PM US/Eastern
- 12 more annotations...
- - The intensity of the sun's million-mile-per-hour solar wind has dropped to its lowest levels since accurate records began half a century ago, scientists say.
  - Measurements of the cosmic blasts of radiation, ejected from the sun's upper atmosphere, were made with the Ulysses spacecraft, a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
  - The solar wind "inflates a protective bubble, or heliosphere, around the solar system," which protects the inner planets against the radiation from other stars, said Dave McComas, Ulysses' solar wind principal investigator and senior executive director at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
  - "With the solar wind at an all-time low, there is an excellent chance the heliosphere will diminish in size and strength," said Ed Smith, NASA's Ulysses project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
  - "If that occurs, more galactic cosmic rays will make it into the inner part of our solar system," added Smith.
  - Scientists say the weakening of solar wind appears to be due to changes in the sun's magnetic field, but the causes of these changes are unknown.
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - The weakened solar activity can be beneficial because it slows satellites around the Earth, allowing them to remain in orbit longer.
  - The sun normally experiences 11-year-cycles between periods of great activity and lesser activity.
  - But, Smith said, the Ulysses mission's recent results, published in Geophysical Research Letters, show that "we are in a period of minimal activity that has stretched on longer than anyone anticipated."
  - The Ulysses mission was the first project to survey the space environment over the sun's poles.
  - The data the spacecraft has collected has profoundly changed the way scientists view our nearest star and its effects on the Earth.
  - The spacecraft has traveled more than 539 million kilometers in more than 18 years, almost four times its expected lifetime.
NASA: 2012 'space Katrina' may cripple U.S. for months

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space space-weather 2012 solar sun nasa studies disruption solar-storm communications electronics magnetic-field katrine-size coronal-mass on 2009-01-12 and saved by 2 people
- NASA: 2012 'space Katrina' may cripple U.S. for months
- Damages could be trillions from solar 'perfect storm'
- 22 more annotations...
- - Posted: January 10, 2009
    6:42 pm Eastern
  - By Drew Zahn
    
    
    
    
    © 2009 WorldNetDaily
  - A recently released NASA report warns that the U.S. has forgotten the power of the sun, creating a technological society susceptible like never before to massive infrastructure damage from solar storms.
  - The study, carried out for NASA by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, doesn't predict some new solar or environmental disaster. Instead, it studies the effects of the sun's normal, cyclical behavior upon modern technology.
  - Professor Daniel Baker is director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado and chaired the panel that prepared the report.
  - "Whether it is terrestrial catastrophes or extreme space weather incidents," writes Baker in a statement released with the report, "the results can be devastating to modern societies that depend in a myriad of ways on advanced technological systems."
  - According to the report, the U.S. has grown so dependent on modern technologies without respect of what the sun can and has done, that it's risking major communications, finance, transportation, government and even emergency services meltdowns.
  - And if one of the sun's periodic, catastrophic storms hits the earth the way Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. coastline, the report estimates that damages from the "space weather Katrina" could top $1 or $2 trillion.
  - The sun is currently near minimum on its 11-year activity cycle, the report explains, but is expected to produce solar storms that will increase in intensity and frequency as it approaches peak activity levels in 2012.
  - The NASA report warns that if the sun's activity over the next few years flares to the level of the May 1921 "superstorm" or the so-called Carrington event of 1859, a "perfect storm" that Space.com called "the most powerful onslaught of solar energy in recorded history," the U.S. may not be equipped to handle the damages.
  - "The impacts of severe space weather events," the report states, "can go beyond disruption of existing technical systems and lead to short-term, as well as to long-term collateral socioeconomic disruptions."
  - The report listed possible cascading effects of a major solar storm as "disruption of the transportation, communication, banking and finance systems, and government services; the breakdown of the distribution of potable water owing to pump failure, and the loss of perishable foods and medications because of a lack of refrigeration."
  - Solar storm history
  - The impact of the solar storms is widely, and even recently, recorded.
  - In March 1989, a geomagnetic storm took down the power grid over much of Quebec, leaving millions of Canadians without power for hours.
  - In January 1994, the NASA report records, Canada's $290 million Anik E2 telecommunications satellite was knocked out by a solar storm, and it took six months and $50-70 million to get it back in operation.
  - One of the most dangerous contributors to solar storms is a coronal mass ejection, an expanding cloud of charged particles belched from the sun and sailing through space at supersonic speeds.
  - According to a video on Space.com, a CME impacted the earth in 1998, knocking a communications satellite out of space to crash in the middle of the U.S. and disrupting nearly every pager signal in the country.
  - Coronal mass ejections hit the earth relatively routinely.
  - But in 1859, a CME of extreme intensity, exceptionally high speed and magnetic fields opposite the earth's blasted the planet. The resulting "perfect storm" temporarily doubled the light of the sun, caused colorful aurora – normally only visible in the polar regions – to be seen as far south as Hawaii and shorted out telegraph wires, starting fires across the U.S. and Europe.
  - In 1859, however, the telegraph was only 15 years old. There was no satellite or television technology, no power grids, no automated teller machines
    and no global positioning systems helping direct traffic on land, air and sea.
  - "A contemporary repetition of the [1859] event," the NASA report concludes, "would cause significantly more extensive (and possibly catastrophic) social and economic disruptions."
SPACE.com -- Mystery Roar from Faraway Space Detected

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mystery-roar outer-space universe roaring-sound radio-waves space radio-hiss milky-way astrophysics arcade-mission radio-galaxies mysterious-sound voice god gods-voice creation on 2009-01-14 and saved by 4 people
- Mystery Roar from Faraway Space Detected
- By Andrea Thompson
  Senior Writer
  posted: 07 January 2009
- 20 more annotations...
- - LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Space is typically thought of as a very quiet place. But one team of astronomers has found a strange cosmic noise that booms six times louder than expected.
  - The roar is from the distant cosmos. Nobody knows what causes it.
  - Of course, sound waves can't travel in a vacuum (which is what most of space is), or at least they can't very efficiently. But radio waves can.
  - Radio waves are not sound waves, but they are still electromagnetic waves, situated on the low-frequency end of the light spectrum.
  - Many objects in the universe, including stars and quasars, emit radio waves.
  - Even our home galaxy, the Milky Way, emits a static hiss (first detected in 1931 by physicist Karl Jansky).
  - Other galaxies also send out a background radio hiss.
  - But the newly detected signal, described here today at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, is far louder than astronomers expected.
  - There is "something new and interesting going on in the universe," said Alan Kogut of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
  - A team led by Kogut detected the signal with a balloon-borne instrument named ARCADE (Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission).
  - In July 2006, the instrument was launched from NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, and reached an altitude of about 120,000 feet (36,500 meters), where the atmosphere thins into the vacuum of space.
  - ARCADE's mission was to search the sky for faint signs of heat from the first generation of stars, but instead they heard a roar from the distant reaches of the universe.
  - "The universe really threw us a curve," Kogut said. "Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted."
  - Detailed analysis of the signal ruled out primordial stars or any known radio sources, including gas in the outermost halo of our own galaxy.
    
    Other radio galaxies also can't account for the noise – there just aren't enough of them.
  - "You'd have to pack them into the universe like sardines," said study team member Dale Fixsen of the University of Maryland. "There wouldn't be any space left between one galaxy and the next."
  - The signal is measured to be six times brighter than the combined emission of all known radio sources in the universe.
  - For now, the origin of the signal remains a mystery.
  - "We really don't know what it is,"said team member Michael Seiffert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
  - And not only has it presented astronomers with a new puzzle, it is obscuring the sought-for signal from the earliest stars.
  - But the cosmic static may itself provide important clues to the development of galaxies when the universe was much younger, less than half its present age. Because the radio waves come from far away, traveling at the speed of light, they therefore represent an earlier time in the universe.
BibleGateway.com - Passage Lookup: Jeremiah 25:30-31

Mystery roar from far reaches of the universe; the voice of God?

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jeremiah-25 bible scripture mystery-roar gods-voice strange-sound universe god mysterious-sound radio-waves on 2009-01-14
- Jeremiah 25:30-31 (King James Version)
- 30Therefore prophesy thou against them all these words, and say unto them, The LORD shall roar from on high, and utter his voice from his holy habitation; he shall mightily roar upon his habitation; he shall give a shout, as they that tread the grapes, against all the inhabitants of the earth.
  31A noise shall come even to the ends of the earth; for the LORD hath a controversy with the nations, he will plead with all flesh; he will give them that are wicked to the sword, saith the LORD.
YouTube - the Sound of Saturn's Rings

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saturn rings sound space solar-system planet audio planets on 2009-02-04
- the Sound of Saturn's Rings
- 2 more annotations...
- - gregreese
    
    April 23, 2007
  - Audio and Video of Saturn's Rings taken by NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan 2007
Unusual Green Comet Thrills Stargazers

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comet green solar-system clockwise space science stellar outer-space regulus spica southern-sky lulin february-2009 on 2009-02-19
- Unusual Green Comet Thrills Stargazers
- By SETH BORENSTEIN
  ,
  AP
- 13 more annotations...
- - WASHINGTON (Feb. 18)
  - An odd, greenish backward-flying comet is zipping by Earth this month, as it takes its only trip toward the sun from the farthest edges of the solar system.
  - The comet is called Lulin, and there's a chance it can be seen with the naked eye — far from city lights, astronomers say. But you'll most likely need a telescope, or at least binoculars, to spot it.
  - The best opportunity is just before dawn one-third of the way up the southern sky. It should be near Saturn and two bright stars, Spica and Regula.
    
    
    
    Skip over this content
    
    
    
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    Amazing Space Images
  - On Monday at 10:43 p.m. EST, it will be 38 million miles from Earth, the closest it will ever get, according to Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near Earth Object program.
  - The story behind the comet is more intriguing than its appearance — the greenish tinge may be hard for many to discern. The color comes from a type of carbon and cyanogen, a poisonous gas.
  - Lulin was discovered by a Chinese teenager two years ago. It still has many of its original gases — gases that are usually stripped away as comets near the sun.
  - Unlike most comets viewable from Earth, this one hasn't been this close to the sun before, Yeomans said.
  - While all the planets and most of the other objects in the solar system circle the sun counterclockwise, Lulin circles clockwise, said NASA astronomer Stephen Edberg.
  - And thanks to an optical illusion, from Earth it appears as if the comet's tail is in the front as the comet approaches Earth and the sun.
  - "It essentially is going backwards through the solar system," he said.
  - It came from the outskirts of the solar system, 18 trillion miles away. Once it's made the journey around the sun, Lulin will gain enough speed to escape the solar system, Edberg said.
  - "If you are interested in comets, make sure you see it," he said. "But it's not going to be a real great blast for the general public."
2012 CHANGES ARE NOW: Truth About The Moon - NASA Black Box Transcripts

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NASA moon moltke-crater transcript CSM DSE black-box recordings lunar-module darkside smoking-gun apollo-mission on 2009-10-01
- Monday, September 28, 2009
  
  Truth About The Moon - NASA Black Box Transcripts
- 14 more annotations...
- - This has to go down as some of THE BEST smoking gun evidence that NASA failed to cover up.
  - YouTuber "LunaCognita" has done a fantastic job by searching through the NASA archives to share this information with the world. Check this video out!
  - In this examination into NASA's "black box" transcripts, we will look at just a few of the many interesting and revealing comments made by the astronauts throughout the Apollo program that were captured by the CSM's DSE system, as well as touch on some of the scripting protocols employed during the various TV broadcasts made from the CSM during the journey to and from the Moon and while in lunar orbit.
  - Contrary to what many think, those TV broadcasts were in fact elegantly scripted affairs, designed to rigidly control the amount of data that we, the general public, would have available to analyze.
  - Because of this, the DSE and DSEA internal crew conversation transcripts can provide us, in the astronauts own words, an unscripted and less-guarded insight into some of the incredible things they really witnessed during their journey to and from the Moon.
  - During the Apollo lunar landing program, NASA made use of two primary flight telemetry/voice recording systems aboard their spacecraft.
  - One of these systems was inside the Command/Service Module, and the other was mounted within the Lunar Module.
  - These two systems were known as the DSE (aboard the CSM) and the DSEA (aboard the LM). The "Data Storage Equipment" systems essentially served as Black Box cockpit voice recorders, designed to tape some of the internal conversations between the astronauts while they were out of radio contact with Mission Control in Houston.
  - After contact was re-established during the flight, Mission Control could then dump (downlink) the recorded data from the CSM to Earth, where it would be analyzed.
  - Unfortunately, NASA today claims that the original DSE Black Box tapes from the Apollo missions are missing and are presumed lost.
  - However, these DSE recordings were transcribed shortly after the contents of the tapes were originally dumped from the CSM to the Earth, and several years after the Apollo program ended, these transcripts finally were declassified and then released to the NASA archives.
  - In coming segments, we will examine many more impressive statements made by the NASA astronauts that were captured by the various cockpit voice recording systems utilized during not only the Apollo program, but during the earlier Gemini Earth-orbital flights as well. There is much more to come!
  - Cheers,
    LunaCognita
  - The Moltke Crater Featured In The Video.
    
    Notice the tubular legs evenly spaced coming down from the raised center.
    
    NASA Mission Transcripts can be found HERE
YouTube - Strange Huge Light Cloud over Moscow Oct 09, What is it???

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moscow russia cloud-formation cloud oddity weird weather atmosphere on 2009-10-09
- Strange Huge Light Cloud over Moscow Oct 09, What is it???
- 2 more annotations...
- - Truthspeaker74
    
    October 07, 2009
  - Any Ideas on what this Could Be???
    Is just a reflection of light?, A UFO?, Just a Pretty Circular Glowing cloud?, The Sun?, CGI?, \he Moon shining above the clouds???HAARP at work?Natural occurance and phenomena?,
    Please give me your thoughts on what this could be thankyou
Weather Geeks Champion New Armageddon-Worthy Cloud

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clouds cloud-formation undulatus-asperatus meteorology weather atmosphere USA UK on 2009-10-12 and saved by 5 people
- Weather Geeks Champion New Armageddon-Worthy Cloud
- Weather Geeks Champion New Armageddon-Worthy Cloud
  
  By Mike Olson
  
  09.21.09
  
  
  
  
  
  Photo: Danielle Maxwell
- 8 more annotations...
- - In hill country from Iowa to the Scottish Highlands, sky-gazers have reported some strange, ominous-looking clouds of late.
  - Dubbed undulatus asperatus (turbulent undulation), the atmospheric anomaly could be headed where only 80-odd clouds have gone before: into the International Cloud Atlas.
  - If it makes the cut, asperatus will be the first new addition in more than 50 years.
  - Where did it come from? Gavin Pretor-Pinney, president of the UK-based Cloud Appreciation Society, has a theory: "It's warmer, moister air above and colder, drier air below, with an abrupt boundary in between."
  - Add wind passing over rolling terrain and "you get the same wavy effect as on the surface of water."
  - The formation has probably been around for a long time, but it's only now getting attention: "Before the Internet and digicams, people might have mentioned it to a few friends and that would be it," Pretor-Pinney says.
  - "Once the news got out, I was inundated with emails saying, 'I saw it three years ago; here's the picture!'"
  - He's charting those images against atmospheric conditions to document the cloud's unique characteristics. The next step: Storm Geneva to seek formal recognition from the World Meteorological Organization.
NewsDaily: Mission finds bright ribbon at solar system border

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ribbon bright solar-system hydrogen-atoms sun galaxy boundary IBEX scientists space border heliopause galactic-wind on 2009-10-17
- Mission finds bright ribbon at solar system border
- Posted 2009/10/15 at 10:16 pm EDT
- 11 more annotations...
- - WASHINGTON, Oct. 15, 2009 (Reuters) —
  - A bright ribbon of hydrogen atoms marks the edge of the solar system, where the Sun's wind meets emissions from the rest of the galaxy, researchers reported on Thursday.
  - They used telescopes aboard the orbiting Interstellar Boundary Explorer spacecraft or IBEX to look toward the heliopause, which is the boundary where solar wind meets galactic wind at the edge of the solar system beyond Pluto.
  - Researchers combined images from IBEX with data from the Cassini spacecraft, which is near Saturn, and said it completely alters their ideas about what this border area looks like.
  - "The IBEX results are truly remarkable, with emissions not resembling any of the current theories or models of this never-before-seen region," David McComas of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, who led the research, said in a statement.
  - A bright ribbon of hydrogen atoms marks the edge of the solar system, where the Sun's wind meets emissions from the rest of the galaxy, researchers reported on Thursday. They used telescopes aboard the orbiting Interstellar Boundary Explorer spacecraft or IBEX to look toward the heliopause, which is the boundary where solar wind meets galactic wind at the edge of the solar system beyond Pluto. REUTERS/Science/AAAS/Handout
  - "We expected to see small, gradual spatial variations at the interstellar boundary, some ten billion miles (16 billion km) away.
  - However, IBEX is showing us a very narrow ribbon that is two to three times brighter than anything else in the sky."
  - It consists of hydrogen atoms that were once charged but which have been neutralized, they reported in five separate reports in the journal Science.
  - The researchers say the findings can tell them about the interstellar cloud through which our Milky Way galaxy is moving and which the galaxy will leave in about 10,000 years.
  - (Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
Buzz Aldrin: 'There's a Monolith on Mars Moon'

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buzz-aldrin astronaut mars moon phobos monolith space anomalies space-exploration God creation heavenlies planets on 2009-10-25
- Buzz Aldrin: 'There's a Monolith on Mars Moon'
- 3 more annotations...
- - Phobos
    
    "When people find out about [the monolith] they're going to say 'who put that there?!'"
    
    —Buzz Aldrin
  - Buzz Aldrin tells C-SPAN that there is a monolith on Phobos, one of the two small moons that revolve around Mars. Mr. Aldrin states:
    
    We should go boldly where man has not gone before ... we should ... visit the moon of Mars. There's a monolith there, a very unusual structure on this little potato shaped object that goes around Mars once in 7 hours. When people find out about that they're going to say 'who put that there?!'"
  - In a seeming move to deflect controversy, Aldrin goes onto to say that God or the "universe" must have put it there.
    
    Hat tip to Aquarian Solutions for this very unusual revelation.
Lambert Dolphin & The Great Sphinx

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barbara-aho lambert-dolphin sphinx egypt giza-plateau zahi-hawass osiris horus SRI ARE NASA mars moon farouk-el-baz hoagland on 2009-10-29
- LAMBERT DOLPHIN & THE GREAT SPHINX
- OPENING THE LOST TOMBS: LIVE
  FROM EGYPT
  
  Expert Archeologists
  
  Dr. Gaballa Ali Gaballa and
  Dr. Zahi Hawass Featured
  
  Hosted
  by Maury Povich
- 101 more annotations...
- - By Barbara Aho
  - On March 2, 1999, the Fox Channel TV featured
    the above special two-hour program on the opening of the sealed tombs
    of the Unknown and the Queen's Pyramid at Giza in Egypt.
  - The live broadcast
    presented information on the search for the Hall of Records at the Great
    Sphinx, which supposedly contains the records of the lost civilization
    of Atlantis.
  - With feigned surprise, Dr. Zahi Hawass, Director of the Egyptian
    Antiquity Organization, found instead the tomb of the Egyptian god, Osiris!
  - This TV special was extremely relevant to
    our research as part of the inculturation of society into the mythology
    of the god Osiris and the Gnostic religious system which is slated to
    supplant orthodox Christianity around the turn of the Millennium.
  - Those who have read the
    Cosmic Christmas
    report and/or have been on our mailing list for some time would have
    recognized the program as a continuation of the ongoing New Age attempt
    to validate the ancient mystery religions and return mankind to the worship
    of Osiris, reincarnated in his son, Horus.
  - The mystery religions, aka
    Mystery Babylon of Revelation 17, worship Horus in various forms, i.e.,
    Freemasons worship the Egyptian Osiris/Horus and Kabbalists worship this
    same god by the Chaldean name of Tammuz (Ezekiel 8:13).
  - Alexander Hislop
    wrote in
    The Two Babylons
    :
    
    "The identity of Nimrod, however,
    and the Egyptian, Osiris, having been established, we have thereby light
    as to Nimrod's death. Osiris met with a violent death, and that violent
    death of Osiris was the central theme of the whole idolatry of Egypt.
    If Osiris was Nimrod, as we have seen, that violent death which the
    Egyptians so pathetically deplored in their annual festivals was just
    the death of Nimrod. The accounts in regard to the death of the god
    worshipped in the several mysteries of the different countries are all
    to the same effect. A statement of Plato seems to show, that in his
    day the Egyptian Osiris was regarded as identical to Tammuz; and Tammuz
    is well known to have been the same as Adonis, the famous Huntsman,
    for whose death Venus is fabled to have made such bitter lamentations.
    As the women of Egypt wept for Osiris, as the Phenician and Assyrian
    women wept for Tammuz, so in Greece and Rome the women wept for Bacchus,
    whose name, as we have seen, means 'The bewailed,' or 'Lamented one.'"
    (p. 56)
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - George Bush, Jr., the Governor of Texas, coincidentally
    announced his candidacy for President the same day as the TV-staged discovery
    of the tomb of Osiris, while George Bush Sr. plans to be at the Egyptian
    pyramids on New Year's Eve 1999.
  - Watching closely the developments in Egypt
    are many modern worshippers of Osiris, such as the Skull & Bones initiates
    of the George Bush family.
  - William Cooper's book,
    Behold a Pale Horse,
    mentions this Millennial New Years Eve event on p. 73:
    
    "Simultaneously a vault containing
    the ancient records of the earth will be opened in Egypt. The opening
    of the vault will usher in the millennium. A great celebration has already
    been planned by the Millennium Society to take place at the pyramids
    in Egypt. According to the January 3, 1989, edition of the Arizona Daily
    Star, 'President-elect Bush is spending this New Year's holiday at Camp
    David, Maryland, but in 10 years he may be in Egypt. Organizers of the
    Millennium Society say he's already committed to ushering in the next
    century at the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Giza.'"
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - On the internet is found an edited portion
    of Behold a Pale Horse
    in which Cooper predicts a sequence of apocalyptic events which will
    lead to the discovery and acceptance by humanity of the presumed records
    of the lost civilization of Atlantis.
  - William Cooper also relates to Bible prophecy
    the role of NASA in a project which he believes is designed to produce
    an explosion on Jupiter that will be perceived as a prophetic sign.
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - This
    and other apocalyptic catastrophes which NASA may be planning and which
    will lead to the revealing of the counterfeit Christ are covered in our
    Cosmic Christmas
    report.
  - Although it is plausible that a series
    of catastrophes will lead mankind to embrace the spurious archaeological
    records as valid, Mr. Cooper makes us wonder whether he is exposing or
    promoting the mystery religions when he gives credence further on to the
    Grail mythos of the Rosicrucian brotherhood:
    
    "I am amazed at the authors of
    Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the information that they have unearthed.
    Most of all I am amazed at their inability to put the puzzle together.
    The treasure hidden in France is not the treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem.
    It is the Holy Grail itself, the robe of Jesus, the last remaining pieces
    of the Cross of Crucifixion, and, according to my sources, someone's
    bones. I can tell you that the reality of the bones will shake the world
    to its very foundations if I have been told the truth. The relics are
    hidden in France." (p. 76)
  - William Cooper's mention of the "last
    remaining pieces of the Cross of Crucifixion" bears an uneasy resemblance
    to The Rod of an Almond
    Tree
    , a supposed relic from the Cross of Jesus Christ which Peter Michas,
    in his book by that name, elevates to a Scepter of Authority which will
    validate the credentials of the coming Messiah.
  - Authors Michas and Vander
    Maten, base their fabulous suppositions on Jewish rabbinic sources and
    the misinterpretation of Scripture to prove that the Tree of Life in the
    Garden of Eden was passed through generations of Israelites as the rod
    of Aaron.
  - According to the purveyors of the Talmud and Kabbalah, this
    rod, which possessed magical powers because it was engraved with the
    Ineffable Name, YHWH
    , was planted by King David on the Mount of Olives and later became the
    cross of Christ.
  - Subsequently, according to Michas and Vander Maten, this
    ancient relic will be returned by
    Elijah
    the prophet to validate the true Messiah who will take his place upon
    the Throne (Mercy Seat) at the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem.
  - In Matthew 24:24, Jesus Christ warned
    His closest disciples that there will be false prophets and false Christs
    preceding the time of His coming whose deception is so well executed that
    even the elect might be deceived. Having been forewarned, we are already
    quite deceived if we reject the possibility, indeed the probability, that
    the Freemasons and their Jewish allies, the Kabbalists, have insinuated
    themselves, their false messiah and their pernicious doctrines into the
    very organizations which are posing as
    Discernment Ministries.
  - The Edgar Cayce Connection
  - The Message of the Sphinx
    by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval
    cites a prophecy by the late psychic, Edgar Cayce, to the effect that
    a Hall of Records at the Great Sphinx at Giza would be rediscovered and
    opened between 1996 and 1998 and that this discovery would be related to
    the second coming of Christ:
  - "Headquartered in Virginia
    Beach in the United States . . . the A.R.E. [Association for Research
    and Enlightenment] is a multimillion dollar organization that exists
    to promulgate the teachings and prophecies of the American psychic Edgar
    Cayce, who died in 1945. Prominent amongst Cayce’s pronouncements were
    many statements... to the effect that the Sphinx had been built in 10,500
    BC by the survivors of Atlantis who had concealed beneath it a ‘Hall
    of Records’ containing all the wisdom of their lost civilization and
    the true history of the human race. Cayce prophesied that this Hall
    of Records would be rediscovered and opened between 1996 and 1998. He
    connected the opening to the second coming of Christ and asserted that
    the contents of the Hall would not be shared with the general public
    until many years after it had first been entered by ‘three who would
    make of the perfect way of life.’" (p. 306)
  - The Message
    of the Sphinx is a pseudo historical/archaeological work that
    pretends to unravel the clues of an ancient civilization, Atlantis, which
    are found in the Egyptian pyramids and the Great Sphinx.
  - A major figure
    involved in the exploration of the Great Sphinx at Giza, was Lambert Dolphin,
    who directed the Stanford Research Institute project on the very site
    at which the Fox Channel documentary was filmed.
  - Lambert Dolphin, who claims to have
    became a Christian in 1962, has a website that is promoted by a Discernment
    ministry, Banner Ministries
    of the UK, which recommends Lambert Dolphin's Christian Resource files
    and Lambert Dolphin's Web Links.
  - Since this expose, the first link, which
    is Lambert Dolphin's Home Page, has been removed from the Banner site,
    most likely because it displays a banner for the MYTHOS & LOGOS WEB
    RINGS, which includes, among many others, the following New Age webrings:
    
    Existentialism Ring
    
    Circle of the Muses
    
    Philosophy Webring
    
    Critical Psychology Webring
    
    Fairy Tales, Folk Tales and Mythology
    Ring
    
    Unity of Spiritual Experience Webring
    
    SpiritRing
    
    Circle of Light Ring
    
    The Open Your Mind Ring
  - Lambert Dolphin's Resource Files
    link to the Edgar Cayce Foundation and Kabbalist Chabad Lubavitch in
    Cyberspace, among numerous other occult societies. [Predictably, the Edgar
    Cayce link has also been removed since this expose.]
  - Coincidentally, Peter
    Michas' states in the Preface of his aforementioned
    book
    that he received his education in the Hebrew Roots of Christianity through
    the Chabad-Lubavich.
  - On a page titled
    Remote Viewing, Channeling, ESP--and the Power of God
    , Lambert Dolphin describes his 30 year career at the Stanford Research
    Institute:
    
    "For thirty years I enjoyed
    a wonderful and challenging career spanning some 30 years with a large
    and prestigious West Coast think tank. [SRI] Our projects at the lab
    were often multi-disciplinary and the climate was one where all sorts
    of diverse ideas could be exchanged freely. Our projects ranged over
    the broadest possible range."
  - Although Lambert Dolphin mentions
    the government's involvement with remote viewers for espionage, he does
    not disclose that in 1977 he traveled to Virginia Beach to negotiate funding
    from the Edgar Cayce organization for the SRI project at Giza --
  - nor that
    in 1983 he helped to set up the Independent Mars Project’ as consultant
    to NASA and leader of the SRI project at the Great Sphinx.
  - The following
    chronicle of Lambert Dolphin's activities appears in
    The Message of the Sphinx:
    
    "Back in Egypt in 1977,
    a year after the Viking images had first reached the Earth, Mark Lehner
    [A.R.E.’s ‘man’ at Giza] made contact with NASA’s Dr. Lambert T. Dolphin,
    leader of the Stanford Research Institute project at the Sphinx ..."
    (p. 313)
    
    "Later in 1977 Lambert
    Dolphin traveled to Virginia Beach to negotiate funding from the Edgar
    Cayce organization for a proposed new SRI project at Giza... In (1983)
    ‘The Independent Mars Project’ was set up in the United States by Richard
    Hoagland, a former NASA consultant, and Lambert Dolphin… " (pp.
    313-14)
  - It seems that Edgar Cayce,
    who was known as the "sleeping prophet," entered into deep trances during
    which he prophesied the existence of a Hall of Records in Egypt with identification
    as to its specific location:
    
    "One of the most
    persistent accounts given by Edgar Cayce during his deep trances concerned:
    
    "'References
    and clues [which] indicate Egypt as a repository for records - records
    of Atlantis and ancient Egypt during the time of Ra-Ta, which may
    some day be found... that a vast underground repository was established
    containing a library of wisdom from the lost civilization of Atlantis:
    'This in position lies, as the sun rises from the waters, the line
    of shadow (or light) falls between the paws of the Sphinx...There
    is a chamber or passage from the right forepaw [of the Sphinx] to
    this entrance of the record chamber...'"
  - "According
    to the readings, the Hall of Records is to be discovered and re-entered
    when 'the time has been fulfilled' -- which, Cayce suggested, would
    be at or just before the close of the twentieth century, perhaps in
    1998. The readings allude frequently to Old and New Testaments of the
    Bible, certain numerous references to Jesus, and depict the rediscovery
    of the Hall of Records as being linked in some way to a series of events
    that will prelude the 'Second Coming' of Christ." (p. 88)
  - Lambert Dolphin,
    who led the SRI team at Giza, wrote the following report of his involvement
    in the project:
    
    "In 1977,
    the US National Science Foundation funded a project at Giza again involving
    the SRI...According to the SRI team's official report: 'Several anomalies
    were observed as a result of our resistivity survey at the Sphinx...Behind
    the rear paws (north-west end) we ran two traverses. Both traverses
    indicate an anomaly that could possibly be due to a tunnel aligned north-west
    to south-east..." (Footnote: L.T. Dolphin, E. Moussa et.al, 'Applications
    of Modern Sensing Techniques to Egyptology', Menlo Park, Calif., SRI
    International, September 1977)
  - Today, the Edgar
    Cayce Foundation and its Association for Research & Enligtenment credits
    Lambert Dolphin and his SRI team with determining the location of the
    hidden chambers in the project's early stages:
    
    "According
    to ECF/ARE historians the 1973-4 and 1977 projects paved the way for
    work. . . that would succeed in discovering hidden chambers. Exactly
    how and where is not made clear. At any rate in 1978 the ECF/ARE collaborated
    with the SRI and provided funds (to the tune of about US $50,000) for
    a more detailed survey of the Sphinx enclosure and the nearby Sphinx
    Temple. Should any 'anomalies' be found it was agreed that the SRI was
    to confirm them with acoustic sounding techniques..." (p. 91)
  - The Edgar
    Cayce Foundation funded SRI again in 1982, at which time the location of
    the mysterious chambers under the paw of the Great Sphinx was verified
    by SRI:
    
    "Adding
    to the intrigue were further discoveries that the SRI made around the
    Sphinx in 1982 as a result of yet another project financed by the Edgar
    Cayce Foundation. Mark Lehner . . . described what the SRI did as follows:
    
    "They brought a very powerful acoustical sounder, which is a long pencil-shaped
    thing...They put the sounder underneath the paw [of the Sphinx] and
    always got a good, clear signal - there's no underground cavity blocking
    it. And they put it along the paw between the elbow and that box on
    the side...and there was always a good signal. But, at my prompting,
    they put it on the bedrock floor inside the box - and it was dead in
    three places where they put it down, as though there is some kind of
    opening or empty space underneath that was blocking the signal..." (p.
    93)
  - The
    current president of the A.R.E. and Edgar Cayce Foundation is Cayce's
    grandson, Charles T. Cayce. According to Hancock and Bauval, these organizations
    have carried on various initiatives at the Giza pyramid for the past two
    decades.
  - Charles Cayce has expressed his conviction that "the truth about
    Giza was going to emerge and the 'Hall of Records' was going to be discovered,
    just as Edgar Cayce had prophesied." (p. 97-8)
  - Hancock
    and Bauval also state that, in March 1996, the Egyptian Antiquities Organization
    granted a one-year renewable license for the project at the Sphinx and
    that team members consulted with former NASA consultant, Dr. James Hurtak,
    and SRI consultant, Richard Hoagland -- the men with whom Lambert Dolphin
    worked on the Independent Mars Project. Lambert Dolphin's Web Links include
    various websites which purvey esoteric science, including Richard Hoagland's
    UFO News. (p. 315)
  - In 1985,
    the Edgar Cayce Foundation and A.R.E. magazine, "Venture Inward," identified
    the primary agency created to fulfill Edgar Cayce's prophecy concerning
    the second coming of Christ:
    
    "There has been one systematic search, a sort of direct shot at finding
    the Hall of Records, when the Edgar Cayce Foundation funded SRI International..."
    (p. 85)
  - For information
    on the Freemasons' control of NASA and connections with the Edgar Cayce
    Foundation, please refer to
    Cosmic Christmas
    under Remote Viewers.
  - The
    Fox Channel documentary opened with the proposition that an advanced civilization
    once populated Mars until a cataclysmic event caused it to relocate to
    Earth. This unproven hypothesis which is underwritten by the American
    taxpayers, is defended in a paper, The Sphinx / Mars Connection also by
    Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock.
  - In this report, the Masonic Egyptologists
    mention Lambert Dolphin's influence and enterprise with NASA consultant,
    Richard Hoagland, in pioneering the Independent Mars Investigation Project
    under the sponsorship of SRI.
  - THE MYSTERIOUS STRUCTURES THAT MAY UPSTAGE
    
    NASA'S EVIDENCE OF MARTIAN LIFE
    
    August 17-19, 1996
    
    from the 'Daily Mail' - London
    
    by Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock
    
    Could the sphinx of Mars be proof of an alien civilization as great
    as our own?
    
    "...Former NASA consultant Richard Hoagland is convinced there may be
    a 'terrestrial connection' between Giza and Cydonia - the region of
    Mars where the mysterious structures are located - perhaps a common
    source that imparted the same legacy of knowledge and symbolism on both
    worlds.
    
    "Hoagland's interest in Giza began when he met Dr. Lambert Dolphin
    , a scientist from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) who had conducted
    radar and seismographic research to locate hidden chambers near and
    under the Great Sphinx.
    
    "Dr. Dolphin was captivated by Hoagland's idea of a 'Martian
    Sphinx' - the Face - and , in 1983, was instrumental in helping Hoagland
    set up the Independent Mars Investigation Project under the aegis of
    SRI..."
  - The Sphinx
    Bulletin
    by the same authors indicates there has been no minor controversy between
    the Egyptian government which has sought to preserve the Egyptian heritage
    and the Masonic Don Quixotes who see sphinxes and pyramids in the sky
    rather than windmills, and spend their lives and our substance pursuing
    hidden caverns containing spurious records of lost civilizations from
    outer space.
  - Finally, a brief portion of the Appendix of The
    Message of the Sphinx, is worth quoting
    which shows the professional relationship between Lambert Dolphin of Stanford
    Research Institute and Dr. Zahi Hawass, former Director and present Undersecretary
    of State for Egypt's Giza Plateau of the Egyptian Antiquity Organization
    who, we are told, discovered the tomb of Osiris this week on Fox TV.
    
    The Message of the Sphinx
    
    Appendix 5
    
    The Door Inside the Great Pyramid;
    
    Tunnels - and Chambers Under the Great Sphinx
  - Further developments
    
    Since the first English-language edition of this book went to press in
    February i996 there have been a number of significant developments concerning
    the opening of the door in the Great Pyramid at the end of the southern
    shaft of the Queen's Chamber (see in particular Chapter 7) and the search
    for tunnels and chambers under the Great Sphinx (see in particular Chapter
    2 and Chapter 5).
  - We anticipate that there will be further developments--quite
    possibly of major historical significance-which we will cover in a future
    book. It is our intention, meanwhile to monitor this 'running story' and
    to update our readers in a series of appendices that will be published
    in future editions of The Message of the Sphinx.
  - The update presented herewith, covers the period from March to end-August
    1996.
  - The Great Pyramid
  - At the end Of 1995, as reported in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7, the position
    of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization regarding the 'door' at the end
    of the southern shaft of the Queen's Chamber was apparently one of official
    disinterest. The reader will recall that Dr Nur El Din, (Chairman of the
    EAO (now renamed the Supreme Council of Antiquities) had declined Rudolf
    Gantenbrink's offer to donate the robot to the Egyptian government and
    to train an Egyptian technician to operate it: 'Thank you for your offer
    to train the Egyptian technician... Unfortunately we are very busy for
    the time being, therefore we will postpone the matter...1.
  - Similarly Dr
    Zahi Hawass had declared: 'I do not think this is a door and nothing is
    behind it.'2
  - In March 1996, however, Dr Hawass changed his mind, declaring in the Egyptian
    Gazette that Gantenbrink's find was of huge interest and that the door
    would be opened in September 1996 by a multinational team led by the Egyptian
    geologist (and NASA consultant) Dr Farouk El Baz.
  - Rudolf Gantenbrink would
    not be involved and 'another robot' -- not Upuaut--would be used to explore
    the shaft. Participating in the exploration would be a 'Canadian' contingent.3
  - The Canadian element, 'Amtex', is headed by Peter Zuuring, a wealthy Dutch-Canadian
    businessman, who told us that he had shown the Egyptians how the door
    could be opened 'relatively inexpensively... We're working with Spar Aerospace
    to design a miniature arm with tools that could first tap the door, knock
    it open and try to lever things a little bit to see if there's anything
    loose. But I think ultimately we'll go straight through.'
  - The objective, which might take some
    time, was to raise the huge sum of ten million dollars to promote a staged
    'live opening' of the door on international television networks. 'I'm
    working with a private guy who is a personal friend of Hawass and we are
    absolutely going to drum this thing to death. Whatever the event, we are
    going to stage, it will be televised live.'4
  - In two conversations, Souring told us that he thought it unlikely that
    the project could start as early as September 1996: the following year,
    he said, 1997, was far more likely.
  - The Great Sphinx
  - In 1993-4 (see Chapter 2 and Chapter 5) Dr Zahi Hawass appeared to be
    adamantly opposed to the notion that the Sphinx might be far older than
    ancient Egypt - and thus the work of a lost civilization.
  - The reader will
    recall that the EAO official was particularly incensed by the NBC television
    film, The Mystery of the Sphinx, that was made about the work of John
    Anthony West.
  - In addition Hawass had been personally responsible for expelling
    John West and his research team from the Sphinx enclosure. The team included
    the geologist Robert Schoch, a Professor at Boston University, and the
    seismologist Thomas Dobecki (who was to identify a large rectangular chamber
    concealed in the bedrock at a depth of about twenty feet beneath the front
    paws of the Sphinx).
  - The NBC documentary linked the Sphinx to Atlantis and suggested that the
    chamber of Thomas Dobecki's seismograph had detected beneath its paws
    might have some sort of time capsule of Atlantean wisdom and history.
  - Hawass called these claims: 'American hallucinations. West is an amateur.
    There is absolutely no scientific base for any of this. We have older
    monuments in the same area. They definitely weren't built by men from
    Atlantis. It's nonsense and we won't allow our monuments to be exploited
    for personal enrichment. The Sphinx is the soul of Egypt.'5
  - An article in the Egyptian press responding to the NBC film quoted Dr
    Hawass on his further reasons for expelling John West and his team from
    the Sphinx enclosure: 'I have found that their work is carried out by
    installing endoscopes in the Sphinx's body and shooting films for all
    phases of the work in a propaganda...but not scientific manner. I therefore
    suspended the work of this unscientific mission and made a report which
    was presented to the permanent commission who rejected the mission's work
    in the future.'6
  - Headquartered in Virginia Beach in the United States
    (see Chapter 5), the ARE is a multimillion dollar organization that exists
    to promulgate the teachings and prophecies of American psychic Edgar Cayce,
    who died in 1945.
  - The NBC film was produced by Boris Said (see Chapter 2) and partially
    financed by investments from members of the Association for Research and
    Enlightenment (ARE).
  - Prominent amongst Cayce’s pronouncements were many statements...
    to the effect that the Sphinx had been built in 10,500 BC by the survivors
    of Atlantis who had concealed beneath it a ‘Hall of Records’ containing
    all the wisdom of their lost civilization and the true history of the
    human race. Cayce prophesied that this Hall of Records would be rediscovered
    and opened between 1996 and 1998.
  - He connected the opening to the second
    coming of Christ and asserted that the contents of the Hall would not
    be shared with the general public until many years after it had first
    been entered by ‘three who would make of the perfect way of life.’"7 ...
    (pp.304-6)
  - Mars and Giza:
    
    Strange connections and synchronicity
  - In our research we have stumbled across a tangled web of clues, connections
    and overlapping interests appearing to suggest that American scientists
    with links to NASA may have quietly involved themselves, since at least
    in the 1970's, in covert 'expeditions' to unveil the secrets of the great
    pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza.
  - The story, oddly enough, appears
    to be running in parallel with research stemming from the existence of
    curious pyramidial structures (and a gigantic Sphinx-like 'Face') that were
    photographed on Mars by NASA spacecraft during the 1970s.
  - In 1971 NASA's Mariner 9 probe took the first ever photographs of strange
    'pyramid' structures on Mars on a region of the planet known to astronomers
    as Elysium.
  - Dr James Hurtak, a graduate in remote sensing technology (and
    an acquaintance of Mark Lehner's) was one of the earliest researchers
    to show interest in the Elysium 'pyramids' -- which were officially dismissed
    by NASA as 'tricks of light'.
  - In 1975, despite NASA's apparent indifference,
    Hurtak predicted that further finds of similar structures, including a
    Sphinx-like monument, would be made on Mars and that they would all prove
    to be connected in a great cosmic blueprint to the Giza monuments in Egypt.
    22
  - Hurtak is an active campaigner against the secrecy of the United States
    military and related agencies with regard to UFO 'cover-ups' and other
    similar issues.
  - He also claims to have had close links with researchers
    at California's prestigious Stanford Research Institute, America's second
    largest scientific think-tank (which has an annual budget from the United
    States government of over three hundred million dollars).
  - SRI's projects
    have included the 'Remote Viewing Program' (started in 1972), funded by
    the CIA as an intelligence-gathering exercise, which recruited top psychics
    to 'remote view' enemy military installations and other sites.
    
    Add Sticky Note
  - In 1973, as we saw in Chapter 5, the Egyptian Antiquities Organization
    (EAO) granted an official license to the SRI, permitting it to conduct
    surveys around the Great Sphinx at Giza using ground-penetrating radar
    and seismographs. The local sponsor of this project was Cairo's Ain Shams
    University. We recall that in the same year Hugh Lynn Cayce sent Mark
    Lehner to the American University in Cairo with funds raised by ARE members.
  - In 1976 a second NASA probe, Viking I, went into Mars orbit. In the region
    known as Cydonia it photographed several more pyramidial structures (including
    the five-sided 'DYM Pyramid') and the famous 'Face'.
  - NASA has argued officially
    that it is nothing more than a small mountain, naturally weathered. But
    how many mountains have their left and right sides so intricately similar?
  - Complete with its
    distinctive Sphinx-like headdress, this latter feature has been calculated
    from the NASA images to be 1.6 miles in high.
  - Image analysts say that the 'bilateral symmetry' of the Face, mimicking
    a natural, almost human appearance, is most unlikely to have come about
    by chance.
  - And this impression is confirmed by other characteristics that
    have subsequently been identified under computer enhancement. These include
    'teeth' in the mouth, bilaterally crossed lines above the eyes, and regular
    lateral stripes in the headpiece -- suggestive, to some researchers at
    least, of the nemes headdress of ancient Egyptian pharaohs. 23
  - Back in Egypt in 1977, a year after the Viking images had first reached
    the Earth, Mark Lehner [A.R.E.’s ‘man’ at Giza] made contact with NASA’s
    Dr. Lambert
    T. Dolphin, leader of the Stanford Research Institute project at the
    Sphinx. The reader will recall from Chapter 5 that Lehner was by then
    already well acquainted with Zahi Hawass.
  - Later in 1977 Lambert Dolphin traveled to Virginia Beach to negotiate
    funding from the Edgar Cayce organization for a proposed new SRI project
    at Giza. The purpose of this project was to use the latest remote sensing
    technology to search for hidden chambers around and under the Sphinx --
    with Lehner again 'participating as the Edgar Cayce Foundation's "man
    in Cairo".
  - Several underground cavities were detected by this Sphinx Exploration
    Project.
  - The project, again partially financed by the Edgar Cayce
    group, was approved and went ahead with Lehner as its Field Director.
  - In 1978 Mark Lehner proposed a project on the Sphinx to the American Research
    Centre in Egypt.
  - Soon afterwards a United States registered company called Recovery Systems
    International (RSI) appeared on the scene. As we saw in Chapter 5, it
    undertook core drillings in front of the Sphinx to investigate the promising
    underground cavities previously pinpointed by SRI.
  - In 1983 Hugh Lynn Cayce died and the management of the Edgar Cayce group
    was handed to his son, Charles Thomas Cayce.
  - In the same year, ‘The Independent
    Mars Project’ was set up in the United States by Richard Hoagland, a former
    NASA consultant, and Lambert Dolphin.
  - Meanwhile in 1987 Dr Zahi
    Hawass completed his education in the United States and returned to Egypt
    to be appointed as the EAO's Director General of the Giza Plateau.
  - In March 1996 Dr Hawass announced that the Egyptian scientist Farouk El
    Baz (whose name...translates into ancient Egyptian as Horus) had been
    chosen to lead a team to open the secret door inside the Great Pyramid
    at the end of the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber.
  - The reader will
    recall that Amtex, the Canadian company participating in the project,
    claim to be ‘working with Spar Aerospace’ to devise a tool to open or
    ‘go straight through’ the door. Spar Aerospace are better known for manufacturing
    hydraulic arms used in NASA Space Shuttles.
  - As we noted at the beginning
    of this appendix, Dr El Baz, a graduate of Cairo’s Ain Shams University,
    is a NASA consultant.
  - He has been involved for many years with studies
    of geological formations on the Moon and on Mars and he is a one-time
    personal friend of astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong.
  - It was El Baz,
    nicknamed King by his NASA colleagues, who in 1969 chose the spot for
    the Apollo 11 Moon landing. El Baz is the founder of Centre of Remote
    Sensing at Boston University and presently serves as its Director. 24
  - Also in March 1996 the EAO [Egyptian Antiquities Organization] granted
    a one-year renewable license for the project at the Sphinx -- see above
    -- financed by Joseph Schor. Project members include Boris Said, Thomas
    Dobecki, and four senior geologists from Florida State University, who
    began to work with a million dollars worth of ground-penetrating radar
    and seismic equipment at their disposal. It was reported to us that team
    members had consulted with Dr. James Hurtak and Richard Hoagland in August
    1996. (pp. 312-15)
  - ENDNOTES
    for Appendix 5 of The Message of the Sphinx
    
    The Door Inside the Great Pyramid; Tunnels - and Chambers Under the Great
    Sphinx
    
    Further developments
    
    1. Sunday Telegraph, 1 January, 1995.
    
    2. Sat I, Spiegel Reportage, 15 August 1995.
    
    3. Egyptian Gazette, 31 March 1996.
    
    4. Documented conversations with Peter Zurring.
    
    5. Serpent, op. cit., p. 229.
    
    6. Al Akhbar El Yom, 8 January 1994.
    
    7. Edgar Cayce Reading Ref No 3976-15, in Earth Changes circulating file,
    Edgar Cayce Foundation, 1993, p. 38.
    
    Mars and Giza: Strange connections and synchronicity
    
    22. Dr. James Hurtak, The Keys of Enoch, California, 1976. See also the
    video UFO: Evidence of the Use of Extraterrestrial Technology, Labyrinth
    Media, UK.
    
    23. Richard C. Hoagland, The Monuments of Mars, North Atlantic Books,
    Berkeley, California, 1992, p. 262. See also Plates 38 and 39.
    
    24. Omni Magazine, 'Interview with Farouk El Baz', 1990, p. 75.