I got an early Christmas present last year: a package from Los Angeles cartoonist Mike Jasorka. Inside was the fruit of his efforts and my $20 Kickstarter pledge: December 3rd 1967: An Alien Encounter, a graphic novelisation of the strange case of Herbert Schirmer, a Nebraska state patrolman who claims to have been taken aboard an alien spacecraft.

I commend it to all wrong-thinking disinfonauts everywhere, for several reasons, but mostly aesthetic. The black and white panels occasionally splashed with dramatic colour ensures that the 50+ page book is a visually compelling artefact:

It also arrives with a CD, a word for word adaptation from the found audio of Schirmer at a 1970’s UFO conference in Florida, making it simultaneously an aural event (surely a first for a graphic novel, but fanboys will no doubt correct me). Finally, there’s the story: of Schirmer’s childhood upbringing that leads him to become a police officer, what happened that very night on duty and why even after countless ridicule, he stuck next to the unbelievable truth.

You can get a foretaste of the audio-visual effect at Jasorka’s website, www.bombshell-comics.com – where you can now buy the Kickstarter-funded comic for $13US.

There are two other reasons for the commendation: for acknowledging the ‘forgotten humanoids’ of UFO lore, and for revealing the future of funding for all things Fortean.

Today, popular culture is permeated and UFOlogy dominated by the archetypal ‘Greys’ from Zeta Reticulli. But before this, between the ‘Greys’ first brush with humanity in the Betty and Barney Hill abduction of 1961 and 1973, the infamous ‘Year of the Humanoids’, lies the high strangeness of the forgotten humanoid encounters. The global preponderance of non-Grey encounters prior to the 1980s could almost call it the dirty secret of ‘nuts and bolts’ UFOlogy. The beings in the Schirmer case serves as a reminder that groupthink can skew even the most Fortean of researchers.

A project like this is one of the reasons I signed up eBay, Amazon-powered Kickstarter and donate to PayPal-enabled sites like The Daily Grail: like all disinfonauts I am passionate about giving repressed knowledge a voice amidst the cacophony that is the Internet (among other things). And lo! the internet did come to our aid to fix the problem it helped to create by providing a voice box in the first place. In the successful crowdfunded wake of the projects like this and others like Daniel Johnston’s Infinite Comic Book of Musical Greatness and the films Supernature: Esalen and the Human Potential and The Spirit Molecule, I see a rich future for Fortean and outsider works in the Long Tail of the 1000 True Fans.

Leonid Ksanfomaliti, an astronomer based at the Space Research Institute of Russia’s Academy of Sciences, analyzed photographs taken by a Russian landing probe during a 1982 during a mission to explore the heavily acid-clouded planet.

Venus is roughly the same size as Earth, but it has a thick atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide. With an atmospheric pressure 92 times Earth’s, a waterless and volcano-riddled surface and a surface temperature of 894 degrees, the planet has never been considered a serious target of research into the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

But in his article, published in the magazine Solar System Research, Ksanfomaliti says the Russian photographs depict objects resembling a “disk,” a “black flap” and a “scorpion.”

“What if we forget about the current theories about the non-existence of life on Venus?” he wrote. “Let’s boldly suggest that the objects’ morphological features would allow us to say that they are living.”

Read More: Yahoo News

Scientists are confirming a recent and rare invasion from Mars: meteorite chunks from the red planet that fell in Morocco last July. The fireball was spotted in the sky six months ago, but the rocks weren’t discovered on the ground until December.

The last time a Martian meteorite fell and was found fresh was in 1962. All the known Martian rocks on Earth add up to less than 240 pounds. This is an important and unique opportunity for scientists trying to learn about Mars’ potential for life. So far, no NASA or Russian spacecraft has returned bits of Mars, so the only Martian samples scientists can examine are those that come here in a meteorite shower.

Scientists and collectors of meteorites are ecstatic, and already the rocks are fetching big bucks because they are among the rarest things on Earth — rarer even than gold.

A Martian meteorite that was buried in Antarctica made news in 1996. NASA scientists theorized that the rock, found in 1984, showed signs of traces of life from Mars, fossils of what seemed to be lifelong forms. Even the White House made an announcement about it as the first sign of life outside of Earth. Years of study since then have led much of the astronomy world to conclude that there was not enough evidence to support the claim.

Because known Martian meteorite falls happen only once every 50 years or so — 1815 in France, 1865 in India, 1911 in Egypt and 1962 in Nigeria — this is a once-in-a-career or even one-in-a-lifetime event.

“It’s incredibly fresh. It’s highly valuable for that reason,” said Carl Agee, director of the Institute of Meteoritics and curator at the University of New Mexico. “For someone who knows their Martian, this is a beauty. It’s gorgeous.”

Forget Kenya. Never mind the secret madrassas. The sinister, shocking truth about Barack Obama’s past lies not in east Africa, but in outer space. As a young man in the early 1980s, Obama was part of a secret CIA project to explore Mars. The future president teleported there, along with the future head of Darpa.

That’s the assertion, at least, of a pair of self-proclaimed time-traveling, universe-exploring government agents. Andrew D. Basiago and William Stillings insist that they once served as “chrononauts” at Darpa’s behest, traversing the boundaries of time and space. They swear: A youthful Barack Obama was one of them.

Perhaps this all sounds fantastical, absurd, and more than a little nuts. We couldn’t agree more. That’s one of the reasons we love conspiracy theories — the more awesomely insane, the better. Each week during 2012, when the Mayans tell us to expect the apocalypse, Danger Room will peel back a new layer of crazy to expose those oh-so-cleverly hidden machinations powering this doomed plane of existence. Welcome — back — to Tinfoil Tuesday…

What a relief! (I wonder if this woman’s Pleiadian lover knew about this?)

In early November, the White House officially responded to two UFO petitions on their “We The People” section of the White House website. The White House stated that “The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race.” Authors of the petitions, as well as some supporters of these petitions, were hoping for a different response.

As a result, Stephen Bassett of the Paradigm Research Group (PRG), who authored one of the initial petitions, announced his follow-up petition that will be submitted to the “We the People” section of the White House website on December 1st. The new petition reads, “We petition the Obama Administration to demand a full congressional investigation of UFO/ET Disclosure efforts by the Clinton OSTP — the Rockefeller Initiative.” The information on the PRG website about this new petition explains, “In response to the Disclosure Petition, the OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy) stated, ‘The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race.’ If true, what was the OSTP investigating from March 1993 to October 1996 in concert with billionaire and Clinton friend, Laurance Rockefeller?”

Bassett’s petition goes live on December 1, and will need to get 25,000 signatures by December 31 in order to receive a response from the White House. But Bassett’s petitions have received criticism for their combative wording and conspiracy-oriented nature. A new petition that went live today takes a different approach …

More at OpenMinds

Has a genuine alien corpse been discovered? One woman in Russia certainly thinks so. Marta Yegorovnam claims she salvaged an extraterrestrial body from the site of a UFO crash in 2009 and stored it in her fridge for two years before authorities took it away from her for examination, according to the Daily Mail.

The being is about 2 feet tall and looks suspiciously like stereotypical extraterrestrial beings: It’s skinny, sort of slimy looking, with a large, bobbly head, bulging eyes, and twiggy arms. The two men who confiscated the supposed body said they were from the Karelian Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Of course, the odds are high that this could all be a hoax.

In April, an 18-year-old and a 19-year-old student set off an Internet frenzy by planting what looked like an otherworldly being’s remains in the snow in Irkutsk, Siberia, according to the Daily Mail. When police questioned the scheming teens, they admitted that the body was not in fact from another planet but from the grocery store shelves: They had created what looked like a decimated body using stale bread and chicken skin.

Read More: Yahoo News

Behold a giant-headed alien mummy that turned up in Peru. Stare into the all-knowing eye sockets of an alien that somehow wound up on Earth many years ago, and was mummified by the locals. But what was is it doing here?

Website RPP is claiming that Renato Davila Riquelme, an anthropologist working at the Privado Ritos Andinos museum in Cusco, has discovered remains of something that isn’t human. Measuring at 20 inches tall, the tiny remains were originally believed to be that of a child, but Spanish and Russian doctors disagree, saying:

“It has a non-human appearance because the head is triangular and big, almost the same size as the body. At first we believed it to be a child’s body until Spanish and Russian doctors came and confirmed that, yes, it’s an extraterrestrial being.”

The White House has responded to two petitions asking the US government to formally acknowledge that aliens have visited Earth and to disclose to any intentional withholding of government interactions with extraterrestrial beings. “The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race,” said Phil Larson from the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, on the WhiteHouse.gov website. “In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.”

5,387 people had signed the petition for immediately disclosing the government’s knowledge of and communications with extraterrestrial beings, and 12,078 signed the request for a formal acknowledgement from the White House that extraterrestrials have been engaging the human race.

“Hundreds of military and government agency witnesses have come forward with testimony confirming this extraterrestrial presence,” the second petition states. “Opinion polls now indicate more than 50% of the American people believe there is an extraterrestrial presence and more than 80% believe the government is not telling the truth about this phenomenon. The people have a right to know. The people can handle the truth.”

More: Universe Today

Imagine that you wake up one morning, sit at your computer, and you are bombarded with links to a developing story from a major news outlet: Stephen Hawking, by making novel use of Cambridge University’s new quantum supercomputer to analyze data from SETI’s telescope array, has discerned that the universe is awash with signals from intelligent life. It reads like a regular science story, at first, but soon it is revealed that Hawking and his colleagues have tapped into an extra-terrestrial television transmission, and are even now watching, breathless, as the first, dream-like images of alien civilizations display themselves on the Q-computer’s tiny monitor.

You and your friends refresh your browsers compulsively, talking over each new description that emerges of strange alien races and the exotic landscapes they inhabit, as gleaned from upon the wacky sitcoms and low-budget reality shows that they are indiscriminately beaming into space. Then, questions are raised, skepticism emerges. You begin to have doubts. Eventually, you realize that you have been taken in by a clever hoax—you ought to have known better than to trust Fox News, after all—but despite the deception, you find that you cannot help but appreciate how, for one shining moment, people everywhere had set aside their petty rivalries and believed in marvels from above.

Such is how the people of New York City must have felt during the summer of 1835 when the New York Sun published a series of articles describing the startling lunar discoveries that had recently been made by the famous astronomer John Herschel from his observatory at the Cape of Good Hope. Using cutting-edge “hydro-oxygen magnifiers,” Herschel had developed a powerful new telescope that could achieve an astounding magnification of 42,000x—enough to resolve objects on the lunar surface as small as 18 inches in diameter—and project the images onto the wall of his observatory. Purporting to be a reprint from a supplement to the (non-existent) Edinburgh Journal of Science penned by Herschel’s assistant, Dr. Andrew Grant, it contained just the right mixture popular science buzzwords and technical minutia to render itself plausible.

The first images to resolve themselves onto the wall of Herschel’s observatory were of basaltic rock, and then, tellingly enough, a poppy field. The telescope next swept over lunar forests, populated by what looked like massive yew trees, by beaches of “brilliant white sand, girt with wild castellated rocks, apparently of green marble,”and clusters of resplendent crystalline spires and pyramids, lilac in hue. Finally, it came to rest on an oval valley, surrounded by crystallized hills of “purest vermilion,” with cascading waterfalls pouring from their cliffs, where they discovered, nestled in among its lush trees and vegetation, a herd of diminutive lunar bison…

[Full Article at Victorian Gothic]

Microbes born on Earth are already pre-adapted for journeying through space, living in space, and not just surviving but flourishing in radioactive environments where they are continually exposed to radiation by ions similar to what might be encountered in a nebular cloud.

In 1958, physicists discovered clouds of bacteria, ranging from two million bacteria per cm3 and over 1 billion per quart, thriving in pools of radioactive waste directly exposed to ionizing radiation and radiation levels millions of times greater than could have ever before been experienced on this plane.

The world’s first artificial nuclear reactor was not even built until 1942. Prior to the 1945, poisonous pools of radioactive waste did not even exist on Earth. And yet, over a dozen different species of microbe have inherited the genes which enable them to survive conditions which for the previous 4.5 billion years could have only been experienced in space. (These radiation-loving microbes include Deinococcus radiodurans, D. proteolyticus, D. radiopugnans, D. radiophilus, D. grandis, D. indicus, D. frigens, D. saxicola, D. marmola, D. geothermalis, D. murrayi).

Microbes from Earth are preadapted to surviving conditions which they have not encountered on this planet. Therefore, they must have inherited the genes which made survival in space possible; and this means these genes were acquired from microbes which had lived in space. It is this adaptation which made them the perfect vehicle for spreading the genetic seeds of life throughout the cosmos.

More on the Daily Galaxy

One idea he presented was that humans were the only “sinners” out of God’s creation, and are therefore the only ones that require a savior, but he considered other possibilities as well.

“If there are extra-terrestrial intelligent beings at all, it is safe to assume that most of them are sinners too,” Weidemann said. “If so, did Jesus save them too? My position is no. If so, our position among intelligent beings in the universe would be very exceptional.”

If other life forms exist in our universe, he said, we should try to understand why Jesus chose to save those from Earth over other civilized life forms from other planets.

Did God reserve His grace solely for Earthlings and abandon the rest of the intelligent creatures in the universe? If not, how did God deal with the sin problem on multiple planets?

One possibility he mentioned is that God-incarnate visited each of the civilized planets and saved each of the races that inhabited them separately.

Read entire article at the Christian Science Monitor

Former National Aeronautics and Space Administration Data and Photo Control Department manager, Ken Johnston, who worked for the space agency’s Lunar Receiving Laboratory during the Apollo missions has been fired for telling the truth.

Johnston asserts NASA knows astronauts discovered ancient alien cities and the remains of amazingly advanced machinery on the Moon. Some of the technology can manipulate gravity. He says the agency ordered a cover-up and forced him to participate in it. Over the past 40 years other scientists, engineers and technicians have accused NASA of cover-ups and obscuring data.

The growing number of accusers’ allegations range from hiding information about anomalous space objects and lying about the discovery of artifacts on the surface of the Moon and Mars, to denying the evidence of life reported back by the Viking lander during the mid-1970s.

More on Before It’s News

In an exclusive ExopoliticsTV interview by Alfred Lambremont Webre with a human representative-contactee of the extraterrestrial governance council known as the Andromeda Council it has been revealed that the war of liberation against a 4th dimensional Orion grey and Draco reptilian alliance has been won by the forces of the Andromeda Council as of the 3rd quarter of 2011. The attempted the occupation of Earth, our moon and Mars by this grey-Reptilian alliance is over. The defeated grey-reptilian forces have been sent via stargate into the far reaches of our universe.

The Andromeda Council representative states in his ExopoliticsTV interview that the forces of the 4th dimensional Orion grey and Draco reptilian forces that remain on Earth consist of small pockets of isolated forces around such as Washington, DC.

We can all cast in our $.02 on this one. I’ll stick to what I already cast into the pot a little while back …

Alexander believes UFO’s exists but are not necessarily extraterrestrial, and that there is no grand, sinister, coordinated cover-up by the military structure. His hope is for experts to be able to probe the topic further without being subjected to ridicule or damage to their careers. My conclusion: this man is, in fact, an alien.

Scientists examining the remains of Napoleon Bonaparte admit they are “deeply puzzled” by the discovery of a half-inch long microchip embedded in his skull. They say the mysterious object could be an alien implant — suggesting that the French emperor was once abducted by a UFO!

“The possible ramifications of this discovery are almost too enormous to comprehend,” declared Dr. Andre Dubois, who made the astonishing revelation in a French medical journal. Until now, every indication has been that victims of alien abduction are ordinary people who play no role in world events. Now we have compelling evidence that extraterrestrials acted in the past to influence human history – and may continue to do so!”

Dr. Dubois made the amazing find while studying Napoleon’s exhumed skeleton on a $140,000 grant from the French government.

“I was hoping to learn whether he suffered from a pituitary disorder that contributed to his small stature,” he explained. But instead the researcher found something far more extraordinary: “As I examined the interior of the skull, my hand brushed across a tiny protrusion. “I then looked at the area under a magnifying glass – and was stunned to find that the object was some kind of super-advanced microchip.”

Photo: Auntie Rain (CC)

Could talking to animals guide us to talking to extraterrestrials? Discovery News reports:

For 27 years, marine biologist Denise Herzing and colleagues have been regular visitors in the Atlantic Ocean home of a 200-member pod of spotted dolphins living north of the Bahama Islands.

Understanding the relationships between the members of the pod is key to unraveling what their dozens of whistles, clicks and other signals mean.

“The large goal of this project is to tell the story of what it’s like to be a dolphin,” Herzing, a researcher with Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton and the founder and head of the Wild Dolphin Project, told Discovery News.

[Continues at Discovery News]

The idea of reptilian aliens that rule the planet is of course on its face patently absurd, yet it is a myth that has driven a wide range of fictional media (V, Sitchen’s various novels, etc), as well as a surprising number of people who believe it quite literally, especially those that buy Icke’s implicitly anti-semitic model of reptilian aliens.

As I said in the Immanence of Myth:

Zecharia Sitchin has written several books about the “true” origin of Sumerian mythology: aliens. This, or the mythology of planet Niburu, is a wonderful modernization of ancient mythic elements, but considered as empirical fact, one may as well buy into the hollow Earth theory. The author David Icke takes it a step further: aliens, or reptilians, exist in the world today and control the world economy. Though there is some truth to the argument from ignorance “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence,” that doesn’t mean either of these scenarios are even remotely likely in a factual or historic sense…

So let’s look a little deeper at this as a myth, and at some of the ideas that exist in what we might call the connective tissue of these ideas. Reptilians are of course cold-blooded, and they do not nurture their young. If you’ve ever spent time with a lizard or bird, you can get a sense of the consciousness at work behind their similarly cold eyes. It calculates, it measures, it ponders and waits, and most of what it is contemplating is food and danger. So too with mammals, but there is something uniquely … reptilian … about the way that a lizard does it, isn’t there?

Studies have shown, interestingly enough, that empathy is a trait that gets reduced in the wealthy classes. One can only imagine that in the top 1%, many of them must have a downright reptilian disposition. It isn’t much of a stretch. They don’t need to originate from a far off planet X on some massive elliptical orbit: the worst atrocities humans have suffered have been, with the exception of plagues and natural disasters, at the hands of other humans. There is something especially awful about these cruelties, because they could have been averted.

What kind of cold-bloodedness does it take to order the genocide of millions, as has happened time and again throughout history, often for no crime other than having the misfortune of being born in a politically unfavorable spot. That such genocides are often carried out by obedient proles, by the lower classes themselves, that the lower classes often tear themselves apart, and burn their own homes when they riot, is a further bewildering horror – but all of it begins with the reptilians, the cold snake eye that feels no need for mother’s breast, for warm companionship or compassion. It kills, hunts, and grows without those feelings, such that we are all more than a little surprised when we discover that the coldest of butchers loved puppies, or enjoyed playing with children.

This leads us to an associated issue, of the personal psychology of the tyrant. Do they differ between different political and social systems? It would seem at first that the obvious answer would be yes. In the theoretical extremes of free market capitalism and communism, the flaw of the former is an over-emphasis on the individual to the point that it produces cold, unempathic, self obsessed people that are fixated on consumption, whereas communism produces a lack of personal freedom, and de-motivated, inherently socially repressed individuals without any sense of self-worth.

But that doesn’t seem to play out at the top levels. It would seem that the top 1% remain the same in many ways the world over. A look at the homes of communist dictators shows that there are some inherent psychological necessities that supersede this dichotomy of cultural structure — they look more or less the same, barring cultural differences, as the palaces of their capitalist or even monarchist counterparts.

Perhaps they are reptilians after all …

[More on Modern Mythology]

Maybe NASA believes that the little green men really are green – one of its scientists has collaborated on a report suggesting that the Earth’s rising levels of greenhouse gases could provoke an alien attack.

Using spectrometry, extraterrestrials could detect changes in Earth’s atmosphere and deduce that we’re out of control, the report suggests. It’s one of a number of scenarios discussed in the paper, written by Shawn Domagal-Goldman of Nasa’s Planetary Science Division and Pennsylvania State University academics.

“These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets,” the authors write.

“A preemptive strike would be particularly likely in the early phases of our expansion because a civilization may become increasingly difficult to destroy as it continues to expand.”

In some places the authors get really carried away – one wonders how many of them are frustrated would-be Hollywood screen-writers.

If we did get attacked by aliens, they suggest, it’s possible that another bunch might fly in to save us…

[continues at TG Daily]

Citizens of the world: You are awesome. This week the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute announced that it had raised more than $200,000 from a crowd-sourced fundraising effort that launched this spring. The money, which came from just over 2,000 people who want to keep the search for alien life alive, will help the institute put its Allen Telescope Array back online.

“We are so grateful to our donors,” said Tom Pierson, who co-founded the SETI Institute with Jill Tarter (the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in “Contact”). “We believe we will be back on the air in September.”

On the Setistars website, where the call for donations was originally placed, large red type proclaims: “Thank You for Your Support to Resume the Search!”

The Allen Telescope Array, or ATA, is a series of 42 linked radio-telescope dishes funded by a $30-million gift from Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen. Built at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in a valley near Mt. Shasta, it is the first group of radio telescopes built from the ground up with the intention of monitoring the universe full-time for radio waves that would indicate there is life on other planets.

The ATA has been monitoring the universe consistently since 2008, but in April, SETI and its partner, the Radio Astronomy Lab of UC Berkeley, ran out of money and had to put the ATA into hibernation mode.

That’s when SETI turned to earthlings via the Internet, to see if they could help raise money to put the array back online.

So far, 2,276 of them have responded and the institute met its fundraising goal with days to spare. (Pierson notes that the institute is happy to collect additional donations.)

[continues in the LA Times]

Mankind has been broadcasting radio waves into deep space for about a hundred years now — since the days of Marconi.

That, of course, means there is an ever-expanding bubble announcing Humanity’s presence to anyone listening in the Milky Way. This bubble is astronomically large (literally), and currently spans approximately 200 light years across.

But how big is this, really, compared to the size of the Galaxy in which we live (which is, itself, just one of countless billions of galaxies in the observable universe)?

More on jackadamblog

The ATA is SETI’s primary tool for scanning the skies for potential intelligent life, and recent federal and state budget deficits have cut its funding so severely as to force it to shut down. It takes $200,000 per month to pay the staff and operating expenses of the ATA, and SETIstars hopes to help bridge the gap between the community and SETI in order to get the ATA up and running again. Please donate today!

The argument that life on Earth may have been seeded from the stars just received a major boost, as scientists have found the building blocks of life inside a meteorite that landed in British Columbia in 2000.

The Tagish Lake meteorite landed in January of that year, a streaking fireball that burst into more than 500 fragments which rained down on the lake. In its trip from the outer reaches of the asteroid belt it burned down from 56 tonnes to 1.3, and deep inside the fragments there are the basic building blocks of life, including the amino acids, sugars and hydrocarbons that could have jump started life on our planet.

This meteorite is the only uncontaminated example we’ve ever found, thanks to the quick actions of the people who spotted it. What the researchers have found is that the organic compounds in the rock date back to the early days of the solar system, or possible predate it. A large parent body was formed in orbit around the star with chunks of ice trapped within. Over the billions of years that followed, the ice warmed, and the hydrothermal change altered the organic compounds. The large body has since broken up, and constitutes the carbonaceous chondrites meteorites that make their way to Earth. Within the samples discovered was organic matter that had properties that spanned properties found in other similar meteorites around the world — showing that the differing organic compound makeup of these rocks can come from a common precursor.

Read More: Tim Barribeau on io9.com

An American armchair astronomer claims he has found evidence of, well, something on Mars. David Martines’ YouTube video is heading for viral status after he uploaded a flyby of Google Earth’s Mars explorer zooming in on a white, cylindrical shaped object.

He’s calling it “Bio Station Alpha, because I’m just assuming that something lives in it or has lived in it”.

“It’s very unusual in that it’s quite large, it’s over 700 feet long and 150 feet wide, it looks like it’s a cylinder or made up of cylinders,” he says, “It could be a power station or it could be a biological containment or it could be a glorified garage — hope it’s not a weapon. Whoever put it up there had a purpose I’m sure. I couldn’t imagine what the purpose was. I couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to live on Mars.”

Read More: News.Au.com

Trackers at the Mutual UFO Network, one of the oldest unidentified-flying-object research organizations in this world, say that since the slump of the Western banking system in 2008, UFO sightings among Asia’s fast-growing economies have accelerated. Suspicious UFOs have shut down airports in China, buzzed resorts in Borneo and lit up the night sky in Myanmar.

“It’s not surprising, really,” says Debhanom Muangman, a 75-year-old Harvard-educated physician and one of Thailand’s leading UFO investigators. “Aliens have been coming to Asia for decades, but now they sense a change. This is where the progressive countries are, so they are coming here much more often now.”

Still, these aren’t American-style alien encounters. The aliens that Thai researchers say they have encountered bear little resemblance to the typical creatures depicted in Hollywood films, which have included resource-grabbing monsters or eerily calm, environmentally friendly creatures. The aliens that allegedly visit Southeast Asia tend to have a rather different view of the universe, following Buddhist precepts such as reincarnation and greeting one another by cupping their hands together in the shape of a lotus flower.

The CIA created Area 51 in 1955 to test and develop top secret U.S. military projects in the remote Nevada desert. More than 50 years later, the base still doesn’t officially exist and appears on no public U.S. government maps.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Area 51 was the epicenter of the OXCART project, intended to create the successor for the U-2 spy plane.

The OXCART plane was expected to be undetectable in the air as it flew surveillance and information-gathering missions over the Soviet Union. But Area 51 personnel soon found it necessary to conceal the craft from the Soviets eyes even when it was still being tested on the ground.

It was discovered that Soviet spy satellites, dubbed ash cans by Area 51 staff, were making regular rounds over Nevada.

[Continues at National Geographic]

Devotees of science fiction have been convinced for decades that an alien spacecraft crashed in the desert of New Mexico – and that the American government covered up the recovery of extraterrestrial bodies. The so-called Roswell Incident of 1947 spawned conspiracy theories by the score.

But now, sadly for UFO spotters, a new book offers an entirely man-made — and some would say even more bizarre — explanation, featuring two of the greatest villains of 20th century history: the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and the infamous Nazi “Angel of Death” Dr Joseph Mengele.

During a powerful storm in July, 1947, an object crashed near a rancher’s home in Roswell, New Mexico.

Roswell army air base initially said that a “flying disc” had come down, but hours later, as government scientists arrived in the area, it was stated instead that a weather balloon had crashed.

Read More: Telegraph

A new survey is under way to search for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life, but this one has a twist: Instead of listening for alien signals from anywhere in the sky, scientists are aiming radio telescopes at the alien planets most likely to be like our own Earth.

The new search, which began last week, is scanning 86 alien worlds for radio signals that could suggest the presence of an advanced civilization. The extrasolar planets are thought to be the most Earth-like of the 1,235 candidate planets discovered so far by NASA’s prolific Kepler space observatory.

“We’ve picked out the planets with nice temperatures — between zero and 100 degrees Celsius [32 and 212 degrees Fahrenheit] — because they are a lot more likely to harbor life,” said physicist Dan Werthimer of the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement.

This new SETI search is not part of the SETI Institute, which has long served as the Earth’s ears for any signals from intelligent aliens. Earlier this month, the Institute announced it was placing its primary listening station – a network of radio telescopes called the Allen Array — in hibernation due to funding problems.

[Continues at Space.com]

So it looks like the Allen Telescope Array is falling onto the chopping block in this era of fiscal “emergency.” To me, this sounds a lot like the recent battle to defund NPR or PBS, in that the money they need to continue is just … chump change in the grand scheme of finances. They’re $2.5 million short, and for that, they’ll need to stop taking data and shut down the telescope array. It deeply bums me out to think that such a low value is placed on the quest to find other intelligence in our universe. When compared with so many other things that gladly get millions or billions of dollars, it’s maddening to see SETI so marginalized …

And to put things into perspective, I’ve whipped up this handy infographic, comparing how $2.5 million compares to so many other things that we absolutely must have, and will not hesitate to pay for:

Background info on the shutdown here.

Read More: MicroCosmologist blog