Secret files on aliens

Secret files on aliens - Russian PM Dimitry Medvedev, may have set conspiracy theorists in a rut of excitement two weeks to the Mayan Apocalypse when he said in a footage recorded after a TV interview that Russian presidents get to see secret files about aliens living among us.

According to The Telegraph, as he was finishing an interview with a Ren TV journalist, the former Russian president, presumed to have been unaware that the microphone was still turned on, said every new Russian president is given two folders of information about extraterrestrials who are permanently resident on earth. According to The Telegraph, he was responding to a question whether Russian presidents receive secret files on aliens. He said:

"Along with the briefcase with nuclear codes, the president of the country is given a special 'top secret' folder. This folder in its entirety contains information about aliens who visited our planet. Along with this, you are given a report of the absolutely secret special service that exercises control over aliens on the territory of our country..."

And just in case the journalist could not picture the scenario he was trying to communicate about "absolutely secret special service that exercises control over aliens on the territory of our country," he advised him to see the film "Men in Black," saying, "more detailed information on this topic you can get from a well-known movie called 'Men In Black...'" 

Medvedev told the journalist that he was not allowed to say "how many of them are among us because it may cause panic," implying there may be hordes of them, maybe even enough to take over the world. 

According to The Telegraph, none of the TV stations that interviewed Medvedev broadcast his tongue-in-cheek comments, but they were delivered to Reuters and some were shown on YouTube. 

While the media have been quick to say that Medvedev was joking, the former president of Russia from 2008 to 2012 must realize that was an expensive joke coming from a former president of a country that is a major military power, in a world of conspiracy theorists who already assume the scenario independent of presidential endorsement, especially at less than two weeks to the prophesied Mayan "end of the world," scheduled for December 21. 

His statement will be seen by fringe Alien and UFO conspiracy theorists as significant given that Russia boasts some of the most spectacular claims of UFO sightings and alien encounters. According to IB Times, some of the bizarre stories include an alleged incidence in Minsk in 1984: "a green beam appeared from an aircraft. The beam was said to have swung rapidly from side to side while illuminating the cabin of an aircraft nearby. Two pilots who reported seeing the events first-hand were later diagnosed with cancer from electromagnetic radiation and severe brain damage, respectively." 

As IB Times points out, dryly, with such stories coming from Russia, "Perhaps Medvedev was not joking after all." 

But the former president expressed belief in other unlikely phenomena that may suggest he was in a jocular off-air mood. He spoke about Santa Claus:

"I believe in Father Frost. But not too deeply. But anyway, you know, I'm not one of those people who are able to tell the kids that Father Frost does not exist.”

However, when he was asked whether he believed the world would end on Dec. 21, he said no. ( digitaljournal.com )

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A Career Waiting for E.T. to Phone

A Career Waiting for E.T. to Phone - Jill Tarter once complained to me that she had no poetry in her soul - It was 1990, and NASA was getting ready to undertake a survey of the 1,000 nearest stars, looking for radio signals from aliens. Dr. Tarter, then 46 and a researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., was in charge of it.

“I can’t say what they will be like,” she sighed, when asked to speculate about the nature and motives of these putative aliens.

She was far too busy worrying about how to recognize a signal, not to mention how to avoid being fooled by the kid next door or a stray weather or spy satellite.

For some three decades, Dr. Tarter, now 68, has been the person most likely to be the first to know if we make contact with E.T. — the one who will sound the alarm, spreading the news that We Are Not Alone.

Now Dr. Tarter is stepping away from the radio telescope, retiring from her post as the director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View. SETI, of course, refers to the search for intelligent life in the universe.

“The SETI Institute has a good pension plan — we’re grown-ups,” she said by telephone recently.

There will be a dinner and speeches in her honor at SETIcon, a gathering of astronomers, astronauts and science-fiction fans in Santa Clara this weekend.

“I hope it’s not a roast,” she said.

Dr. Tarter never did get to deliver the news that we have company. But this, she contends, is not disappointing. What would be disappointing is if humans were not able to search for their neighbors at all.

Over the decades she has brooked few distractions from that quest.

When a reporter (O.K., it was me) once described Dr. Tarter’s blond hair tied with a pink ribbon into a ponytail, she cut her hair short.

When the SETI researchers got a new radio telescope for their search — the Allen Array, at the University of California’s Hat Creek Observatory in Northern California — she got a pilot’s license so she could make the trip from her Berkeley home in one hour instead of six.

Jodie Foster’s performance as an astronomer who does make contact, in the movie “Contact,” was largely based on time she spent with Dr. Tarter.

Three times, Dr. Tarter says, she has thought we had made contact, but hard-boiled caution prevailed. Once was in France in 1980, when she and her team had to wait for a suspicious source to pass over their telescope, and Dr. Tarter was afraid to go to sleep. “I had to stay up for three days, afraid my French colleagues were going to call up Le Monde,” she said.

Another time, while she was observing with a radio telescope in West Virginia, Dr. Tarter went so far as to alert colleagues in California of an auspicious signal — and then forgot to call back when she discovered it was a satellite.

None of them was E.T. calling. Each one was another way to be fooled, another addition to Dr. Tarter’s checklist, another necessary step along a path that may or may not have an ending.

It was in the 1970s while she was pursuing a Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and raising a daughter that she first heard of SETI: the idea that lonely species could bridge the voids between stars with radio waves. She fell in love with it after reading a NASA report on the subject edited by Barney Oliver, the former head of research at Hewlett-Packard. Reassuringly, Dr. Oliver was a crusty gear head who had made himself and others rich, not the sort of man given to romantic fantasies. Hard-boiled, you might say.

Dr. Tarter said she considered herself lucky to have been born when the issue of life in the universe had become a scientific instead of a philosophical or religious one. “For the very first time we had technology where we could do an experiment instead of asking priests and philosophers,” she said.

“It might take multiple generations,” she added, “but there were no reasons not to start with the tools I have.”

The NASA survey that Dr. Tarter led began with great fanfare on Columbus Day of 1992, the 500th anniversary of the great explorer’s arrival in the Americas — a day that she called the high point of her life, a monument to human curiosity. “I felt so proud,” she recalled.

A year later it was over, canceled at the behest of a senator, Richard Bryan of Nevada, who was skittish about “little green men.”

With help from Silicon Valley friends, Dr. Tarter and her colleagues at the institute took the search private and, over time, began to expand it farther out in space, to stars identified by the Kepler spacecraft as having planets.

Last year, however, the recession left the University of California with no money to operate Hat Creek Observatory, and the Allen Array had to be shut down, a moment that Dr. Tarter called the low point of her career.

“To have built that beautiful instrument and then have to turn it off, that hurt,” she said.

The Allen Array is now back on the cosmic search job, thanks to a deal to share observing time on it with the Air Force. But to Dr. Tarter the whole affair was a wake-up call: SETI needs a permanent endowment. “It’s on my to-do list,” she said last winter.

So she is not moving far, just down the hall, to concentrate on fund-raising. It’s time, she said, to go calling on Silicon Valley 2.0.

The search, she explained, is “too long and too difficult. If we want to attract the best and brightest, we want to be able to say, ‘It’s O.K., they can plan on raising a family.’ ”

Once upon a time it was a crazy, romantic idea, perhaps nothing better than wishful thinking. It still is, but it makes us feel bigger and more grown-up just to try. And now it comes with grown-up benefits, like a retirement plan.

There might or might not be poetry in her soul, but Dr. Tarter’s whole career has been a poem. ( nytimes.com )

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Long Before Earth, Asteroids May Have Served as Incubators of Life

Long Before Earth, Asteroids May Have Served as Incubators of Life — Meteorites don't always announce their arrival, but the one bearing down on Canada on Jan. 18, 2000, was not shy. Plunging toward the ground in a roaring fireball, it took aim at Lake Tagish in the British Columbia mountains and — this being winter — smashed itself into fragments on the lake's icy surface.

It wasn't until Jan. 25 and 26 that scientists could travel to the site and collect bits of what was once a meteorite measuring perhaps 13 ft. (4 m) across. Those fragments have been kept frozen to preserve any organic compounds that may have been riding aboard the rock when it crashed and are periodically subjected to scientific analysis. The latest of those studies was published this week in the journal Science, and what the new investigators reported was eye opening: biology may have been incubating on asteroids long before it arose on Earth.

The elements that give rise to life are hardly unique to our planet. Hydrocarbons, the basic molecules from which known life is built, are made of nothing but hydrogen and carbon. Two other key players are oxygen and nitrogen — and all four of them are everywhere in the universe, often combining in interesting ways.

"There's no doubt from astronomical observations that we can see organic compounds out there in space," says geologist and mineralogist Christopher Herd of the University of Alberta, the lead author of the new paper. "You can also cook them up on Earth."

A fragment of the Lake Tagish meteorite

But if raw materials were all it took for life to exist, it would be everywhere. It's not, of course, partly because those extremely simple building blocks have to be processed into slightly less simple ones and on and on through various stages of refinement. Three of the most critical materials produced in this process are amino acids (from which DNA is made); monocarboxylic acids, a suite of hydrocarbons that readily participate in chemical reactions; and macromolecular clumps of organic material called kerogen.

Bits of some of these prebiotic materials have been observed in meteor samples before, and Herd and his colleagues were thus not terribly surprised to find them in the tiny 0.4-in. (1 cm) samples of the Tagish meteorite that they studied. What was unexpected, however, was that they saw all the materials in various stages of development, from their simplest forms to their most complex ones. It was as if the scientists had discovered not only butterflies but also cocoons and caterpillars.

"There was this linear correlation from one stage to the next to the next," says Herd. "We saw the organic materials through five different stages of sophistication."

The Tagish meteor, Herd and his colleagues concluded, must have been operating as a sort of incubator, flying through space and cooking up increasingly elaborate organic compounds until it deposited them in British Columbia. On modern-day Earth, which is saturated with life, a few more organic materials wouldn't make much of a difference. On the original, barren Earth, they could have played a meaningful role — adding at least some extraterrestrial seasonings to the organic soup already bubbling here.

Just how a dead rock flying through icy space could support such elaborate chemical processes is not clear, but Herd has a theory. The Tagish meteor formed the same way all the asteroids and meteors in the solar system formed: accreting out of the primordial swirl of gas and dust that also gave rise to the sun and planets. The oxygen and hydrogen in that cloud would have combined to create at least some water, which would also have been mixed into the matrix of the asteroid. And the gravitational heat generated as the rock was coalescing, coupled with radioactive materials onboard, would have kept the water warm and, in a sense, pulsing.

"It could have operated almost like a hydrothermal cell," says Herd, "with water circulating through the asteroid. After a while, the heat would run out and that process would shut off, and you'd be left with different stages of organic materials."

None of this means that true life could have arisen on asteroids; their warm phase would simply have been too brief. What it does mean is that biological processes may be taking place everywhere in the solar system and that some of the early chemical seeds may have been scattered on Earth. In other words, we have met the aliens — and they are at least partly us. ( time.com )

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Is this a squadron of UFOs flying over California?

Is this a squadron of UFOs flying over California? - The Internet is abuzz over an alleged UFO sighting in the night sky over Oakland, California.

Three fast-moving dots of light can be seen travelling close together in a video posted on YouTube by a KevinMC360.

The 'UFO squadron' shows the three lights in a triangular pattern spotted on May 26.

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Spotted: Three fast-moving dots of light can be seen travelling close together

Cynics claim the cameraman has merely captured a flock of birds, but Kevin insists the sighting was genuine.

In the film, he follows a plane as a point of reference.

'For all you bird lovers out there you can call them geese, if you like, but I will only laugh at you,' he said.

The UFO video has already attracted more than 2,500 viewings.

He posted it a year after claiming to have filmed 'a group of spacecraft' over Oakland.

'I got them. There was a squadron of spacecraft,' he claimed in the video, which shows five lights in a V-formation.

That video has been viewed more than 23,780 times. ( dailymail.co.uk )

Watch the video

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