Pentagon Answers Mysteries Involving UFOs

Last 19 November, a pentagon official told Congress that the agency has solved a prominent UFO mystery from 2016 which showed what appeared to be an object flying at a high speed just above water.

The object was recorded by a fighter jet from the USS Theodore Roosevelt off the east coast of Florida in 2016 and became known as the "GOFAST" video when it was made public the following year.

The grainy, black and white video, is from a fighter jet’s head-up display and eventually locks onto the object and the pilot can be heard shouting: "Ohhh, got it!... Oh my gosh dude."

Dr. Jon Kosloski, the director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which is tasked with investigating UFOs, or what the Pentagon calls unidentified anomalous phenomena (UPA), says that the object was not anomalous — or out of the ordinary — and hovering over the water but was in fact 13,000 feet above the sea.

He said the phenomenon was caused by a trick of the eye" called parallax, which made it look like the object is moving much faster.

"Through a very careful geospatial intelligence analysis and using trigonometry, we assess with high confidence that the object is not actually close to the water, but is rather closer to 13,000 feet," said Kosloski, who added that the office has a detailed analysis of the parallax phenomenon on its website.

He said the object, which he did not identify, traveled in a relatively straight, riding trajectory with a slow curving descent near the end of the analyzed video.

Kosloski also presented two other resolved cases the Defense Department calls "The Puerto Rico Objects" and "Mt. Etna," the latter which was captured in 2018 from a UAV flying in the Mediterranean watching Mount Etna as it was erupting. He said he believed the public was not familiar with it.

"And it appears that that object is flying through the plume of superheated gas and ash," Kosloski said.

"This was a rather difficult case to resolve. We had to pull in support from a number of IC and S&T partners and even reach out to a volcanologist. And through very detailed remodeling and pixel-by-pixel analysis of the object as it’s traversing across the clouds, they assess that the object was actually 170 meters away from the plume and not flying through it."

He said his office is still actively investigating cases with an "orange orb" and "a metallic cylinder."

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Development In Nuclear Fusion Reactor Continues

Scientists at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, a national lab run by the U.S. Department of Energy, reportedly achieved a major milestone in the development of a nuclear fusion reactor, Interesting Engineering reported.

The breakthrough in this area came in the form of the first quadrant of a super-powerful magnet for the core of the Princeton Lab's National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U) nuclear fusion reactor.

The scientists described their development as "two high-current magnets [joined] to create the toroidal field-ohmic heating coil (TF-OH) bundle." They further explained by noting that, "The magnets make up the core of the NSTX-U, similar to the core of an apple."

To break it down a bit further: The core is indeed similar to the core of an apple, if we imagine an apple that is incredibly difficult to build, but may one day have the capability to deliver virtually unlimited clean, renewable energy to replace the dirty energy sources overheating our planet.

There are existing nuclear reactors creating energy, but those reactors use a process called nuclear fission — the reaction where atoms split apart. The scientists at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory are attempting to create a nuclear fusion reactor that would create energy by slamming atoms together, mimicking the process that powers the sun.

If successful, a nuclear fusion reactor could provide virtually unlimited clean energy, which has led some to dub it the "holy grail of clean energy."

Although the dream of a fully functional commercial nuclear fusion reactor has yet to be realized, the work of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory reportedly brings it one step closer.

"These magnets are critical to the NSTX-U experiment, and the team has been laser focused on this assembly," laboratory director Steve Cowley said. "Constructing the first quadrant is a big achievement."

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15th Century Mexicans Offered Mass Child Sacrifices To Rain God

There was a mass ritual sacrifice of young children to a rain god in 15th-century Mexico which coincided with a deadly drought in the region, according to new research.

The skeletal remains of at least 42 children, ages 2 to 7, were discovered at Templo Mayor, the most significant temple complex in Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City, in 1980 and 1981.

The skeletons, which were facing up and had their limbs contracted, were placed inside ashlar boxes on a layer of sand. Some were adorned with finery such as necklaces and had green stone beads in their mouths.

Recently, new research has revealed that the sacrifices were likely an attempt to end a great drought in the region by making offerings to the rain god Tláloc. The research was presented at the ninth Liberation through knowledge meeting: "Water and Life" at Mexico's National College.

"At first, the Mexica state tried to mitigate its effects by opening the royal granaries to redistribute food among the neediest classes, while carrying out mass sacrifices of children in the Templo Mayor to calm the fury of the tlaloque [rain dwarves who were assistants of Tláloc]," Leonardo López Luján, an archaeologist and director of the National Institute of Anthropology and History's (INAH) Templo Mayor Project, said at the meeting. "For a time, it faced the tragedy this way, but the excessive duration of the crisis made the state vulnerable, forcing it to allow the mass exodus of its people."

To find out why the mass offering was performed, INAH researchers studied geological data alongside entries in the Mexican Drought Atlas, which showed that a major drought occurred across central Mexico between 1452 and 1454.

The drought, which took place during the reign of Moctezuma I and the construction of the Templo Mayor, decimated harvests, devastated populations in the region and forced starving families to sell children to nearby towns in exchange for food, according to López Luján.

"Everything seems to indicate that droughts in early summer would have affected the germination, growth and flowering of plants prior to the canícula [dog days of summer], while autumn frosts would have attacked corn before it had ripened,” López Luján said. "Thus, the concurrence of both phenomena would have destroyed the harvests and led to occurrences of prolonged famine."

In an effort to alleviate the crisis, the sacrificed children's bodies were sprinkled with blue pigment, seashells and small birds and were surrounded by 11 sculptures made of volcanic rock.

The sculptures were made to resemble the face of Tláloc, the Aztec god of rain, water and fertility. In fact, the adornment of the children was likely an attempt to make the children resemble rain dwarves, López Luján said.

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Message From Space Was Decoded

An art project from the SETI Institute, a nonprofit in Mountain View, California, devoted to searching for life beyond Earth, received a message from outer space over a year ago before a father-daughter team of citizen scientists recently deciphered the message. Its meaning, however, remains a mystery.

After the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a European Space Agency spacecraft orbiting Mars, beamed a signal containing an alien-like message in May 2023, three observatories on Earth picked it up and released the raw data on the internet, giving citizen scientists across the globe a chance to decipher the transmission.

Ken Chaffin and daughter Keli, who worked on decoding the message for nearly a year, uncovered the answer in June, the European Space Agency announced last 22 October. Doing so required thousands of hours experimenting with various ideas and running mathematical simulations on a computer, the Chaffins told CNN.

In what appears to be clusters of white pixels on a black background, the visualized message is of five configurations that represent amino acids, the building blocks of life. The message is not static but is in motion and only displays the arrangement for about one-tenth of a second. The project’s designers confirmed that amino acids are the intended message, but they are leaving the interpretation open.

Now, citizen scientists are grappling with the meaning behind the cryptic cosmic puzzle. So far, the community engaged in the project has not been able to determine and agree on what the amino acids represent.

When Ken Chaffin came across the original image from the scrambled raw data, which the Discord community of citizen scientists referred to as the "starmap," he said he suspected a cellular automata algorithm produced it.

Cellular automata are grids of units that are mathematically coded to move or follow certain sets of rules. "I knew I had the skills to decode the message," he said, explaining he has decades of amateur experience working with cellular automata.

By running the cellular automata simulations on the "starmap," the Chaffins were eventually able to generate the image of the amino acids.

"I had no idea what the message would show or say," he added. "I suspected that it might have something to do with life." When the image of the clusters revealed itself, Chaffin said he immediately recognized them to be amino acids from school chemistry classes.

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Is King Arthur An Amalgamation Of Historical Figures?

In England, there is a story about a mythical Celtic warlord who held out against the Anglo Saxon invasion. His right-hand man was a wizard, he was handed his famous sword by a deity, and he was a romantic — and chivalrous — hero.

The story also says that he isn’t dead. He’s merely asleep, and will rise again when the time is right to expel the invaders and turn Britain back into a Celtic land.

He is widely known as King Arthur, a figure so imbued with beauty and potential. But was there a real man behind the myth? Or is he just our platonic ideal of a hero — a respectful king, in today’s parlance?

Today, Arthur's supposed exploits have left behind a tourist trail across the UK and beyond, with scores of sites claiming connections to his myth.

It’s nothing new. For centuries, the legend of Arthur has fascinated much of Europe.

He was supposedly the leader of a tribe of Celts — indigenous Britons — when the Saxons invaded Britain in the fifth century.

The Saxons — people from modern-day Scandinavia, Germany and France — eventually colonized Britain, but there were fierce pockets of resistance from the Celts, especially in the far west of the country. Wales and Cornwall — England’s southwesternmost county – were the last to fall. The Celtic languages that all Britons originally spoke held out here, while elsewhere people began to speak what would become English.

Arthur was, according to tradition, a leader resisting to the end against the Saxon colonizers. Fittingly, both Cornwall and Wales (among other places) claim him. Today, he is best associated with Tintagel Castle, where remains of a settlement dating back to the fifth century perch strikingly on an islet off the wild coast of Cornwall. Supposedly, Arthur was conceived here.

But the myth of Arthur is also bound intrinsically with Glastonbury Tor (a hill in Somerset where Merlin, his magician, is said to be asleep, waiting to return), Caerleon Castle in Wales (this was said to where Arthur had his court, Camelot), and South Cadbury in Somerset, where archaeologists in the 1970s thought they’d located Camelot.

In Wales alone, Arthur is meant to have killed a giant on Yr Wyddfa (Mount Snowdon) and a fearsome beast in Llyn Barfog lake, while Merlin is said to be buried both on Bardsey Island, off the north coast, and in a cliff at Nevern. Mind you, Arthur is also rumored to be sleeping in that cliffside — as well as buried at Glastonbury Abbey, Baschurch in Shropshire, and Mynydd y Gaer, a mountain in Wales. Even for a mythical figure, he got around.

There’s also Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh — the names of Arthur and Merlin are "right at the top of the list" of historical figures who’ve loaned their names to places, according to Mark Stoyle, professor of early modern history at the UK’s University of Southampton.

Even the French claim a link with him, with some arguing that he was from Brittany — another Celtic part of Europe. The study of his story is, apparently, on the national school curriculum in France.

For Stoyle, it’s likely that the myth of Arthur has at least its roots in fact.

"Nobody knows for sure," he says. "Historians are so divided on it."

He says that an increasing number of archaeologists and historians believe that Arthur is an amalgamation of various historical characters, rather than an actual figure himself —although plenty still believe that Arthur himself existed.

Stoyle himself is in the former camp.

"When the Roman empire fell, the Anglo Saxons took over in the east of England and then moved to the west. There was fierce resistance to them which lasted a long time, and it’s easy to believe that there was one or more local chieftains who opposed them, and that those stories are perhaps the germ for the story of Arthur," he says.

"My gut feeling is that there has to be someone extraordinary behind this [these stories] but we have so little hard evidence, and some things [which he is said to have done] he definitely couldn’t do."

That would be things like pulling a sword out of a rock in which it was lodged (this marked him out as the rightful king), or getting his most famous sword, Excalibur, handed to him by "the lady of the lake," a kind of water deity (Cornish people swear this happened at Dozmary Pool on Bodmin Moor). Excalibur has, of course, become so rooted in our global consciousness that it was not only the subject of the 1963 Disney film "The Sword in the Stone" but also is the name of a medieval-themed resort in Las Vegas.

Whoever inspired these stories is almost a moot point for Stoyle. "In a way, everybody has their own Arthur — perceptions about who we want him to have been," he says.

Perhaps he’s the chivalrous knight who spent more time instilling good behavior at Camelot than killing his enemies. This is the Arthur that went viral in the medieval period, when chivalry was all the rage.

Perhaps he’s the romantic hero, the king who fought for love when his wife Guinevere ran off with his most trusted confidant, Lancelot. That’s the erotic Arthur beloved by the pre-Raphaelite artists and poets who obsessed over him in the 1800s.

Perhaps he’s the mystic — the proto-New Age king who was led to victory by his trusted magician Merlin. Modern-day mystics swarm to Glastonbury to soak up his magic there.

Or maybe he’s supernatural — a man who never really died, but lies sleeping, ready to return when his country needs him. This Arthur will kick the Saxon colonizers out and return Britain to its native Celtic culture. That’s the guy who, says Stoyle, the Welsh and Cornish "absolutely believed" in for centuries.

As for Merlin, Stoyle says that most leaders of that age would have been accompanied by a sage. Merlin is the model in popular culture for the likes of Gandalf and Dumbledore, he says.

(Note: It was pointed out by one Historian that the Celts themselves were colonizers from Central Europe. England does not have indigenous peoples because it was settled, not fertile. The Beakers predate the Celts. Moreover, the Welsh and Cornish were Bretons, a sub-ethnic group of the Celts. To merely call them Celts erases their individual languages, customs, and beliefs.)

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Prehistoric Ecosystem Discovered Under The Italian Alps

Under the snowy slopes of the Italian Alps, there lies an ecosystem that predates the dinosaurs, revealed by melting snow before being stumbled upon by a hiker.

The discovery, made public last 13 November, includes well-preserved footprints of reptiles and amphibians that scientists say date back 280 million years to a geologic period known as the Permian period.

"Dinosaurs had not yet emerged at this time, but the animals responsible for the largest footprints here would still have been impressive, reaching up to 2-3 meters in length," said Cristiano Dal Sasso, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in Milan, where the finds are now on display.

The fossils were discovered in the mountains of northern Italy's Lombardy region after the snow and ice that once covered them melted away, scientists say, as a result of the ongoing climate crisis.

Claudia Steffensen was hiking along a trail in the Valtellina Orobie mountain range in the summer of 2023 when she stepped on a gray stone marked with unusual patterns.

"My husband was in front of me, looking straight ahead, while I was looking toward my feet. I put my foot on a rock, which struck me as odd as it seemed more like a slab of cement. I then noticed these strange circular designs with wavy lines. I took a closer look and realized they were footprints," Steffensen told the Guardian newspaper.

Intrigued, she snapped photos and shared them with her friend, Elio Della Ferrera, a nature photographer. Della Ferrera then contacted Dal Sasso, at the museum in Milan, to learn more about the discovery.

Dal Sasso enlisted the expertise of two specialists: Ausonio Ronchi, a professor of stratigraphy at the University of Pavia in Northern Italy, and Lorenzo Marchetti, a fossil expert from the Natural History Museum in Berlin.

Marchetti told NBC News that he was "amazed by the quality and quantity of the material," and said that while he had studied other Permian sites in the area, none seemed as "rich" as this one.

The Permian period immediately predated the dinosaurs.

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NASA's Roman Space Telescope Close To Launching

Inside NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, scientists were able to integrate a crucial component onto the Roman Space Telescope. This device, known as the Roman Coronagraph Instrument, is designed to block starlight, enabling scientists to detect the faint light from planets beyond our solar system.

This achievement marks a significant milestone for NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a next-generation space observatory that will launch around May 2027. With a field of view at least 100 times larger than that of the Hubble Space Telescope, Roman will be used to investigate scientific mysteries related to dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astrophysics.

It will do so using its one science instrument called the Wide Field Instrument, and the Roman Coronagraph Instrument, which is a technology demonstration—a stepping stone for future space missions, like the proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory, which would be the first telescope designed specifically to search for signs of life on exoplanets.

"In order to get from where we are to where we want to be, we need the Roman Coronagraph to demonstrate this technology," said Rob Zellem, Roman Space Telescope deputy project scientist for communications at NASA Goddard. "We'll be applying those lessons learned to the next generation of NASA flagship missions that will be explicitly designed to look for Earth-like planets."

The coronagraph, which is roughly the size of a baby grand piano, is a sophisticated system composed of masks, prisms, detectors, and self-flexing mirrors that work together to block the glare from distant stars, allowing scientists to detect the planets orbiting them.

Currently, exoplanets are observed through indirect methods, particularly using a technique called transiting. This method involves measuring dips in the light of a distant star that occur when an exoplanet passes in front of it. These dips provide valuable insights, including information about the planet's atmospheric composition, which is important in determining habitability. They may even reveal the presence of gases that could indicate the existence of life.

While this method has provided incredibly valuable insights, it also has its limitations. For one, only a small fraction of planets can be observed this way, as transits occur for just a brief period during a planet's total orbital cycle, restricting the amount of data that can be gathered.

Engineers will now perform different checks and tests before moving forward with the integration of the Wide Field Instrument and finally, the telescope itself.

"It's really rewarding to watch these teams come together and build up the Roman observatory. That's the result of a lot of teams, long hours, hard work, sweat, and tears," said Liz Daly, the integrated payload assembly integration and test lead for Roman at Goddard.

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