7 Old West UFO Encounters That (Probably) Actually Happened

by Justin Thomas

from http://egotvonline.com/

Cowboys & Aliens opens this weekend, and moviegoers are already chomping at the bit for a chance to see cowboys duke it out with UFO’s. As crazy as this genre-blending fantasy world seems, American history boasts a fairly healthy collection of Old West UFO stories during the 1800′s. Even before Roswell and Area 51, people were seeing strange things in the sky, describing them to their local papers, and coming up with wild theories as to what the mysterious objects could be. Of course, there were no video cameras in the 1800′s, and even still photography technology was in its infancy, so collecting documentation of Old West UFO encounters was nearly impossible. Nonetheless, newspapers from the 1800′s are jam-packed with awesome Old West UFO encounters. Here are 7 Old West UFO Encounters That Actually Happened…(maybe).

The Aurora Incident

Aurora, Texas, 1897


The Aurora Incident is one of the more famous Old West UFO Encounters. The incident occured on the morning of April 17, 1897 in Aurora, Texas, a small town in the northeastern corner of the state. According to the Dallas Morning News, Judge J.S. Proctor was preparing his breakfast when he heard a loud crash outside of his farmhouse. Upon investigating, Judge Proctor discovered a strange airship that had collided with his windmill, causing it to crash to the ground. In the wreckage, the Judge found the ship’s pilot, who was dead and described as “not of this world”. Of course, that could just mean “horrifically burned”, but who knows for sure. The Judge buried the wreckage in an old well on his property and the pilot’s body was reportedly buried in a nearby cemetery, with a plaque marking the grave site that briefly describes the incident. Because of the popularity of this legend, there have been numerous follow up investigations (especially in recent years) that have yielded no conclusive evidence to support the theory that a) the pilot of the mysterious craft was an extraterrestrial, or b) that the event ever happened in the first place, aside from a plaque in the cemetery describing the event as it was reported in the papers. Nonetheless, the town of Aurora considers the incident to be a local precursor to the Roswell incident, which occurred nearly 50 years later, because the two stories bear a remarkable resemblance to one another.

John Martin’s “Flying Saucer”

Denison, Texas, 1878


Many people attribute the term “flying saucer” to Kenneth Arnold, a pilot who used the term to describe an object he encountered while flying a plane in 1947. But the term was used almost 70-years earlier in a Denison Daily News article about a strange object that Texas farmer John Martin spotted on a recent hunting trip. Martin, a reputable local farmer, was out hunting one morning when he suddenly noticed a strange, shiny object in the sky.  As he watched it, the object gradually moved closer to him. When the object silently flew overhead, Martin clearly saw the craft and later described it as dark and saucer-shaped, using the term “flying saucer” for lack of a better explanation. Despite Martin’s solid reputation, nobody else saw the craft and no evidence of its existence was ever unearthed.

Lumley’s UFO

Great Falls, Montana, 1865


This story appeared in a few different newspapers in 1865. The papers reported the story of a fur trapper named James Lumley, who claims to have witnessed a UFO crash in the deep woods of Montana in 1865. Lumley was in the forest trapping animals for his fur trade when he suddenly noticed a brilliant, bright light in the sky. The object streamed across the sky, then broke into several parts and crashed to the ground out of view. So far it sounds like a meteorite, right? That’s what Lumley thought too, until he investigated the crash site the following day. As Lumley approached the site where the object crashed, he noticed a huge stretch of land that had been completely cleared of trees and other foliage. The object had forcefully cleared a path in the woods upon touching down. Lumley followed the trail of devastation and eventually discovered its source: a large stone-like object that had smashed into a mountainside. Upon investigating the object, Lumley discovered that it was sectioned off, almost as if it had rooms inside of it. Lumley said that the object was also covered with “heiroglyphics” that could only have been made by humans or other intelligent creatures. In other words, they weren’t just random scratches on a rock. He also stated that the hunk of rock he came upon appeared to be a small part of a much larger object that he could not find in the area. While sifting through the debris, Lumley found a number of glass-like shards and chunks of what seem to resemble melted metal. Despite Lumley’s claims, the “ship” was never found, and besides his awesome story, there’s no evidence of his extraterrestrial treasure.

The Niagara Falls Lights

Niagara Falls, 1833


In 1833, a series of strange incidents were reported near Niagara Falls in New York. The incidents involved sightings of luminous objects in the sky along with reports of a strange, jelly-like substance falling from the sky. At around 2am on November 13th, a strange luminous object was spotted hovering in the sky near Niagara Falls. The object looked like “a square table that hovered in the sky and emitted bright rays of light”, according to one eye witness. Later that day, a series of jelly-like blobs were discovered littering the ground throughout New York, Newark, and New Jersey. The blobs were described as flat, jelly-like transparent blobs about 4 feet in diameter that fell from the sky, then dissolved within a few hours of exposure to air. Despite numerous eye witness accounts of the blobs and other mysterious lights, no samples of the jelly substance were taken and, aside from eye witness accounts and newspaper reports, there is no concrete evidence to substantiate the sightings or the mysterious jelly blobs.

The Mystery Airships of 1896

San Francisco, California 1896


1896 was a great year for mysterious airships. Hot air balloons and crude airships had already been invented by this time, although it would be another 7 years until the Wright brothers would record their first successes in their flying machine. But something else was flying around in Northern California in 1896. Hundreds of eye witnesses reported seeing a massive airship slowly floating about 1,000 feet over the city on the night of November 18, 1896. Most of the witnesses were drawn by the ship’s light, mainly because people just weren’t accustomed to seeing anything besides a bird flying around in the sky in 1896. The following night, Colonel H.G. Shaw was driving in his buggy in Stockton, California (near San Francisco) when he came upon a large airship that had landed in a field. He later described the ship as being cylindrical shaped, about 150 feet long and 25 feet in diameter, and made entirely of metal. Not exactly an every day sight in 1896. He also claims that three very tall, slender men were accompanying the ship, and that they examined his car briefly before boarding the ship again and taking to the skies, and eventually out of site. For the next few weeks, numerous mysterious airships were spotted all along the west coast, in western Canada, and even as far east as Nebraska. While airships had already been invented in 1896, nobody had one that could cover such vast distances and reach such heights, which is why the incident is referred to as The Mystery Airships of 1896.

 

The Flying discs of Salem, Massachusetts

 
1952 Salem, Massachusetts July 16, 1952 1952 was a busy year for UFO sightings, and about that time Shel Alpert, a USCG seaman on duty in the Coast Guard Weather Office at the Salem Coast Guard Station, witnessed four unexplained brilliant lights in the sky. After dimming and brightening again Alpert was able to get a single photograph through the window of this office. This photo has been published in many places, including books, newspapers, magazines, and now websites. (source:UfoCasebook)

The Mysterious Lights of 1897

Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska & Illinois, 1897
 
There were a lot of “mysterious” things happening in the late 1800′s. A tidal wave of “mysterious lights in the sky” sightings were reported throughout the Midwest in April of 1897. The first reports came from Omaha, where hundreds of eye witnesses reported seeing the same thing: a 12-foot wide egg-shaped metallic object flying through the air. That night, hundreds more reported being awakened by a blinding bright light flooding through their bedroom windows, apparently coming from a moving object in the sky. Similar reports came in over the next few nights from Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, and even Chicago, where thousands of people stood in the streets and stared at the mysterious object in the sky with one bright light at the “front”, and a red and green light on either side that seemed to rotate around the object. Apparently, two photos were taken of the object by a Chicago resident, but the photos have since disappeared.

U.S. Cavalry vs. Aliens

Southwestern U.S., 1909


There’s an unconfirmed story floating around regarding a U.S. Cavalry unit that encountered a UFO, and possibly even some pesky little aliens, in 1909. As the story goes, a Cavalry unit was in hot pursuit of a gang of Mexican bandits in the Southwestern U.S. in 1909. During their pursuit, the Cavalry unit came upon a cave that they’d never seen before, despite being familiar with the region. Upon entering the cave, they discovered a number of metallic, horseshoe-shaped flying vehicles, along with a small collection of “little grey demons”, which may have been aliens. The Cavalry unit’s horses were spooked by the ships and the creatures, and the Cavalry immediately left the cave. Upon returning the next day, the cave was empty and the ships and aliens were nowhere to be found.

UFOs spotted over London?

A video of bright disc-shaped objects dashing through the blue skies over central London has been posted on YouTube.

The footage was filmed near the BBC Radio 1 building in Great Portland Street, and shows specks of white light flying at high altitude over the capital.

A larger object then emerges from behind a cloud before vanishing moments later.

The YouTube user who posted the clip online wrote: "Right – took over a week to get it ... but finally managed to get these critters on camera on a clear day, and even get a close-up.

"It seems to be attracting quite a crowd now when they appear. Can anyone explain what on earth these lights are please?"

A separate video posted by the same user, alymc01, is believed to have been shot from inside the offices of a visual effects company called The Mill. The firm creates special effects for the film industry.

Area 51 De-Classified and Uncovered

As information from the top secret US military base is declassified, The Independent talks alien conspiracy theories, the Cold War and UFOs with a man who was there

Interview by Jonathan Owen
From: http://www.independent.co.uk/

Rumours that the U.S government had proof of visiting alien life hidden away in a top secret military installation known as Area 51 have persisted for half a century.

One of the most famous secret military bases in the world, Area 51 has been shrouded in secrecy since it was set up during the early years of the Cold War.

Access to the Nevada base has always been highly restricted and those who worked there were sworn not to speak of it.

A U-2 pilot is being fitted into a partial pressure suit at Area 51. These early pressure suits bore a cunning resemblance to the alien costumes of 1950s B-movies.

 CLICK HERE FOR DECLASSIFIED IMAGES

But now early veterans have spilled the beans for a documentary Area 51: I Was There being broadcast on National Geographic Channel on Sunday.

The documentary combines personal testimonies with recently declassified information, photos and video (some of which can be found above).

Here T.D Barnes, 74, one of the documentary participants and a man who was commissioned to test secret aircraft by the CIA at Area 51 in the late ‘60s, shares his experiences:

I think the people selected were all the same. We weren’t really nosy. There were 23 of us but we protected our own secrets from each other. You didn’t snoop into what each other was doing and we still don’t today because some of it is still classified.

You didn’t volunteer to tell people what you were doing. You only reported to what we called ‘the customer’, which could be the CIA or it could be any other agency, could be air force foreign technology division.

I decided to talk about my experiences because about eight or ten years ago we started realising that we were losing our people and that the stories of what we did have never been told. When the CIA started declassifying information, I started gathering these stories together.

The more we talked to the historians and the military the more we realised that they simply did not know what we did. A lot of the technical stuff that we did that was classified so the world never knew about it and today they had gone ahead and reinvented the wheel that we had invented back in the 1960s.

For example a lot of [the work I was doing] had to do with high speed flight and the radar- that was one of my specialties. I came from a programme where I was used to dealing with tracking planes so one of the things I did at Area 51 was radar tracking. We were developing the very first stealth plane but we didn’t know what the radar would see when it was flying overhead at 2,200 miles an hour.

They brought me out there because I was used to dealing with high speed radar [monitoring]. The plane would fly overhead and we would look for it with the radar. Technology like that that was really primitive back then, we marvel today they can do the same thing with computers, but we didn’t have computers back then.

When I was in the army I became a specialist in electronic counter measures. The CIA was evaluating the capabilities of the Soviet Union, would we be able to shoot this plane down, that sort of thing. So when the Russians set up camp in Cuba that made it really easy for the CIA to evaluate the equipment.

A lot of activity took place not necessarily at the area [Cuba]. That’s what few people know about. And that less than 5 per cent of all the people working on the programme even knew the CIA was involved.

I was on a special project working for the CIA. I was a consultant/contractor. I left them in 1975 and have always been available for consulting and that sort of thing and they call me up on different things but after that I went into private business, the oil and gas business.

I was loaned out to the Nevada test site [by the CIA] for a period to work on the rig that was drilling the holes for the atomic bomb and I got familiar with the drilling equipment and the geology and that sort of thing.

When I was in the army my wife knew I was working on top secret projects. The wives were very important in the screening process. Anyone who had a wife that was a security risk didn’t get into the programme. They’d vet the wives and families almost as strongly as they did us.

I think the reason [there are so many conspiracy theories] is that for many years no-one knew about Area 51. Then all of a sudden the general public found out that it had been there all these years and it was like “What had they been doing there?” and “Oh, it must be tied in with the aliens”.

We brought some of this on ourselves. For instance the A12 - we flew 2,850 missions out of area 51 from 1952 to 1958. So people were obviously seeing things. Even flying 90,000ft at 2,200 miles an hour, which is faster than a bullet, people would occasionally see it or maybe an airline pilot or people on a commercial airline - and to them it was a UFO.

We were so secret even our own military didn’t know that we existed. No-one knew that we existed. So the air forces started investigating the sightings and they would start getting too close to finding out what we were doing and they would hit that security block where someone said “That’s a top secret programme, make up a story, go home and don’t say another word about it”.

So they would make up a story to explain the UFO sighting and the stories were just not very good and the people just didn’t believe them and rightly so.

The rumours of aliens are not true. It was so primitive back when we drilled the first water wells out there in the desert, you just didn’t have anything, it was just desert. I think it was because it was such a mystery what was going on that’s what attracted the conspiracy theories.

The Soviets had satellites looking at us all the time, every 45 minutes one came over the horizon. If [there had been anything to do with aliens] going on Russia would have certainly known about it.

We got our hands on a Soviet Mig-21 [a jet fighter aircraft], to find out why they were giving us such a rough time and that was exciting. We were flying the enemy’s planes, tracking it with their radar. During the Six-Day War Israel captured a lot of Soviet radar and, of course, that was my area of expertise. We brought them out to Nevada and actually got them operating so that we could see what the Russians were seeing when they would track us.

That was a big part of the Stealth programme, we realised that we needed to have all these various radars scattered around the desert

Some of [the stuff I know] will probably never be declassified. A lot of it is political or based on technical details. A lot of it is just plain political.

I believe in secrecy. There’s a lot of stuff that should never be secret that is, but then when the CIA started declassifying the documents in 2007 they were putting major documents on their website. I told the CIA security people then “Are you crazy, the enemy would love to have this knowledge even though its 50 years old, it’s never been reinvented.” So we started working together on some of the sensitive things. They didn’t realise because they didn’t know enough about what we did.

Secrets don’t stay secret very long now, not like they used to.

Area 51: I Was There premieres on Sunday at 9pm on National Geographic Channel

3 of the FBI's real life X-Files investigated

From: http://dvice.com/archives/

A memo from FBI agent Guy Hottel that many believe proves Roswell's crashed saucer (more on that below).
It's one of many FBI docs now available.

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation's newly-revamped online "Vault" gives the public easy access to formerly-secret documents that detail everything from counter-terrorism investigations to rundowns on prominent individuals and potentially "subversive" national organizations.
It's a fascinating resource. For example, we were able to discover that the U.S. government spent actual time and money investigating the mid-1960s make-believe band, The Monkees. The curiously heavily-redacted Monkees dossier summarizes the pretend bands' television show as "four young men who dress as 'beatnik types' and is geared primarily to the teenage market." During a Monkees performance, a (name-redacted) source reports that an onstage screen flashed subliminal "left wing innovations of a political nature."
But the Bureau isn't all about keeping tabs on fake boy bands, assessing threatening letters sent to Colonel Sanders, or probing Carl Sagan's tenuous connections to Central American terrorists. They also launched numerous investigations into crazy supernatural stuff! The Vault's features previously secret FBI documents looking into phenomenon usually reserved for Hollywood-style escapism. Here's a look at some of the most fascinating real life X-Files.

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Mysterious Cattle Mutilations

As early as the 1960s, ranchers throughout several western states reported the mysterious deaths of stray cattle whose mutilated corpses were found butchered with near surgical precision and drained of their blood. Here's some gory details from a 1979 letter between state officials:

[Officer] O'Dell said the steer's scrotum and penis had been removed with surgical precision — a feature common to all previous mutilations — and indicated that patches of hair around the carcass seemed to indicate that the steer had been dropped or bounced — another feature common to all previous mutilations. The steer's intestines had been removed through the hole where the scrotum had been cut out, but were not disturbed.

Slowly, the strange phenomenon — which evidently occurred with some frequency — began to move beyond ranching circles into media and public at large. Rumors spread of helicopters and UFOs hovering over locations shortly before the mutilated bovines were discovered.
As early as 1974, there was some collaboration between the FBI and state investigators looking into the mutilations. But the record shows that by mid-decade local officials grew tired of ineffectual local investigations and began petitioning the FBI to take the lead. These correspondences largely consist of local press clippings detailing the bovine slayings backing up urgent appeals from senators and representatives. The FBI, for its part, seemed mostly reticent to launch an investigation into this spree of mysterious — but decidedly non-Federal — crimes. A 1975 letter from Colorado Senator Floyd Haskell to the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the investigation epitomizes the urgency felt by ranchers in his state:

...The bizarre mutilations are frightening in themselves: in virtually all the cases, the left ear, left eye, rectum, and sex organ of each animal has been cut away and the blood drained from the carcass, but with no traces of blood left on the ground and no foot-prints. In Colorado's Morgan County area, there has also been reports that a helicopter was used by those who mutilated the carcasses of the cattle, and several persons have reported being chased by a similar helicopter.

Freaky.
After lamenting the disorganized and un-serious investigations undertaken by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the Senator also goes on to describe a sort of mass hysteria overtaking his constituents.

Now it appears that ranchers are arming themselves to protect their livestock, as well as their families and themselves, because they are frustrated by the unsuccessful investigation. Clearly something must be done before someone gets hurt.

Apparently, the cattle mutilations became common enough that there was even an official mutilation form:

In 1979, a federal investigation into the mutilations was finally launched under the "Animal Mutilation Project." In March of 1980, we have a record of mysterious "flake" samples sent to FBI lab for examination and identification. The flakes corresponded to "a U.F.O. [that] was reportedly observed by a resident of Taos, New Mexico, reportedly hovering over a pickup truck. The next morning the enclosed powder flakes were reportedly recovered from the roof of the aforementioned pickup." The flakes turned out to be white enamel paint.
Documented cases of animal mutilations largely subsided in the U.S. after the federal investigation began (though similar incidences of "horse ripping" continued into the late-1990s in Europe). Officially, the authorities concluded that the mysterious mutilations were largely the work of natural wild life that would often attack the "soft" parts of deceased cows first, such as the ears, eyes, and genitals. Though, to this day, many aspects of the mutilation phenomenon remains officially unexplained.

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Extra Sensory Perception

Declassified CIA documents have revealed that the KGB was investigating the use of ESP (or "remote viewing") until as recently as the early 1990s. While citizens of the Cold War era could sleep better knowing Russian intelligence agency's plans of psychic imperialism didn't go unchecked, who was protecting brave American brainwaves on the domestic front? You may harbor visions of the FBI cultivating a covert Dreamscape team of subconscious commandos with a secret base buried under Mount Rushmore in Franklin Roosevelt's forehead. Unfortunately no super awesome dream warrior base existed.
But, boy, did the FBI want one!
In particular, there was a lot of back and forth regarding the astounding feats of a Richmond, Virginia-area man named William Foos. Mr. Foos used to travel around the mid-Atlantic region giving "demonstrations" of his extrasensory method, which he claimed was both authentic and teachable. Foos could boast some bona fides via past collaborations with Duke University's Department of Parapsychology (the department was the focal point of some ire by established academia in its day and has since divorced from the university and been reincarnated as the independent Rhine Research Center).
Foos, a high-school educated part-time railway employee, never charged admission for his demonstrations, but was actively seeking funding to set up a center which would teach the blind to see. Foos had hopes the proposed center would instate him as the organization's president while hiring various members of his family.
According to the released documents, Foos' presentations didn't do much to sway other government organizations such as the Blind Veterans Association. They did, however, manage to impress at least one agent who took in a demonstration at a D.C.-area American Legion Hall in July of 1957:

Mr. Foos, resident of Richmond, Va., is a high school graduate employed in a minor capacity with the C. and O. Railway. About two years ago he became interested in extra sensory perception (a term probably technically inaccurate) and began experimenting with members of his family. He claims to have achieved amazing success... Very simply, Foos claims the ability to teach the blind to see: in six months to teach a person without eyes to see sufficiently well to drive an automobile safely. He disclaims any supernatural power and, not being a scientist or physician, has no technical or scientific explanation.

After witnessing Mr. Foos' teenage daughter walk about a room while blindfolded, as well as reading and distinguishing colors "with complete ease," the agent speculates:

Should his claims be well-founded, there is no limit the value which could accrue to the FBI — complete and undetectable access to mail, the diplomatic pouch; visual access to buildings — the possibilities are unlimited insofar as law enforcement and counterintelligence are concerned.

I get the feeling think this special agent's brain might explode if he ever saw one episode of Mindfreak.

As fantastic as this may appear, the actuality of extra sensory perception has long been recognized — though not to the degree of perfection claimed by Mr. Foos. It is difficult to see how the Bureau can afford to not inquire into this matter fully. [REDACTED NAME], Bureau interest can be completely discreet and controlled and no embarrassment would result.

And then, unfortunately, the Freedom of Information Act came along and now the whole world is clued into the FBI's secret psychic shame. By 1960, the Bureau still kept a skeptical eye on Foos, but seemed willing to kick his particular skill set on over to the CIA or Army Intelligence.

Foos may, of course, be attempting to commercialize on a "fake trick" he and his daughter and the young boy have perfected. On the other hand there is a possibility that Foos does have extrasensory perception abilities. This, of course, is something we cannot afford to overlook in our work but we should not, however, under any circumstances allow Foos the privilege of indicating to outsiders the FBI is interested in his work... It is believed advisable, however, to have checks made with CIA and the Intelligence Division of the Army to determine what reaction those agencies had after witnessing the demonstration as put on by Foos, his daughter, and the young boy traveling with them.

In June of 1960, an FBI memorandum stated that "[Foos'] alleged powers [have] no scientific basis. Other Government agencies such as Veterans Administration, Central Intelligence Agency and Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence also checked on Foos and were highly skeptical of his work."
As for the FBI's current research into paranormal showmen, that part of the FBI story remains shrouded in mystery. Penn Jillette is pretty upfront with his anti-government views. Teller remains a bit more mum on the subject.

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Roswell

The majority of the the FBI's unexplained section is dedicated to UFO sightings, and in particular the reported "flying disc" which crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Roswell has been thrown back into the public's consciousness recently due to the implications in Annie Jacobson's new book about Area 51.
In her book, Jacobson's inside source claims that the Roswell crash did occur and strange child-sized alien-like bodies were recovered from the wreckage. However, according to Jacobson, the "crash" was part of a Soviet plot to disrupt U.S. society and defenses — a plan inspired by the chaos that unfolded in the wake of Orson Wells' War of The Worlds mockumentary broadcast from 1938. Most disturbingly, Jacobson's source claims there were actual child-sized human bodies recovered from the crash that were genetically or surgically altered to resemble extraterrestrials.
Which is almost a stranger concept than visiting aliens.
Here's the text of a 1950 memo from Special Agent Guy Hottel to the FBI Director regarding the Air Force's investigation into Roswell.

The following was furnished to [Special Agent in Charge], [REDACTED TEXT]... An investigator for the Air Force stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots.
According to Mr. [REDACTED] informant, the saucers were found in New Mexico due to the fact that the Government has a very high-powered radar set-up in that area and it is believed the radar interferes with the controlling mechanism of the saucers.
No further evaluation was attempted by S.A. [REDACTED] concerning the above.

This stands is some contrast to a 1947 memo from the Dallas FBI office to the Cincinnati branch which stands by the official story that the flying disc was a downed weather balloon.
There are literally hundreds of pages regarding UFO investigations in the FBI's vault. Much of these documents include press clippings in addition to correspondences with private individuals and organizations inquiring about the Bureau's investigations into the phenomenon.

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The truth is out there. And by "out there," we mean photocopied and available online. Happy reading!

For the latest tech stories, follow us on Twitter at @dvice

SETI Turns Radio Telescopes Toward Kepler Candidate Planets, Listening for Signs of Life

Listening to places where conditions are right for life

By Rebecca Boyle

From http://www.popsci.com/

Is There Anybody Out There? The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope, is listening to 86 Kepler candidate Earth-like planets in the hopes of hearing from alien life. Wikimedia Commons

A gigantic radio telescope in Virginia has started listening to 86 Earth-like planet candidates identified by the Kepler Space Telescope, hoping to hear signs of alien life. Astronomers aren’t even sure the stars to which they are listening actually harbor planets, let alone radio-communicating extraterrestrials, but hey, we might as well bend an ear, right?

The SETI Institute is looking at Earth-like (rocky) planets with a focus on those with temperatures between 0 and 100 °C (32° and 212 °F), where liquid water can exist. As far as our Earth-biased science can tell us, that’s a crucial ingredient for life.SETI has been listening to parts of the sky for decades, but pointing directly at Kepler findings stands among the project’s best-informed attempts yet. The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico looks at stars like the sun, hoping they might have planets around them.

“But we’ve never had a list of planets like this before,” said physicist Dan Werthimer, director of the SETI project at Arecibo, in an interview with AFP.

In February, Kepler scientists announced they had found 1,235 potential planets orbiting sun-like stars in the Milky Way, including 68 approximately Earth-size and 288 super-Earth-size. Scientists have been verifying and refining the measurements in the months since.

The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope will gather 24 hours of data on each of 86 planets identified this spring by the Kepler space telescope science team as potential Earth-like planets in “Goldilocks” orbits, where conditions are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water.

SETI has its own telescopes, too, but apparently they’ve gone dark for a lack of funding, according to the AFP — SETI announced last month it was shutting down its 42-dish Allen Telescope Array because of a budget shortfall, AFP reports. While the 4-year-old, $50 million project is on hiatus, the Green Bank telescope will assume its responsibilities.

While Arecibo will also keep listening, Green Bank can hear a lot more — it scans 300 times the range of frequencies that Arecibo can, so it can collect as much data in one day as Arecibo could in one year.

The Kepler listening project will take about a year, AFP reports. SETI@home users will help crunch the data; the program uses small bits of unused processing power from idle Internet-connected computers to run calculations. You can find out more, and sign up to help, by clicking here.

[AFP]

NASA Finds New Life (Updated with Pictures)

From: http://gizmodo.com/5704158/nasa-finds-new-life

Hours before their special news conference today, the cat is out of the bag: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn't share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. This changes everything. Updated.

At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

 
The new life forms up close, at five micrometers.

But not this one. This one is completely different. We knew that there were microorganisms that processed arsenic, but this bacteria—discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California—is actually made of arsenic, with phosphorus absent from its DNA. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don't have to be like planet Earth.

 
Even closer, showing their internal structure.
No details have been disclosed about the origin or nature of this new life form. We will know more today at 2pm EST but, while this life hasn't been found in another planet, this discovery does indeed change everything we know about biology. I don't know about you but I've not been so excited about a bacteria since my STD tests came back clean. And that's without counting yesterday's announcement on the discovery of a massive number of red dwarf stars, which may harbor a trillion Earths, dramatically increasing our chances of finding extraterrestrial life. [NOS—In Dutch]

Mono Lake photography by Sathish J — Creative Commons

THIS MAN REALLY, REALLY LIKES E.T.

From: http://www.viceland.com/

Nick Gjoka got his first E.T. toy soon after he saw the film, when he was four. When he hit his teens he stepped up his game and started hunting for more obscure bits of E.T. merchandise in flea markets and yard sales. Then came eBay. “When I turned 21 or 22, that’s when I started to really collect,” he says. He’s now 32, and estimates there are thousands of items in his collection. He didn’t want to discuss such matters over the phone so we enjoyed this sprightly email exchange.

Vice: What’s your living situation?
Nick: In March, I moved in with my Grandmother who has Alzheimer’s, to take care of her in Pennsylvania. My collection is mostly boxed up in a storage spot. I don’t collect as much as I used to, but when I do find something I usually bring it here first or have the item shipped here and my family doesn’t mind. They think that it’s funny and they always ask questions about it.

What do you do for a living?
My “life” is on hold right now. All I do is take care of my grandmother. It truly is a 24/7 job. Everyday I also ride my bike (bicycles and no, not one with an E.T. on front), meditate, read, workout, and cook. My Gram and I like to take naps watching Lifetime TV network movies too. When I’m not doing this, I can be found (or not found) traveling, touring, cooking, skating, cycling, snowboarding and going to shows.

What do you think it is that compels you to collect?
I’m pretty sure it’s in the family. My parents collect and sell antiques. I was raised around it. An average summer holiday get away would be for a weekend of drag racing, flea markets, 50’s doo-wop, rock ‘n roll, and hot rods. I used to hate it back then but I look back at it now and I am glad that I was raised around that stuff. Besides that, I really like E.T. because it reminds me about my Grandfather that I had growing up. I can clearly remember opening one of my first E.T. toys at his house on Christmas morning. He was my only Grandfather growing up, and I thought maybe my collecting was a connection with him. When I was younger and had started collecting, E.T. items became an easy gift to get me, so all of a sudden I had a huge collection and started looking for more rare E.T. things.

Do you think there’s some OCD going on here?
After that comment I made up above (he was my only Grandfather, growing up and I thought maybe my collecting was a connection with him), I sound like some of the people on those reality TV shows about hoarding. I probably do have OCD with other things in my life but not with my collecting. Now it’s just an on-and-off hobby for me. It’s not like crack where I NEED to have this E.T. doll to where I would go beg someone for money. I’m a 31-year-old straightedge vegan guy so I don’t waste money on a Big Mac before washing it down with a beer after, so I have some extra money lying around. I’ll buy an E.T. item if the mood strikes and if it’s something that I don’t already have.

When people you meet find out about your E.T. collection, what do they think about it?
I typically don’t tell people. I have a couple of E.T. tattoos so sometimes someone may ask about them and it will lead into some other E.T. discussions. If I do meet someone who knows about my collection it is usually because a mutual friend might have mentioned it to them. More often then not, people are usually totally down with it and want to see it. A lot of people talk about an E.T. toy they had as a kid and they say something like, “If I can find it, I’ll give it to you.” I like when people try to find something I don’t already have. It’s nice.

Have you met any other big E.T. fans?
Well not to boast, but I AM THE BIGGEST E.T. FAN! Seriously though, I have met a few other collectors through eBay over the years. We’ll swap stories, collectibles etc. One other fan started collecting because his mum had an E.T. collection so he just continued it. Another collector from the UK is a little girl. E.T. is her favorite movie and her family buys her tons of E.T. stuff. Other collectors are fans of Spielberg’s movies and this being one of the most popular ones, they collect E.T. items.

What’s the most expensive E.T. thing you’ve bought?
The most expensive item that I paid for would be an E.T. clothes hamper. It is basically a life-size E.T. doll that opens in the back to put stuff in. Items that should have been more but I found for cheap were some candid production photos and crew items. The item that’s worth the most to me would be the E.T. toys that my grandfather gave me when I was a little kid.

What’s the worst piece of E.T. merchandise you’ve seen?
There are too many bootleg items to mention! The official red light-up finger that was sold in 1982 is pretty phallic and disturbing looking.

I hear you own a piece of E.T.’s foot.
I guess when I say “foot”, it’s kind of a stretch. It is really a piece of foam from the puppet’s foot. It was sent to Collegeville Costumes as a color swatch so they could get the color correct in the making of the E.T. Halloween costumes that they made in 1982. It was a plastic mask with a smock/bib plastic like top. The costume company couldn’t get the color correct so they sent a piece of the original E.T. from the film. I received it along with some correspondence letter between the producer of the film and someone at Collegeville Costumes.

What bootleg stuff have you got? Would you buy anything that was E.T. branded, even unofficial rubbish?
I have some ceramic E.T. dolls, some school supplies and a cookie jar. I like to buy more official stuff but once in a while I see some outrageous bootleg item that I have to have! A couple of my friends (not E.T. collectors) like to collect weird bootleg stuff too so we look out for each other. Along with that, another one of the E.T. collectors focuses on bootleg stuff so I try not to bid on it.

What about the Turkish E.T. rip-off?
You mean Badi? I have yet to see it.

What about E.T. porn?
Oh geez. I’ve heard about at least two different ones involving E.T. but I don’t bother with any of that.

Do you think you’ll stop collecting at some point?
I go in spurts. I will go for a week, checking eBay and then I’ll go for a month or two and not check it. If I got a fair offer for the collection, I would sell the whole thing!

Tell us about the Halloween parade, when you and your friends dress up and ride through New York.
NYC has an annual Halloween parade that goes up 6th Ave for over 20 blocks. It is a huge deal and people come out from all over! The first time my friends and I just wanted to ride around through Brooklyn and NYC on Halloween dressed up like Elliot, with E.T. in a basket on the front of our bikes. One of my friends that rode the first couple of times was also an E.T. fan and bit of a collector. Over the years it has evolved and the group became bigger and bigger. The last time we did it, we had it down to a science. We knew the best ways to attach the crates to the bikes, we had the E.T. bust already made, we had extra red hoodies, white blankets, and BMX bikes in case anyone wanted to join us. We had at least eight riders as opposed to the three we had the first time. After a friend would do it once they would always want to do it the next year too. It was soooooooo much fun!

You also run a Morrissey blog. How does Morrissey compare to E.T.?
I don’t think they are similar at all. I would love for someone to try and find some similarities. Some people are maniacs. They will over analyze stuff and somehow make a connection. Oh wait, how about this one? E.T. came out in 1982 and The Smiths started in 1982!!! Bam! there you go, there’s your connection. People are strange.

If E.T. came down and visited you and asked you to go off in his spaceship forever, would you go?
Those kind of ideas are on some next level. That’s some Star Trek nerd’s fantasy, not mine. It’s just a hobby for me and a way for someone to finally notice me in this cold miserable world.

ALEX GODFREY

You can see more of Nick’s collection at www.iloveet.com

First Direct Photo of Alien Planet Finally Confirmed

By Denise Chow SPACE.com Staff Writer

A planet outside of our solar system, said to be the first ever directly photographed by telescopes on Earth, has been officially confirmed to be orbiting a sun-like star, according to follow-up observations.

The alien planet is eight times the mass of Jupiter and orbits at an unusually great distance from its host star — more than 300 times farther from the star than our Earth is from the sun.

Astronomers first discovered the planet in 2008 using visible light observations from telescopes on Earth, making it the first direct photo of an extrasolar world. But at the time there was still the remote chance that it only looked like it was orbiting the star, from the perspective of Earth, due to a lucky alignment of object, star and observer.

"Our new observations rule out this chance alignment possibility, and thus confirms that the planet and the star are related to each other," said astronomer David Lafreniere, who led the research team that discovered the planet.

The new observations that confirm the planet circles its parent star were made using high-resolution adaptive optics technology at the Gemini Observatory. The observatory is an international collaboration with two identical 8-meter telescopes, located at Mauna Kea, Hawaii and Cerro Pachon in northern Chile.

Planet around young star

The host star, which has an estimated mass of about 85 percent that of our sun, is located approximately 500 light-years away in a group of young stars called the Upper Scorpius Association that formed about 5 million years ago.

The planet has an estimated temperature of over 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1,500 degrees Celsius). This makes the planet much hotter than Jupiter, which has an atmospheric cloud-top temperature of approximately minus 166 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 110 degrees Celsius).

The relatively young age of the system — our solar system is 4.6 billion years old — explains the high temperature of the planet, according to the researchers. [The Strangest Alien Planets]

The contraction of the planet under its own gravity during its formation quickly raised its temperature to thousands of degrees. But, once this contraction phase is over, the planet will slowly cool down by radiating infrared light. Within billions of years, the planet will eventually reach a temperature that is much more similar to that of Jupiter.

Tale of a planet find

Lafreniere and his research team firstannounced their planet's discovery in September 2008. At the time he was at the University of Toronto, but is now at the University of Montreal and Center for Research in Astrophysics of Quebec.

In 2008, the researchers claimed that the discovery also represented thefirst picture of a planet that orbits around a star similar to our sun. Other astronomers have also made similar claims, including a 2004 discovery of an object that could be a planet or a type of failed star called a brown dwarf.

"Back in 2008 what we knew for sure was that there was this young planetary mass object sitting right next to a young sun-like star on the sky," Lafreniere said.

The close proximity of the two cosmic objects seemed to suggest that they were associated with each other, but there was a possibility — albeit unlikely — that they were unrelated and had only aligned in the sky by chance. One of the objects might have been closer or farther by considerable distance. So more observations were required to confirm the cosmic find.

The results of the study will be published in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

The system, known as 1RXS J160929.1-210524 (or 1RXS 1609 for short), will give scientists a unique example to study, as its extreme separation from the star seems to challenge common planetary formation theories.

"The unlikely locale of this alien world could be telling us that nature has more than one way of making planets," said the study's co-author Ray Jayawardhana of the University of Toronto. "Or, it could be hinting at a violent youth when close encounters between newborn planets hurl some siblings out to the hinterlands."

The team of astronomers initially detected the exoplanet using the Gemini Observatory in April 2008, which made it the first likely planet known to orbit a sun-like star that was revealed by direct imaging. At the time, the researchers also obtained a spectrum of the planet and were able to determine many of its characteristics, which are confirmed in the new study.

"In retrospect, this makes our initial data the first spectrum of a confirmed exoplanet ever!," Lafreniere said.

The spectrum illustrates absorption features due to water vapor, carbon monoxide and molecular hydrogen in the planet's atmosphere.

Other distant planets photographed

This is not the only exoplanet to be discovered using direct imaging.

Since initially observing 1RXS 1609, several other alien worlds have also been found, including a system of three planets that orbit around the star HR 8799. This discovery was also made using the Gemini Observatory.

The latest exoplanet confirmation is unique, however, because the planets around HR 8799 orbit much closer to their host star.

The study of 1RXS 1609 also verified that no additional large planets (between one and eight times the mass of Jupiter) are present in the system that are closer to the star.

Future observations may reveal evidence on the origin of thestrangely far-out planet. In fact, within a few years, it should be possible to detect a slight difference in the motion of the planet and its star, due to their mutual orbits.

This difference, however, will be "very small," said the study's co-author Marten van Kerkwijk of the University of Toronto, since the fastest possible orbital period is more than one thousand years.

Clocking alien planet's speed

But, using Gemini, it is possible to precisely measure the velocity of the planet relative to its host star.

This can help astronomers determine whether the planet is following a roughly circular orbit — as would be expected if it really formed far from its host star — or whether it is in a very non-circular or even unbound orbit. The latter could be the case if it formed closer to the star but was kicked out as a result of an encounter with another alien planet, researchers said.

The adaptive optics system on the Gemini telescopes were crucial to making the observations of 1RXS 1609.

"Without adaptive optics, we would simply have been unable to see this planet," Lafreniere said. "The atmosphere blurs the image of a star so much that it extends over and is much brighter than the image of a faint planet around it, rendering the planet undetectable. Adaptive optics removes this blurring and provides a better view of faint objects very close to stars."

• Gallery - Strangest Alien Planets
• Top 10 Extreme Planet Facts
• Hundreds of Possible Alien Planets Discovered By NASA Spacecraft

Is Stephen Hawking right about aliens?

Stephen Hawking thinks that making contact with aliens would be a very bad idea indeed. But with new, massive telescopes, we humans are stepping up the search. Have we really thought this through?

• • Alok Jha
  • The Guardian

Close enough? A scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Photograph: Allstar/COLUMBIA/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

In February 2008, Nasa sent the Beatles song, Across the Universe, across the universe. Pointing the telescopes in its Deep Space Network towards the north star, Polaris, astronomers played out their short cosmic DJ set, hoping that it might be heard by intelligent aliens during its 430-year journey to the star.

The hunt for intelligent species outside Earth may be a staple of literature and film – but it is happening in real life, too. Nasa probes are on the lookout for planets outside our solar system, and astronomers are carefully listening for any messages being beamed through space. How awe-inspiring it would be to get confirmation that we are not alone in the universe, to finally speak to an alien race. Wouldn't it?

Well no, according to the eminent physicist Stephen Hawking. "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," Hawking has said in a forthcoming documentary made for the Discovery Channel. He argues that, instead of trying to find and communicate with life in the cosmos, humans would be better off doing everything they can to avoid contact.
Hawking believes that, based on the sheer number of planets that scientists know must exist, we are not the only life-form in the universe. There are, after all, billions and billions of stars in our galaxy alone, with, it is reasonable to expect, an even greater number of planets orbiting them. And it is not unreasonable to expect some of that alien life to be intelligent, and capable of interstellar communication. So, when someone with Hawking's knowledge of the universe advises against contact, it's worth listening, isn't it?

Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Seti Institute in California, the world's leading organisation searching for telltale alien signals, is not so sure. "This is an unwarranted fear," Shostak says. "If their interest in our planet is for something valuable that our planet has to offer, there's no particular reason to worry about them now. If they're interested in resources, they have ways of finding rocky planets that don't depend on whether we broadcast or not. They could have found us a billion years ago."

If we were really worried about shouting in the stellar jungle, Shostak says, the first thing to do would be to shut down the BBC, NBC, CBS and the radars at all airports. Those broadcasts have been streaming into space for years – the oldest is already more than 80 light years from Earth – so it is already too late to stop passing aliens watching every episode of Big Brother or What Katie and Peter Did Next.

The biggest and most active hunt for life outside Earth started in 1960, when Frank Drake pointed the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia towards the star Tau Ceti. He was looking for anomalous radio signals that could have been sent by intelligent life. Eventually, his idea turned into Seti (standing for Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence), which used the downtime on radar telescopes around the world to scour the sky for any signals. For 50 years, however, the sky has been silent.

There are lots of practical problems involved in hunting for aliens, of course, chief among them being distance. If our nearest neighbours were life-forms on the (fictional) forest moon of Endor, 1,000 light years away, it would take a millennium for us to receive any message they might send. If the Endorians were watching us, the light reaching them from Earth at this very moment would show them our planet as it was 1,000 years ago; in Europe that means lots of fighting between knights around castles and, in north America, small bands of natives living on the great plains. It is not a timescale that allows for quick banter – and, anyway, they might not be communicating in our direction.

The lack of a signal from ET has not, however, prevented astronomers and biologists (not to mention film-makers) coming up with a whole range of ideas about what aliens might be like. In the early days of Seti, astronomers focused on the search for planets like ours – the idea being that, since the only biology we know about is our own, we might as well assume aliens are going to be something like us. But there's no reason why that should be true. You don't even need to step off the Earth to find life that is radically different from our common experience of it.

"Extremophiles" are species that can survive in places that would quickly kill humans and other "normal" life-forms. These single-celled creatures have been found in boiling hot vents of water thrusting through the ocean floor, or at temperatures well below the freezing point of water. The front ends of some creatures that live near deep-sea vents are 200C warmer than their back ends.

"In our naive and parochial way, we have named these things extremophiles, which shows prejudice – we're normal, everything else is extreme," says Ian Stewart, a mathematician at Warwick University and author of What Does A Martian Look Like? "From the point of view of a creature that lives in boiling water, we're extreme because we live in much milder temperatures. We're at least as extreme compared to them as they are compared to us."

On Earth, life exists in water and on land but, on a giant gas planet, for example, it might exist high in the atmosphere, trapping nutrients from the air swirling around it. And given that aliens may be so out of our experience, guessing motives and intentions if they ever got in touch seems beyond the realm's even of Hawking's mind.

Paul Davies, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University and chair of Seti's post-detection taskforce, argues that alien brains, with their different architecture, would interpret information very differently from ours. What we think of as beautiful or friendly might come across as violent to them, or vice versa. "Lots of people think that because they would be so wise and knowledgeable, they would be peaceful," adds Stewart. "I don't think you can assume that. I don't think you can put human views on to them; that's a dangerous way of thinking. Aliens are alien. If they exist at all, we cannot assume they're like us."

Answers to some of these conundrums will begin to emerge in the next few decades. The researchers at the forefront of the work are astrobiologists, working in an area that has steadily marched in from the fringes of science thanks to the improvements in technology available to explore space.

Scientists discovered the first few extrasolar planets in the early 1990s and, ever since, the numbers have shot up. Today, scientists know of 443 planets orbiting around more than 350 stars. Most are gas giants in the mould of Jupiter, the smallest being Gliese 581, which has a mass of 1.9 Earths. In 2009, Nasa launched the Kepler satellite, a probe specifically designed to look for Earth-like planets.

Future generations of ground-based telescopes, such as the proposed European Extremely Large Telescope (with a 30m main mirror), could be operational by 2030, and would be powerful enough to image the atmospheres of faraway planets, looking for chemical signatures that could indicate life. The Seti Institute also, finally, has a serious piece of kit under construction: the Allen Array (funded by a $11.5m/£7.5m donation from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen) has, at present, 42 radio antennae, each six metres in diameter, but there are plans, if the Seti Institute can raise another $35m, to have up to 300 radio dishes.

In all the years that Seti has been running, it has managed to look carefully at less than 1,000 star systems. With the full Allen Array, they could look at 1,000 star systems in a couple of years.

Shostak is confident that, as telescope technology keeps improving, Seti will find an ET signal within the next two decades. "We will have looked at another million star systems in two dozen years. If this is going to work, it will work soon."

And what happens if and when we detect a signal? "My strenuous advice will be that the coordinates of the transmitting entity should be kept confidential, until the world community has had a chance to evaluate what it's dealing with," Davies told the Guardian recently. "We don't want anybody just turning a radio telescope on the sky and sending their own messages to the source."

But his colleague, Shostak, says we should have no such concerns. "You'll have told the astronomical community – that's thousands of people. Are you going to ask them all not to tell anybody where you're pointing your antenna? There's no way you could do that.

"And anyway, why wouldn't you tell them where [the alien lifeform] is? Are you afraid people will broadcast their own message? They might do that but, remember, The Gong Show has already been broadcast for years." And, for that matter, the Beatles.

Only Aliens Could Survive Through Torture Like This

From: http://gizmodo.com/

Some think animals who live without oxygen are proof of alien existence, but how about little creatures who can be dried out, frozen, and boiled only to be resurrected with a few drops of water? Are those our next overlords?

The creatures in the video are rotifers—tiny and resilient little beasts. Their ability to survive through even the most extreme conditions makes scientists daydream about how life might travel to and from the far ends of space.

As those scientists daydream, I'm having nightmares of alien invasions.

Send an email to Rosa Golijan, the author of this post, at rgolijan@gizmodo.com.

Seti: The hunt for ET

Scientists have been searching for aliens for 50 years, scanning the skies with an ever-more sophisticated array of radio telescopes and computers. Known as Seti, the search marks its half-century this month. Jennifer Armstrong and Andrew Johnson examine its close – and not so close – encounters

Rex

Scientists have been searching for aliens for 50 years