UK airline pilots spot "mile-wide" UFO

Two experienced airline pilots at the controls of separate flights have reported seeing a mystery object "up to a mile wide" hovering off the coast of Alderney on Monday, This is Guernsey reports. Captain Ray Bowyer, 50, of local airline Aurigny, spotted a "bright-yellow light" 10 miles west of Alderney at about 3pm during a flight from Southampton while his aircraft was 30 miles from the island at 4,000ft.He recounted: "It was a very sharp, thin yellow object with a green area. It was 2,000ft up and stationary. I thought it was about 10 miles away, although I later realised it was approximately 40 miles from us. At first, I thought it was the size of a [Boeing] 737."But it must have been much bigger because of how far away it was. It could have been as much as a mile wide."Continuing his approach to Guernsey, Bowyer spied a "second identical object further to the west". He said: "It was exactly the same but looked smaller because it was further away. It was closer to Guernsey. I can't explain it. At first, I thought it might have been a reflection from a vinery in Guernsey, but that would have disappeared quickly. This was clearly visual for about nine minutes.

"As I got closer to it, it became clear to me that it was tangible. I was in two minds about going towards it to have a closer look but decided against it because of the size of it. I had to think of the safety of the passengers first. I'm certainly not saying that it was something of another world. All I'm saying is that I have never seen anything like it before in all my years of flying."Bowyer described his sightings to ATC. Paul Kelly, 31, the duty air traffic controller at the time, said "nothing had appeared on his radar", but that he'd received a "similar report" from a Blue Islands pilot en route to Jersey at the same time. Kelly explained that as the pilot went past Sark he "described an object behind him to his left".

MoD probe into UFO sightings

Residents who all witnessed UFOs on the same night have come forward to report their sightings, and the incident is now being investigated by the Ministry of Defence. The massive response follows an appeal in last week's Reporter, by a young couple who thought they were 'going mad' after a close encounter.Claims made by Stacy Shaw, 19, and Gavin Drummond, 22, that they saw 'burning balls of fire', before midnight on Saturday (15) have been echoed by other witnesses.Stories given by nine residents share striking similarities, all report seeing moving lights in the sky at almost the exact same time. Now a UFO expert who also saw the objects has asked the Ministry of Defence (MoD) for an explanation. Frank Salmon, 46, from Kings Drive, Gravesend, is a member of organisation UFOMEK (UFO Monitoring, East Kent).He said: "When I first saw them, I thought they were meteorites. But then my daughter said, 'they're coming up from the ground daddy!'"Sightings have been reported in Singlewell, Northfleet and Gravesend. Many residents saw the mysterious floating objects from their gardens, and many followed them in cars. They are also reported to have been moving in organised formations.

Mr Salmon added: "We have contacted the MoD, they will do a proper investigation and be able to tell us if there was any unusual air-traffic that night."One possible explanation is that the moving objects were floating Chinese lanterns, perhaps used as part of a celebration earlier that day.Resident Malcolm Eggleton, 70, said: "I saw them in the sky on Saturday when I was leaving a party, and I saw something similar about a year ago.

The search for life gets serious

Swiss scientist Michel Mayor, who heads the European team that announced the discovery of a new potentially habitable planet, has his sights set on an even bigger target, detecting signs of extraterrestrial life. Mayor predicts that top researchers are less than two decades away from being able to detect real signs of such life -- if it exists. "There's only one thing we can do. We can do science, we can do experiments. We have the methodology, the ability to do this simply on science, so let's do it,'' the University of Geneva scientist said Wednesday. Mayor, who was credited in 1995 with co-finding the first planets outside our solar system, said the scientist in him was unsure of the presence of other life forms in our universe. "But, personally, I feel comfortable with the idea of life existing elsewhere,'' the 65-year-old said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. Leading astronomers are describing the discovery of the new planet as a big step in the search for life in the universe because it is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away.

But there is still a lot that is unknown about the new planet, named 581 c, discovered by the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile. The telescope, which Mayor helped design, has a special instrument that splits light to find wobbles in different wave lengths, revealing the possible existence of other worlds. "It is an absolutely fantastic instrument with great precision,'' Mayor said, but added that the planet's diameter, atmospheric makeup and contents have yet to be confirmed.

New Earth-like planet discovered

It's got the same climate as Earth, plus water and gravity. A newly discovered planet is the most stunning evidence that life - just like us - might be out there. Above a calm, dark ocean, a huge, bloated red sun rises in the sky - a full ten times the size of our Sun as seen from Earth. Small waves lap at a sandy shore and on the beach, something stirs... This is the scene - or may be the scene - on what is possibly the most extraordinary world to have been discovered by astronomers: the first truly Earth-like planet to have been found outside our Solar System. The discovery was announced today by a team of European astronomers, using a telescope in La Silla in the Chilean Andes. If forced bookies to slash odds on the existence of alien beings. The Earth-like planet that could be covered in oceans and may support life is 20.5 light years away, and has the right temperature to allow liquid water on its surface. This remarkable discovery appears to confirm the suspicions of most astronomers that the universe is swarming with Earth-like worlds. We don't yet know much about this planet, but scientists believe that it may be the best candidate so far for supporting extraterrestrial life.

The new planet, which orbits a small, red star called Gliese 581, is about one-and-a-half times the diameter of the Earth. It probably has a substantial atmosphere and may be covered with large amounts of water - necessary for life to evolve - and, most importantly, temperatures are very similar to those on our world. It is the first exoplanet (a planet orbiting a star other than our own Sun) that is anything like our Earth. Of the 220 or so exoplanets found to date, most have either been too big, made of gas rather than solid material, far too hot, or far too cold for life to survive.

'Kryptonite' discovered in mine

Kryptonite is no longer just the stuff of fiction feared by caped superheroes. A new mineral matching its unique chemistry - as described in the film Superman Returns - has been identified in a mine in Serbia. According to movie and comic-book storylines, kryptonite is supposed to sap Superman's powers whenever he is exposed to its large green crystals. The real mineral is white and harmless, says Dr Chris Stanley, a mineralogist at London's Natural History Museum. "I'm afraid it's not green and it doesn't glow either - although it will react to ultraviolet light by fluorescing a pinkish-orange," he told BBC News. Researchers from mining group Rio Tinto discovered the unusual mineral and enlisted the help of Dr Stanley when they could not match it with anything known previously to science. Once the London expert had unravelled the mineral's chemical make-up, he was shocked to discover this formula was already referenced in literature - albeit fictional literature. "Towards the end of my research I searched the web using the mineral's chemical formula - sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide - and was amazed to discover that same scientific name, written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luthor from a museum in the film Superman Returns.

"The new mineral does not contain fluorine (which it does in the film) and is white rather than green but, in all other respects, the chemistry matches that for the rock containing kryptonite." The mineral is relatively hard but is very small grained. Each individual crystal is less than five microns (millionths of a metre) across. Identifying its atomic structure required sophisticated analytical facilities at Canada's National Research Council and the assistance and expertise of its researchers, Dr Pamela Whitfield and Dr Yvon Le Page. "'Knowing a material's crystal structure means scientists can calculate other physical properties of the material, such as its elasticity or thermochemical properties," explained Dr Le Page.

Was the Roswell evidence switched ?

Kevin Randle: Cruising the blogoshpere the other day, I happened on a site that told me that the Roswell case was basically over and for proof offered the fact that the debris in General Ramey’s (that is Brigadier General Roger Ramey, at the time the commander of the Eighth Air Force) office had not been switched. This was based on an interview that Jaime Shandera had conducted with Colonel Thomas DuBose. For a little background, let’s review. In July 1947, seven pictures were taken in Ramey’s office of the material brought from Roswell. From the pictures, it’s clear that what Major Jesse Marcel, the Air Intelligence officer is holding, are the remnants of a rawin radar detector, launched by weather services to track winds aloft. In this case, the skeptics have suggested it was part of an array train that was used by the then highly classified Project Mogul. The point is, if this is truly what Marcel found in the desert, and this is truly the stuff that he brought from New Mexico, then we have solved the mystery. Roswell was a weather balloon and for some bizarre reason neither Marcel nor the commander of the 509th Bomb Group, Colonel William Blanchard were able to recognize it.

But in all things Roswell there is a complication. Colonel Thomas DuBose, the Chief of Staff of the Eighth Air Force, the parent organization to the 509th , and who appears in two of the pictures, said that the real debris was switched and that what was left was the balloon material. If true, then what is in the pictures tells us nothing about what was found in Roswell, and the idea of a cover-up is planted. If it was a balloon, even a top-secret Mogul balloon, there was no need for a switch.

Chilean army discloses UFO contact

Inexplicata: The Journal of Hispanic Ufology reports in its 7 February 2007 Edition that Chilean Army Discloses Recordings and Secret Contacts with UFOs. The evidence was presented before one thousand people at the 10th International UFO Congress, which highlighted a video taken seven years ago, showing moments in which Navy vessels and helicopters pursue a UFO that was even picked up on radar. Santiago de Chile - The Chilean Army revealed to the UFO community classified material regarding recordings and encounters between the military and UFOs over the past 30 years, according to the El Mercurio newspaper in early February 2007. The evidence was presented at the 10th International UFO Congress, highlighting the display of a video that captures a UFO pursuit by surface vessels and helicopters of the Chilean Navy seven years ago, according to Rodrigo Fuenzalida, director of the Agrupacio de Investigaciones Ovnilogicas (AION).

Another pursuit took place on March 27, 2000 when a Citation 2 military aircraft crossed an unidentified flying object, measuring 40 meters in length, at an altitude of 1000 meters and 100 kilometres away from the Chilean capital. Disclosure of this information was authorized by Oscar Izurieta, Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, and forms part of an official investigation undertaken by Rodrigo Bravo, captain of the Army's 5th Division, who participates in the congress, which is being held at the Viña del Mar resort 120 kilometres distant from Santiago de Chile.

'Alien' artifact found in Siberia ?

Scientists from the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk claim that they have discovered several artifacts with extraterrestrial writings near the fall site of the Tunguska meteorite, the Regnum news agency reports. The president of the Tunguska Space Phenomenon research foundation told reporters that several quartz boulders with mysterious writings on them were found in the Tunguska river basin in 2006. The boulders were tested in Krasnoyarsk and Moscow and test results speak for the fact that they are of extraterrestrial origin, he said.The boulders were covered in strange signs of artificial origin, presumably made with plasma.Russian researchers suggested a hypothesis that the quartz tablets were parts of an information container delivered to Earth by the extraterrestrial spaceship that crashed in Tunguska region in 1908.Russian researcher also said that scientists from the United States, Britain, France and Germany have requested the newly-found artifacts for research, but Russians want to be the first people to decode the message from another civilization.

Mystery stone eggs discovered

A large number of "stone eggs" were recently discovered along with a copper sword at a construction site in Bandeng Hill and Zhanlong Hill, Gongxi Town of Hunan Province. The discoveries were made by highway construction workers while they were digging the foundation for a road. The origin of the stone eggs is currently unknown as it is reported that further analysis by experts will be required to determine what they are and where they came from. The construction workers said that Bandeng Hill is quite simply a stone-egg mountain. They found multiple nests of unique stone eggs throughout the course of digging the road's foundation. The eggs are oval in shape, with a wide range of sizes; the smallest one being no bigger than a water melon, while the largest is reported as being the size of a big table. Upon closer examination they look like eggs from the outside, but are very shiny and black on the inside. The copper sword which the construction team had also discovered was found to weigh over 1,000 pounds. Unfortunately the sword disappeared later and there are no leads as to the identities of the people involved in the theft. The incident has been reported to the police. Upon photo analysis geologists believe that the stone eggs are rare, large concretions of the carbonate rock. They were formed, starting from a tiny nucleus in the center, snowballing slowly in the oscillating sea water.

The exact ingredients and the purpose of the stone eggs can only be determined through further analysis. After the eggs had been unearthed, some villagers took them home to use as benches, some put them in their living rooms on display as family treasures, and some even carried them with a truck to sell at market in the neighboring towns. The Mayor of Gongxi, Yao Ji, also said that many similar stone eggs had been unearthed at the construction site in Moshou Village.

Probe results are in - was Einstein right ?

For the past three years a satellite has circled the Earth, collecting data to determine whether two predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity are correct. Saturday, at the American Physical Society meeting in Jacksonville, Fla., Professor Francis Everitt, a Stanford University physicist and principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B ( GP-B ) Relativity Mission, a collaboration of Stanford, NASA and Lockheed Martin, provided the first public peek at data that will reveal whether Einstein's theory has been confirmed by the most sophisticated orbiting laboratory ever created. "Gravity Probe B has been a great scientific adventure for all of us, and we are grateful to NASA for its long history of support," Everitt said. "My colleagues and I [presented] the first results [Saturday, April 14] and [Sunday, April 15]. It's fascinating to be able to watch the Einstein warping of space-time directly in the tilting of these GP-B gyroscopes—more than a million times better than the best inertial navigation gyroscopes." The GP-B satellite was launched in April 2004. It collected more than a year's worth of data that the Stanford GP-B science team has been poring over for the past 18 months. The satellite was designed as a pristine, space-borne laboratory, whose sole task was to use four ultra-precise gyroscopes to measure directly two effects predicted by general relativity.

GP-B scientists expect to announce the final results of the experiment in December 2007, following eight months of further data analysis and refinement. Today, Everitt and his team are poised to share what they have found so far—namely that the data from the GP-B gyroscopes clearly confirm Einstein's predicted geodetic effect to a precision of better than 1 percent. However, the frame-dragging effect is 170 times smaller than the geodetic effect, and Stanford scientists are still extracting its signature from the spacecraft data. The GP-B instrument has ample resolution to measure the frame-dragging effect precisely, but the team has discovered small torque and sensor effects that must be accurately modeled and removed from the result.

Hallucinations and the paranormal

Hallucination. People don’t like that word. It suggests seeing things that aren’t there. It is incorrectly associated with madness. Yet I’m convinced it can hold the key to much of the paranormal. However, we need to reassess what hallucination is.First of all, provided you do not suffer hallucinations all the time, there is nothing strange about them. Further, to occasionally hallucinate is not to lose grip on reality. As we will see shortly, to hallucinate is a natural physiological function.Believers in classic interpretations of the paranormal offer another misconception about hallucination. They say there is a difference between seeing real phenomena and hallucinating. Is this the case, or do hallucinations come in degrees of severity?I suppose the best way to understand this point is to make a hallucination analogous to a dream. Most of the time we know we are dreaming, but in the lucid dream we experience something so ‘real’ we cannot make the separation between reality and dream.Like hallucination, a dream is a mind function, so if we can mistake a mind construct for reality in the dream, then it is natural to assume we can do the same with a hallucination.

From the 1950s onwards, test after test has shown a simple reality. Remove, or disrupt, our attention on the real world and a hallucination can easily be the outcome. From floatation tanks to sensory deprivation, this has been the case.From this we can learn something about the mind. Whilst the senses can be disrupted, the mind itself continually attempts to validate what it sees. Hence, if it has insufficient data from the senses, it will fill in the gaps itself.

New high-res 'Face on Mars' released

NASA has released the new ultra high resolution pictures of the "face on Mars." For just a little bit of background, In 1979, scientists studying pictures of the Martian surface noticed that on the Cydonian plain, there stood out, what seemed to plainly be, a giant face staring out into space. Over the years, scientist Richard Hoagland has studied a series of NASA images. Richard and other investigators have postulated that this face is in fact, ancient architecture fallen into ruin. This structure is one square mile in size, and part of a larger complex which appears to be an ancient Martian city, all fallen into ruins.These latest images reveal details as small as a few inches, and according to Hoagland, appear to confirm the alien architecture hypothesis. Richard Hoagland and his team have doggedly pursued this story, and publicly pushed to have a reluctant NASA provide more high resolution pictures of the Cydonian structures. Much science fiction (such as the popular television series X-Files) and much public ridicule have accompanied this debate. These latest pictures appear to detail walls, windows, and girders. "The debate is over," boasts Richard, "I no longer need to prove that these are ruins, my critics need to prove that they are not."

NASA has methodically explored Mars for decades, but officially, any suggestion that there may once have been life on Mars, let alone intelligent civilization, has been brushed aside in favor of answering more basic questions such as - does water exist in liquid form on the Martian surface? Long before NASA officially admitted it, Hoagland surmised the existence of such liquid water. In another episode, photographic close-ups of the Martain surface snapped by the Martian Rovers, appear to contain tiny fossil-like structures, yet NASA has refused to comment on these images.
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The extraterrestrial highway

A moment before the sonic boom hit his trailer, Joerg Arnu’s UHF radio scanner crackled to life. “Cylon 1, got you on radar,” said a voice just barely perceptible through the static.And then — badamm-booom! — the whole trailer shook in a shockwave, and Mr. Arnu jumped, a big plexiglass window reverberating as a jet streaked overhead and through the sky.“That was probably an F-16,” Mr. Arnu said, peering out the window and squinting into the sun. A telephoto lens sat on a countertop nearby.“They’re testing a new weapon lately, and a laser system to shoot down missiles,” he said.From his trailer in the town of Rachel, Nev., Mr. Arnu is less than 10 miles from an unmarked military boundary, beyond which the top-secret Air Force base known as Area 51 sits on a dry salt flat guarded by big arid mountains and bleak desert on all sides. To the east, tracking past Rachel in two asphalt lanes, Nevada State Route 375 bisects a wide basin, coursing northbound before disappearing into a haze of nothingness beyond.

This is Alien Country, where more U.F.O.’s are sighted each year than at any other place on the planet, at least according to Larry Friedman of the Nevada Commission on Tourism.A sign outside Rachel declares Nevada State Route 375 to be the Extraterrestrial Highway, the name given to the road in 1996. Renaming the road, the tourism commission had hoped at the time, would draw travelers to the austere and remote reaches of south-central Nevada, where old atomic bomb test sites, secret Defense Department airstrips and huge, sequestered tracts of military land create a marketable mystique.

Half of French UFOs remain unexplained

For three decades, an arms length branch of France's national space agency quietly gathered reports of strange apparitions in the skies over the republic, from bright lights zig-zagging in the dark night to calls about flying saucers. A small team of investigators dutifully probed each sighting, and either reached a logical conclusion, or consigned it to enigma.Now, after decades under lock and key in dusty filing cabinets, France went public with its "X-Files" late last month. The Centre national d'etudes spatiales decided not only to declassify more than 1,600 cases, but to scan each official page and post it online for all to see."When the site went live, it was hit by so much traffic it went down almost immediately," said Chris Rutkowski, a co-ordinator for the Winnipeg-based Ufology Research Centre, noting the popularity of the project. With more than 100,000 documents the archives of GEIPAN, the Groupement pour l'etude et l'information sur les phenomenes aerospatiaux non indentifier, contains official police reports, statements by witnesses to bizarre scenes -- even colourful hand-drawn diagrams resembling children's artwork.

Each incident has been slotted into one of four categories: definitely solved, likely solved, unsolved for lack of sufficient information or unsolved mystery. More than half -- 58% -- of the phenomena investigated by the experts remain unexplained while just 9% have been definitely figured out.

Signs of water found on extrasolar planet

Evidence of water has been detected for the first time in a planet outside our solar system, an astronomer said on Tuesday, a tantalizing find for scientists eager to know whether life exists beyond Earth. Travis Barman, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, said water vapor has been found in the atmosphere of a large, Jupiter-like gaseous planet located 150 light years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. The planet is known as HD 209458b.Other scientists reported in February that they were unable to find evidence of water in this planet's atmosphere, as well as another Jupiter-like planet."I'm very confident," Barman said in an interview. "It's definitely good news because water has been predicted to be present in the atmosphere of this planet and many of the other ones for some time."Lowell Observatory, a privately owned astronomical research institution, announced the finding, which has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. The research was backed by NASA, it said.

The detection of the presence of water vapor was possible because this planet, from the vantage point of Earth, orbits directly in front of its star every 3-1/2 days, allowing crucial measurements to be made. It is what is known as a transiting planet.Scientists searching for signs of life beyond Earth are keen to learn about the presence of water on other planets -- both in and beyond our solar system -- because water is thought to be fundamental to the existence of life.

Did the Soviets build German UFOs ?

On the summer morning of July 16, 1951 part of the La-11 1619-Northern Fleet out of Murmansk was on a routine patrol in the coastal territory. The first 30 minutes of the flight proceeded normally, and then lead Captain Peter Vusov, flying at an altitude of about 4000 meters above the sea, spotted a slowly moving object. "But, by getter closer, I saw a strange object-dark disc 20 meters in diameter and unmarked, but armed with powerful cannons below. I have never seen such a machine and immediately contacted the base and reported the craft. At that point the pilot of the unknown probably noticed our planes and dramatically changed course." The fighters on this patrol were armed and Vusov decided to attack the strange object. They fired 23mm shells, which apparently caused no damage so he went around for a second attack, but the results were the same. The commander then radio them, Vusov and lieutenant Ivanchenko who was piloting a second plane, were ordered to cease-fire and immediately return to base. The pilots waited to be debriefed and to their surprise a stranger not in military uniform accompanied the senior officers.

This man was obviously an important person who worked for the government. "I was scared", recalls Vusov. The pilots were told not to tell anyone about what they saw and that the matter was of national security. After the debriefing both pilots were transferred: Vusov to the Pacific fleet, and Ivanchenko to Khabarovsk. Both pilots were also promoted.In the early 1930s, a young German, Oregon Irman Mayer designed an aircraft with an inverted shape with ringbolts in the center. Such a design would protect vital engineering components from possible enemy fire and the area was of sufficient size to accommodate the onboard weapons.

Tunguska - the fire in the sky

No one can dispute the occurrence, but how it happened is the subject of continuing, and often heated, controversy. Despite the best efforts of science, every acceptable “explanation” leaves inescapable facts still shouting for attention.The event began at about 7:15 on the morning of June 30, 1908 in a remote region of central Siberia near the Stony Tunguska River. A blue-white fireball—brighter than the Sun, some said—raced across the sky, then exploded with the force of a 10- to 15- megaton hydrogen bomb.The explosion felled some 60 million trees across an area of 2000 square kilometers. Yet some trees near the blast center were not burnt and a ring of burnt trees circling the epicenter was left standing. The thunderous sounds were accompanied by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of kilometers away.The explosion registered on seismic stations across Europe and Asia, and as far away as Britain meteorologists registered fluctuations in atmospheric pressure. The resulting pulse of air pressure circled the Earth twice, and astronomers observed for several nights afterwards a glowing red haze in the upper atmosphere, though they were not aware of the cause at the time.

Curiously, reports of an unusually bright night sky began the night before the Tunguska event and continued for several days afterwards.For the next few weeks, reports suggest that the night skies were aglow to such an extent that one could read in their light. Both the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Mount Wilson Observatory reported a decrease in atmospheric transparency persisting for several months.What, then, was experienced by the witnesses to the event: Accounts gathered by the Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik, in his 1930 expedition to the site of the explosion are consistent enough on many details to be considered generally reliable.

Disclosure and the Paradigm Clock

Almost one year ago on April 24, 2006 the Paradigm Clock, which tracks proximity to a formal acknowledgement of an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race, was reset to 11:59:45 - 15 seconds to midnight. Such an acknowledgment is referred to as Disclosure and would mark the end of a 60 year truth embargo imposed by federal authorities. The explanation for resetting the time included this statement: Based upon an analysis of multiple circumstances within and outside the nation, PRG has concluded that America is now facing an unprecedented crisis which has opened a window to disclosure wider than at any previous time.One of the circumstances referred to was and remains an unprecedented breach between the military and intelligence communities and the Executive Branch. As a consequence of this breach PRG believed that should a disclosure effort emerge from within the military/intelligence sector and the Executive moved to block, it is more likely that blocking move would be rebuffed.

On the other hand an increasingly isolated Executive facing a cascade of allegations and investigations and lacking support from the military/intelligence sector might see Disclosure as a means to "change the subject" on a global scale. Thus a window for Disclosure was created, and one year later that window remains open. The U.S. Congress, news media and the American people must prepare for the possibility that an event of sufficient magnitude to trigger formal Disclosure could take place at any time. Such an event could come from any number of directions and take place in any of a dozen countries.

Archaeologists unearth jewelry-laden tomb

Archaeologists on a Greek island have discovered a large Roman-era tomb containing gold jewelry, pottery and bronze offerings, officials said Wednesday. The building, near the village of Fiscardo on Kefalonia, contained five burials including a large vaulted grave and a stone coffin, a Culture Ministry announcement said. The complex, measuring 26 by 20 feet, had been missed by grave-robbers, the announcement said. Archaeologists found gold earrings and rings, gold leaves that may have been attached to ceremonial clothing, as well as glass and clay pots, bronze artifacts decorated with masks, a bronze lock and copper coins. The vaulted grave, a house-shaped structure, had a small stone door that still works perfectly - turning on stone pivots.

Did Hitler have a base in the Antarctic?

The Nazis, some believe, established a secret base in Antarctica to which they spirited Hitler at the war's end, fought off British special forces and an American military taskforce, partly by shooting down US planes using flying saucers. The Americans eventually destroyed the base with nuclear weapons in the 1950s. Since then, various governments have striven to conceal this.In this light, it's no effort to re-imagine Antarctic explorations proposed under the aegis of IPY. A quick tour of the website reveals a project entitled 'Exploring Antarctic Dry Valleys in Preparation for Mars Landings'. It seems scarcely less unlikely that this could really be a mission to recover Nazi treasure or technologies. Like all good conspiracy theories, this one is built on a skeleton of facts. There was a German expedition to Antarctica in 1938-39. There was classified British military activity in Antarctica during the war. In July 1945, two months after VE Day, the German submarine U-530 appeared at the Argentine naval base of Mar del Plata. The next month, U-977 did the same.

In 1946-47 the US military mounted Operation Highjump, the largest ever Antarctic expedition, consisting of 4,700 men and 13 ships. And in 1958, they carried out three nuclear explosions in the southern hemisphere that were meant to stay secret, but didn't.However, when you see a paper titled "Hitler's Antarctic base: the myth and the reality," you know that reality is going to disappoint. Using documentary evidence and first-hand experience of Antarctica, Colin Summerhayes of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, UK, and Toronto-based Peter Beeching puncture every last bit of the story.

Do animals have telepathy ?

A cat disappears when her owners go on vacation each year, yet arrives back at the house right before they return. A man sits on the couch, his dog alseep in the next room. He thinks, "I should take Daisy for a walk," and suddenly his dog comes bounding in the room, leash in mouth. A cat curls up next to the phone just before a family member calls, but never when anyone else is about to call. These stories are told by many pet owners from all over the world. Most dogs and cats are attuned to their owners and learn their patterns, read their body language and anticipate what's going to happen next. But there are so many stories of pets seeming to know more than their natural senses would allow that it has been the subject of study and debate for years. Are their natural senses even greater than we ever imagined? Or do they have a sixth sense? Biologist Rupert Sheldrake, author of "Dogs That Know When Their Owner is Coming Home," believes that animals have perceptive abilities of telepathy and premonitions. Veterinarian and author Dr. Allan Schoen says in his book, "Kindred Spirits," that people and animals are intimately connected. Pets whom we feel especially close to seem to understand our needs, read our moods, and even communicate with us on a level that transcends words or body language.

Can pets be so connected and attuned to their owners when they are far apart, even when there is no possible way they could be using their sense of smell or hearing? Physician and author Dr. Larry Dossey says there is a connection between all species, which is not limited by locality. He refers to it as a "nonlocal mind." Consciousness is not restricted to the brain or the body, or time or place. Therefore, people and animals can have an effect on each other, even when miles apart. Traditional scientists remain skeptical about psychic abilities among people -- let alone pets. They say much of the phenomenon can be explained in other ways, through pets' acute senses of hearing and smell, reading human body language, or noting other cues.

Skull for scandal

It's a nondescript area of the Mayan ruins here, the original entrance to what is now known as Lubaantun, or "place of falling stones." But it's the site of an enduring modern mystery.Mayan guide Nathaniel Mas gestures beyond a stone altar towards to a grassy corner. "The crystal skull was found there," he says, casually. And thereby hangs a tale.The mystical skull was supposedly discovered on New Year's Day of 1924, by Anna Mitchell-Hedges, an orphan from Port Colborne, Ont. Anna had been adopted by British adventurer and story-spinner Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, who was excavating the Lubaantun ruins, looking for clues about the lost city of Atlantis. Remarkably, it just happened to be Anna's 17th birthday. She had spotted something shining deep inside a chamber of the ruins and was lowered by ropes to investigate. What she found was a wondrous piece of quartz crystal carved in the shape of a skull. The detachable crystal jawbone was found later.Now aged 100, Anna Mitchell-Hedges still has the skull, though it is mostly kept locked away in a bank vault.

Anna moved away from her Kitchener home more than a decade ago and now stays with friends in the United States."She's in good health," Bill Homann, one of those friends, told the Star in a recent telephone interview. "She has some aches and pains but we all have that." There's still intense interest in the skull, Homann says – he and Mitchell-Hedges are planning to give a couple of lectures on it in New York and Arizona later this year.But controversy continues to swirl around the skull and the story of its discovery, particularly after it was revealed that Frederick Mitchell-Hedges had bought the skull at a Sotheby's auction in 1943.

Ancient human unearthed in China

The remains of one of the earliest modern humans to inhabit eastern Asia have been unearthed in a cave in China. The find could shed light on how our ancestors colonised the East, a movement that is only poorly understood by anthropologists. Researchers found 34 bone fragments belonging to a single individual at the Tianyuan Cave, near Beijing. Details of the discovery appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. Radiocarbon dates, obtained directly from the bones, show the person lived between 42,000 and 39,000 years ago. "For this time period, which is critical for understanding the spread of modern humans around the world, we have two well-dated human fossils from eastern Asia," said co-author Professor Erik Trinkaus, from Washington University in St Louis, US. "We have remains from the Niah Cave from Sarawak on Borneo, and now this specimen from China. As you go west, the next specimens are from Lebanon.

There's nothing in between." According to the "Out of Africa" theory, modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved in East Africa and then spread out across the globe about 70,000 years ago, replacing earlier, or archaic, human populations, such as the Neanderthals, with very little, if any, interbreeding. The Tianyuan remains display diagnostic features of modern H. sapiens. But co-author Erik Trinkaus and his colleagues argue, controversially, that the bones also display features characteristic of earlier human species, such as relatively large front teeth.

AP diary adds clue to Earhart mystery

It's the coldest of cold cases, and yet it keeps warming to life. Seventy years after Amelia Earhart disappeared, clues are still turning up. Long-dismissed notes taken of a shortwave distress call beginning, "This is Amelia Earhart...," are getting another look. The previously unknown diary of an Associated Press reporter reveals a new perspective.A team that has already found aircraft parts and pieces of a woman's shoe on a remote South Pacific atoll hopes to return there this year to search for more evidence, maybe even DNA.If what's known now had been conveyed to searchers then, might Earhart and her navigator have been found alive? It's one of a thousand questions that keep the case from being declared dead, as Earhart herself was a year and a half after she vanished.For nearly 18 hours, Earhart's twin-engine Lockheed Electra drummed steadily eastward over the Pacific, and as sunrise etched a molten strip of light along the horizon, navigator Fred J. Noonan marked the time and calculated the remaining distance to Howland Island.

The date was July 2, 1937, and the pair were near the end of a 2,550-mile trek from Lae, New Guinea, the longest and most perilous leg of a much-publicized "World Flight" begun 44 days earlier in Oakland, Calif.At the journey's end there a few days hence, Earhart, already the most famous aviator of the decade, was to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe.Noonan, a former Pan American Airways navigator, estimated when the plane would reach an imaginary "line of position" running northwest-southeast through Howland, where they were to land, rest and refuel for the onward flight to Hawaii.Earhart pushed the talk button on her radio mike and said, "200 miles out."
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Mystery of the ostrich people

Beyond the southern valley of the Zambezi river in Zimbabwe where buffalo roam under bleached skies and tsetse flies linger on human flesh... Beyond the scattering of bamboo huts where river beds dry up and dirt tracks end and the nearest police outpost is hundreds of miles away...Beyond musiga trees stripped of bark, high up in the Chiruwa hills, you will at last hear the far-off rumbling of drums that belong to a tribe known as the ostrich people because of their V-shaped feet.They are the Vadoma, or two-toed tribe, and they provide an unmatched example of genetic effects in a small population, for they have the condition known as ectrodactyly in which the middle three toes are absent.In reference books you will search vainly for all but the most cursory details of their mysterious existence. Only a handful of men have encountered pure-bred members of the Vadoma.

The first white man to do so was reportedly Charles Sutton, from Banstead, and now he has decided to share his remarkable story.It is a story that begins in 1951 when he decided to emigrate from Surrey. Eyes shut, the young Charles aimed a pin at an atlas and found it embedded in southern Rhodesia. After making extensive enquiries, he was recruited by British South Africa police then posted to several rural stations.
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Architect claims to solve pyramid secret

Submitted bgy Pendekar & Waspie: A French architect claimed Friday to have uncovered the mystery about how Egypt's Great Pyramid of Khufu was built — with use of a spiral ramp to hoist huge stone blocks into place. The construction of the Great Pyramid 4,500 years ago by Khufu, a ruler also known as Cheops, has long befuddled scientists as to how its 3 million stone blocks weighing 2.5 tons each were lifted into place.Ending eight years of study on the subject, architect Jean-Pierre Houdin released his findings and a computerized 3-D mockup showing how workers would have erected the pyramid at Giza outside Cairo.The most widespread theory had been that an outer ramp had been used by the Egyptians, who left few traces to help archeologists and other scientists decode the secret to the construction.

Houdin said he had taken into account the copper and stone tools available at the time, the granite and limestone blocks, the location of the pyramid and the strength and knowledge of the workers.According to his theory — shown in a computer model available at http://www.3ds.com/khufu — the builders put up an outer ramp for the first 140 feet, then constructed an inner ramp in a corkscrew shape to complete the 450-foot structure.

Many planets may have double suns

The dual suns that rise and set over Luke Skywalker's homeworld in the film Star Wars may be more than just fantasy, according to data from Nasa. In a classic scene from the 1977 movie, the hero gazes into the distance as two yellow suns set on the horizon. Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope has found that planetary systems are as common around double stars as they are around single stars, like our own Sun. Details of the research have been published in the Astrophysical Journal. In the study, a team of researchers used an infrared camera on the Spitzer telescope to search for so-called dusty discs around binary, or double, stars. Dusty discs are made from the leftover debris of planet formation. "We knew the stars would be there, the question was whether there was a planet to be the place where you could stand and see these sunsets," said Karl Stapelfeldt, a scientist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

"The inference is getting stronger now that there must be such planets based on what Spitzer has found." The presence of planets in dusty discs is thought likely, but is by no means certain. "In our Solar System, asteroids collide with each other and produce showers of dust and that is, we assume, what we're seeing in these other discs - the dust produced by the collision of two bigger bodies," lead author David Trilling, from the University of Arizona, told BBC News.