Monday, 29 October 2007

Human race will 'split into two different species'

The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist. 100,000 years into the future, sexual selection could mean that two distinct breeds of human will have developed. The alarming prediction comes from evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry from the London School of Economics, who says that the human race will have reached its physical peak by the year 3000. The report claims that after they reach their peak around the year 3000 humans will begin to regress These humans will be between 6ft and 7ft tall and they will live up to 120 years. "Physical features will be driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility that men and women have evolved to look for in potential mates," says the report, which suggests that advances in cosmetic surgery and other body modifying techniques will effectively homogenise our appearance. Men will have symmetrical facial features, deeper voices and bigger penises, according to Curry in a report commissioned for men's satellite TV channel Bravo. Women will all have glossy hair, smooth hairless skin, large eyes and pert breasts, according to Curry. Racial differences will be a thing of the past as interbreeding produces a single coffee-coloured skin tone. The future for our descendants isn't all long life, perfect bodies and chiselled features, however.

While humans will reach their peak in 1000 years' time, 10,000 years later our reliance on technology will have begun to dramatically change our appearance. Medicine will weaken our immune system and we will begin to appear more child-like. Dr Curry said: "The report suggests that the future of man will be a story of the good, the bad and the ugly.

Saturday, 27 October 2007

Missing black hole report: hundreds found!

Astronomers have unmasked hundreds of black holes hiding deep inside dusty galaxies billions of light-years away. The massive, growing black holes, discovered by NASA's Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes, represent a large fraction of a long-sought missing population. Their discovery implies there were hundreds of millions of additional black holes growing in our young universe, more than doubling the total amount known at that distance. "We had seen the tip of the iceberg before in our search for these objects. Now, we can see the iceberg itself." Dickinson is a co-author of two new papers appearing in the Nov. 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal. Emanuele Daddi of the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique in France led the research. The findings are also the first direct evidence that most, if not all, massive galaxies in the distant universe spent their youths building monstrous black holes at their cores. For decades, a large population of active black holes has been considered missing. These highly energetic structures belong to a class of black holes called quasars.

A quasar consists of a doughnut-shaped cloud of gas and dust that surrounds and feeds a budding supermassive black hole. As the gas and dust are devoured by the black hole, they heat up and shoot out X-rays. Those X-rays can be detected as a general glow in space, but often the quasars themselves can't be seen directly because dust and gas blocks them from our view.

Roswell witness tells his story

Retired air force veteran Milton Sprouse clearly remembers the summer day in 1947 when he returned to Roswell Army Air Field aboard the B-29 bomber Dave's Dream from a three-day maneuver in Florida.The Escondido resident, then a corporal and engine mechanic in the Army Air Forces could not believe what his ground crew was telling him: a UFO had crashed in the New Mexico desert, on a ranch 70 miles away.The story made the front page of the Roswell Daily Record: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer" read the headline.According to the July 8 story, "the intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment group at Roswell Army Air Field announced ... that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer."The craft supposedly had been recovered after the ranch owner notified the sheriff's department, who sent Maj. Jesse Marcel and a team to investigate. "Marcel and a detail from his department went to the ranch and recovered the disk" the story stated. "After the intelligence officer here had inspected the instrument it was flown to higher headquarters."The next day, the paper retracted the story, claiming that the recovered object was a weather balloon -an account the government stuck with until 1995. It was then announced that the weather ballon story had been fabricated to cover up Project Mogul, a top-secret project involving two-dozen high-altitude neoprene balloons designed to detect Russian nuclear explosions.According to Sprouse, five of his crew were called to the site to collect the remaining debris and load it onto a flatbed truck.

Sprouse was ordered to stay with Dave's Dream in case the military should suddenly need the craft."I had reservations of what all they were telling me, because each one of them told something different" he said. "I thought, 'I don't know.' ... Later on, when it all started coming out in piecemeal, you could put it together and tell what they said was true."As years passed, Sprouse grew more comfortable talking about the Roswell Incident.

Wednesday, 24 October 2007

Reagan was critically concerned about extraterrestrials

Soon after his election as U.S. President, Ronald Reagan demonstrated an apparent "rigid" belief of the nature of an Extraterrestrial (ET) threat, and laced many of his public statements referring to the ET presence and its threat to humanity. According to Dixon Davis, one of the two CIA agents appointed to brief Reagan when he was President-elect: "The problem with Ronald Reagan was that all his ideas were all fixed. He thought that he knew about everything -- he was an old dog." Reagan’s anti-communist rhetoric and massive build-up of military forces was a cover for Reagan’s true desire to militarily confront ET races. His first major public comment on an ET threat occurred at a 1985 US-Soviet Summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev at Geneva when he said: "I couldn’t help but - when you stop to think that we’re all God’s children, wherever we live in the world, I couldn’t help but say to him (Gorbachev) just how easy his task and mine might be if suddenly there was a threat to this world from some other species from another planet outside in the universe. We’d forget all the little local differences that we have between our countries and we would find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this Earth together. Well I guess we can wait for some alien race to come down and threaten us, but I think that between us we can bring about that realization." If his unscheduled comment at a U.S.-Soviet Summit were not itself a provocative enough expression of Reagan’s views on the possible threat of an ET presence, then his speech to the Forty-Second UN General Assembly of the United Nations on September 21, 1987, was even more provocative and disturbing in its implications: "In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity.

Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside of this world."

Mystery of Tutankhamun's death solved

The mystery behind the sudden death of Tutankhamun, the boy king who ruled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago, may have been finally solved by scientists who believe that he fell from a fast-moving chariot while out hunting in the desert. Speculation surrounding Tutankhamun's death has been rife since his tomb was broken into in 1922 by archaeologist Howard Carter. X-rays of the mummy taken in 1968 indicated a swelling at the base of the skull, suggesting "King Tut" was killed by a blow to the head. More recent studies using a CT medical scanner, however, revealed he suffered a badly broken leg, just above his knee just before he died. That in turn probably led to lethal blood poisoning. Now further evidence has come to light suggesting that he suffered the fracture while hunting game from a chariot. The new findings are still circumstantial but one of Egypt's leading experts on Tutankhamun will say in a television documentary to be screened this week that he believes the case is now solved on how the boy king met his sudden and unexpected end. "He was not murdered as many people thought. He had an accident when he was hunting in the desert. Falling from a chariot made this fracture in his left leg and this really is in my opinion how he died," said Zahi Hawass, general secretary of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. Until now, many historians had assumed that he was treated as a rather fragile child who was cosseted and protected from physical danger. However, Nadia Lokma of the Cairo Museum said that a recent analysis of the chariots found in the tombs of the pharaohs indicated that they were not merely ceremonial but show signs of wear and tear.

Hundreds of arrows recovered from the tomb also show evidence of having been fired and recovered. "These chariots are hunting chariots, not war chariots. You can see from the wear on them that they were actually used in life," Dr Lokma said. A cache of clothing found in Tutankhamun's tomb, which was stored in the vaults of the Cairo Museum, suggest that he was accustomed to riding these chariots himself.

Sunday, 21 October 2007

Peru mystery meteorite to be extracted

According to andina, Peru's government news agency, Peru's Geological, Mining and Metallurgical Institute (INGEMMET) reported today that Russian meteorite traffickers were persuading authorities and citizens in Puno, Peru to extract the fallen meteorite for economic gain. The Regional Geology Director for INGEMMET, Hernando Núñez del Prado stated, "I've been told that foreigners, with Russian nationalities, have been manipulating the people, telling them that if they don't extract the probable fragments that are in the deep (crater), they will turn to ash and disappear." In addition, Núñez del Prado revealed that municipal authorities from Desaguadero and Chucuito would begin digging for the meteorite using heavy machinery. In the specialist's opinion this would cause an uproar among the townspeople. "If municipal authorities come in with backhoes and find fragments in the deep (crater), people will throw themselves on (the fragments) because they know the value of the meteorite, there could be accidents, even a slaughter," warned Peru's Regional Geology Director. Núñez del Prado told Andina News Agency that the excavation project could destroy the meteorite fragments due to the fact that the Municipalities had not done a technical survey or study of the area.

He added that the Geological Institute had much more precise methods for extracting the meteorite fragments. "They are looking to recover remains of the meteorite to sell them and make money. They will probably say they are going to preserve them and put them in a museum," affirmed Núñez del Prado.

Thursday, 18 October 2007

USS supply UFO sighting

On february 28, 1904 the US navy steam and sail schooner USS Supply was about 400 miles southwest of San Francisco. Several members of the crew sighted what they described as "Meteors", for lack of a better term in 1904, that would form the basis for one of the most remarkable early sightings in UFO history. Collecting the accounts was Lt. Frank Schofield, who would later become an admiral and Commander-in-Chief of the US pacific Battle Fleet. Schofield didn't quite know what to make of the accounts, which described the red meteor-like craft flying in what's known as the echelon formation. This formation involves aircraft flying in a diagonal arrangement side by side, a grouping that would be very unlikely for meteors. The red meteors initially appeared below the clouds, something that natural meteorites never do, and moved directly toward the ship. As they came closer, they moved above the clouds, until they seemed to stop moving north, and began moving directly away from the earth. Color alterations were noted in that the objects' dull red color faded as they changed direction.

The size of the largest object was described as being "an apparent area of about six suns", and was egg shaped, traveling with the sharp end forward. The other's were smaller, one being about twice the apparent size of the sun, and one about the same size as the sun.

Ancient reptile tracks unearthed

The earliest evidence for the existence of reptiles has been found in Canada. The 315 million-year-old fossilised tracks give an insight into a key milestone in the history of life, when animals left water to live on dry land. The footprints suggest reptiles evolved between one and three million years earlier than previously thought. They were found by UK scientist Dr Howard Falcon-Lang in fossil-rich sea cliffs at New Brunswick. "The discovery was pure luck," he said. "As I walked along remote sea-cliffs at the end of a long day in the field, I passed a recent rock fall. "One large slab of rock was covered with hundreds of fossil footprints! The Sun was low in the sky and I probably wouldn't have seen them if it hadn't been for the shadows," the University of Bristol researcher explained. Diverse ecology: The ancient trackway gives an insight into a time when vertebrates were evolving through amphibians to reptiles. How the reptile might have looked The origin of reptiles, in particular the appearance of eggs protected by a shell, allowed four-legged animals to avoid having to go back into water to lay eggs, heralding life on dry land. "The evolution of reptiles was one of the most important events in the whole history of life," Dr Falcon-Lang told BBC News. "That paved the way for the diverse ecology that we have on our planet today." Scientists believe the tracks preserved in sandstone were left by reptiles gathering around a watering hole on river plains that were dry for at least part of the year.

List of suspects: Using a bit of biological detective work, Dr Falcon-Lang and colleagues in the UK and Canada tracked down the likely maker of the footprints. We can be confident the footprints are older than the skeletons Howard Falcon-Lang "There were only a few species capable of making prints like this around at the time so we came up with a shortlist of suspects," said Professor Mike Benton, also of the University of Bristol, who co-authored the study.

Wednesday, 17 October 2007

Nemesis: does another star orbit our sun ?

Some years ago a scientist by the name of Richard Muller formulated a controversial theory regarding the possibility of a second star that may orbit our sun in the outer reaches of the solar system. Formulated in 1983, the theory was designed in part to explain a seemingly regular interval of 26 million years between mass extinctions on earth. Its now widely accepted that these extinctions do occur, one of them killed the dinosaurs,  and were normally the result of asteroid or comet impacts. But what sent these objects careening toward earth every 26 million years? Muller believed it might just be due to a second star.  He named it Nemesis after the Greek goddess of divine retribution, and suspects that if it exists it would probably be a common red dwarf type star. He also thinks it should be easily visible from earth, if we knew where to look. If it exists, its almost certainly already been photographed, but simply hasn't been noticed. Stranger things have happened in the history of astronomy. If its out there,  Muller suspects it must orbit very distantly at a whopping 1 to 3 light years from earth, quite distant when you consider that the nearest seperate star is Proxima Centauri at 4.

22 light years away. Nemesis' orbit would be irregular, sometimes making a closer approach, near enough to disturb the grouping of icy comets at the edge of the solar system known as the oort cloud, and sending some of them our way.

Tuesday, 16 October 2007

Huge dinosaur skeleton is a new species

The skeleton of what's believed to be a new dinosaur species - a 105-foot plant-eater that is among the largest dinosaurs ever found - has been uncovered in Argentina, scientists said Monday. Scientists from Argentina and Brazil said the Patagonian dinosaur appears to represent a previously unknown species of Titanosaur because of the unique structure of its neck. They named it Futalognkosaurus dukei after the Mapuche Indian words for "giant" and "chief," and for Duke Energy Argentina, which helped fund the skeleton's excavation. "This is one of the biggest in the world and one of the most complete of these giants that exist," said Jorge Calvo, director of paleontology center of National University of Comahue, Argentina, lead author of a study on the dinosaur published in the peer-reviewed Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. Scientists said the giant herbivore walked the Earth some 88 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous period. Since the first bones were found on the banks of Lake Barreales in the Argentine province of Neuquen in 2000, paleontologists have dug up the dinosaur's neck, back region, hips and the first vertebra of its tail. "I'm pretty certain it's a new species," agreed Peter Mackovicky, associate curator for dinosaurs at Chicago's Field Museum, who was not involved with the discovery. "I've seen some of the remains of Futalognkosaurus and it is truly gigantic." Calvo said the neck alone must have been 56 feet long, and by studying the vertebrae, they figured the tail probably measured 49 feet. The dinosaur reached over 43 feet tall, and the excavated spinal column alone weighed about 9 tons when excavated.

Patagonia also was home to the other two largest dinosaur skeletons found to date - Argentinosaurus, at around 115 feet long, and Puertasaurus reuili, between 115 and 131 feet long. Comparison between the three herbivores, however, is difficult because scientists have only found few vertebrae of Puertasaurus and while the skeleton of Futalognkosaurus is fairly complete, scientists have not uncovered any bones from its limbs.

Project Moonshaft

The Moonshaft Project began in 1970 when I was contacted by Don Richmond, an investigator with the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) about his neighbor, who had a fantastic story I should hear. He gave me a brief summary and I made arrangements to meet him. My wife and I traveled to Colorado two weeks later and spent a day and evening with Antonin and his wife, Anna. He displayed his original WW II diary from 1943 to early 1945. The diary contained numerous sketches of the artifact/structure, the mountain area where it is located, a view of the immediate area of the cavern containing the structure, and the cave. The sketches were made during the time he was hidden in the cave. He allowed us to photograph the sketches and later gave me a translation of the diary. I was so impressed with Tony and his story I contacted Dr. J. Allen Hynek and he drove up from New Mexico to meet with Horak. We both felt it was a project that should be initiated as soon as possible and we started making plans for an expedition to Slovakia. Tony Horak was born in the village Ville de Hermannstadt in Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) on July 7, 1897. The Horak family was in Hermannstadt on vacation when Tony was born.

Shortly after they returned to their home in Czechoslovakia near the German border. The Horak property had been the family enterprise for many generations. The property included agriculture, forests, and mines. It extended north to the German border and covered a vast area. From 1903 - 1915 Tony attended school in Prague with six months in Paris and four months in London.

Saturday, 6 October 2007

‘UFO scared me so much I almost went into labour’

Mysterious bright yellow lights were seen plummeting towards a couple's house at "an abnormal speed", writes Simon Wesson.The Bernasconis, who live in Homestead Road, Hatfield, were "scared to death" when they saw two gleaming lights which they believed were "about to crash just behind their house".Rachel, 33, told the WHT that she had "never been so scared in her life"."I'm 39 weeks pregnant and I thought I was going to go into labour, I was that scared. She added: "My husband, Mark, saw two lights hovering above the houses opposite."At first he presumed it was an aircraft, because it looked like two wing tip lights; but after a while it was still there, so he opened the window to check it wasn't a reflection and it was at this point that he shouted for me to come over."I jumped out of bed and watched it hover from the open window, then suddenly the lights started to get closer and closer, within seconds we ran down the stairs and out of the door; at this point we were running for our lives!"We got outside and it just disappeared, no noise or sight of the object, it was a complete mystery."Rachel said that she had never believed in UFOs but this had really made her "wonder what is out there".

"The lights were too far apart to be a helicopter and they were too low and going too fast to be an airplane," she said. "If it was a plane, we would have heard some kind of engine noise, but there was absolutely nothing."I just cannot explain it. I'm a bit of sceptic about these things, but those lights were irregularly bright!"

Computers to read minds

They're already predicting, mathematically, what you'll want to watch, what you'll want to wear, and who you'll want to vote for. Obviously, the next step is for computers to read your mind—and that's just what they're working toward at Tufts University in Boston. Your computer won't be picking up details about your plans for the evening anytime soon. But researchers with the Human Computer Interaction group at Tufts have, thanks to a $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, come up with a straightforward way for your computer to tell if you are overworked, under-worked or not working at all, according to a paper they will present next week at an Association of Computing Machinery symposium. That may not sound like penetrating perception, but the researchers hope that capacity will eventually help them gain real-time insight into the brain's more subtle emotional states and help provide pointers about how we can get work done more efficiently. The mind reading actually involves measuring the volume and oxygen level of the blood around the subject's brain, using technology called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). The user wears a sort of futuristic headband that sends light in that spectrum into the tissues of the head where it is absorbed by active, blood-filled tissues. The headband then measures how much light was not absorbed, letting the computer gauge the metabolic demands that the brain is making.

The results are often compared to an MRI, but can be gathered with lightweight, non-invasive equipment. Wearing the fNIRS sensor, experimental subjects were asked to count the number of squares on a rotating onscreen cube and to perform other tasks. The subjects were then asked to rate the difficulty of the tasks, and their ratings agreed with the work intensity detected by the fNIRS system up to 83 percent of the time.

Titan's icy climate mimics earth's tropics

If space travelers ever visit Saturn's largest moon, they will find a tropical world where temperatures plunge to minus 274 degrees Fahrenheit, methane rains from the sky and dunes of ice or tar cover the planet's most arid regions. These conditions reflect a cold mirror image of Earth's tropical climate, according to scientists at the University of Chicago. "You have all these things that are analogous to Earth. At the same time, it's foreign and unfamiliar," said Ray Pierrehumbert, the Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences at Chicago. Titan, one of Saturn's 60 moons, is the only moon in the solar system large enough to support an atmosphere. Pierrehumbert and Jonathan Mitchell, who recently completed his Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics at Chicago, have been comparing observations of Titan collected by the Cassini space probe and the Hubble Space Telescope with their own computer simulations of the moon's atmosphere. Their study of the dynamics behind Titan's methane clouds have appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their continuing research on Titan's climate focuses on the moon's deserts. "One of the things that attracts me about Titan is that it has a lot of the same circulation features as Earth, but done with completely different substances that work at different temperatures," Pierrehumbert said. On Earth, for example, water forms liquid and is relatively active as a vapor in the atmosphere. But on Titan, water is a rock. "It's not more volatile on Titan than sand is on Earth.

" Methane-natural gas-assumes an Earthlike role of water on Titan. It exists in enough abundance to condense into rain and form puddles on the surface within the range of temperatures that occur on Titan. "The ironic thing on Titan is that although it's much colder than Earth, it actually acts like a super-hot Earth rather than a snowball Earth, because at Titan temperatures, methane is more volatile than water vapor is at Earth temperatures," Pierrehumbert said.

Friday, 5 October 2007

'Unknown' Peru Amazon tribe sighted

A previously unknown indigenous group living in isolation has been found deep in Peru's Amazon jungle, a team of ecologists has said. The ecologists spotted the 21 Indians near the Brazilian border as they flew overhead looking for illegal loggers. Contact with outsiders can be fatal for isolated tribes people who have no immunity to many diseases. Some groups have fled deep into the jungle to avoid contact with loggers and oil and gas prospectors. Nomadic group: The group was photographed and filmed from the air on the banks of the Las Piedras River in Peru's south-eastern Amazon region. A government official who was on the flight said there were three palm huts on the river bank. "We've found five other sites with this kind of shelter along the same river," Ricardo Hon told Associated Press news agency. "This group is nomadic." He said the government had no plans to try to find the tribe again. The steady advance of logging has forced the isolated groups, among them the Mashco-Piro and Yora tribes, deeper into Peru's jungle frontier with Brazil and Bolivia.

Indigenous leaders say tribes have suffered many deaths from diseases contracted from outsiders. A pan-American human rights group criticised Peru's government this year for doing little to protect the groups from illegal loggers who are chopping down the mahogany-rich forests in which they live.

Borley Rectory revisited

Often remembered as the most haunted house ever, Borley Rectory celebrated the 68th anniversary of its own death this year. In 1939, this beautiful, but thoroughly frightening red brick home burned to the ground after a ghost identified as "Sunex Amures" claimed he would set fire to the building on the night of March 27, 1938. He apparently waited until February before starting the fire, when it was claimed that an oil lamp inexplicably fell over and torched the place. As it was burning, someone watching the spectacle claimed to see the figure of a nun in one of the upper windows of the fire-engulfed rectory. An investigation by the insurance company, however, concluded that the fire was intentionally set. Unfortunately, it didn't elaborate on just who set the fire.  Borley rectory was host to numerous paranormal events, including ghost writing on the walls, poltergeist activity that went so far as to throw a large rock at a man and injure his shoulder, and a spectral nun that was frequently seen around the home. Even after the place burned, sightings of the ghostly nun continued. Claims that the ghost has been seen hovering in the air, as if standing on the long-gone upper floor of the rectory, are still occasionally reported.   Borley seems to have been haunted from the beginning. Built in 1863, stories immediately surfaced of people hearing unexplainable footsteps coming from upstairs. Presumably, something about the ground itself was causing the hauntings. After the fire, excavations under the rectory did turn up a few human bones, and a female skull was also supposedly found in the rectory hidden in a paper bag.

Unfortunately, Borley Rectory is also tainted with claims that the investigations done there were questionable, particularly in the case of that done by the somewhat discredited paranormalist Harry Price. Further, legends about the ghostly nun's history appear to have been completely fabricated by the daughters of one of the early residents.

Defending Einstein's 'speed of gravity'

Scientists have attempted to disprove Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity for the better part of a century. After testing and confirming Einstein's prediction in 2002 that gravity moves at the speed of light, a professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia has spent the past five years defending the result, as well as his own innovative experimental techniques for measuring the speed of propagation of the tiny ripples of space-time known as gravitational waves. Sergei Kopeikin, associate professor of physics and astronomy in the College of Arts and Science, believes that his latest article, "Gravimagnetism, causality, and aberration of gravity in the gravitational light-ray deflection experiments" published along with Edward Fomalont from the National Radio Astronomical Observatory, arrives at a consensus in the continuing debate that has divided the scientific community. An experiment conducted by Fomalont and Kopeikin five years ago found that the gravity force of Jupiter and light travel at the same speed, which validates Einstein's suggestion that gravity and electromagnetic field properties, are governed by the same principle of special relativity with a single fundamental speed. In observing the gravitational deflection of light caused by motion of Jupiter in space, Kopeikin concluded that mass currents cause non-stationary gravimagnetic fields to form in accordance with Einstein's point of view. The research paper that discusses the gravimagnetic field appears in the October edition of Journal of General Relativity and Gravitation.

Einstein believed that in order to measure any property of gravity, one has to use test particles. “By observing the motion of the particles under influence of the gravity force, one can then extract properties of the gravitational field,” Kopeikin said. “Particles without mass – such as photons – are particularly useful because they always propagate with constant speed of light irrespectively of the reference frame used for observations.

Monday, 1 October 2007

The abnormal moons of Mars

In 1988 the soviet Union launched two probes to study Mars and its two moons Phobos and Deimos. Unlike most other Russian missions around the solar system, the Phobos I and II missions were done with some cooperation with the United States, which contributed the use of the Deep Space radio telescope network, along with various contributions from Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Germany and France. The missions were to provide the first close look at Phobos and Deimos, and hopefully answer the question as to why these two moons are unlike anything else in the solar system.   The names of the two moons comes from greek mythology, after the sons of the god Mars. Phobos (meaning fear) and Deimos (meaning panic) both appear, at least according to current science, to be ex-asteroids that were captured by Mars' gravity, rather than being moons in the traditional sense. They are both quite small, being only a few tens of kilometers in size, and are tootiny for their gravity to pull themselves into spheres as with most larger moons in the solar system, and as a result they resemble an oblong potato.   Deimos is the smaller of the two, and orbits mars more distantly than Phobos. We know it has a composition similar to a meteorite sometimes found on earth called a carbonaceous chondrite, a fascinating group of rocks that contain not only the most ancient material known to man, some of which predates the solar system entirely, but also amino acids which are organic molecules that form the basis for life. Oddly, Deimos is relatively uncratered.

In contrast, Phobos is heavily cratered, and orbits Mars in a very bizarre way; it moves so fast that it rises and sets to an observer on Mars twice each day, and due to that speed appears to rise in the west and set in the east, the opposite of earth's own moon. Phobos seems to be composed of the same materials as Deimos, but for some reason, the moon has a seriously low density. So low that in the 1960's Russian planetary scientists suggested that the moon was hollow, and might be an artificial satellite.

Army vet recalls Roswell incident

In June or early July 1947, a farmer found strange debris while working on a ranch about 70 miles north of Roswell. He put some of it in a box and drove to the local sheriff. Neither man knew what to make of it, so the sheriff called Roswell Army Air Field, which sent two men to investigate. On July 9, 1947, the Roswell Daily Record, a newspaper, printed a story with the alarming headline: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region." Other than those facts, there appear to be few things people agree on regarding what has become known as "the Roswell incident."Six decades later, competing UFO enthusiasts promote their own theories, skeptics dismiss the spaceship claims as outrageous, and the military, which originally claimed all the fuss was over a weather balloon, now sticks to its story that it was an experimental spy craft.Escondido resident Milton Sprouse, 85, said he knows what happened in Roswell - not because he favors one theory over another, but because he was there.As for the outrageous stories of mysterious metal, alien corpses and a military coverup?It's all true, he said. Before arriving at Roswell Army Air Field in 1945 as a corporal and engine mechanic, Sprouse already had participated in an undisputable historic event.As a member of the 393rd Bomb Squadron assigned to the 509th Composite Group, Sprouse worked on the ground crew of Big Stink, one of the B-29 bombers stationed on the Pacific island of Tinian, where the two atomic bomb missions on Japan were launched to end World War II.After the war, the 509th Composite Group was reassigned to Roswell, where they were renamed the 509th Bomb Wing.

Sprouse continued to lead the ground crew of Big Stink, which had been renamed Dave's Dream after the pilot."There was nothing there but tumbleweeds blowing for miles," he said about arriving at Roswell in November 1945.