The MoD and remote viewing

Earlier this year (February) it was revealed through FOIA (Freedom of information act) documents that the UK MOD previously conducted secret tests into remote viewing in 2002. The MOD study concluded that even though they used complete novices with very shaky project structure and a 28% accuracy rate that 'remote viewing' was of little value. Yet this doesn’t actually seem to be the first time the British MOD investigated remote viewing, and it seems that certain branches of the MOD actually already had a closer relationship with remote viewing. Hidden amongst the confusion of the 89,901 CIA/DIA Stargate FOIA documents was a standard run of the mill report of the monthly activities of the current Stargate project manager circa June 1994. In this document he details an upcoming meeting with a secret arm of the UK MOD - DI-55.

Why is this interesting? – Firstly because it seems the MOD interest in remote viewing actually started well before the 2002 study (eight years before) and secondly, DI-55 is the branch of the MOD that allegedly deals with UFO’s. So yet again we have two intelligence services across the pond from each other and another UFO connection to American remote viewing projects.

28 new extrasolar planets discovered

The world's leading team of planet-hunters has announced the discovery of 28 new planets outside our solar system. They are among 37 objects outside our solar system found to orbit distant stars. Seven of the objects are confirmed brown dwarfs - failed stars much more massive than the largest planet - and two are borderline and could be small brown dwarfs or large planets. Jason Wright of the University of California announced the team's results yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu. "Taken together, in the last year our teams have increased the number of known planets by 12% and shown that at least 30% of stars known to host planets have more than one object orbiting." He explained his team's success as a testament to the advances in observing technology. "Planet hunting is getting much more sophisticated. Our primary technique, observing the small, reflex motions of a star as a planet orbits it, has improved greatly in the past 15 years. Today we can detect changes in the motion of some stars of only one metre per second."

Scientists were getting to the stage that, if they were observing our own solar system from afar, their telescopes could detect Jupiter. They have recorded more than 200 planets outside our solar system. One of the highlights is a detailed analysis of a planet circling the star Gliese 436, 30 light years from Earth. Working with colleagues in Europe, Dr Wright's team calculated that the planet was an ice giant of at least 22 Earth masses, which makes it slightly more massive than Neptune.

Indian man celebrates 138th birthday

As per Indian "Limca Book of Records", oldest person of India is "Habib Miyan", who celebrated his 138th birthday last sunday. He is a resident of Pink City "Jaipur" in Rajasthan state of India. People from all walks of life thronged his residence in Jaipur to greet him on that day. Miyan cut a cake, firecrackers were burst and 139 balloons released to mark the celebrations, joined in by people from as far as Indian States of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, as also chairman of the Rajasthan Minority Commission Sardar Jasbir Singh. "Kisi raees ki mehfil ka jikra kya hai amir, khuda ke ghar bhi na jayenge bin bulawe ke (May you discuss a party of a rich man, I will not even go to God's house without invitation)," Miyan quipped at his house. Asked about his eating habits, he said: "I am open to any kind of food," but added that he was a great fan of meat preparations, even if these were considered too oily for his age. "Gosht roti khao, Allah ke gun gao," Miyan said. Habib Miyan is a very optimistic person, said Dr R K Verma, an orthopedic surgeon who had treated him when he fractured his hip six months back. "He has recovered well." Miyan`s family comprising dozens of members reside in a very small dwelling and he had met President A P J Abdul Kalam during the latter`s visit to the city to appeal for a house. "I am happy that he spared some time for me." Miyan said.

Comet may have doomed mammoths

There's a new extraterrestrial suspect in the mysterious, highly debated disappearance of the woolly mammoth some 12,900 years ago. A team of two dozen scientists say the culprit was likely a comet that exploded in the atmosphere above North America. The explosions sent a heat and shock wave across the continent, pelted the ground with a layer of telltale debris, ignited massive wildfires and triggered a major cooling of the climate, said nuclear analytic chemist Richard Firestone of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, one of the scientists who presented the controversial new theory Thursday at a conference of the American Geophysical Union in Acapulco. At least 15 species, mostly large mammals including mammoths, mastadons, giant ground sloths, camels and horses, were wiped out about the same time. Firestone and his colleagues think some may have been killed by the explosions, and the rest died off after fires burned the vegetation they depended on. "It seems awfully coincidental that the mammoths died at exactly the same moment where we find this impact layer," said Allen West, a member of the team from GeoScience consulting in Dewey, Ariz. The scientists are bracing themselves for fiery reaction to their theory.

The extinctions were already a hotly debated event with scientists split between two theories. The leading theory is that man hunted the animals into extinction soon after arriving in North America, but some scientists think climate upheaval as the earth warmed up from the last ice age was the killer. Others think it was more of a one-two punch with climate change weakening the animal populations and hunters delivering the final blow. But the impact theory has the advantage that it would explain why the Clovis hunting culture disappeared along with the animals, said archeologist Douglas Kennett of the University of Oregon.

NASA makes Exoplanet weathermap

Researchers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have learned what the weather is like on two distant, exotic worlds. One team of astronomers used the infrared telescope to map temperature variations over the surface of a giant gas planet, HD 189733b, revealing it likely is whipped by roaring winds. Another team determined that the gas planet HD 149026b is the hottest yet discovered. Both findings appear May 9 in Nature. "We have mapped the temperature variations across the entire surface of a planet that is so far away, its light takes 60 years to reach us," said Heather Knutson of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., lead author of the paper describing HD 189733b. The two planets are "hot Jupiters" -- sizzling, gas giant planets that zip closely around their stars. Roughly 50 of the more than 200 known planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets, are hot Jupiters. Visible-light telescopes can detect these strange worlds and determine certain characteristics, such as their sizes and orbits, but not much is known about their atmospheres or what they look like. Since 2005, Spitzer has been revolutionizing the study of exoplanets' atmospheres by examining their infrared light, or heat.

In one of the new studies, Spitzer set its infrared eyes on HD 189733b, located 60 light-years away in the constellation Vulpecula. HD 189733b is the closest known transiting planet, which means that it crosses in front and behind its star when viewed from Earth. It races around its star every 2.2 days. Spitzer measured the infrared light coming from the planet as it circled around its star, revealing its different faces. These infrared measurements, comprising about a quarter of a million data points, were then assembled into pole-to-pole strips, and, ultimately, used to map the temperature of the entire surface of the cloudy, giant planet.

Egypt finds 4,000-year-old tomb

A tomb of an Egyptian courtier who lived about 4,000 years ago was discovered by Belgian archaeologists, Egypt's culture ministry has said. The team from Leuven Catholic University accidentally found the tomb, one of the best preserved of its time.They were excavating a later burial site at the Deir al-Barsha necropolis near the Nile Valley town of Minya, 225 km south of Cairo.The tomb belonged to Henu, an estate manager and high-ranking official during the first intermediate period, which lasted from 2181 to 2050 BC and was a time of political chaos in ancient Egypt.The archaeologists found Henu's mummy wrapped in linen in a large wooden coffin and a sarcophagus decorated with hieroglyphic texts addressed to the gods Anubis and Osiris.

The tomb contained well-preserved painted wooden statuettes of workers making bricks, women making beer and pounding cereal, and a model of a boat with rowers, a ministry statement said."The statuettes (are of) the best quality of their time. They are characterized by realistic touches and unusual details such as the dirty hands and feet of the brick makers," the statement said, quoting Belgian team leader Harco Willems.

The surprising realites of mythical creatures

While sailing the ocean near Haiti, Christopher Columbus in 1493 reported seeing three mermaids from a distance. The Genoese explorer was not impressed.Up close, the sea maidens were "not as pretty as they are depicted," he wrote in his journal, "for somehow in the face they look like men."Many scientists now think that what Columbus probably saw was a manatee, an aquatic mammal that resembles a flippered hippo.In a new exhibition opening at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) here this weekend, viewers can digitally superimpose the picture of a mermaid atop that of a manatee and see how Columbus and countless other sailors might have been fooled.Entitled Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids, the exhibition traces the possible origins of some of the world's most famous "imaginary" beasts and also their lesser-known counterparts. "This museum has a long history of studying and presenting great stories about the natural world and the culture of humanity," said AMNH president Ellen Futter at a press preview of the exhibition earlier this week. "In this exhibition, we extend that tradition further, by looking at the intersection of nature and culture, those moments when people glimpse something fantastical in nature."

The exhibition deftly combines nature and myth, paleontology and anthropology, and delightfully campy models of mythical creatures with real fossils. Upon first entering the exhibition, visitors are greeted by a 17-foot-long, green, European dragon of the sort that legend says Saint George slew. Its sinuous and colorful Chinese counterpart hangs from the ceiling in one of the last rooms of the exhibition. In the mythical water-creatures section, large tentacles and the head of a giant squid-inspired kraken rise from the floor, its body mostly hidden.Mythic Creatures borrows specimens and artifacts from the fossil, art and anthropological collections of the AMNH and other museums, and examines how such objects might have-through imagination, misidentification, speculation or outright deception-given birth to fantastical creatures.

Plan to build giant liquid telescope on Moon

Even by astronomical standards, Roger Angel thinks big. Angel, a leading astronomer at the University of Arizona, is proposing an enormous liquid-mirror telescope on the moon that could be hundreds of times more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope.Using a rotating dish of reflective liquid as its primary mirror, Angel's telescope would the largest ever built, and would permit astronomers to study the oldest and most distant objects in the universe, including the very first stars."It's an idea that's been around, and we decided to flesh it out," Angel says.Angel, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a MacArthur Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society, is currently concluding a study to determine the feasibility of constructing a lunar liquid mirror telescope, or LMT, for NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, an NASA-funded space think tank.LMT's have been built on Earth -- the Large Zenith Telescope in British Columbia is the third largest telescope in North America -- but the moon's low gravity and lack of atmosphere would allow for a truly gigantic instrument.

Angel dreams of a 100-meter mirror, which would be larger than two side-by-side football fields and would collect 1,736 times more light than the Hubble.Even a 20-meter instrument, which is more likely in the near term, would be 70 times more sensitive than the Hubble and could detect objects 100 times fainter than those that will be seen with the James Webb Space Telescope, a next-generation orbiting observatory scheduled for launch in 2013."At first, it sort of sounds like a crazy idea," says Paul Hickson of the University of British Columbia, one of two Canadian LMT experts who collaborated with Angel on the study. "But when you go through it in some detail, you realize it could actually work."NIAC director Bob Cassanova agrees. "It's quite feasible," he says. "The debate about this is about some of the details."

Rover unearths Mars water evidence

A patch of Martian soil analyzed by NASA's rover Spirit is so rich in silica that it may provide some of the strongest evidence yet that ancient Mars was much wetter than it is now. The processes that could have produced such a concentrated deposit of silica require the presence of water. Members of the rover science team heard from a colleague during a recent teleconference that the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, a chemical analyzer at the end of Spirit's arm, had measured a composition of about 90 percent pure silica for this soil. "You could hear people gasp in astonishment," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the Mars rovers' science instruments. "This is a remarkable discovery. And the fact that we found something this new and different after nearly 1,200 days on Mars makes it even more remarkable. It makes you wonder what else is still out there." Spirit's miniature thermal emission spectrometer observed the patch, and Steve Ruff of Arizona State University, Tempe, noticed that its spectrum showed a high silica content.

The team has laid out plans for further study of the soil patch and surrounding deposits. Exploring a low range of hills inside a Connecticut-sized basin named Gusev Crater, Spirit had previously found other indicators of long-ago water at the site, such as patches of water-bearing, sulfur-rich soil; alteration of minerals; and evidence of explosive volcanism.

The Ark of the Covenant

No ancient relic causes so much controversy as the Ark of the Covenant. The subject of Spielberg’s ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, featuring the intrepid Indiana Jones, the film does not exaggerate the passions the mystery of its location and power entails.Believed to have been constructed from acacia wood by Moses on Mount Sinai about 1250BC, the wooden chest is overlain with solid gold on both the inside and outside. 3ft 9in long and 2ft 3in wide and high, it has a lid of solid gold with a pair of cherubim. Gold rings attached to the Ark’s sides allow poles to pass through to be carried. Why an Ark ? Built according to Divine instructions, the Ark carried the two tablets upon which God scribed the Ten Commandments. Symbolic of the covenant God made between Himself and the people of Israel, it was said to be the focus of God’s presence.Carried by Levites, members of one of the twelve tribes of Israel, it always went ahead of the Israelites as they wandered through the desert, even going ahead of their armies as they waged war.When camped, the Ark was placed at the centre of a temporary sanctuary known as the Tabernacle. This centre became known as the Holy of Holies. Once the Promised Land was conquered and the Temple constructed at Jerusalem, the Ark was placed in the Holy of Holies of the temple.In this respect we can see the Ark as the central symbol of faith. Some mystical Jews have even drawn an analogy of the Ark, with its two tablets inside, with the brain and its two cerebral hemispheres. The Ark remained the centre of their religion until after the Exile to Babylon in the 6th century BC.

Object of mystery: Today there are two central mysteries concerning the Ark of the Covenant - namely, where is it, and what strange powers did it have? The former enigma comes from its remarkable history. According to the Old Testament, some time around 1000BC the Ark was captured by the Philistines. For reasons we will narrate later, they eventually let it go, sending it away strapped to a cart pulled by two cows. Reclaimed by the Israelites, they took it to Kiriath¬ Jearim, with King David eventually taking it to Jerusalem. Here, in 955BC, King Solomon placed it in the Holy of Holies of the first Temple.At one stage one tradition speaks of it being stolen by Menelik, son of Solomon and Sheba and taken to Axum in Ethiopia. Another tradition speaks of it being taken by the prophet Jeremiah to an unknown cave prior to the Babylonian destruction of the Temple in 587BC.What exactly happened is not known - it could have been simply destroyed - but the Ark was never seen again.

Planet of promise could harbour life

For the first time, astronomers have discovered a planet far, far away that might be similar to Earth. This distant world, which pirouettes around a dim bulb of a star with the unglamorous name Gliese 581, may possibly sport a landscape that would be vaguely familiar to us - a panorama of liquid oceans and drifting continents. If so, there's the chance that it's a home to life - perhaps even advanced life.It's been a dozen years since the first planet around a star other than the Sun was uncovered. Since then, small teams of astronomers have been flushing out fresh planetary prey at the rate of about one every two weeks. Today, it's easy to have a blase attitude about this continuing drizzle of new worlds. With more than two hundred planets already on the scoreboard, adding yet another sounds redundant.But this planet is different.It's different mostly because it's small. Nearly all the earlier discoveries were of massive worlds, lumbering giants comparable to Jupiter or Saturn. Such behemoths are likely to be buried in thick and toxic atmospheres, and seem ill-suited for supporting life.

Mind you, it's not that nature prefers the creation of such brawny planets; it's only that the wobble technique used to find them strongly favors the heavyweights.However, by measuring the motions of bantam stars, such as the red dwarf Gliese 581, it's possible to uncover lighter-weight worlds, since detectability depends on the ratio of stellar to planetary mass. Gliese 581c, as the new find is called, is the smallest yet discovered around a normal star, a mere 50% larger across than Earth. This diminutive size suggests (but does not prove) that it's a rocky world, like Venus, Earth or Mars.

Indonesian fisherman catches 'living fossil'

An Indonesian fisherman hooked a rare coelacanth, a species once thought as extinct as dinosaurs, and briefly kept the "living fossil" alive in a quarantined pool. Justinus Lahama caught the four-foot, 110-pound fish early Saturday off Sulawesi island near Bunaken National Marine Park, which has some of the highest marine biodiversity in the world. The fish died 17 hours later, an extraordinary survival time, marine biologist Lucky Lumingas said Sunday. "The fish should have died within two hours because this species only lives in deep, cold-sea environment," he said. Lumingas works at the local Sam Ratulangi University, which plans to study the carcass. The coelacanth (pronounced SEE-la-kanth) was believed to be extinct for 65 million years until one was found in 1938 off Africa's coast, igniting worldwide interest. Several other specimens have since been discovered, including another off Sulawesi island in 1998. The powerful predator is highly mobile with limb-like fins, and it gives birth to live young rather than laying eggs.

The surprising truth behind the Pyramids

"This is not my day job." So begins Michel Barsoum as he recounts his foray into the mysteries of the Great Pyramids of Egypt. As a well respected researcher in the field of ceramics, Barsoum never expected his career to take him down a path of history, archaeology, and political science, with materials research mixed in. As a distinguished professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University, his daily routine consists mainly of teaching students about ceramics, or performing research on a new class of materials, the so-called MAX Phases, that he and his colleagues discovered in the 1990s. These modern ceramics are machinable, thermal-shock resistant, and are better conductors of heat and electricity than many metals-making them potential candidates for use in nuclear power plants, the automotive industry, jet engines, and a range of other high-demand systems. Then Barsoum received an unexpected phone call from Michael Carrell, a friend of a retired colleague of Barsoum, who called to chat with the Egyptian-born Barsoum about how much he knew of the mysteries surrounding the building of the Great Pyramids of Giza, the only remaining of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The widely accepted theory-that the pyramids were crafted of carved-out giant limestone blocks that workers carried up ramps-had not only not been embraced by everyone, but as important had quite a number of holes.

According to the caller, the mysteries had actually been solved by Joseph Davidovits, Director of the Geopolymer Institute in St. Quentin, France, more than two decades ago. Davidovits claimed that the stones of the pyramids were actually made of a very early form of concrete created using a mixture of limestone, clay, lime, and water. "It was at this point in the conversation that I burst out laughing," says Barsoum. If the pyramids were indeed cast, he says, someone should have proven it beyond a doubt by now, in this day and age, with just a few hours of electron microscopy. It turned out that nobody had completely proven the theory...yet.

Future now

Premonition, precognition, second sight – three labels often applied to the ability to see into the future. This is, infact, one of the most troublesome areas of paranormal research. This is so for two reasons.The first is the sheer volume of supposed cases – everyone, it seems, has hints of the ability some time in their lives. And second, the apparent impossibility of being able to see the future before it happens. The Theories: Many exotic theories have been attempted to explain the ability to see the future. Typical is the ‘bow wave’ effect. Here it is argued that, just as a boat leaves a wake from its bow, so, too, with time, sending ripples of a future event back into the past.Consciousness has often been used to explain premonition. Typical is the idea that we have several states of consciousness, some bigger than others, and witnessing events ahead of the consciousness we already experience.The problem with such theories is not simply the fact that there is no real science to back them up. Unfortunately, experience of being human places immense stumbling blocks upon accepting the ability as credible.

Problems, problems everywhere: The first major stumbling block to accepting an ability to see into the future is ‘free will.’ It is self-evident that we seem to have it. But free will can only be true if the future is an unknown country. If it was mapped out, free will would become an irrelevance.A similar problem arises with the law of causality. Stated simply, a cause must come before an event. If premonition is to be accepted, then it has also to be accepted that knowledge of an event can come before the cause.So it seems, at our present level of knowledge, there is nothing in science or experience that allows us to see into the future. But this is not to deny that ‘premonitions’ occur. It simply suggests that whatever is going on has to be tied to the present.

Laws of chance: We can, perhaps, answer the problem on many different levels. The first is to understand an important point about paranormal phenomena. We have a habit of tying phenomena to the individual. But often an explanation can come from a wider society.Consider, in a country such as the United States, chance dictates that there could be upwards of a million nightmares on a particular night. Of these, it is inevitable that some would hold imagery of, say, a particular type of disaster.If such a disaster happened in the days following such a nightmare, it would be tagged as a premonition, when, in reality, it is nothing more than an inevitability of chance. In a society, such coincidences are bound to happen.

On the road to Roswell: Stanton Friedman

This is the first in a special series of Raiders News Network interviews focusing on the 60th Anniversary of the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico, UFO Incident: HORN: Stanton, Roswell is the pre-eminent story of Ufology. Some say whatever occurred near Roswell, NM, in July 1947 will never be known. Others like you disagree on some levels. You and Bill Moore brought this story to light many years ago. This is the most appropriate place to start this series, so please tell us how that happened. STAN: I first heard of Roswell in the early 1970s from a woman named Lydia Sleppy whose son was a forest ranger in California .He had had a good sighting. My associate (Bobbi Ann Slate Gironda , long deceased) and I spoke with him and he suggested we talk to his mother who had had a good sighting near Albuquerque. We did speak to her and after she told us about the sighting, she mentioned that when she had been working at an Albuquerque Radio Station in the late 1940s, she was asked to type the story coming in from a broadcaster at their Roswell affiliate station for a newswire. He dictated how a flying saucer had been recovered and was being sent to Wright Field. Part way through the story the bell went off on the machine she was using to put the story on the news wire. The FBI instructed her not to continue the transmission. She remembered the names of some of the people and I located several, but came to a dead end. I should stress that New Mexico was a hotbed of classified Research and Development activities and certainly it was expected that there would be spies and counter intelligence concerns.

In 1978 I was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at a TV station to do three interviews before my lecture "Flying Saucers ARE Real!" that evening at Louisiana State University. I had done two, but the third reporter was nowhere to be found. The station manager was giving me coffee, looking at his watch, and was embarrassed as he knew the person who had brought me to the station and that I had other things to do. Out of the blue he told me that the person I ought to talk to was Jesse Marcel over in Houma, Louisiana. I asked "Who is he?" He answered "Oh, he handled wreckage of a flying saucer when he was in the military. We are old Ham radio buddies." The reporter finally showed up and I was busy the rest of the day. Next day from the Airport I called information and then spoke with Jesse who told me his story. This is described in detail in "Crash at Corona: The Definitive Story of the Roswell Incident" by Don Berliner and myself and available from my website at www.stantonfriedman.com. Jesse didn't have a precise date. I shared the story with Bill Moore (we had known each other in Pittsburgh, years before). I also saw him months later in Minnesota the day after meeting with Vern and Jean Maltaise of Bemidji, MN, who told me a story of their friend Barney Barnett who had come across a crashed saucer and strange bodies in New Mexico. Bill had a 3rd story (From the Flying Saucer Review) about an English actor named Hughie Green who heard a story on the radio about a New Mexico crashed saucer when driving from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. He could pin down a date (early July, 1947). Bill went to the U. of Minnesota Library and found the stories in newspapers in the periodicals department. These gave us an independent check on Jesse's story and the names of many more people . By 1980 we had located 62 people. That is when the first Roswell book "The Roswell Incident" by Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz was published. Bill and I did 90% of the research. By 1986 we had published several more articles and the total was up to 92. This was all before the internet made searching a lot easier and cheaper. I instigated, and was in, the Unsolved Mysteries NBC TV program about Roswell in 1989. It was well done and was seen by 28 million people.

Polar depths yield weird new species

Carnivorous sponges, blind creepy-crawlies adorned with hairy antennae and ribbed worms are just some of the new characters found to inhabit the dark abysses of the Southern Ocean, an alien abode once thought devoid of such life. Recent expeditions have uncloaked this polar region, finding nearly 600 species of organisms never described before and challenging some assumptions that deep-sea biodiversity is depressed. The findings also suggest that all of Earth's marine life originated in Antarctic waters.Scientists had assumed that the deep sea of the South Pole would follow similar trends in biodiversity documented for the Arctic. "There are less species in the Arctic than around the equator," said one of the scientists behind the study, Brigitte Ebbe, a taxonomist at the German Center for Marine Biodiversity Research. "People assumed that it would be the same if you went from the equator south, but it didn't prove to be true at all."

The findings, reported this week in the journal Nature provide a more accurate picture of creatures in the southern deep sea and shed light on the evolution of biodiversity in the deep ocean, including ancient colonization dating back 65 million years. "The Antarctic deep sea is potentially the cradle of life of the global marine species," said lead author Angelika Brandt of the Zoological Institute and Zoological Museum at the University of Hamburg.

Mysterious metal object not a meterorite

The mysterious metallic object that crashed through the roof of a central New Jersey family's home earlier this year was not a meteorite after all, geologists said Friday. While the rocklike object looks like a meteorite, scientists say it is a stainless steel alloy that does not occur in nature and is most likely "orbital debris" - or plain terms, scrap iron.It's still a mystery where the object came from."That's the $64,000 question, and there's probably no way to answer it," said Rutgers University geologist Jeremy Delaney. "A piece of scrap iron dropped out of the sky. The question is how did it get into the sky in the first place? That one I simply cannot answer."Srinivasan Nageswaran, whose family discovered the silver object after it crashed through the roof and into the upstairs bathroom of his home in Freehold Township, was disappointed by the news."That's the nature of science," he said Friday. "If the conclusion from the test says it's not a meteorite, then it's not a meteorite. We have to move forward."

The 46-year-old information technology consultant will now finish repairing his roof. The object, slightly bigger than a golf ball and about as heavy as a can of soup, crashed into his bathroom and dented its tile floor in January."It's still the world's most popular metallic object that fell from the sky," Nageswaran said.Scientists had initially determined it was a meteorite. In late April, it was brought to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City so its composition could be examined by its new variable-pressure scanning electron microscope.

Did climate change kill the Maya ?

With their awe-inspiring architecture and sophisticated concepts of astronomy and mathematics, the Maya were undoubtedly among the great ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica. At the peak of their glory, around 800 A.D., the Maya ranged from Mexico's Yucatán peninsula to Honduras. Then, almost in an instant, a society of some 15 million people imploded, leaving deserted cities, trade routes, and immense pyramids in ruins. The sudden demise is one of the greatest archeological mysteries of our time. What caused the collapse of the great Maya civilization? The answer, say researchers, is climate change. According to a new study published in the current issue of Science, a long period of dry climate, punctuated by three intense droughts, led to the end of the Maya society. "Climate change is to blame for one of the most catastrophic collapses in human history," said Gerald Haug, a professor of geology at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and one of the study's authors.

The drought hypothesis is not new. Sediments taken by scientists in 2001 from a lake on the Yucatan peninsula showed that a series of extended droughts coincided with major cultural upheavals among the Maya people. But the study of that lake also found man-made effects, such as deforestation and soil erosion, and therefore didn't reflect a "pure climate signal," according to Haug. For the new study, the scientists instead analyzed sediment core from the Cariaco Basin off northern Venezuela, where the record is cleaner.

UFOs spotted over Northern Ireland

Residents in County Down have raised the possibility of a UFO sighting above the skies of Bangor. Several callers to BBC Northern Ireland have reported a series of strange orange lights in the night sky. Air traffic control at Belfast International Airport said it had also received reports about the sightings, including one from the Coastguard. However, the airport said it had no record of any aircraft in the sky at the time. The callers said the sightings had been made on Saturday evening. Clifford Rossbottom from Bangor told the BBC: "There were three orange globes - nearly in a straight line - they were an absolutely fascinating sight. "I watched them for five minutes, and then very slowly, they just disappeared. "The only thing I thought it could have been was three high-flying aircraft. "If that is not the case, then I have no idea, and the only other thing I can think of is in fact that they were UFOs."

Tunnel open again at Silbury hill

Engineers have reopened a tunnel that goes deep inside the ancient monument of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire. The tunnel, dug in 1968, was the last of many made over the centuries by archaeologists exploring the site. Engineers are planning to stabilise the 5,000-year-old structure, which is believed to be the world's largest man-made prehistoric mound. Archaeologists will also try to unlock the site's ancient secrets and find out how, why and when it was built. Earlier this year, archaeologists found traces of a Roman settlement at the landmark. English Heritage, which is conducting the stabilising work, believes there was a Roman community at Silbury Hill about 2,000 years ago. It says the site may have been a sacred place of pilgrimage. "We don't know exactly what it was for but it was probably part of a ceremonial and sacred landscape which centered on the Avebury henge," said an English Heritage spokeswoman.

The 130ft Neolithic mound near Avebury - one of Europe's largest prehistoric monuments - is thought to have been created some 3,000 years earlier. Heavy rains in May 2000 caused substantial damage to the hill, with the collapse of an 18th century shaft. Parts of the ancient site are thought to be collapsing because of the tunnels dug by archaeologists over many centuries.

Can life hitch a ride on a meteorite ?

Can life travel from planet to planet? A theory called Panspermia says that meteorites could potentially act as miniature spaceships, carrying microorganism passengers. But a new study has found that photosynthetic life probably wouldn’t survive the journey.Can life travel from planet to planet? When a rocky world is hit by a meteorite, the impact can send pieces of the planetary surface out into space, and eventually these ejected rocks can travel to other planets in the solar system. Here on Earth we have collected many meteorites that originated from the moon and from Mars, and there are also likely rocks from Earth sitting on the surfaces of our planetary neighbors.On Earth, tiny organisms like bacteria or lichen can live in the crevices and holes that permeate rocks. These forms of life, already adapted to the uncomfortable environment inside a rock, have proven to be resilient when subjected to the harsh conditions of space, often surviving radiation and frigid temperatures when exposed for short periods. Could such forms of life be carried in their rocky home to another world, and then, once landed, set up shop on the alien planet?This theory of life traveling between worlds is known as Panspermia. Some scientists have suggested that life on Earth could be alien-born, having originated on Mars or even further afield and then brought to Earth by a meteorite.

Today astrobiologists are testing the possibility of Panspermia in various ways. The STONE experiments of European Space Agency scientists sent microbes inside rocks into outer space to see if they could survive the journey.“To be transferred from one planet to another, you have to survive atmospheric exit, you have to survive the conditions in space, and you also have to survive atmospheric re-entry when you reach the destination planet,” says Charles Cockell, a microbiologist at the Open University in the UK who was involved in this study.

Weird gravity in Canada blamed on glaciers

A mysterious dip in gravity over Canada has been a weighty topic for some scientists. Now satellite data reveal a thick ice sheet that once cloaked the region partially resolves this so-called gravitational anomaly. Scientists have known that the Hudson Bay region features lower gravity than surrounding areas. While two theories have emerged to explain the strange phenomenon, conclusive evidence has been elusive. One theory involved a change in the area's overlying glacial weight as the Laurentide Ice Sheet melted.The new results, reported in the May 11 issue of the journal Science, provide a crude map of the ice sheet’s structure as it was during the most recent ice age. Turns out, the now-melted ice left behind an imprint from which the Earth is still rebounding, and that imprint contributes to the weird gravity. "There are many uncertainties about the last ice age and its impact on the Earth," said one of the study’s researchers Jerry Mitrovica, a physicist at the University of Toronto. “We are able to show that the ghost of the ice age still hangs over North America."

Mark Tamisiea of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and his colleagues relied on gravity-hunting gear: Between April 2002 and April 2006, they collected data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE). The twin GRACE satellites work by taking advantage of the fact that gravity’s pull on an area is proportional to the mass sitting atop that area.

King Herod's ancient tomb 'found'

An Israeli archaeologist says he has found the tomb of King Herod, the ruler of Judea while it was under Roman administration in the first century BC. After a search of more than 30 years, Ehud Netzer of the Hebrew University says he has located the tomb at Herodium, a site south of Jerusalem. Herod was noted in the New Testament for his Massacre of the Innocents. Told of Jesus' birth, Herod ordered all children under two in Bethlehem to be killed, the Gospel of Matthew said. According to the New Testament, Jesus' father Joseph was warned of the threat in a dream and fled with his wife and child to Egypt. "When I realised it was the tomb there was great happiness," said Prof Netzer, who has worked at the Herodium site since 1972. "Everyone has an interest in the Holy Land and Herod's tomb is part of that story." It was an ancient staircase built for Herod's funeral procession - described in detail by First Century historian Josephus Flavius - that led Prof Netzer's team to the hill-top burial site.

"The monumental stairs were built specifically for the funeral," Prof Netzer said. At the site, archaeologists found a smashed limestone sarcophagus that, when whole, would have been around 2.5m (8ft) long. Ornate rosette decorations on the fragments alerted the team to the coffin's significance. No bones were found at the site. Prof Netzer said that they had likely been removed by Jewish rebels who fought against Rome between 66 and 72 AD.

Can man see in to the future ?

Do some of us avoid tragedy by foreseeing it? Some scientists nowbelieve that the brain really CAN predict events before they happen. Professor Dick Bierman sits hunched over his computer in a darkened room. The gentle whirring of machinery can be heard faintly in the background. He smiles and presses a grubby-looking red button. In the next room, a patient slips slowly inside a hospital brain scanner. If it wasn't for the strange smiles and grimaces that flicker across the woman's face, you could be forgiven for thinking this was just a normal health check. But this scanner is engaged in one of the most profound paranormal experiments of all time, one that may well prove whether or not it is possible to predict the future. For the results - released exclusively to the Daily Mail - suggest that ordinary people really do have a sixth sense that can help them 'see' the future. Such amazing studies - if verified - might help explain the predictive powers of mediums and a range of other psychic phenomena such Extra Sensory Perception, deja vu and clairvoyance.

On a more mundane level, it may account for 'gut feelings' and instinct. The man behind the experiments is certainly convinced. "We're satisfied that people can sense the future before it happens," says Professor Bierman, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam. "We'd now like to move on and see what kind of person is particularly good at it."And Bierman is not alone: his findings mirror the data gathered by other scientists and paranormal researchers both here and abroad.

Rare skeleton found in Bolivia pyramid

Archaeologists have uncovered the 1,300-year-old skeleton of a ruler or priest of the ancient Tiwanaku civilisation together with precious jewels inside a much-looted pyramid in western Bolivia. The bones are "in very good condition" and belong to either "a ruler or a priest," Roger Angel Cossio, the Bolivian archaeologist who made the discovery, told Reuters on Wednesday.He said the tomb -- containing a diadem and fist-sized carved pendant of solid gold -- survived centuries of looting by Spanish invaders and unscrupulous raiders who depleted Tiwanaku of many precious treasures."After so much looting... miraculously this has stayed to tell us the history," Cossio said."It's a complete body... next to it are jewels, offerings and a llama," he said.The llama may have been a status symbol or a source of food for the journey to the afterlife, archaeologistssaid.

The corpse was found in a niche carved inside the 15-yard-high (15-metre-high) Akapana pyramid, which was built around 1200 BC and is described by experts as one of the biggest pre-Columbian constructions in South America.At its peak, the city of Tiwanaku stretched over 1,480 acres (600 hectares) and had a population of over 100,000, according to chief archaeologist Javier Escalante, who presented the findings on Wednesday at a news conference near the pyramid.

Ancient caves, paintings discovered in Nepal

Explorers have discovered a series of caves decorated with ancient Buddhist paintings, set in sheer cliffs in Nepal's remote Himalayan north, leaving archaeologists excited and puzzled. An international team of scholars, archaeologists, climbers and explorers examined at least 12 cave complexes at 14,000 feet (4,300 metres) near Lo Manthang, a mediaeval walled city in Nepal's Mustang district, about 125 km (80 miles) northwest of Kathmandu.The caves contain paintings that could date back as far as the 13th century, as well as Tibetan scripts executed in ink, silver and gold and pre-Christian era pottery shards."Who lived in those caves? When were they there, when were (the caves) first excavated and how did the residents access them, perched as they are on vertical cliffs?" asked Broughton Coburn, an American member of the survey team."It's a compelling, marvellous mystery."Explorers from the United States, Italy and Nepal used ice axes and ropes to climb to the caves, cutting steps in the cliff face as they went."These findings underscore the richness of the Tibetan Buddhist religious tradition of this area -- stretching back nearly a millennium -- as well as the artistic beauty and wide geographical reach of Newari artists," said Coburn, an expert in Himalayan conservation and development.

Newaris are ethnic Nepalis renowned for skills in wall paintings and other forms of mostly Buddhist art.The cave complexes are several hours walking distance apart. Some chambers were thought to have been used for burials, and there were also mounds archaeologists hope may hide further treasures.There are about 20 openings in each complex, and their multiple floors are connected by vertical passages with rudimentary handholds or footholds, requiring some climbing skill to negotiate.They contained stupas, decorative art and paintings depicting various forms of the Buddha, often with disciples, supplicants and attendants.

Arctic ice cap melting 30 years too soon

The Arctic ice cap is melting much faster than expected and is now about 30 years ahead of predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.S. ice expert said on Tuesday. This means the ocean at the top of the world could be free or nearly free of summer ice by 2020, three decades sooner than the global panel's gloomiest forecast of 2050.No ice on the Arctic Ocean during summer would be a major spur to global warming, said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Center in Colorado."Right now ... the Arctic helps keep the Earth cool," Scambos said in a telephone interview. "Without that Arctic ice, or with much less of it, the Earth will warm much faster."That is because the ice reflects light and heat; when it is gone, the much darker land or sea will absorb more light and heat, making it more difficult for the planet to cool down, even in winter, he said.Scambos and co-authors of the study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, used satellite data and visual confirmation of Arctic ice to reach their conclusions, a far different picture than that obtained from computer models used by the scientists of the intergovernmental panel.

"The IPCC report was very careful, very thorough and cautious, so they erred on the side of what would certainly occur as opposed to what might occur," Scambos said in a telephone interview.The wide possibility of what might occur included a much later melt up north, or a much earlier one, Scambos said."It appears we're on pace about 30 years earlier than expected to reach a state where we don't have sea ice or at least not very much in late summer in the Arctic Ocean," he said.

MoD due to release UFO files

The Ministry of Defence has officially announced that it plans to open the many files detailing UFO sightings to the public for the first time. The files date back to 1967 and though a release date for the files has not yet been decided it is hoped the process will occur within weeks. This move follows the decision made by the French national space agency to release its files pertaining to UFO’s making them the first country to do so. We reported on the French UFO files release back in March.David Clark recently stated the following in a recent statement regarding the release of these files - “The decision - announced in a letter I received last month - is a direct result of my attempts, working with colleagues, to persuade the MoD to follow the recent French example and open their entire historical and recent archive to public scrutiny."“An additional problem in the British case was that 24 files containing UFO reports examined by the DIS branch DI55 from the mid-1970s until 2002, had been permanently closed along with 63,000 other records due to exposure to asbestos during storage in the basement of the Old War Office building in central London." The files due for release could have a huge impact on such cases like the Rendlesham Forest Incident that took place in 1980.

Witnesses to the December incident claimed that radiation was emitted from the UFO and these files could prove those claims made by military witnesses that night.There are 24 files due for release each containing 200-300 reports of UFO activity that is approximately over 7000 reports the MOD has received since 1967. It is reported that not only do the files contain details on sightings by the general public but they also contain details on sightings reported by civil pilots and military personnel. David Clark is pleased with the result and stated this is a major breakthrough for UFOlogy - “The decision to release these files to the public is a major breakthrough and a landmark both for British Ufology and in the wider campaign for Freedom of Information in the UK.“It also marks the end of my personal campaign, which began almost a decade ago before FOI arrived in 2005, to persuade the MoD to release all their UFO records." One more step towards disclosure!

Fossil of dinosaur-skin traces found

Workers at a leisure facility found a fossil containing traces of dinosaur skin patterns, a rare discovery that could shed light on the actual appearance of the creature, the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum said Thursday. Museum officials said classifying the dinosaur has been difficult because fossils of its bones have not been found. But they said it could be a plant-eater from the early Cretaceous Period, about 100 million to 140 million years ago, judging from the age of the stratum where the fossil was found. Illustrations and reproductions of dinosaurs are largely based on guesswork, given the scarcity of fossilized skin in comparison to bones and teeth. "It is extremely rare for skin to be preserved as fossil because unlike bones, skin rots," Yoichi Azuma, assistant director of the museum, said. "We'd like to continue research on the fossil and use the results for restoring dinosaurs in detail and other purposes." The latest finding will be displayed at the museum from today through the end of May. Museum officials said the skin traces might have been left on the surface of the wet ground when the dinosaur tumbled or collapsed. The traces are believed to have been covered by sand and were fossilized over the eons.

In 1995, traces of skin were discovered from a fossil of a dinosaur's footprint at a nearby location. The latest traces were found on the surface of a 23- to 24-centimeter square, 7-cm-thick plate of fine-grained sandstone in the Katsuyama's Kitadani-cho district. The traces covered about 60 percent of the plate's surface, with polygonal and circular patterns of 3-5 millimeters in diameter and up to 1 mm in height. The plate was among rocks taken from the Kitadani stratum, the upper part of the early Cretaceous Period layers collectively known as the Tetori group. These layers are estimated to have formed about 120 million years ago. The rocks had been brought to a leisure facility, where children can excavate fossils. The plate was discovered in October by workers at the facility.