On this month's Oddities in the News Page:
Aliens exist and could already be on earth, first British astronaut says
IN THE ODDITIES ARCHIVES
Banana Art
Twinkie
What’s really in Loch Ness
Shark Tooth DNA
Military Admits to UFOs
Wild Animal Pets
Dr. Helen Sharman says "there's no two ways" that aliens exist and that it's possible "we simply can't see them"
Dr. Helen Sharman today
Dr. Helen Sharman at a news conference in London after returning from space in 1991
The first British astronaut to go into space has claimed aliens exist and it is possible they are living among us on earth.
Sky News, Lucia Binding, January 6, 2020 -- "There are so many billions of stars out there in the universe that there must be all sorts of different forms of life," Dr. Sharman said. She added that although aliens may not be made up of carbon and nitrogen like humans, "it's possible they're here right now and we simply can't see them."
The 56-year-old worked as a chemist before making history as the first British astronaut to participate in a mission to the Soviet modular space station Mir in May 1991.
She also highlighted in the interview that she is often referred to as the first British woman in space, rather than simply the first Briton. "It's telling that we would otherwise assume it was a man," she said.
"When Tim Peake went into space, some people simply forgot about me. A man going first would be the norm, so I'm thrilled that I got to upset that order."
Videos purporting to be leaked military footage of UFOs were claimed as genuine by the US Navy.
The clips - published by the To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science In December 2017 and March 2018 - showed several mystery objects travelling through the air at high speed. Our link above is to Time Magazine' reports of the story.
Military Pilots are Coming Foward to Officially Report UFO Sightings
New York Post -- The unidentified flying objects look like white Tic Tacs, or spinning tops flying against the wind — and Navy pilots keep reporting their presence over U.S. airspace. In interviews with the New York Times, five more pilots have come forward describing their experiences with UFOs flying off the Eastern seaboard from Virginia to Florida between 2014 and 2015.
One ten-year veteran, Lieutenant Ryan Graves, claimed that he saw UFOs almost daily, and that the objects could reach hypersonic speeds and heights of up to 30,000 feet without any visible engine or plumes of infrared exhaust. Graves, who reported his experience to the Pentagon and Congress, said, “These things would be out there all day,” and that, “with the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”
In late 2014, a pilot of a Super Hornet reported a near-collision with a UFO when an object that looked like a “sphere encasing a cube” zipped between two fighter jets flying roughly 100 feet from each other. Another pilot, Lieutenant Danny Accoin, could identify a flying object’s presence on his radar, missile system, and infrared camera but was not able to actually see it in his helmet camera. “I knew I had it, I knew it was not a false hit,” Accoin said. But still, “I could not pick it up visually.”
As the Times reports, pilot sightings of UFOs have increased since “their 1980s-era radar was upgraded to a more advanced system. As one fighter jet after another got the new radar, pilots began picking up the objects, but ignoring what they thought were false radar tracks.”
Actual photographs taken by US Military Pilots
Harvard University says yes to alien life HERE
What about Military Pilots? See HERE
What is the "Wow!" signal?
The Wow! signal represented as "6EQUJ5". The original printout with Ehman's handwritten exclamation is preserved by Ohio History Connection.
The Wow! signal was a strong narrowband radio signal received on August 15, 1977, by Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope in the United States, then used to support the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The signal appeared to come from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius and bore the expected hallmarks of extraterrestrial origin.
Astronomer Jerry R. Ehman discovered the anomaly a few days later while reviewing the recorded data. He was so impressed by the result that he circled the reading on the computer printout, 6EQUJ5, and wrote the comment Wow! on its side, leading to the event's widely used name.
The entire signal sequence lasted for the full 72-second window during which Big Ear was able to observe it, but has not been detected since, despite several subsequent attempts by Ehman and others. Many hypotheses have been advanced on the origin of the emission, including natural and human-made sources, but none of them adequately explains the signal. The Wow! signal remains the strongest candidate for an alien radio transmission ever detected.
See more HERE
What are the odds for alien life?
Frank Drake is the least lonely man on Earth—if not in the entire galaxy. Most of us are reserving judgment on whether there is intelligent life on other planets; we haven’t even found bacteria yet, much less a race of aliens with Internet service and takeout food. But Drake, an astrophysicist and chairman emeritus of the California-based SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, has no such doubts.
It was in 1961, when he was working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W. Va., that Drake developed the eponymous—and now famous—Drake Equation, which calculates how many advanced and detectable civilizations there should be in the Milky Way in any one year. The number turns out to be potentially huge, and while it’s admittedly based on a number of Earth-centric suppositions—the collapse of any one of which calls much of the equation into question—all of those suppositions are based in increasingly solid science.
Start with the number of stars in our galaxy, which is conservatively estimated at 100 billion, though is often cited as three times that. Of those 100 billion, from 20% to 50% probably harbor planetary systems—an estimate that becomes more and more reliable as the Kepler Space Telescope and various ground-based observatories detect increasing numbers of exoplanets.
Not all of those exoplanets would be capable of sustaining Earth-like life, so the equation assumes from 1 to 5 in any system could. Of those bio-friendly worlds, from 0% to 100% would actually go on to develop life. And of those world, in turn, from 0% to 100% would develop life forms that we would consider intelligent.
The mere existence of intelligent life forms tells us nothing, however, unless they have the ability to make themselves known—which means to manipulate radio waves and other forms of electromagnetic signaling. Drake estimates that from 10% to 20% of the smart civilizations would clear that bar.
Finally, and perhaps most anthropocentrically, the equation considers how long any one of those semaphoring civilizations would be around to blink their signals our way. A sun like ours survives for about 10 billion years; life on Earth has been around for only about 3.5 billion years, and humans have been radio-capable for barely a century.
If we destroy ourselves in an environmental or nuclear holocaust tomorrow, our signal will go dark then. If we survive for tens of thousands of years, we will be announcing our presence to the cosmos for far longer—and the same is true of all of the other civilizations that live in the Milky Way.
Factor all of this together and stir in a little statistical seasoning concerning our increasing ability to study other star systems for signals, and, as the above interactive shows—the results can vary wildly. If you play the game conservatively—lowballing all of the variables—you might get about 1,000 detectable civilizations out there at any given time. Play it more liberally and you get hundreds of millions. The interactive let’s you play that game yourself. Imagine there are 10,000 detectable civilizations and we are likely to find alien life by 2040. If there are a million, we’d discover alien life by 2028.
Nobody pretends the Drake Equation is the final word. Even its enthusiasts admit that it is, at best, a way to “organize our ignorance.” But organized ignorance is a whole lot better than the disorganized kind; and it is, almost always, a starting point toward wisdom.
Read the entire article HERE