>>20751865
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/HITLER%2C%20ADOLF_0003.pdf
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
April 20, 2024
Diamonds in the Sky
When the dark shadow of the Moon raced across North America on April 8, sky watchers along the shadow's narrow central path were treated to a total solar eclipse. During the New Moon's shadow play diamonds glistened twice in the eclipse-darkened skies. The transient celestial jewels appeared immediately before and after the total eclipse phase. That's when the rays of a vanishing and then emerging sliver of solar disk are just visible behind the silhouetted Moon's edge, creating the appearance of a shiny diamond set in a dark ring. This dramatic timelapse composite from north-central Arkansas captures both diamond ring moments of this total solar eclipse. The diamond rings are separated by the ethereal beauty of the solar corona visible during totality.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?
Slovenia Signs Artemis Accords, Joins Pursuit of Safer Space
APR 19, 2024
NASA and Slovenia affirmed their cooperation in future space endeavors on Friday as Slovenia became the 39th country to sign the Artemis Accords. The signing certified Slovenia’s commitment to pursue safe and sustainable exploration of space for the benefit of humanity and took place during a U.S.-Slovenia strategic dialogue in Ljubljana, Slovenia, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Offices.
“NASA welcomes Slovenia to the Artemis Accords,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Today, the partnership between the United States and Slovenia crosses a new frontier. We live in a golden era of exploring the stars. That era will be written by nations that explore the cosmos openly, responsibly, and in peace.”
State Secretary Matevž Frangež of the Ministry of the Economy, Tourism, and Sport signed the Accords on behalf of Slovenia, with James O’Brien, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, participating in the signing event.
“Slovenia joins the principles, values, and rules on the peaceful use of space as a common good of humanity,” Frangež said.
Rebecca Bresnik, Associate General Counsel for International and Space Law, served as the senior NASA official at the ceremony, along with her husband, Randy Bresnik, who is a NASA astronaut of Slovenian descent.
“We are delighted to welcome Slovenia to the Artemis Accords family,” said Ambassador Jamie Harpootlian, the U.S. ambassador to Slovenia “We recognize Slovenia as a rising leader in space. We look forward to taking our collaborations with Slovenia on science, technology, and innovation to new frontiers.”
In 2020, the United States and seven other countries established the Artemis Accords to establish guidelines for the peaceful exploration and use of outer space. The Accords reinforce and implement key obligations in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. They also strengthen the commitment by the United States and signatory nations to the Registration Convention, the Rescue and Return Agreement, as well as best practices NASA and its partners support, including the public release of scientific data.
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/slovenia-signs-artemis-accords-joins-pursuit-of-safer-space/
NASA, FAA Partner to Develop New Wildland Fire Technologies
APR 19, 2024
NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have established a research transition team to guide the development of wildland fire technology.
Wildland fires are occurring more frequently and at a larger scale than in past decades, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Emergency responders will need a broader set of technologies to prevent, monitor, and fight these growing fires more effectively. Under this Wildland Fire Airspace Operations research transition team, NASA and the FAA will develop concepts and test new technologies to improve airspace integration.
Current aerial firefighting operations are limited to times when aircraft have clear visibility – otherwise pilots run the risk of flying into terrain or colliding with other aircraft. Drones could overcome this limitation by enabling responders to remotely monitor and suppress these fires during nighttime and low visibility conditions, such as periods of heavy smoke. However, advanced airspace management technologies are needed to enable these uncrewed aircraft to stay safely separated and allow aircraft operators to maintain situational awareness during wildland fire management response operations.
Over the next four years, NASA’s Advanced Capabilities for Emergency Response Operations (ACERO) project, in collaboration with the FAA, will work to develop new airspace access and traffic management concepts and technologies to support wildland fire operations. These advancements will help inform a concept of operations for the future of wildland fire management under development by NASA and other government agencies. The team will test and validate uncrewed aircraft technologies for use by commercial industry and government agencies, paving the way for integrating them into future wildland fire operations.
ACERO is led out of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley under the agency’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasa-faa-partner-to-develop-new-wildland-fire-technologies/
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/nasa-selects-new-aircraft-driven-studies-of-earth-and-climate-change/
NASA Selects New Aircraft-Driven Studies of Earth and Climate Change
APR 19, 2024
NASA has selected six new airborne missions that include domestic and international studies of fire-induced clouds, Arctic coastal change, air quality, landslide hazards, shrinking glaciers, and emissions from agricultural lands. NASA’s suite of airborne missions complement what scientists can see from orbit, measure from the ground, and simulate in computer models.
Funded through the agency's Earth Venture program, the missions center around the use of instruments mounted on aircraft to make measurements in finer detail—both in spatial resolution and shorter time scales—than can be made by many satellites. Competitively selected, the missions provide opportunities to supplement satellite observations and make innovative measurements.
These missions will help us interpret what our current satellites are seeing from space and test new ideas and techniques for our upcoming Earth System Observatory, said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA's Earth Science Division. There is also a strong focus on actionable Earth science—gathering fundamental observations that have connections to our economy and societal decision-making and information needs.
Roughly $120 million has been allotted for the six missions, which will deploy at various times from 2026 to 2029. Three lead investigators were chosen for each mission, with at least one required to be an early career scientist. Full staffing of the science teams and selection of complementary instruments will be competed in the coming months. These changes in the selection process were made to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the teams.
We are constantly looking to foster the growth of the next generation of scientists, said Barry Lefer, the program manager who led the Earth Venture selection panels at NASA Headquarters in Washington. This round of missions will put an extra emphasis on bringing new people into mission planning and leadership.
The six missions include:
Arctic coastal change
Maria Tzortziou of the City College of New York will lead a project to observe changes in river systems on the North Slope of Alaska. Known as FORTE (short for Arctic Coastlines–The Frontlines of Rapidly Transforming Ecosystems), the project will combine optical and radar measurements from planes, helicopters, boats, and drones to measure water flows and chemistry and observe how ecosystems respond to changing climate. The team will collaborate with indigenous communities to sustain observations over time.
Clouds created by fire
In PYREX—the Pyrocumulonimbus Experiment—David Peterson of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington will lead a study of pyrocumulonimbus clouds, which form when wildfires burn hot enough to make their own weather. Flying over the western U.S. and Canada, researchers will examine the fire characteristics that produce pyrocumulonimbus, while exploring the mechanisms that lead these clouds to inject smoke into the stratosphere, where it can have climate effects.
1/2
Urban air pollution
James Crawford of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, will lead HAMAQ (Hemispheric Airborne Measurements of Air Quality), a project that capitalizes on the recent launches of NASA's TEMPO pollution-monitoring satellite instrument and comparable measurements made by Korean and European satellites. Over Mexico City and a U.S. city to be determined, scientists will investigate areas of poor air quality and test how satellite information can help improve ground-based forecasting and mitigation strategies.
Shifting weather, shifting lands
Climate change is leading to more extreme droughts and rainfall events that affect the stability of hillslopes and the soil and rock on them. Led by Alexander Handwerger of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, LACCE (Landslide Climate Change Experiment) will combine airborne measurements with land-based sensors to track the way slopes and landslides are changing as water moves differently across the landscape.
Glacier retreat
John Holt of the University of Arizona will lead Snow4Flow, a project to quantify the retreat of glaciers and ice sheets in ways that can lead to better projections of land-ice change. In Alaska, southeastern Greenland, the Canadian Arctic, and Svalbard, the team will use microwave and high-frequency radar sounders to measure snow accumulation, ice melting, and changes in ice thickness and motion.
Agricultural emissions
While the burning of fossil fuels remains the leading source of carbon in our atmosphere, farmlands and ranchlands are also substantial sources of gas and particle emissions. In the NTERFAACE (Nitrogen and Carbon Terrestrial Fluxes: Agriculture, Atmospheric Composition, and Ecosystems) mission, led by Glenn Wolfe of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, researchers will measure the amount of greenhouse gases, nitrogen, and other pollutants that are emitted from agricultural lands across the United States.
2/2
Watch 'Devil Comet' approach the sun during explosive coronal mass ejection (video)
April 20, 2024
NASA's space-based solar observatory STEREO-A is keeping a close eye on 'Devil Comet' 12P/Pons-Brooks as it prepares to make its closest approach to the sun — known as perihelion — on April 21.
In this footage, the comet is passing by Jupiter from the observatory's perspective, just as a coronal mass ejection (CME), a large expulsion of plasma and magnetic field from the sun, launches into space.
CMEs form in a similar fashion to solar flares: They're the result of the twisting and realignment of the sun's magnetic field, known as magnetic reconnection. When these magnetic field lines 'tangle' they produce strong localized magnetic fields which can break through the sun's surface and release CMEs.
In this NASA video, you can see a kink in the tail of comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, created during a 'disconnection event' triggered by a CME or strong gust of solar wind, according to Spaceweather.com. During a disconnection event, these solar outbursts can uproot a comet's tail and force it away from the comet.
The same kink is visible in this incredible image below captured by Chris Schur on April 9.
"The comet is a spectacular sight both in binoculars and with the camera from our northern Arizona location," Schur told Space.com.
"This image is our best shot yet at this wonder, the beautiful kinked blue gas tail follows the dusty amber-tinted coma shaped like a parabola as it heads for its coming perihelion" Schur continued.
On April 21, comet 12P/Pons-Brooks will pass within about 72.6 million miles (116.8 million km), of the sun, this is equivalent to three-quarters the Earth's distance from the sun.
The comet has gained much media attention in recent years due to its sudden glare ups in brightness and changing appearance.
Though the exact cause of these flares is unknown, Richard Miles of the British Astronomical Association thinks comet 12P/Pons Brooks may be one of 10 to 20 known comets that contain active ice volcanoes.
The 'magma' of these volcanoes is a cold mixture of liquid hydrocarbons and dissolved gasses, all trapped beneath a surface that has the consistency of wax, skywatching columnist and meteorologist Joe Rao previously reported. "These bottled-up volatiles can explode when sunlight opens a fissure," Rao explained.
Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks gained the moniker 'Devil Comet' when a large outburst on July 20, 2023, caused a shell of expanding gas surrounding the nucleus, known as the coma, to resemble some a horseshoe shape. After this, comet 12P/Pons-Brooks has been likened to a horseshoe crab, the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars and yes, you guessed it, the 'Devil Comet'.
https://www.space.com/watch-devil-comet-12p-pons-brooks-approach-sun-during-explosive-cme-eruption
Tucker Carlson says UFOs are piloted by 'spiritual entities' with bases 'under the ocean and the ground'
UPDATED: 17:13 EDT, 19 April 2024
UFOs and their pilots might not be 'extra-terrestrials' from a distant planet at all, but 'spiritual entities' who have inhabited Earth for as long as humanity itself.
At least, that's the 'supernatural' theory Fox News vet and one-time MSNBC host Tucker Carlson put forward this week on comedian Joe Rogan's podcast
'There's a ton of evidence that they're under the ocean and under the ground,' Carlson told Rogan's listeners during the show's usual, sprawling, three-hour-long chat format, adding: 'They've been here for a long time.'
Carlson's latest comments echo an increasingly common refrain from UFO-curious lawmakers, including Missouri Congressman Eric Burlison and his fellow GOP legislator Tim Burchett, who both compared UFOs to Biblical entities in the past year.
'The first chapter of Ezekiel is pretty clear of a UFO sighting,' Rep. Burchett told reporters in January of 2023, ahead of his push to bring UFO whistleblowers to testify before Congress last summer.
'Whenever I use the term "angels,"' added Rep. Burlison, who has been privy to classified briefings on the UFO phenomena, 'to me, it's synonymous with an extradimensional being.'
Tucker Carlson appeared to earnestly cosign these notions on his April 19 podcast appearance, while pleading ignorance on many unanswered questions surrounding the issue, now more commonly called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena or UAP.
'They're from here and they've been here for thousands of years,' Carlson said, 'whatever they are.'
'And it's pretty clear to me that they're "spiritual entities,"' he continued, 'whatever that means.'
The veteran broadcaster explained that by 'supernatural' he meant that the beings were 'above the observable nature' and that they 'don't behave according to the laws of science.'
'With that fact set,' Carlson put it rhetorically, 'what do you conclude?'
Earlier in 2024, Rogan commented on Carlson's growing public interest in UFOs, wondering ahead of Carlson's appearance on his program: 'What does he know?'
But speculation linking UFOs to religious visitations and/or theories about interdimensional beings have been a recurring feature within the discourse on the topic since the early 20th Century.
The concept gained its highest and arguably most reputable profile with the publication of the book 'Passport to Magonia: from Folklore to Flying Saucers' by the astronomer and Internet pioneer Jacques Vallée in 1969.
Vallée, who later served as the inspiration for François Truffaut's character in Steven Spielberg's UFO blockbuster 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind,' had spent years pouring over volumes of ancient texts for the groundbreaking tome.
He paired 1180 encounters with 'luminous' flying 'earthenware vessels' reported over Japan, Roman accounts of hovering 'shields' and Native American stories of 'baskets from heaven' to argue a continuity with modern 'flying saucer' cases.
In more recent years, Vallée, now a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and computer scientist, published a study of physical evidence from a UFO crash in a peer-reviewed science journal, Progress in Aerospace Sciences.
As he told Wired, Vallée hopes that research will become 'a template […] for what serious UFO research could be in the future, if one plays by the rules.'
But similar arguments, linking UFOs to demonic entities or angelic miracles, have also been made in less scholarly form on cable TV shows like 'Ancient Aliens,' and online by conspiracy theorists and evangelical Christians, among others.
The editor for Phenomena Magazine, Brian Allan, to cite one account, spoke to Anglican Pastor Ray Boeche who claims that a faction within the Pentagon deeply believes that UFOs are the product of demonic forces.
'The Defense Intelligence Agency were looking at this demonic element, and they labelled these sorts of aliens as 'non human entities,' Allan said.
'They believed that there was a demonic component to the UFO phenomenon: they are not invading us, it's Biblical.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13329315/Tucker-Carlson-UFO-spiritual-angels-demons-Bible-Joe-Rogan.html
Former CIA officer unveils UFOs have killed US military and cause brain damage
Apr 20, 2024 6:15 AM CDT
A top brain expert and a former CIA officer has said he was instructed to write a paper on the number of injuries sustained by US military serviceman after encountering a UFO, or UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena).
Detroit Professor Christopher Green, a forensic neuroimaging expert who worked at the CIA since the 1960s, said in 2010, he was asked by an unnamed government defense program that was tasked with monitoring UFOs to write a paper on the injuries military personnel received after encountering an "anomalous" craft, or UFO/UAP. The doctor said he has dealt with "hundreds of patients" that range from special forces officials and other military serviceman, with some of these patients later dying.
Dr. Green's paper, titled 'Clinical Medical Acute & Subacute Field Effects on Human Dermal & Neurological Tissues' was released under the Freedom of Information Act and mentions patients developing the following symptoms post-UFO encounter: sclerosis, brain damage, and burns.
"Some of them did come close, and make them become unconscious and they woke up burned or injured," said Green
The doctor said it appears some of the injuries were caused when a person got too close to "subtle, highly powered, highly modulated microwaves," with his study finding that serviceman could have been blasted by a powerful radio or electromagnetic frequencies from the propulsion systems of these objects.
It should be noted that despite Dr. Green's paper specifically mentioning the "ET's (extraterrestrials)" and "off-world exposures" Green states it's entirely possible advanced human technology could have caused the injuries experienced by these military personnel, as humans have the technological capabilities to do so.
"The purpose of this paper is to argue that data exists to 'reverse engineer' propulsion systems of anomalous aerospace vehicles," Green's paper said
Green said that one in ten of his patients died within seven years of their first reported UFO encounter.
"Because I'm a forensic neurologist and a brain imager, I'm the go-to physician in the Department of Defense for unexplained morbidity and mortality," Green said, "I do look at injuries and mortality from unidentified UAPs. My client population is heavily within intelligence, Department of Defense, Special Forces, aerospace industry, people that work under contract for aerospace companies that get ill and they don't know why."
"Sometimes they hovered. Sometimes they moved in odd ways," he said. "Some did show clear, advanced cloaking. Some did show emanations of funny lights, patterns and strobes. There are a lot of cases of things that instantaneously appear and instantaneously disappear."
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/97727/former-cia-officer-unveils-ufos-have-killed-us-military-and-cause-brain-damage/index.html
https://www.dia.mil/FOIA/FOIA-Electronic-Reading-Room/FileId/170026/