There’s still no technology in the world that lets you listen in on someone’s thoughts. But scientific advances are making it easier than ever to measure, interpret, and reconstruct brain activity. Add that to a growing market of wearables with mind-reading sensors, and there are more ways to map our brainwaves than ever before.
With more opportunities to track brain activity comes more opportunities to mine that data. That’s not necessarily a bad thing outright, but it raises some privacy concerns: who owns brain data? fMRIs are already starting to get used as lie detectors, and it’s not unreasonable to expect police and other actors to use cognitive data in the future to gauge whether someone is innocent or guilty. It’s time to talk about how much control we should have over what’s in our brains.
At the World Science Festival, neuroethicist Paul Roote Wolp stressed how important it is right now to set up ground rules to protect cognitive privacy. Wolp believes that people should have absolute control over the information in our skulls, even with warrants for the contents of our brainwaves.
“I’m for an absolute right to cognitive privacy,” he says. “What does the right to privacy mean if it doesn’t mean the absolute right to the content of my own thoughts?”
It’s the early days, but technology that uses brainwaves is well on its way to becoming mainstream. Samsung has been prepping a mind-controlled tablet interface that uses an EEG hood since 2013, and there’s already a slew of devices that use neural-monitoring technology, from Emotiv’s high-tech research EEG headsets to Necomimi Brainwave Cat Ears.
When people use these technologies, the data footprints they leave behind will contain deeply personal information. EEG can be used as a unique personal identifier, for instance. With neuro-gaming and mind-controlled devices taking off, it’s time to have a discussion about the ways companies and governments can use the brain-based data these technologies generate. Sure, cat ears you move with your mind are whimsical, but if Ncomimi sells your brainwave data, that’s not so cute.
Aside from commercial uses, Wolp and others are concerned that government agencies and law enforcement will attempt to make cases against people based on what their brainwaves reveal. Right now, fMRI lie-detection is still in sketchy legal territory, but if the technology advances, there could be scenarios like the one described in the video, where a potential terrorist is “interrogated” by reading and analysing their brain waves.
Brainwave-reading technology is enormously valuable, and can help us understand how our brains work and how diseases of the brain work. It’s inevitable that we will continue developing these technologies. But it’s important not to forget that fighting for a reasonable expectation of privacy is necessary as we develop tools that could help people data-mine minds.
At present, our culture is overly obsessive about germs, cleanliness, and hygiene. Parents are constantly washing their children’s hands, using antibacterial soap, alcohol tinged wipes or changing them the second they have dirt on their clothes.
I don’t know about you, but when I was a child I liked to make mud pies, walk around barefoot and climb any tree I could find. Instinctively I craved to immerse myself in the natural environment.
When I had my own children I reminded myself of this as they shoveled sand into their mouths at the beach or tasted a pebble or a leaf. It is natural for children to be as close to nature as possible. Well, now research into the connection between getting dirty and a immune system health has found that this modern obsession with germs and cleanliness might be leading to the rise in allergies, asthma and inflammatory bowel disease. (1
Just like any other muscle in our body, the immune system needs to be exercised in order to fully develop and become strong enough to resist illness and disease. Eating dirt as a child turns out to be the ideal training to build your immune system’s overall fitness.
Wrote Mary Ruebush:
“What a child is doing when he puts things in his mouth is allowing his immune response to explore his environment. Not only does this allow for ‘practice’ of immune responses, which will be necessary for protection, but it also plays a critical role in teaching the immature immune response what is best ignored.”
Children who grow up on farms and are exposed to all sorts of bugs, worms and natural elements have demonstrably less allergies and autoimmune problems than urban children who spend most of their time indoors. Playing outside barefoot every now and again and digging in the dirt more often would do wonders for the health of today’s youngsters.
Our Natural Instinct is to Love Dirt
New research says that it is possible that children today are ‘too’ clean, and would be better off sticking to their natural instincts.
In a 2012 study, researchers tested what would happen to mice if they were bred to lack stomach bacteria and how it would effect their immune system. It found that exposure early in life to microbes helped to train certain immune cells to resist disease later in life. Exposure to those same microbes as an adult did not have the same effect. The immune cells affected were generally those in the lungs and colon due to hyperactivity in T cells. This is similar to that found in humans with asthma.
The most important point from the research is the idea that during the early years of life there are some crucial biological developments that happen which cannot be recreated later on in life — and building a strong immune system is one of them. (3)
Playing in Dirt Builds a Strong Immune System
By no means am I suggesting that you feed your child spoonfuls of dirt, rather I am letting you know that you can stop worrying about dirt and germs and place your energy elsewhere. People are so worried about their children catching a cold or flu that they are obsessively focused on whether their child is clean and germ-free. However, this seems to work against the natural rhythm of life. Science has proven that exposure to dirt is beneficial to a child’s life. They love dirt because they instinctively know it is good for them in order to grow up with strong immune systems.
We can now relax and trust that our children will actually be healthier the dirtier they get. Take a deep breath and enjoy watching the joy your child experiences playing in dirt while knowing that they are building their intuitive instincts and a strong immune system.
The Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC), based in Rome, Italy, is an international organization jointly created by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WTO) of the United Nations. The Codex Committee on Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Use (CCNFSDU) is responsible for Dietary Supplements and Medical Foods and is one of some 27 separate Codex committees. The CCNFSDU meets once yearly in Berlin, Germany (its host country) and the National Health Federation is a Codex-recognized organization with the right to attend and speak out at these meetings.
The purpose of Codex is to provide a forum to facilitate global trade in foods and promote consumer food safety by developing science based standards and guidelines for use by member countries. Codex guidelines and standards are automatically implemented by the General Agreement on Trade & Tariffs (GATT) of the WTO and become binding for all international trade among GATT signatory countries. The CAC process calls for proposed committee standards and guidelines to be forwarded and approved by the Codex Alimentarius Commission’s Executive Committee.
When the proposals reach final approval (after an eight-step process), they then become binding on all GATT signatories, including the United States. Thereafter, no GATT-signatory country may use as a trade barrier any standard or guideline that disagrees with a Codex guideline or standard. According to some, it does not mean that all GATT countries must adopt Codex standards for their own domestic use. According to the NHF, we think that Codex guidelines and standards will inevitably supersede domestic laws, including the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994.
The National Health Federation supports Codex guidelines and standards that are based on a free-market approach that maximizes freedom and health. In a free-market approach, the consumer is king and can choose to purchase and consume any foods and dietary supplements that he or she wishes. History has shown that the safest food products do not come from a top-down driven, controlled-market economy where an elitist select few decide what is “best” for all of us. Rather, the safest and healthiest individuals are those who are free to choose for themselves what is best for their health. The National Health Federation does not say that a free-market system is perfect.
No system is perfect. Instead, the goal is to minimize health errors and disease and a free-market system inevitably leads to such minimization. Recent history has shown centralized, planned economies to be among the unhealthiest for their citizens. And the more that free-market economies themselves are seduced into allowing health-care decisions to be made by elitist planners, the more health and health freedom will suffer. Therefore, the National Health Federation supports a decentralized system of health choices; and the most decentralized system is one where each individual consumer is free to choose what to put into his or her own body.
In the case of Codex, the National Health Federation opposes the current Codex member states who wrongly believe that consumer health will be enhanced by: (1) denying that dietary supplements can benefit normal, healthy people; (2) incorrectly defining dietary supplements as only those vitamins and minerals that the body cannot manufacture itself; (3) restricting the upper-limit amounts of vitamins and minerals, particularly by referring to currently-crude and archaic medical beliefs about nutrients; (4) restricting any physiological benefit information for consumers; (5) restricting the lower-limit amounts of vitamins and minerals that may be consumed by individuals; and (6) creating “positive” and “negative” lists of dietary supplements.
The current direction of Codex is off course and is unfortunately driven by a statist and elitist mentality that thinks it knows what is best for consumer health and protection. Unfortunately, such a mindset comes from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s kind of “brave new world” thinking that elevated central planners into a form of “God on Earth.” That kind of out-dated thinking has caused more misery, death and disease than can possibly be imagined. That is why the National Health Federation supports a Codex process that will free up health knowledge and products for the entire World.
A free-market system of choice and knowledge will avoid the errors of central planning that sets standards, however well intentioned, into stone. With the doubling time of knowledge constantly accelerating, mankind cannot afford the “luxury” of getting stuck in health standards established in the 20th Century while new health knowledge and products are discovered almost daily. We also wish that such discoveries continue. The best way to ensure such progress and advancing health is to keep the planners and bureaucrats from strait jacketing dietary supplements with medievalist thinking and restrictions.
More than ever before, our world needs people who are alive and inspired, who have new visions, new ideas for implementing them, and new energy. However, as much as corporations, classrooms, and clinical centers say they want to support creativity, they usually end up stifling it.
For one thing, creative people are often misunderstood as undisciplined, or misdiagnosed as having a personality disorder, when in fact they are absolutely healthy within a creative norm, and capable of brilliant work when recognized, nurtured, and supported in developing their expressive capacities.
In Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, creativity scholar Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi developed a generic description of the creative personality. It gives teachers, therapists, coaches, managers, and co-workers an expanded framework for working with people driven by internal passions, visions, and values.
Csikszentmilhalyi wrote:
“If there is one word that makes creative people different from others, it is the word complexity. Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude. Like the color white that includes all colors, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves. Creativity allows for paradox, light, shadow, inconsistency, even chaos –and creative people experience both extremes with equal intensity.”
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CREATIVE PERSONALITY
1. A great deal of physical energy alternating with a great need for quiet and rest. 2. Highly sexual, yet often celibate, especially when working. 3. Both extravagant and spartan. 4. Smart and naïve at the same time. A mix of wisdom and childishness. Emotional immaturity along with the deepest insights. 5. Convergent (rational, left brain, sound judgment) and divergent (intuitive, right brain, visionary) thinking. Divergence is the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas, to switch from one perspective to another, and to pick unusual associations of ideas. Convergence involves evaluation and choice. Creative people have the capacity to think both ways. 6. Both extroverted and introverted, needing people and solitude equally. 7. Humble and proud, both painfully self-doubting and wildly self-confident. 8. May defy gender stereotypes, and are likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other as well. A kind of psychic androgyny. 9. Can be rebellious and independent on one hand, and traditional and conservative on the other. 10. A natural openness and sensitivity that often exposes them to extreme suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment. Despair alternates with bliss, despair when they aren’t working, and bliss when they are.
The most important quality among creative people, says Csikszentmilhalyi, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake.
Ask yourself how you can create classrooms, workplaces, families, and healing environments that value and support the gifts that the creative people you know have to offer.
There’s still no technology in the world that lets you listen in on someone’s thoughts. But scientific advances are making it easier than ever to measure, interpret, and reconstruct brain activity. Add that to a growing market of wearables with mind-reading sensors, and there are more ways to map ourbrainwaves than ever before.
With more opportunities to track brain activity comes more opportunities to mine that data. That’s not necessarily a bad thing outright, but it raises some privacy concerns: who owns brain data? fMRIs are already starting to get used as lie detectors, and it’s not unreasonable to expect police and other actors to use cognitive data in the future to gauge whether someone is innocent or guilty. It’s time to talk about how much control we should have over what’s in our brains.
At the World Science Festival, neuroethicist Paul Roote Wolp stressed how important it is right now to set up ground rules to protect cognitive privacy. Wolp believes that people should have absolute control over the information in our skulls, even with warrants for the contents of our brainwaves.
“I’m for an absolute right to cognitive privacy,” he says. “What does the right to privacy mean if it doesn’t mean the absolute right to the content of my own thoughts?”
It’s the early days, but technology that uses brainwaves is well on its way to becoming mainstream. Samsung has been prepping a mind-controlled tablet interface that uses an EEG hood since 2013, and there’s already a slew of devices that use neural-monitoring technology, from Emotiv’s high-tech research EEG headsets to Necomimi Brainwave Cat Ears.
When people use these technologies, the data footprints they leave behind will contain deeply personal information. EEG can be used as a unique personal identifier, for instance. With neuro-gaming and mind-controlled devices taking off, it’s time to have a discussion about the ways companies and governments can use the brain-based data these technologies generate. Sure, cat ears you move with your mind are whimsical, but if Ncomimi sells your brainwave data, that’s not so cute.
Aside from commercial uses, Wolp and others are concerned that government agencies and law enforcement will attempt to make cases against people based on what their brainwaves reveal. Right now, fMRI lie-detection is still in sketchy legal territory, but if the technology advances, there could be scenarios like the one described in the video, where a potential terrorist is “interrogated” by reading and analysing their brain waves.
Brainwave-reading technology is enormously valuable, and can help us understand how our brains work and how diseases of the brain work. It’s inevitable that we will continue developing these technologies. But it’s important not to forget that fighting for a reasonable expectation of privacy is necessary as we develop tools that could help people data-mine minds.
(Please read the description for context of what you are getting, and what to do with it.)
The media, your pediatrician, politicians and health authorities like the CDC and FDA claim that vaccines are safe and effective. So why do hundreds of peer-reviewed studies indicate the opposite is true? Read, download, and share this document widely to provide the necessary evidence-based counterbalance to the pro-vaccination propaganda that has globally infected popular consciousness and discussion like an intractable disease.
It is abundantly clear that if the present-day vaccine climate, namely, that everyone must comply with the CDC’s one-size-fits-all vaccination schedule or be labeled a health risk to society at large, is to succumb to open and balanced discussion, it is the peer-reviewed biomedical evidence itself that is going to pave the way towards making rational debate on the subject happen.
With this aim in mind, GreenMedInfo.com has painstakingly collected over 300 pages of study abstracts culled directly from the National Library of Medicine’s pubmed.gov bibliographic database on the wide-ranging adverse health effects linked to vaccines in the today’s schedule (over 200 distinct adverse effects, including death), as well as numerous studies related to vaccine contamination, and vaccine failure in highly vaccine compliant populations.
This is the literature that the media, politicians and governmental health organizations like the CDC, pretend with abject dishonesty does not exist – as if vaccine injury did not happen, despite the over 3 billion dollars our government has paid out to vaccine injured through the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund since it was inaugurated in 1986.
We have written extensively about this research previously, highlighting different studies, focusing on translating their implications to the lay persons (view our vaccine article section here), but we believe that collecting and condensing solely the primary literature itself makes a much more powerful statement.
This document is being made free to download to the world at large in order to encourage the lay public, health professionals, activists, and elected officials alike to read, acknowledge and share the voluminous literature with their family, friends, colleagues and related stakeholders. You will find this research undermines the national and global agenda to continue to expand the vaccine schedule (on behalf of a vaccine industry that is indemnified against lawsuit for defective or harmful products), with increasing legislative pressure to remove exemptions and mandate them against the evidence of harm and at best equivocal effectiveness as a preventive health measure.
If the vaccination arm of modern medicine today is to continue to promote itself as a science- and evidence-based practice, it must acknowledge and incorporate the implications of the research we are releasing here, or lose any pretense at credibility. Failing to do so will reveal that the widespread push to remove your choice in the matter is agenda and not evidence driven, and due to the fact that vaccines all carry the risk of irreversible harm and even death(any vaccine insert proves this), it clearly violates the Nuremberg code of medical ethics to promote them as a priori safe and effectiveness.
The goal of the Plan? To vastly increase the number of adults in the US who are vaccinated against diseases in accordance with the CDC schedule of vaccines.
Here are key quotes from the Plan:
“The HHS Action Plan to Reduce Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities includes a measure to increase the percentage of the minority population who receive the seasonal influenza vaccination.”
Translation: The government cares about minorities, and to prove it these persons will be injected with a variety of germs and toxic chemicals.
“Increase the use of electronic health records (EHRs) and immunization information systems (IIS) to collect and track adult immunization data.”
Translation: expose confidential patient medical records to many doctors and government agencies, in order to discover all adults who aren’t up to speed on their vaccinations—and therefore must get the shots. Goodbye, privacy. Goodbye, unencumbered free choice.
“Educate and encourage other groups (e.g., community-
and faith-based groups) to promote the importance of adult immunization…A variety of networks can be leveraged, including faith-based and community organizations and individual trusted leaders.”
Translation: Step up government-initiated propaganda at all levels of society, in order to convince adults to come forward and receive their injections.
“All healthcare professionals must ensure that adult patients are fully immunized.”
Translation: During every office visit, doctors must check the vaccination status of their adult patients and pressure them to take their injections.
“The Affordable Care Act [Obamacare]…will help make prevention [vaccination] affordable and accessible for all Americans by requiring health plans to cover preventive [vaccination] services…”
Translation: Increased taxes and the rabid printing of new money will ensure that many more Americans are injected with a variety of germs and toxic chemicals.
The Adult Immunization Plan doesn’t specify compulsory mandated vaccination, but it certainly moves in that direction. Tracking, surveillance, propaganda, doctor-applied pressure are its features.
Note the connection of the Adult Vaccination Plan to Obamacare. As I warned several years ago, one of the main features of Obamacare is the step-by-step evolution toward medical slavery.
As with any health insurance plan, there comes a complete list of diseases and disorders that are covered, as well as the permitted treatments for each condition.
Eventually, this list IS what medical diagnosis and treatment consist of—and nothing else.
No choice for patients, no choice for doctors.
Government makes all the decisions.
Universal coverage for both childhood and adult vaccinations is now on the Obamacare list.
Pressure to comply now, forced obedience later.
In military terms, this is a pincer movement. State legislatures are now considering new bills to limit or entirely cut off vaccine-exemptions.
Media are falling in line. “Experts” are virulently supporting mandated vaccines for all, under the banner of “protect the children.”
Public schools are overtly lying, telling parents their children must be fully vaccinated in order to enroll, when in fact the parents can opt out with exemptions that the states still allow.
Dumbed-down members of the public are responding to all this with: “What? Vaccines aren’t absolutely required for everybody already? I’m shocked. I thought they were.”
The freedom and the right to refuse medication is the last bastion. It must not fall.
Highly publicized lawsuits must be filed by honorable and relentless attorneys now. One basis for such suits is informed consent. By law, all patients must be informed, by their doctors, about the risks associated with any medicine, including vaccines, before such medications are taken. Vaccine manufacturers’ package inserts spell out some of the major risks and dangers.
Consider this: informed consent absolutely implies that the patient can refuse the medication. He has that freedom. Otherwise, “informed” means nothing and “consent” means nothing.
How can informed consent have any practical force if the patient must take the medicine?
That would be like saying, “I’m now going to tell you about the dangers of jumping out of this plane without a parachute. The law compels me to spell out the dangers. But when I’m through, you will jump out of the plane.”
This is a sword an attorney can hold and use.
Of course, the monolithic State will argue that protection of the population outweighs any consideration of individual freedom and informed consent. The State always and forever argues in that fashion, in all cases, in all matters.
That is why it is the State. It seeks, first and foremost, to expand its own power. It spreads like a fungus.
The newly discovered core at the center of the Earth has a different polarity than its surrounding core, represented by the purple lines. Lachina Publishing Services
Though the seismic waves from earthquakes are best known for their destructive capabilities, in the hands of geologists, they can be powerful tools of discovery. A research team at the University of Illinois has just used the rumbles from quakes to more closely examine the inner core of our planet, and what they found there was quite a surprise. It seems there’s another core inside the inner core that measures about half its diameter.
What demarcates this “inner-inner core” is that the iron crystals it contains are oriented on an east-west axis, unlike the iron crystals in the “outer-inner core” which organize along a north-south axis.
“The fact that we have two regions that are distinctly different may tell us something about how the inner core has been evolving,” Xiaodong Song, a professor of geology at UI who worked on the project with visiting postdoctoral researcher Tao Wang, said in a University of Illinois report about the findings. “For example, over the history of the Earth, the inner core might have had a very dramatic change in its deformation regime. It might hold the key to how the planet has evolved.”
While multiple components of the inner core have been suggested before, this is the first time the difference in polarity has been noted. “Indeed, the layering of the inner core has been suggested more than 10 years ago, at shallow depths of the inner core and at deeper parts of the inner core as well,” Song told Crave. “Everyone assumed before the crystal alignment was north-south. But here we found alignment in the inner-inner core to be nearly east-west.”
If all this inner and inner-inner talk sounds confusing, perhaps a quick geology refresher is in order. The Earth consists of three layers: the crust where we live; the mantle, a layer of scalding-hot liquid rock; and the core. The core consists of a liquid outer core containing mainly nickel and iron and a solid inner core made up mostly of iron. Even though the inner core is even hotter than its surroundings, the intense pressure at the Earth’s center means the inner core is unable to melt and remains solid, according to a National Geographic entry about the topic.
And now we can add another layer to our Earth’s composition: the inner-inner core, which is still mostly solid iron, but has a different polarity than the substance surrounding it.
In “unearthing” the inner-inner core, the research team relied on seismic sensors that pick up the waves that penetrate the planet after an earthquake hits, known as the quake’s coda. “The earthquake is like a hammer striking a bell; much like a listener hears the clear tone that resonates after the bell strike, seismic sensors collect a coherent signal in the earthquake’s coda,” the report says.
“It turns out the coherent signal enhanced by the technology is clearer than the ring itself,” said Song. “The basic idea of the method has been around for a while, and people have used it for other kinds of studies near the surface. But we are looking all the way through the center of the Earth.”
The researchers’ findings were published in the journal Nature on Monday.
Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs as they are commonly known, have been witnessed by millions of people all over the world and have been recorded in history books, myths, legends and traditions for thousands of years. However, many accounts that are recorded in ancient texts are dismissed as mere myths and legends, while UFO sightings that have taken place in the last few centuries have been classified as misinterpretations of natural phenomena, illusions, or conspiracy theories.
History has shown us time and again that a plethora of so-called ‘myths’ have their basis in reality. It is possible, and indeed likely, that stories and legends were a way for people to explain real—and perhaps perplexing—events using the knowledge and beliefs of their time. In support of this theory, a number of events described in mythology, which were once considered mere fairy tales, have now been proven through archaeology to have existed. A famous example is the city Troy, which is central to Homer’s ‘The Iliad’. Long considered to be a city of myth, Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of the actual site in 1868 elevated it to a place in history. Nevertheless, the remainder of The Iliad is still viewed as a myth and fantasy without any serious attempts being made to investigate whether or not there may be more truth behind the tale. The same goes for many accounts of ‘flying machines’, which we find reference to in countless mythologies from numerous different cultures around the world.
Many cultures contain pictorial and written records of ‘flying machines’, yet these are usually dismissed as myth and legend.
It is common to see people selectively decide what is real and what is not and all of this on the unsubstantiated assumption that ancient people were primitive and had little to no knowledge compared to us today. On the contrary, many ancient civilizations, like the Sumerians, Indus Valley, and Egyptians existed with complex social structures, legal systems, art, astronomy, mathematics, and technology, some of which is still not fully understood today. The Antikythera Mechanism, for example, is a 2,200-year-old mechanical device that is still not completely understood despite decades of research by top scientists around the world.
Ancient Astronaut Theory
The topic of flying objects and supernatural beings from out of our world is one in which we find multiple references in mythologies. All of these myths and legends, along with archaeological evidence such as rock art depictions, have created a wave of theories that gave birth to the ‘Ancient Astronaut’ perspective, which links all of these ancient references and depictions to UFOs, and posits that extra-terrestrials visited Earth and made contact with humans in antiquity and prehistory, influencing the development of human cultures, technologies, and religions.
Unfortunately, there are numerous charlatans who have tried to ‘cash in’ on this movement for profit or publicity, or who have diminished it with caricatures of little green men, resulting in the ancient astronaut perspective being widely criticized and attacked for its lack of credibility. Consequently, what is in fact a plausible and possible explanation for what we see in ancient art and texts, is now rarely examined by scholars, who fear being ridiculed or having their professional career seriously undermined.
UFOs in art: “Battesimo di Cristo” 1710; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
UFO sightings in recent history
But let’s leave the ancient past for a while and examine just the last 80 years of human history. Millions of people all over the globe have witnessed unidentified flying objects. Many have been recorded in detailed reports witnessed by police, pilots, astronauts, government officials, pilots, military personnel and, of course, ordinary citizens. Some of the more well-known cases were witnessed by thousands of people at one time. Historical records make it evident that UFO appearances magnified during and after World War II, including the example of the famous ‘Foo Fighters’.
While most sightings can be explained either by celestial phenomena, airplanes, planets, weather phenomena, military exercises, or in some cases drug use or mental instability, there still exists a small percentage that cannot be accounted for by any of these explanations. This is what makes the phenomena important and not to be ignored, particularly considering that sightings are frequently reported around military bases and airfields and are therefore, at the very least, a matter of both national security and air safety.
It is an undeniable fact that there are cases of unidentified objects in our skies. It has been acknowledged by the major governments from all over the world simply through the very fact that official research has been conducted on the matter in the US, UK, Russia, Europe, China, South America, and many others. All of this research, in every single case, concluded that there is a percentage of phenomena that cannot be explained.
In the past decade, many countries have declassified their UFO research files, releasing thousands of documents through the Freedom of Information Act and making numerous UFO cases available in the public domain. One recently released document from the UFO files in Britain, revealed how Churchill, concerned about the UFO issue, ordered a shutdown of information for at least 50 years to prevent mass panic and the potential to undermine religious beliefs. The document in question was also published on the BBC news site in 2010.
By doing careful research on the topic, passing over obvious scam and fake stories, it is clear to see that unidentified flying objects do exist. So the question is not whether they exist or not, but rather, what are they? Are they of terrestrial or extra-terrestrial origin? And what is their purpose?
UFOs and the limits of science
Many prominent scientists have already stated that other civilizations must exist in the Universe, and that it would be statistically impossible for this not to be the case. However, with our knowledge of science and technology today, we cannot yet support the means for interstellar travel, and since we have not discovered intelligent life in our solar system, the assumption is made that there must be no way that extra-terrestrials could have travelled to Earth. However, this argument is of course flawed because it is based within the framework of our own understanding of the universe, and does not take into account the capabilities of civilizations that may be millions of years ahead of our own. It also hinges on the following assumptions:
We know everything about physics and reality and therefore there is no way that such distant travel can be achieved.
We are using our means to try to contact other civilizations (e.g. SETI’s attempts to pick up radio or communication signals) and since we don’t perceive any signals of OUR type, nothing must exist.
We are looking for organic forms of life exactly like us and for planets with the exact same conditions as ours.
It is clear that these arguments show the arrogance of mankind, a mankind that may just be an infant in the Universe. And this is not new. During the history of humanity, in every single period of time, we believed that we knew the truth, only to have it replaced later on by new ‘knowledge’.
There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement, Lord Kelvin, 1901, physicist
Quantum physics, still a relatively new and unexplored field in Science, has shown that reality could be completely different to what we believe it to be. Powerful telescopes have shown distant planets in solar systems that could possibly sustain life. Theories of wormholes and warp drives have shown that at a theoretical level we could achieve interstellar travel. Yes, we would require incredible amounts of energy to even think of trying to achieve something like this, so according to our standards today it is impossible to achieve, but in theory it can be achieved.
“It now seems quite clear that Earth is not the only inhabited planet. There is evidence that the bulk of the stars in the sky have planetary systems. Recent research concerning the origin of life on Earth suggests that the physical and chemical processes leading to the origin of life occur rapidly in the early history of the majority of planets within our Milky Way galaxy–perhaps as many as a million–are inhabited by technical civilizations in advance of our own. Interstellar space flight is far beyond our present technical capabilities, but there seems to be no fundamental physical objections to preclude, from our own vantage point, the possibility of its development by other civilizations.” Carl Sagan, Ph.D. (Late Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences, Cornell University)
Reluctance to engage with the UFO subject
The reason that the scientific community is not dealing seriously with UFOs is because the topic has been extensively ridiculed both by the media and in academic circles, with false information spread everywhere. For similar reasons, military personnel, astronauts, pilots, and other categories of professionals do not want to talk because, either they have been forced to sign confidentiality agreements, or because of fear that their careers would be destroyed. This is why we have seen many examples of ‘death bed confessions’.
One such case was with astronaut Gordon Cooper, who told the world about his experience encountering a UFO during his flight in the Mercury capsule in 1963. Before he died he stated: “for many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists in astronautics. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us”.
While great efforts have been made to ridicule and disparage anyone who lends support to the existence of UFOs, the fact remains that there are numerous high-profile cases that are supported by solid evidence, and which should not be dismissed.
Recorded UFO sightings with extensive witness support
Below I present a very limited list constituting strong evidence for the existence of unidentified flying objects in the last 60 years.
It all happened in the early hours of February 25 in 1942. An aircraft flew over LA County that sparked an air raid alert (it was in the midst of WWII). Searchlights and guns were locked onto the aircraft for about an hour. The picture below appeared in the LA Times in a story about the Battle of LA It clearly shows a night time defensive response to an air raid. The aircraft was not hostile and obviously was not damaged by the attack. The Government stated that the craft they were shooting at was unidentified.
It all happened in the early hours of February 25 in 1942. An aircraft flew over LA County that sparked an air raid alert (it was in the midst of WWII). Searchlights and guns were locked onto the aircraft for about an hour. The picture below appeared in the LA Times in a story about the Battle of LA It clearly shows a night time defensive response to an air raid. The aircraft was not hostile and obviously was not damaged by the attack. The Government stated that the craft they were shooting at was unidentified.
This incident involved a group of American servicemen stationed at a military base in Suffolk that contained a storage centre with nuclear weapons. There had been three consecutive night of sighting objects in the sky over the base, in some cases shining a light down upon the nuclear weapons storage. On the third night, approximately two dozen servicemen were sent into the forest to investigate one set of mysterious lights. The men reported seeing a spacecraft on the ground in close proximity to them and three extra-terrestrial beings. One serviceman claimed to have touched the craft. The whole incident was filmed and photographed by one of the servicemen, but all photos and videos were removed by the US military. When the British Government released the UFO files, the Rendlesham incident papers were missing – as reported on BBC.
In November, 1986, a Japanese crew of a jumbo freighter aircraft witnessed three enormous unidentified objects while flying over Alaska, USA. This sighting gained international attention when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that it was going to officially investigate this sighting because the Air Route Traffic Control Center in Anchorage, Alaska, had reported that the UFO had been detected on radar. The UFOs in this case were tracked on both ground and airborne radar, witnessed by experienced airline pilots, and confirmed by a FAA Division Chief.
Illustration of the object, with the Boeing 747 airplane on the right. Credits: UFO Reporter
The Belgium UFO wave began in November 1989. The events of 29 November would be documented by no less than thirty different groups of witnesses, and three separate groups of police officers. All of the reports related to a large object flying at low altitude. The craft was of a flat, triangular shape, with lights underneath. This giant craft did not make a sound as it slowly moved across the landscape of Belgium. The Belgium UFO wave peaked with events on the night of 30/31 March 1990. On that night, unknown objects were tracked on radar, chased by two Belgian Air Force F16s, photographed, and were sighted by an estimated 13,500 people on the ground – 2,600 of whom filed written statements describing in detail what they had seen. Following the incident, the Belgian air force released a report detailing the events of that night.
The Phoenix Lights (also identified as “Lights over Phoenix”) was a UFO sighting which occurred in Phoenix, Arizona, and Sonora, Mexico on Thursday, March 13, 1997. Lights of varying descriptions were seen by thousands of people between 19:30 and 22:30 MST, in a space of about 300 miles (480 km), from the Nevada line, through Phoenix, to the edge of Tucson. Witnesses claim to have observed a huge square-shaped UFO, containing five spherical lights or possibly light-emitting engines. Fife Symington, the governor at the time, was one witness to this incident; he later called the object “otherworldly.”
On the night of August 30, a cluster of multi-colored lights was seen floating in the sky above Osaka. Several people reported to Twitter that they saw a group of lights forming a triangular shape and flashing green, red and white in the night sky above Izumi city in Osaka Prefecture. The sightings caused a commotion on Twitter after one user wrote: “Everyone in Osaka, go outside! There’s a UFO!” prompting others to grab their cameras and snap up photos of mysterious luminous object.
At approximately 16:15 CST on Tuesday November 7, 2006, federal authorities at Chicago O’Hare International Airport received a report that a group of twelve airport employees were witnessing a metallic, saucer-shaped craft hovering over Gate C-17.
The object was first spotted by a ramp employee who was pushing back United Airlines Flight 446, which was departing Chicago for Charlotte, North Carolina. The employee apprised Flight 446’s crew of the object above their aircraft. It is believed that both the pilot and co-pilot also witnessed the object.
Several independent witnesses outside of the airport also saw the object. According to the Chicago Tribune’s Jon Hilkevitch, “The disc was visible for approximately two minutes and was seen by close to a dozen United Airlines employees, ranging from pilots to supervisors, who heard chatter on the radio and raced out to view it.”
The incident took place on May 2007 at 14.00 local time in Lima Peru. A series of moving lights resembling an armada of flying objects appeared in the skies. The story was reported on the news and was seen by thousands of people.
An unidentified flying object that disrupted air traffic in Hangzhou for an hour on Wednesday, 10th of July 2010. A flight crew preparing for descent first detected the object around 8:40 p.m. and notified the air traffic control department. Aviation authorities responded within minutes, grounding outbound flights and diverting inbound ones to airports in Ningbo and Wuxi. Eighteen flights were affected. A spokesman from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) confirmed to ABC News that the matter is under investigation. He declined to disclose further details. A day after the sighting, however, an anonymous source told China Daily that authorities already discovered the identity of the UFO after an investigation but could not publically disclose the information because “there was a military connection.”
Xiaoshan Airport UFO Incident, China
Disclosure
Many would say that the above examples constitute irrefutable proof that extra-terrestrial UFOs exist. So why isn’t the public told about it? Imagine the implications that disclosure would have and what it would mean. Acknowledgment of extra-terrestrial civilizations having visited Earth would mean that many of the myths and legends of the past are in fact based on reality. It would suggests that humanity has been influenced for millennia by other-worldly beings, beings that in the past were considered gods. Disclosure would entirely topple the status quo and the balance of powers in society, and turn upside down what we know about the history of mankind.
The acknowledgement of the UFO phenomena is an event with the power to bring a global revolution in every sector of our lives today – technology and energy supply, communication and environmental concerns, society and religion. Is this what governments and corporations are afraid of – a shift in balance and their loss of their positions of power and control? Or is it that the powers that be are afraid of re-writing our human history?
“When the long awaited solution to the UFO problem comes, I believe that it will prove to be not merely the next small step in the march of science, but a mighty and totally unexpected quantum leap.” Dr J. Allen Hynek, Scientific Advisor to the U.S. Air Force
Dangerous moderate earthquake near Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina
Last update: February 28, 2015 at 9:17 am by By Armand Vervaeck
Update 08:42 UTC : ER calls this earthquake potentially dangerous for slight damage in the southern suburbs of Sarajevo, mainly because of the shallow depth of the hypocenter. Luckily the shaking did not lasted long.
25 km S of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina / pop: 696,731 / local time: 09:24:24.9 2015-02-28
18 km SE of Gračanica, Bosnia and Herzegovina / pop: 3,871 / local time: 09:24:24.9 2015-02-28
Most important Earthquake Data:
Magnitude : 4.1
Local Time (conversion only below land) : 2015-02-28 09:24:26
Last update: February 28, 2015 at 9:17 am by By Armand Vervaeck
Update 08:42 UTC : ER calls this earthquake potentially dangerous for slight damage in the southern suburbs of Sarajevo, mainly because of the shallow depth of the hypocenter. Luckily the shaking did not lasted long.
25 km S of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina / pop: 696,731 / local time: 09:24:24.9 2015-02-28
18 km SE of Gračanica, Bosnia and Herzegovina / pop: 3,871 / local time: 09:24:24.9 2015-02-28
Most important Earthquake Data:
Magnitude : 4.1
Local Time (conversion only below land) : 2015-02-28 09:24:26
GMT/UTC Time : 2015-02-28 08:24:26
from: http://earthquake-report.com/2015/02/28/moderate-earthquake-nw-balkan-region-on-february-28-2015/