Thursday 21 March 2013

Science Channel presents ‘Aliens: The Definitive Guide’ + Video


On Tuesday, March 19, Science Channel premiered the first of a two part series titled Aliens: The Definitive Guide.
 
(Credit: Science Channel)
(Credit: Science Channel)

A press release published by the network describes:
This all-new special is an “Encyclopedia Galactica” of non-Earth life forms, and an investigation into the latest scientific understanding of life beyond planet Earth. ALIENS: THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE showcases the extraordinary scientists who are currently grappling with extraordinary questions about alien life including: what will aliens really look like?; how will they sound?; what might their words look like; and, of course, will they come in peace? This two-part special takes viewers to stunning, remote locations on Earth as well as elsewhere in the universe.
Dr. Michio Kaku (Credit: Discovery)
Dr. Michio Kaku (Credit: Discovery)

The show features several prominent scientists, including theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. As Lee Speigel of the Huffington Post recently pointed out, Dr. Kaku states on the show,
“Each galaxy consists of a hundred billion stars. Do the math. A hundred billion times a hundred billion is 10 sextillion. That’s one with 22 zeros after it. There definitely are aliens in outer space — they’re out there!”
Aliens: The Definitive Guide is part of Science Channel’s month-long exploration of the question “Are we alone?
The second episode of Aliens: The Definitive Guide premieres Tuesday, March 26 at 10 p.m.

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Mac: Here's the 'Part 1' video...
 


11,000 yr Old Star Chart In Egypt? (Video's)

 
 
11,000 yr old star chart more accurate than NASA
 
 
Published on 25 Dec 2012 By Lobo Texican
 
The star chart at Nabta Playa is composed of a few stones in the sand and it calculates the position of the star system Orion over the 24,000 year procession and calculates the distance to each star in light years. It is accurate on the stars we know the distances to, but have to assume its correct on the stars that NASA currently does not know the exact distance to. These stones were placed in the desert roughly 7,000 years before the Egyptians built the Pyramids. The purpose of the structure was recently discovered by Thomas G. Brophy.
 

 
 
Uploaded on 13 Oct 2009 By matthewgillaspy01
 
To summarize briefly nabta playa is a very ancient stone megalithic complex. The megaliths are aligned with stars and display a very acute understanding of the heavenly bodies they are oriented towards. This is the work of Thomas Brophy and can be found in his book, The Origin Map: Discovery of a Prehistoric, Megalithic, Astrophysical Map and Sculpture of the Universe.


 
 
Published on 9 May 2012 By thirdeyerevolution1
 
Robert Bauval presents evidence that an advanced black African civilization inhabited the Sahara long before Pharaonic Egypt, and reveals black Africa to be at the genesis of ancient civilization and the human story.
The mysterious Nabta Playa ceremonial area and its stone calendar circle and megaliths, and put forward the solid hypothesis that an advanced civilization of black Africans settled in the Sahara long before Pharaonic Egypt existed.
 

UFO movie news round-up

By Robbie Graham

Alien contact movie based on “factual data” seeks funding

 
A new independent film about alien contact based on “factual data” is seeking public funding. According to io9.com, the movie – titled Ellipse – “is about a girl who is destined to be an astrophysicist. It's also about an Enlightenment-era woman who helped discover longitude. And it's about aliens. Plus, it's made by seasoned SF filmmakers in collaboration with scientists at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.”
The filmmakers behind Ellipse describe it as follows:

“Leo is from another world, many light years from Earth. He is a player in an intergalactic game, travelling to other worlds and planting the seed of knowledge about whether we are alone in the universe.

On Earth he has tried many times to point us toward the truth but our technology and the recipients of his 'sharing' have not been able to take the steps needed to unlock the secret.

Then he finds Ro, an exceptionally bright girl who he draws into the game. She becomes fated to study astrophysics and, as a grown up astronomer, her research leads her to identify a particular comet and send a lander to explore it…

The film begins over 400 years ago at The Queen's House. We meet Louise de Kerouaille, a mistress to Charles II. She was responsible for convincing the King to create the observatory as a way to map the stars and solve the problem of longitude, an amazing woman.

Next, the whole of Ro's study and the data seen in the film from the alien world is from NASA's Kepler mission and the amazing app called EXOPLANET. Hanno Rein, from the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton has chosen several stars with exoplanets to be discussed on screen and in the educational pack we are producing to support the film for schools, this will be written by Dr Lewis Dartnell and Marek Kukula, the Public Astronomer at the ROG…

Also, the whole film is being made in collaboration with the Royal Observatory Greenwich, home of the Prime Meridian.”

Ellipse needs £12,000 to get off the ground. If you want to support this movie, you can make a donation here.
 


‘Jupiter Ascending’ gets a release date

Warner Bros. has announced that its epic (and, by the sounds of it, completely bonkers) science-fiction movie Jupiter Ascending will be released on July 25, 2014.

Directed by the Wachowski brothers (Cloud Atlas, The Matrix) and starring Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Eddie Redmayne, and Sean Bean, Jupiter Ascending “focuses on higher forms of life who are watching us from other worlds. Kunis will play a Russian immigrant who is busily scrubbing toilets for a living. Unbeknownst to her, she actually possesses the same perfect genetic makeup as the Queen of the Universe and is therefore a threat to her otherwise immortal rule.”

‘Defiance’: SyFy’s new alien drama reviewed


The hotly-anticipated (exopolitical?) TV series Defiance will premiere on SyFy on April 15. io9.com has already seen the first three episodes and has delivered its verdict:

“On a Syfy scale of Battlestar Galactica to Piranhaconda, Defiance is in the upper middle. It's got heaps of promise and an amazing cast… It's got a lot of heart and so far is a lot of fun.”

For the full, spoiler-free review of Defiance – which is set on Earth 30 years after a collective of five alien races arrives, turning our civilization upside down – head on over to io9.com.

Monsters vs. Aliens’ TV show

DreamWorks Animation's Monsters vs. Aliens is headed to the small screen as a Nickelodeon TV series.
Based on the 2009 feature film, Monsters vs. Aliens tells the story of a team of monsters brought together to protect the Earth from interstellar threats.

The pilot episode – titled "Welcome to Area Fifty-Something" – will premiere on March 23, with the series proper beginning April 6.


Check out the series trailer here...
 

Sci-Fi or Insider Information?


















By Nick Redfern

In 1999, Simon & Schuster published a novel titled Operation Thunder Child. The author was Nick Pope, a now-retired British Ministry of Defense man, and someone who – between 1991 and 1994 – investigated UFO reports for the MoD. When Thunder Child was released, some characters within the world of British Ufology wondered if Pope was trying to reveal more than a few government secrets about flying saucers, albeit under the carefully-crafted guise of a fictional story.
 
Operation Thunder Child

Whatever the answer, it’s interesting to note that Nick Pope was not the only employee of British officialdom involved in the investigation of the unexplained who also focused on the worlds of sci-fi and fantasy. There are, intriguingly, far more than a few such characters that followed a similar – if not near-identical – path. And here’s just a trio of them.
In 1915, a Lieutenant Colonel William Price Drury, the Garrison Intelligence Officer of the British Admiralty at Plymouth, England, prepared an extraordinary document for his superiors titled Report on the Dartmoor Floating (or Balloon) Light. It detailed a series of UFO-style encounters that occurred in the wilds of the moorlands of Devonshire – where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles was set.
On numerous occasions throughout the month, strange, brightly lit aerial objects were seen to move across the moors late at night, and that seemed to exhibit definite signs of intelligent control. Despite the fact that there were numerous sightings of the strange phenomena – Drury was himself a witness to the aerial activity – no definitive conclusion was ever reached and the affair was quietly filed away and classified as unexplained. But the world of the mysterious was one that Lt. Col. Drury had been acquainted with for years.
As far back as 1904, Drury had been writing adventure novels about a character he called “Mr. Pagett,” the first being The Peradventures of Private Pagett. Described as a “one-time private in the Marines, and now hostelry landlord, parish councilor, and vicar’s warden,” Pagett’s escapades were all of the “take it with a pinch of salt”-variety.
One such story, Pagett Meets a Sailor on the Moor, sees our hero crossing paths with the ghost of Sir Francis Drake – on the same moorland where Drury’s very own encounter with the unknown occurred in 1915. Coincidence, bizarre synchronicity, or was Drury possibly an early Fox Mulder type character, secretly undertaking investigations into the paranormal for his Government, and presenting them as thinly-veiled, fictional, paranormal stories?
 
Fox Mulder

Drury is now long gone, as is, frustratingly, a conclusive answer to that question.
Dennis Yates Wheatley was born in South London on January 8, 1897 and joined the family wine business until World War One erupted. With the advent of the Second World War, Wheatley, by now a successful writer, submitted a number of papers to the Joint Planning Staff of the British Government’s War Cabinet, and was eventually asked to join them, subsequently becoming the only civilian ever to be given a commission in the Joint Planning Staff with the rank of Wing Commander.
 
Star of Ill-Omen by Dennis Wheatley
Star of Ill-Omen by Dennis Wheatley

Wheatley continued his career as a writer after the War, and ultimately penned more than seventy books, many on the domain of the supernatural, and perhaps the best-known being The Devil Rides Out. However, it is his 1952 sci-fi novel, Star of Ill-Omen that is perhaps the most intriguing, albeit certainly not the man’s most memorable.
In the book, the hero, Ken Lincoln, a scientist named Escobar and his wife Carmen, are captured by huge Martian creatures known as the Bee-Beetles. They transfer the trio – in their flying saucer, of course - to Mars. Star of Ill-Omen reveals that the Martian world is a decaying and dying one, and it is the Bee-Beetles’ intention to take over the Earth – after they destroy our civilization via a devastating atomic attack.
Now we come to a man named Ralph Noyes.
According to the biographical note on the dust-jacket of his 1985 novel, A Secret Property, “For nearly four years, until late 1972, Ralph Noyes headed a division in the central staffs of the Ministry of Defense which brought him in touch with the UFO problem…A Secret Property is not only fiction but also ‘faction’ – at least to the extent of drawing on Ralph Noyes’s lengthy background in the Royal Air Force and the Ministry of Defense.”
The description of Noyes that his publisher presented is made all the more provocative by virtue of the fact that, in a sci-fi format, A Secret Property specifically dealt with what is perhaps the most well known UFO incident within the British Isles: the alleged landing, on December 26, 1980, of an alien spacecraft at Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk.
Noyes added, regarding Rendlesham specifically: “The case itself is complex. I have given my own views about it – essentially that [Colonel] Halt and several others came face to face with a striking manifestation of the ‘UFO phenomenon,’ whatever that may be, in the December of 1980.”
Taking all of the above into consideration, are we seeing evidence here of people with official ties to government presenting secret truths as science-fiction? Or, is the truth far more down to earth; namely that there were people in government who happened to be fans of sci-fi, and so they decided to write it, too? I’ll leave those questions with you to ponder on…