Manhattan reported more UFO sightings than any other borough

By Dean Balsamini

Houston Street, we have a problem.

Manhattan has gone from Studio 54 to Area 51, leading the five boroughs in sightings of unidentified flying objects over the last two years, data from the National UFO Reporting Center reveals.

Otherworldly tourists have included travelers in a “round orange orb,” a crew in a “cigar-shaped” craft and even “an unknown creature” that rudely “teleported” into one New Yorker’s back yard, according to reports made to the Washington-based group.

One Manhattan true believer claimed a close encounter — just by looking outside the gym window.

“It was rotating like a drill as it was also moving off axis and in a line towards the east,” the person explained. “As it rotated, you would be able to see four lights that would only be on one side and seen after it fully rotated. It has to be hundreds of feet long. Then after it appeared, four other smaller craft appeared that were to me saucer or spherical that blipped in and out.”

In all, there have been 27 spacey sightings in Manhattan since 2016, with Brooklynites close behind, reporting 24 strange objects — from a “very bright, round-shaped light in the sky” to a “fireball” of lights.

Queens denizens described 20 unexplained episodes, with a particularly impressive arrival last June.

“Group of about 7 UFOs, with a leader to the side, and a cluster to its north,” one witness reported.

Just eight mysterious incidents originated out of the Bronx, while Staten Island residents got interstellar a paltry six times.

“Surprised a UFO that was hovering silently above me, then it shot away,” one Staten Islander shrugged last January.

The reports include time and general place of occurrence, but can be painfully short of detail. Last May 3, someone in Brooklyn simply reported, “UFO.”

The center’s director is confident that the truth is out there.

“Do I believe in UFOs? I absolutely believe . . . I believe what the data says,” Peter Davenport insisted. “Read the cases and you come to the realization that these objects we’ve been calling UFOs for 70 years are being seen across the country and around the world on a daily basis.”

The most common claim the center receives is “lights in the sky that they can’t identify.” Davenport noted that, since May 2012, “we started seeing a type of report of clusters of red, orange, amber, yellow or gold lights.”

“Good photos, reliable photos” of UFOs are “scarce” because people have just seconds to capture “objects capable of moving at tremendous speeds,” he explained.

The group says it has catalogued more than 128,000 mysterious sightings worldwide since 1974, with most in the United States — 13,033 — originating in California. New York has collected just 4,500 in that time.

“There’s this sense that this is New York . . . there can’t be a UFO,” Davenport said. “Or they just don’t want to get involved.”

UFO sighting reported at Hervey Bay

By  Matthew McInerney

THE truth is said to be out there, but could it be in our backyard?

As the world's science fiction television fans anticipated The X-Files's eleventh season premiere on January 4, a Fraser Coast woman revealed details of her own experience.

The image is, er, sketchy at best, though a Hervey Bay resident described the moment she saw an unidentified flying object - a UFO - at her house on Tuesday, January 2. 

A sketch based on the eyewitness account of an unidentified flying object (UFO) near Hervey Bay, Queensland. Facebook/UFO Research Queensland

In a post uploaded to UFO Research Queensland's Facebook page on the morning of January 5, she described the appearance of a "crescent-shaped object about 2 metres above her roof".

"It was very dense, black, silent and still, then took off at high speed," the post reads.

Hervey Bay, Queensland.
Tuesday 2/1/18 about 8pm (This is a third hand report so details are limited. Witness sketch supplied)
A woman saw a crescent-shaped object about 2 metres above her roof. It was very dense, black, silent and still, then took off at high speed. Previously she felt called to go outside and look. The night before she heard a low humming for part of the night. If anyone from the area has seen anything please contact us.

The post calls for more information about sightings in Hervey Bay on or around January 2 to be added to their page.

It is not the first time sketches have been used to advertise UFO sightings.

These five Central Queensland sightings were described in October, 2017, while a further 21 were described here.

The X-Files originally ran from 1992 to 2003, before it's triumphant return to screens last year.

Foxtel airs The X-Files' eleventh season on Showcase every Friday at 8.30pm. 

Huge Water Reserves Found All Over Mars

By National Geographic

New NASA images show layers of ice peeking out of eroded cliffs—a potential boon for future humans on the red planet.

Eroded banks throughout Mars's mid-latitudes reveal underground bands of bluish material. Spectra of these layers—which start three to six feet beneath the surface—strongly suggest that they are made of water ice.

At sites across the midsection of Mars, scientists have found layers of water ice buried mere feet beneath the red planet’s surface. The discovery adds crucial detail to Mars’s geologic history, and it may shape how future humans on Mars get their water.

"This is a new window into ground ice on Mars," says Colin Dundas, the U.S. Geological Survey geologist who co-discovered the ice layers.

Scientists have long theorized that reserves of water ice are locked underground on Mars. In 2002, the NASA Odyssey mission scanned the planet from orbit and detected signs of shallow ground ice at high latitudes. In 2008, the NASA Phoenix mission dug up water ice at its landing site near the Martian north pole.

Mars 101 Mars, the fourth planet from the sun, has been a source of intrigue throughout human history. Recent NASA exploratory expeditions revealed some of the planet's biggest mysteries. This video explains what makes Mars so different from Earth and what would happen if humans lived there.

And in late 2016, scientists using the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) found a buried ice sheet at Mars’s mid-latitudes that holds about as much water as Lake Superior. But until Dundas’s study, published today in Science, scientists struggled to understand the extent and accessibility of Mars’s subsurface ice layers.

The eight sites featured in the new study include steep banks where, much like cutting into a cake, erosion has exposed layers of rock and ice that MRO could see from overhead. The bands of ice first appear between three and six feet underground, supporting the notion that Mars’s mid-latitudes periodically saw large snowfalls millions of years ago, when Mars was tilted on its axis at a steeper angle than it is today, says Dundas.

The discovery could also influence how future astronauts—who may one day land in Mars’s mid-latitudes—slake their thirst.

Human missions to Mars would likely rely on extracting water from the local environment, either baking it out of hydrated minerals or mining it from ice deposits. Humans would then drink the water or break it down into hydrogen and oxygen, which could then be used to make breathable air and methane for rocket fuel.

As a 2016 NASA study makes clear, ice may yield more water per scoop than minerals, but if accessing this ice requires digging through 30 feet of rock, then ice mining ends up being too inefficient. That picture changes, however, if ice sheets lie within only a few feet of the surface.

"It’s looking more encouraging that water ice could be available at depths shallow enough that could be used as resources for human missions to Mars," says Angel Abbud-Madrid, the director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines.

'Alien Intrusion: Unmasking a Deception'

By Kari Kenner

There’s the “Alien” film series, “Signs,” “Arrival,” “Independence Day,” “War of the Worlds” and even “Avengers.” Pop culture and especially popular sci-fi films are riddled with references to life beyond Earth and the existence of extra-terrestrials: you know, aliens.

Regardless of where you stand on the spectrum of belief in “life beyond,” there’s something to be said about UFO reports, personal accounts of alien encounters and even the United States government’s spotty past with extra-terrestrially-suspicious, which is where the film “Alien Intrusion: Unmasking a Deception” comes in.

'Ran recently' (Mac Edit)  at the Cinemark at Provo Towne Centre and University Mall, “Alien Intrusion” is a new documentary intended to confront alien phenomenon head on, including analyzing UFO sightings across the globe and real-life accounts of paranormal experiences, as well as discussing the events that took place at Roswell in New Mexico, government cover-ups and even the ties between the “otherworldly” and religion. The documentary is narrated by actor John Schneider, produced by writer and producer Gary Bates and taps into the knowledge of author and scientist Dr. Jonathan Sarfati, Biologist Dr. Robert Carter, author Nick Redfern and pastor Dr. Johnny Hunt.

'Zoo Theory' Finally Explains Why Aliens Haven't Contacted Us Yet?

By Matthew Loffhagen

At present, there are two contradictory issues surrounding the existence of aliens that are seemingly increasingly at odds with each other.

On the one hand, our every attempt to survey the stars in the hopes of finding alien life is turning up absolutely nothing.

There doesn't seem to be any organic life on Mars that we haven't accidentally put there ourselves, and we haven't yet got a response from any of our needy broadcasts out into the cosmos in the hopes of finding intelligent beings somewhere beyond our own world.

On the other hand, many people are convinced that UFOs are genuinely the work of advanced alien races that frequently visit the Earth. This belief is so strong among some of the world's most powerful people that the US government has been investigating its own version of The X-Files for several years now.

So if there are intelligent aliens out there, why haven't seen even the slightest evidence of their existence?

The so-called "Zoo Theory" hopes to explain this, and the logic is pretty much what you'd expect from its title. 

MIT radio astronomer John A Ball has proposed the theory that the planet Earth is a kind of nature preserve, overseen by caretaker aliens who keep us from making contact with anyone else in the universe.

Ball has even written a paper documenting his theory, claiming that occasionally spotted UFOs are in fact the signs of Extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) aliens, who slip up every now and then in their goal of observing, but never interfering, with our species' social order.

"Why are we unaware of ETI? A premise of most searches is that ETI are trying to communicate with us, but we are not quite clever enough to see or hear them. I suggest, instead, that if ETI had chosen to announce their presence to us, we would be aware. Since we are not, I presume they have not," Ball explains in the paper.

This is a relatively common idea in science fiction; the notion that humanity is just a little bit too stupid or uncivilized to be welcomed into the intergalactic community.

In Star Trek, Vulcans make first contact with humans after our species proves capable of creating warp-drive technology, while in Mass Effect, it's only after humanity advances enough to stumble into an accidental war with the Turians that anyone on the galactic stage starts paying us any attention.

If Ball's theory is correct, all alien species are really going out of their way to remain hidden, to the point that they must be carefully cloaking their entire civilizations at all times in fear of being spotted by us.

We're getting better at spotting distant objects throughout the universe, so you have to assume that if an alien race exists close enough to be able to reach our planet, we'd also be able to spot their home colonies as well.

It's possible that aliens exist trapped under layers of ice that keep them hidden, or that they only exist around the equators of planets which makes them harder to spot, but there's really not enough evidence to assume that UFOs are proof of alien visitations when we can't even be sure that there are other sentient species living anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy.

The idea that we're alone is very scary to a lot of people—perhaps even scarier than the prospect of being visited periodically by mysterious aliens. It's hard to handle the possibility that our civilization is the only one that's ever been aware enough to observe the universe, in all its majesty, and that the knowledge that we've accrued will die with us.

That's the scariest possibility of all; and one that theorists like John A Ball like to try to avoid thinking about—maybe, in all the grand, beautiful wonder of the cosmos, we really are just a random, rare accident that will never happen again.

Plus, if this is true, we can never live out our Captain Kirk fantasies of romancing beautiful green-skinned aliens, and that seems like a big let-down based on everything that science fiction has been promising us for the past 50 years.