WONDERFUL SCIENTIFIC CURIOSITY? HUMAN ODDITY?
OUTRAGEOUS HOAX? RELATED TO THE NEPHILM OF GENESIS?

- HERE THERE BE GIANTS DEPARTMENT -

Giants on the Rampage
By Nick Redfern

DID GIANTS ONCE ROAM THE EARTH?

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Far from being a product of the UFO craze, the desire to contact intelligent life dates back to Ancient Greece.

Most people would be surprised to discover to discover that several 19th century scientists contemplated how we might communicate with possible Martians and Venusians.

These early proposals - which predate by 150 years the first intentional message aimed at extraterrestrials, beamed out from Earth in 1974 - were based on signals in visual light, as the invention of radio was still decades away.

In fact, as history shows, ideas for interplanetary communication have largely been driven by whatever the contemporary technology allowed - be it lamps, radios or lasers. "You go with what you know," says Steven Dick, NASA's Chief Historian.

Over two thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks argued over the existence of life on other planets, but the idea really took off after the Copernican revolution, says Dick. "Once it was realised that all the planets go around the Sun, it was not hard to imagine that the other planets could be like Earth."

Galileo, Kepler and others considered the inhabitability of the planets, while being careful not to upset Church authority. Later "the idea blossomed in the 17th century into the 'plurality of worlds' debate, but it remained controversial," adds Dick, who has written several books on the topic.

One of the most influential proponents for extraterrestrial life was Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, who wrote a book called Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds in 1686. Despite the interest, there was no recorded discussion of how we might locate or contact these potential aliens until more than a century later.

Florence Raulin-Cerceau of the Alexandre Koyré Centre in Paris, France, has documented the early attempts at communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI), or what is now often called active SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence).

"As early as the 19th century, inventors imagined "sky telegraph" equipment to communicate with the supposed inhabitants of the Solar System's planets," Raulin-Cerceau recently wrote in the French magazine Pour la Science.

The first of these inventors was Carl Friedrich Gauss, a German mathematician. In the 1820s, he spoke of reflecting sunlight towards the planets with his land surveying invention, the heliotrope. He is also credited with the idea of cutting a giant triangle in the Siberian forest and planting wheat inside.

"The size and colour contrast should have made the object visible from the Moon or Mars, and the geometric figure could only be interpreted as an intentional construction," says Raulin-Cerceau.

Twenty years later, the astronomer Joseph von Littrow came up with a similar idea to pour kerosene into a 30-kilometre-wide circular canal that would be lit at night to signal our presence. The second half of the 19th century saw more realistic proposals develop, however.

In a more modern fashion, French inventor and poet Charles Cros was one of the first to propose sending coded messages to other planets by flashing beams of light. In 1869, he imagined using a parabolic mirror to focus the light from electric lamps towards Mars or Venus. He figured the light could be flashed on and off to encode a message.

"Cros granted that the planets could be inhabited by beings not able to respond, but he was still persuaded that 'the eternal isolation of the spheres [will be] vanquished,'" wrote Raulin-Cerceau.

A light-based "Morse code" was also considered by the British statistician (and half-cousin of Charles Darwin) Francis Galton in 1896. He took care not to assume that Martians would have our same base-10 counting system, as they probably wouldn't have 10 fingers.

Around the same time, A. Mercier, a member of the Astronomical Society of France, devised a plan to place several reflectors on the Eiffel Tower that could direct sunlight towards Mars. He also considered using the Moon as a giant screen on which to project light beams.

Could aliens have seen any of these light displays though? "It depends on how much money you think the Martians are spending on their telescopes," quips astronomer Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute in Mountain View California.

Today, radio is thought of as a much more efficient means of extraterrestrial communication. Radio waves are less affected by cosmic dust than visible light, and there is less of a radio background to deal with in the sky.

With its 300-metre reflector dish, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico is the world's largest single-dish radio telescope and most powerful radar. Frank Drake used it in 1974 to send the first CETI message.

Two of radio's pioneers showed interest in interplanetary radio communication. In 1901, American Nikola Tesla reported receiving a strange signal, we he thought might have come from Mars, on his giant transmitting tower in Colorado Springs. Nineteen years later, Guglielmo Marconi told reporters about his detection of radio emissions that appeared to come from outer space.

However, the switch to radio-based SETI didn't happen immediately. As late as the 1920s, many people (including Albert Einstein) still considered visual-based communication more practical, since radio transmitters were not yet capable of focusing a beam at a distant planet.

What's more, scientists gradually became convinced that Mars did not have the right conditions to support life, so any presumed extraterrestrials likely lived much, much further away. "It seemed hopeless to receive messages from other stellar systems, so people said 'forget it'," says Shostak.

It wasn't until 1959 that radio-based SETI started to be taken seriously. In that year, Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison showed that radar transmitters of the time were already powerful enough to send signals many light years through space.

Then people started to think "If we can do it, then the aliens might be doing it," Shostak says. In the year that followed, Frank Drake performed Project Ozma, the first radio sky survey to look for intelligent signals.

And then in 1974 - a century and half after Gauss - Drake transmitted the first actual SETI message using the Arecibo radio telescope. Scientists are still waiting for a response.

Source: Cosmos Magazine
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/2516/full

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Latin America has often been scorned by U.S. researchers as a place that produces highly colorful and unverifiable accounts of UFO sightings, with the attendant phenomena of occupants, monsters, submarine bases, etcetera. While it is true that once upon a time the line between the metaphysical and the entirely physical tended to get blurred, there can be no doubt that many of the objects seen streaking across the southern skies are in fact, not quite so alien.

With "kind space brothers" of the Adamskian mold consigned to the attic of history, and the ETH in retreat, ovnílogos have turned their attention to a possibility that always lurked in the back of everyone's mind: that certain types of UFO phenomena could be a lot closer to earth than was previously believed.

Daniel Rebisso Giese, the Brazilian author of Vampiros Extraterrestres Na Amazonia, was among the first researchers to look into the 1977 UFO attack on the isolated communities of the Amazon Delta. The book popularized the "Chupa-Chupa", described as rectangular and cylindrical structures capable of firing beams of cohered energy against both animals and humans. Rebisso states that these hostile devices forced the locals to stay home at night, and kept fishermen from heading out to the sea, "since many declared that the objects came out of the depths of the Atlantic Ocean."

A number of fanciful theories were juggled about to explain the origin of these solid objects--bona fide alien bloodsuckers, the denizens from an underground empire, a "dying" alien race in need of blood plasma, etc. A possibility that received shorter shrift was that the "chupas" represented the success efforts of Nazi scientists working secretly on an island of the Bay of Marajó since WWII. However, a curious sideline to the "chupa" phenomenon was the presence of a foreigner, an unnamed young woman, who would purchase vast amounts of fish at the market in Bragança. No one knew where she lived or who she was, or what she did with her considerable amount of "groceries," but evidence pointed to her living on Ilha do Cajueiro, an island infamous for its strange phenomena: local fishermen had reported seeing bizarre lights and the shadows of people moving around in the darkness for many years.

Word of the "fish girl" and her activities prompted action by Brazil's intelligence apparatus, who feared she might be a gun runner or a spy. When they arrived in force on Cajueiro, all they found was an abandoned cabin and an envelope addressed to "Elisabeth". It was believed that whoever she was, this mysterious foreign woman was somehow involved with the "chupas" operators, if only as far as stocking their larder. The presence of strange humans among the confusion caused by the UFO flap was not limited to Ilha Cajueiro, either. In July 1977, at the height of the "chupa" incidents, the corpses of some dead farmers were found in the vicinity of the municipality of Bequimao. Five hundred cruzeiro notes were found lying beside them. The police associated these unexplained deaths with the presence of three "foreign-looking men, who spent most of the day closeted in a local hotel." The trio would be seen driving around at night in a car of unknown manufacture. Other corpses were found in the area, with curiously punctured dollar bills lying next to the hapless victims. [Spanish author Manuel Carballal mentions a curious parallel to this gruesome activity - in this case allegedly related to the UMMO hoax -- in the controversy surrounding Spain's Baroness Lihory and her strange subterranean "laboratory"].

An extraterrestrial hypothesis was also discarded when Mexican authorities were faced with an "unidentified terrestrial object" seen repeatedly in the not readily accessible reaches of the Sonora Desert, particularly in the enigmatic Zone of Silence . According to reports made by local residents, this ground-based UFO was a brilliant light that would move quietly along the desert surface, somehow skirting or rolling over the cacti and other desert plant life. A number of Mexican UFO researchers voiced an opinion that the strange light could be an American contraption resembling the Soviet Lunakhod moon-rover. A vehicle of this sort, they reasoned, would remain immobile during the hot desert day, recharging its batteries, and roam around at night on its "secret" mission. The real identity of the mysterious light was never established, but it was reminiscent of similar lights seen operating in the Brazil's dense caatinga forests.

A UFO allegedly went down over the Mexico's Sierra Madre mountains during the month of February 1967, causing a great deal of consternation on account of the number of sightings which had taken place throughout the country that year. The residents of Villa Del General Terán had heard a number of large explosions while a sphere descended toward the ground. When the object was examined by American scientists weeks later, it was determined to be " a manufactured titanium gas stowage sphere form a Titan III-C upper stage." The Titan rocket had placed seven communication satellites in orbit a month earlier.

Argentina has also been a favorite UFO port of call since the phenomenon first received attention in the postwar years, and in the heat of intense "flaps", man-made vehicles can sometimes be lumped in with the unknown ones. In 1980, the Argentine media carried a story about an Argentine-born NASA scientist named Fabio Hector Acuña, who notified his mother in Buenos Aires that the "flying saucers" seen over that country were the results of a NASA venture called Project Firewheel. The text of the message read: "On May 23, we will launch a satellite--look up at the sky from June 9th to the 15th around midnight. You will probably only see a flying saucer, but it will have been created by us. The project is called "Firewheel" and it consists of injecting an artificial cloud which will create something like a comet, and that is what you are going to see."

If it were ever positively determined that the UFO phenomenon was a purely terrestrial one, involving man-made craft, it probably woudn't cause much of a sensation in many Latin American countries. For a number of years, Dr. Antonio Las Heras, an Argentinian parapsychologist and talk-show personality, has worked hard at demystifying a number of cases that have formed part of the UFO canon for the past thirty years.

Las Heras concentrated his efforts on the July 1965 involving the sighting of a UFO over the Antarctic by Chilean, Argentinian and British polar research teams. The allegedly alien craft drove compasses crazy, caused magnetometers to produce wild readings. The official statement made at the time by Cmdr. Mario Jahn of the Chilean fleet stated that "it would be foolish to claim that we saw a flying saucer of the type seen in science fiction shows. What we saw was real--a solid object that moved at a tremendous speed...gave off a greenish light, and caused interference with the electromagnetic devices of the Argentine base next to our own, on Decepción Island." Dr. Las Heras suggests that the Decepción Island UFO of 1965 was, in fact, something much more mundane and by far more perilous: a nuclear-powered or warhead-equipped satellite belonging to one of the superpowers, spinning out of control. The EM effects that upset the delicate instruments could have easily been produced by a disintegrating nuclear reactor, or as a result of the satellite's self-destruct mechanism going into action. The satellite's disintegration in the atmosphere would have given the impression of zig-zagging to any earthbound onlooker. Not to disappoint his readers, Las Heras hastily adds that real UFOs were seen (and photographed) over Decepción two years later, at the height of volcanic eruptions that destroyed the island itself.

Las Heras' conclusions cannot be dismissed so easily when we consider that six months after the Antarctic episode, the northern hemisphere faced a similar incident in the woods of Pennsylvania.

The non-extraterrestrial hypotheses set forth for the December 1965 crash at Kecksburg, PA are considerable: a Soviet or Chinese satellite, a nuclear device of the sort mentioned earlier, or a U.S. space mission gone awry. Ufologist Stan Gordon, who has devoted decades to the study of the Kecksburg crash, has always taken great care to point out in his research that UFO and ET are not synonymous, particularly during this incident. Dr. James Oberg suggested that the object was recovered under such secrecy on account of its heat shield, which was far in advance of anything we believed the Communist Bloc to be capable of at the time.

Landlocked Bolivia, home of the inscrutable Tiahuanaco ruins, has a rather active recent history of UFO sightings and crash/retrievals which have proved to have a decidedly non-extraterrestrial bent. In 1962, the Andean community of Ayo-Ayo became the destination of a "space capsule" which apparently disgorged a puma-like feline. The disoriented space traveler was clubbed to death by the frightened locals, who then sold its pelt to a "Colonel Wymer" of the U.S. Embassy, which apparently took charge of the recovery efforts. Seventeen years later, another UFO crashed on the property of a wealthy landowner in the Andean foothills. A local farmer had allegedly seen "a fireball" streaking across the clear night skies, and accompanied by a friend, reached the impact site, where they found a metal sphere made of some lightweight metal roughly the size of a basketball. This evidence was confiscated by Bolivian soldiers. The Bolivian Army would later release a statement saying that the object was by no means extraterrestrial, merely a fuel cell from a satellite. A video of the recovery effort was presented to the U.S. Embassy in La Paz.

These South American incidents bring us ever closer to the role played by the U.S. in recovering space hardware--not our own, in some cases--that has fallen back into the atmosphere. Specialized teams attached to the U.S. Air Force (the Project Moondust and Operation Bluefly of UFO fame) were charged with the mission of beating the particular country's authorities to the site and recovering the artifacts in question. While the possibility that actual extraterrestrial devices have been retrieved should never be discounted, there is a greater likelihood that these teams have recovered film canisters from KH-series spy satellites ("Big Birds") and other sensitive technology that may have survived disintegration upon reentry.

Recently declassified State Department documentation (obtained through the repeated filing of FOIA requests by investigator Stan Gordon) indicate that careful tabs are indeed kept on all the hardware hitting the ground in far-off places. A memo sent to the State Department from the American embassy in Buenos Aires in February 1984 dutifully reports the reentry of "what may have been a satellite" 70 kilometers from the town of Ayacucho. The memo also states the size and shape of the object and solicits guidance from Washington in determining if it is indeed a U.S. or Soviet satellite. In this case, the reply to the memo indicates that it appears that the object was not "one of ours" and that "authorities do not know what the identity of the object could be."

Across the Atlantic Ocean, Spain has also experienced its share of man-made UFOs amid some of the richest case histories in the study of the phenomenon. Vicente Juan Ballester-Olmos and Juan Fernández Peris's monumental Enciclopedia de los Encuentros Cercanos con OVNIS (Encyclopedia of UFO Close Encounters) carefully points out a listing of cases described as "pseudo-ufo's"--355 cases spanning both Portugal and Spain and whose real explanations lay far from outer space: from meteorites, promotional devices, and weather balloons to a motley assortment of truck tires, marine algae, and in a Barcelona case, the drivers of a Red Cross ambulance. "To account for the thousand and one stimuli that can--and do--deceive the senses, or the processes conductive to imagining UFOs, illustrates the importance of erroneous interpretation to the UFO phenomenon as a whole," declare the authors. However, the catalogue lists 230 cases that correspond to bona fide unknown phenomena of possible nonterrestrial origin.

Source: Inexplicata
http://inexplicata.blogspot.com/2010/04/ufos-not-so-strange-after-all.html

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Scientists have discovered a real-life 'moral compass' in the brain that controls how we judge other people's behaviour.

The region, which lies just behind the right ear, becomes more active when we think about other people's misdemeanours or good works.

In an extraordinary experiment, researchers were able to use powerful magnets to disrupt this area of the brain and make people temporarily less moral.

The study highlights how our sense of right and wrong isn't just based on upbringing, religion or philosophy - but by the biology of our brains.

Dr Liane Young, who led the study, said: 'You think of morality as being a really high-level behaviour. To be able to apply a magnetic field to a specific brain region and change people's moral judgements is really astonishing.'

The moral compass lies in a part of the brain called the right temporo-parietal junction. It lies near the surface of the brain, just behind the right ear.

The researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used a non-invasive technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the area of the brain.

The technique generates a magnetic field on a small part of the skull which creates weak electric currents in the brain. These currents interfere with nearby brain cells and prevent them from firing normally.

In the first experiment, 12 volunteers were exposed to the magnetic field for 25 minutes before they were given a series of 'moral maze' style scenarios.

For each of the 192 scenarios, they were asked to make a judgement about the character's actions on a scale of 1 for 'absolutely forbidden' to 7 for 'absolutely permissible'.

In the second experiment, the magnetic field was applied to their heads at the time they were asked to weigh up the behaviour of the characters in the scenario.

In both experiments, the magnetic field made the volunteers less moral.

One scenario described a man who let his girlfriend walk over a bridge he knew was unsafe. The girl survived unharmed.

Under normal conditions, most people rate the man's behaviour as unacceptable. But after getting the magnetic pulse, the volunteers tended to see nothing wrong with his actions - and judged his behaviour purely on whether his girlfriend survived.

Another scenario described two girls visiting a chemical plant where one girl asks her friend to put sugar in her coffee.

The friend uses powder from a jar marked 'toxic' - but as the powder turns out to be sugar, the girls if unharmed.

Volunteers with a disrupted moral compass tended to rate the girl's behaviour as permissible because her friend was not injured - even though she was aware the powder came from a jar labelled toxic.

Throughout the experiment, irresponsible or deliberate actions that might have resulted in harm were seen as morally acceptable if the story had a  'happy ending', they reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It's not the first time that scientists have found parts of the brain that specialise in ethics and morality. Last year American scientists claimed to have found a "god spot" - a region of the brain that controls religious belief.

Source: The Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1262074/Scientists-
discover-moral-compass-brain-controlled-magnets.html