Conspiracy Journal #890

All these exciting stories and MORE in this week's issue of
CONSPIRACY JOURNAL!

~ And Now, On With The Show! ~

IDENTFYING THE REAL COMMANDER X

WILL THE REAL COMMANDER X PLEASE STAND UP

“IDENTITY” OF MILITARY INTELLIGENCE OPERATIVE REVEALED...
FOR FIRST TIME!

For more than a decade the mysterious Commander X has caused controversy and dissension among conspiracy theorists, Area 51 aficionados and UFO believers world-wide. Some accept his hair-raising accounts of working behind the scenes with the CIA, the NSA and other government and quasi-federal agencies at face value, while others scratch their heads in bewilderment and wonder if his first-hand chronicles are not at least partially linked to a disinformation program promoted by the New World Order. His face to face confrontations with the greys and reptilians have caused deep concern and discomfort to many.

For the first time, here is the complete dossier on Commander X’s many exploits both with various groups of highly aggressive ultra-extraterrestrials as well as his various battles with our own earthly authorities hell-bent on keeping all these matters of a highly confidential – TOP SECRET! – nature.

Included among the many shocking – and surprising – revelations

* The Alien Dinosaur Connection.

* Who inhabits the Subterranean Regions of Earth?

* Evidence suggests humans victims were still alive when their blood was drained and body parts removed in underground UFO bases.

* The many special powers of ETs – including levitation, dematerialization, invisibility, mind control, advanced light beam technology.

* A Nazi – Alien collaboration. How the Occult inner circle of the Third Reich contacted grey aliens before World War II using ritual magic.

* Evidence Hitler shipped equipment and slave laborers to the Antarctic to construct a fleet of flying saucers.

* The end results was the start of a program to infiltrate the governments of the world after WWII. Many of the early UFO contactees had Nazi UFO connections.

* Proof that the Nazis transferred into the midst of the American spy and space agencies.

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY OF ALL – ARE HUMAN CLONES GOING TO BE USED TO REPLACE ASSASSINATED POLITICIANS?

Only Commander X dares answer these questions.

This Newly Released Book is Now Available for the
Bargain Price of Only $18.95

So don't delay, order your copy of The Commander X Files - Updated

today for only $18.95 plus $5.00 for shipping - A GREAT PRICE!

Click Here to Order With PayPal

You can also phone in your credit card orders to Global Communications
24-hour hotline: 732-602-3407

And as always you can send a check or money order to:
Timothy Green Beckley
P.O. Box 753
New Brunswick, NJ 08903

Please make out checks to: Timothy Green Beckley

Exploring the Bizarre - Thursday Nights at 10:00PM EST

Heard Live on the KCOR Digital Radio Network

- THE MYSTERIOUS FROZEN LANDS DEPARTMENT -

What Is This Mysterious Oval Structure In Antarctica?
By Alfredo Carpineti

New year, new claims of ancient civilizations having developed complex cities at the South Pole. Last month, we covered the pyramids of Antarctica, but January 2017 is all about the dome.

Website Ancient Code has posted about an oval-shaped structure and they put forward the idea that the formation could be man-made and possibly even evidence of an ancient civilization in Antarctica.

The structure in question is 120 meters (400 feet) across and it is located in Eastern Antarctica. The website states that the structure “resembles something that may easily have been designed by someone”.

“What if, in the distant past, when Earth – and Antarctica – was much different then today, an ancient civilization developed there, creating fascinating structures, monuments and temples there? Would we find evidence of their existence today?” asks Ancient Code in their post.

The issue with this is that there have never been favorable conditions for humans to live in Antarctica. It was covered in ice long before Homo sapiens evolved. The frozen continent is inhospitable for us and we have to use the best of our technology for scientists (and the occasional tourist) to stay safe there.

“Antarctica has been completely covered in ice for 15 million years, although it has been very icy for about 23 million years,” IFLScience resident geologist Dr Robin Andrews confirmed.

There’s plenty that we don’t know about our past, and humans have always been ingenious in finding solutions, so archeology is a marvelous and often surprising science. But extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

Yes, you can look at a satellite picture and believe all sort of things, but there are questions that need to be addressed. If it was made by an ancient civilization, how did they build it? Mining in a frozen desert is neither easy nor glamorous. How did they keep the place warm? There are no trees to burn and I don’t think a bonfire of penguins is very efficient. And most importantly, why did they build it there, away from natural resources, in the most extreme environment on Earth?

If a person can find reasonable answers to those questions, then a case can be built. Until then, we should assume that weird geological formations are just weird geological formations.

There have been other mysteries recently found in Antarctica. Spotted on Google Earth map, there is a white blur deep in the barren continent that has provoked speculation it could be a secret research station hidden by a government or a UFO buried in the ice.

YouTube user Wowforreel has highlighted it in a video and shows how you can find it yourself on the web app Google Earth.

Describing the visual as a "patchy mass", he says: "Antarctica is crawling with weirdness."

He then points to the giant 14.5 miles by 4.5 miles area of bright white saying: "This thing is so huge you can't miss it - not even from outer space.

"I've searched the entire continent and I couldn't find anything quite like it.

"I thought maybe there's a peculiar place in the images where there happens to be a gap, but I don't think that's the case."

He points out brush-type movements over the mass which he says suggests someone is trying to cover something up.

He ponders if it is a research station before adding: "If this masking was removed would we seen the deck of a giant UFO mothership buried in ice?"

The video was put online in 2012 but a constant flow of comments continue as intrigued viewers try to figure out what it is.

One of them, Julie Haines said: "Have you noticed that there seems to be a trail behind said rectangular shape? Like its been dragged."

David Darby added: "You're correct, and it's well over 111 miles long to the left."

Bret Hines wrote: "Wow two years and it's still there. They are covering something up with this thing."

Bonnie, said: "It's a government facility. They are allowed to request Google blur out things like this.

"It's probably a research facility."

The staggering video of the mysterious structure has been viewed more than two million times on YouTube.

Source: iflScience
http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/what-is-this-mysterious-oval-structure-
in-antarctica/

- WHAT THE ANCIENTS KNEW DEPARTMENT -

The Ancient Serpent Stone of Loch Ness
By Glasgow Boy

There are some things which reside at the periphery of the Loch Ness Mystery and sometimes present themselves as a mystery within a mystery. I had been meaning to write on this object for some time, but was awaiting further information which has now arrived. One could best sum it up in the words of Nicholas Witchell's "The Loch Ness Story", back in 1974 (p.16 1st edition).

"This carving, believed to be neolithic in origin, was found at Balmacaan House, which used to be near Loch Ness until it was knocked down in the 1930s. It has been speculated that the serpent-like form my be some reference to the animals in Loch Ness."

However, the story of this stone goes further back than this. Ted Holiday first mentioned it in his 1968 book, "The Great Orm of Loch Ness", where he recounts something akin to a jungle expedition in 1965.

"On June 15th I had now been at Loch Ness for nine days. Heavy rain pounded down during breakfast, After going round to Strone for a last word with Clem and Brian, who were leaving for London, I finally spent the rest of the morning searching the grounds of derelict Balmacaan House for a view of the ancient carved stones on which an unidentified creature is depicted. After beating the rhododendron jungle for an hour, I gave the search up as hopeless."

Witchell's circumspection was overshadowed by Holiday's firm belief that this stone showed a Pictish representation of the "Great Orm". In other words, this carving depicted the first recorded "sketch" of the creatures. As he relates further on in the book:

"In his dealings with the Orm the neolithic artist seems to have adopted one of two stylized approaches. Usually, the creature was represented in a sort of plan-view with its body coiled in two wide undulations. The head was ovoid with pear-shaped eyes and a bluntly conical nose. This particular treatment was often incorporated with a symbolic device or pattern known to Archaeologists as a 'Z rod' which may possibly have indicated the rank of the leader for whom the carving was executed. The alternative rendering was a depiction of the head and neck alone. Usually this showed a long neck topped by a small head embellished with a number of feelers or tentacles."

To which Holiday adds a small note beneath a drawing of the stone:

"A neolithic carving found at Balmacaan, near Loch Ness. The creature appears to be a stylized depiction of the Orm and incorporates numerous features reported by witnesses such as vertical undulations, wide head, oval eyes and conical nose."

One could of course argue that the conical nose, oval eyes and sinusoidal curves were equally emblematic of a common snake. However, the discovery of the stone beside the shores of Loch Ness made this more than a matter of land based serpents. To delve further into this neolithic puzzle, we need to know more about the stone.

Though the stone was said to reside at Balmacaan house, the actual site of discovery was beside the river Enrick near Urquhart Bay. According to William Mackay in the 1886 Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, it was accidentally dug up on Drumbuie Farm about 1869 along with another symbol stone which were laying on top of a cairn. The site of that discovery gives the stone its proper title of the "Drumbuie Stone". However, it was removed to the Earl of Seafield's estate prior to 1886. The original location is shown below as the central green circle.

As it turns out, Ted Holiday was wasting his time looking for the stone amongst the rhododendrons in 1965 as it had been removed ten years earlier to the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh for safekeeping. The stone had left Loch Ness, but did the mystery of its serpent remain?

The stone is itself one of over 300 items known as Pictish symbol stones. The Picts were a mysterious race of people who populated the northern parts of Scotland, but little is known of their culture, even after converting to Christianity. The stones are rough hewn slabs of stone carved with known and unknown objects which are found either erect or laid flat on cairns and so on. They are to be found all over the north of Scotland with the preponderance being located in the north east and they date between the 6th and 9th centuries AD.

They have presented a bit of a challenge to archaeologists since the symbols carved on them have remained undeciphered and represent a kind of Highland Hieroglyphics lacking a Highland Rosetta Stone to unlock them. By that I mean, some carvings are clear enough in depicting boar, fish, eagles, deer and so on. Others appear to be more abstract, though some may represent man made objects such as mirrors and combs. But why they are there and how each carving on a given stone relates to those around it has no universally accepted solution.

The Drumbuie stone is no exception in that the serpent is depicted with a construct known as a "Z rod" interlacing it. What this and the double disc below it signifies is a matter of unresolved conjecture. Such abstract symbols are seen across Scotland adorning stones in various ways.

When I considered these discs and the serpent, I thought of Holiday's subsequent book, "The Dragon and the Disc" which explores the links between alleged ancient dragon and disc worshipping cultures. Surely, the Drumbuie stone would be "Exhibit A" in such a theory with its combined discs and serpent? But, surprisingly, Holiday (as far as I can tell), makes no mention of the stone in his book. A curious omission, I thought.

Then again, maybe not. As I continued to research the matter, I found a very useful website mapping out the large number of symbol stones across Scotland. It is run by Strathclyde University and can be found here. Some observations can be made using their information. Firstly, there are 23 symbol stones containing a serpent and 13 of these are this serpent plus Z-rod combination. Moreover, these serpents are combined with so many different other symbols as to look almost random in occurence.

But the second point is that the other serpent stones are located largely in the east of Scotland where there is a dearth of loch monster traditions. Most of the folkloric tales of kelpies, water horses and water bulls reside in the west and centre of the Highlands. This is shown in a rough overlay I did of the distribution of loch monsters and symbol stones.

The folkloric lochs are shown as white circles and the symbol stones as red circles. One can almost argue for a negative correlation between the two classes. The conclusion is that the serpent carvings are not related to any ancient idea of loch monsters (though one cannot quite discount the river varieties).

That may or may not be a surprise, as it depends on what the function of such a Pictish symbol stone was. Was the serpent a real snake or a symbol for something like a notable family or leader? That we'll leave to the experts, but perhaps Holiday himself came to realise the stone serpent was nothing to do with the Loch Ness Monster when he omitted it from his Dragon book.

CONCLUSION

I said the stone was sent to Edinburgh in 1955 and so we complete the story with its current status. I contacted one of the curators who confirmed it was still there and he kindly sent me the latest picture of it, which I reproduce with their permission. At last, we can see the actual stone and not sketches (probably derived from rubbings).

The stone is not on display at the museum due to its somewhat fragile condition and it awaits some restoration work. Therefore, it remains boxed up at the museum's warehouse facility and was not amenable to a visit by myself. At least we know this curious stone still exists and is in good hands.

The Loch Ness Monster may continue to be a mystery, but there is no mystery connecting it to this stone. The mystery of this stone firmly resides in the little known ways and customs of the Pictish people. There may be other symbols that equate to creatures the Picts regarded as aquatic and monstrous, such as those on the Aberlemno II stone and the well known Pictish Beast. To these we must look for clues as to the monster lore of these people.

Source: Loch Ness Mystery
http://lochnessmystery.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-ancient-serpent
-stone-of-loch-ness.html

- BUILDING A NEW FOURTH REICH DEPARTMENT -

Declassified Documents Prove Hitler Escaped to South America

Adolf Hitler escaped alive from his Berlin bunker and was secretly flown to a secure military compound in Argentina, where his legion of Nazi supporters hoped to create the Fourth Reich.

It may sound like historical fiction, but these astounding claims may not be as far-fetched as they sound, according to the latest Hunting Hitler series, which airs on The History Channel tomorrow.

Former CIA operative Bob Baer and Tim Kennedy, a US special forces sergeant who was involved in the capture of Al Qaeda leaders Osama Bin Laden and Abu al-Zarqawi, investigated whether the Fuhrer indeed escaped to a new life in South America.

Sifting through 14,000 declassified documents, the pair discovered there could be an alternative truth to the accepted story that the Fuhrer committed suicide alongside his wife, Eva Braun on 30 April, 1945.

One document, from British Intelligence, claims Hitler was flown out of the German capital by Luftwaffe pilot Captain Peter Baumgart the day before he purportedly took his own life.

The pair also found evidence of a previously unknown, fifth exit from the bunker, which led to an area large enough for a makeshift runway.

Another document reveals an SS officer claiming to have seen Hitler in Denmark, shortly before changing planes to his final destination.

Meanwhile in Argentina, evidence surfaced of a military-style compound where Hitler may have stayed after his arrival.

The Fuhrer had plans for a Fourth Reich centred in the South American country, according to Baer.

He points to the fact that 'tens of thousands' of Nazis arrived Argentina following the end of the Second World War, as well as evidence of a Nazi physicist working at a nuclear facility to test explosive devices.

There is also mystery surrounding the most important pieces of evidence that would conclude whether or not Hitler and Braun died on April 30, 1945 - their bodies.

The only existing remains of Hitler, which has been accepted by historians, is that of a piece of lower jaw bone said to be held by the Kremlin.

According to the Russian Army, the bodies of Hitler and Braun were wrapped in blankets and carried to the garden just outside the bunker, placed in a bomb crater, doused with petrol and set ablaze.

In May 1945 a Russian forensics team dug up what was presumed to be the dictator’s body.

Part of the skull was missing, apparently the result of the suicide shot. The remaining piece of jaw matched his dental records, according to his captured dental assistants. And there was only one testicle.

The skull fragment was dismissed as belonging to Hitler in 2009, leaving only the lower jaw as evidence, which reportedly matched Hitler's dental records.

Unknown to the world, the corpse then believed to be Hitler's was interred in Magdeburg, East Germany.

There it remained long after Stalin’s death in 1953.

Finally, in 1970, the KGB dug up the corpse, cremated it and secretly scattered the ashes in a river.

For Baer, only the lower jaw fragment that remains could conclusively reveal whether or not Hitler died in 1945. But Russia has yet to release it for forensic study.

Speaking to Sunday Express, Baer said: 'It's like the Shroud of Turin: when are they [the Russians] going to bring it out?

'If we want to conclude this story, I would get the lower jaw.

'No-one expects to find Hitler and there are no first-hand witnesses alive that are credible who actually saw him [in South America]. On the other hand, there are Nazi communities in Argentina who just refuse to talk.'

For more information, check out Tim R. Swartz's "Evil Agenda of the Secret Government"

Source: Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4121528/Did-Hitler-fake-death-Bombshell
-new-TV-claims-Fuhrer-fled-South-America-Luftwaffe-plane.html

- PUT YOUR SEATS IN THEIR UPRIGHT POSITIONS DEPARTMENT -

Commercial Pilots Communicate With UFO Using Aircraft Lights
By Paul Seaburn

Despite a few well-publicized instances of flying-under-the-influence, most people have a high regard for pilots, where they be military, space or commercial pilots. That – plus the fact that they spend most of their on-the-job time in the air scanning the skies – is why UFO reports by pilots are taken more seriously than others. On December 26th, 2016, two commercial pilots claim to have had a 10-minute encounter with a UFO off the U.S. coast near Atlantic City, New Jersey, and attempted to communicate with it using the lights on their plane. Is this smoke or the smoking gun?

    "I looked up I saw a very large and bright flashing light, which I brought to the other pilot’s attention. His response when seeing it was pretty much the same as mine…. 'What in the hell?'… 'What is that?'"

According to their report to the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), a UFO investigation organization based in Davenport, Washington, the pilots were on a flight from New York to Miami on a clear night with unlimited visibility. The sighting occurred 100 nautical miles east of Atlantic City over water between 2130-2200 EST (9:30-10:00 pm). They described it as being 3-5 times as big as the brightest star they could see and moving from the horizon to 35 degrees up.

    "At first sight the light was approximately at our 1 o’clock position. It moved to 12, 10, 11, back to 12. At that time, the light appeared to move North, then south at a pretty rapid rate."

Rather than a solid light, the pilots said the UFO was flashing and one noticed an orange/red flash in between the white flashes.

    "We did flash our lights at it a few times, and the other pilot believes it flashed back in sequence; I felt the return flashes were probably coincidental, but possible. Neither one of use have ever seen and/or heard of an occurrence like this."

This sounds like something that should be reported to air traffic control, doesn’t it?

    "We were going to report it to ATC, but mutually decided to let it be. I have no explanation for what we saw, nor does the other pilot. We did try to video the incident, but it wasn’t possible."

While there are many UFO sightings by pilots, they are reluctant to report them – especially using their real names – for fear of ridicule or job loss or – in the case of commercial flights – fear of lawsuits from passengers.

Did these two pilots see more on December 26th than they’re willing to disclose, even anonymously? Did any of their passengers see it? Was their communication with the UFO something more than coincidental? Time may tell. Commercial pilot Andy Danzinger waited 25 years to talk about his UFO encounter publicly. Had he revealed it before, would he have been hired to pilot President Obama’s plane during his campaign?

Are there any other reasons these pilots might be afraid to reveal their UFO sightings?

Source: Mysterious Universe
http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/01/commercial-pilots-communicate-with
-ufo-using-aircraft-lights/

- HAUNTING THROUGH TECHNOLOGY DEPARTMENT -

Ghost in the Machine
By The Rev. Mark Cook

Since time immemorial, spirits/ghosts what ever you wish to call them have been with mankind in our forests and roads, in our homes and work places and as our technology has moved on our ghosts have moved with us as well.

From the spirit photographs of the Victorian age to electronic voice phenomena, the spirit world seems to be eager to use technology to communicate with the world of the living.

The first phantom phone call was in 1886.

A morse code SOS was received by a ship from the titanic three years after it sank.

The first paranormal fax was in 1987. So now in our computer age I ask this, where are our ghosts in cyberspace? In our text messages? Liking our Instagram posts? Sending racy photos over Snapchat?

Well maybe we are being haunted via our mobile phones and our computers. There is the phenomena of the ghost text, this is when you feel your phone vibrate yet when one looks at the phone there is no new text message. I myself have had this experience, is it a friendly poke from the other side?

The Colorado Institute for Paranormal Research investigated 132 cases of texts sent from deceased people's phones hours or days after death. They stated in 94 of those cases the only explanation was the text was sent from the dead themselves.

The slang and abbreviations used in text messages is as individual as handwriting said lead researcher Dr Rick Horn. In one case a Mexican teenager who had been driving erratically after an argument with his mother sent a text reading "soree mom 4 giv me." This was later found to have been sent two hours after he was pronounced dead from a car accident. The phone in question was also destroyed at the time of the crash.

In 2008 in Los Angeles a passenger train collided with a freight train killing 26 people. Among the 26 was one Charles E. Peck who died on impact. For 11 hours after the crash his phone called at least five members of his family and all they could hear was static. When they tried to return the call, they were sent to voice mail.

There are many tales of dead girlfriends and other loved ones sending messages from beyond the grave with varying degrees of credibility attached to them. So this leads me to ask a few questions. What about the occasional like or comment from complete strangers? Have you met all the people you are Facebook friends with? Can you be sure some of them are not just ghosts in the machine?

Source: The Curious Fortean
https://thecuriousforteanweb.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/ghost-in-the-machine/

- SMILE FOR THE CAMERA DEPARTMENT -

Mythological Animal in China Captured on Film
By Marshall Connolly

Cryptozoology is considered a psuedoscioence. Its believers seek evidence of cryptids such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or the Yeti. They may also seek evidence of dragons and other mythical creatures referenced in historical literature. Among zoologists, these people tend to get less respect. Worst of all, they are rarely able to offer scientifically verifiable evidence for their beliefs.

Enter the 'horse deer.' This deer-like species has been reported for centuries as living around a lake in rural, northwestern China. It has been seen so rarely that it has been considered mythological, extinct, or a case of mistaken identity. Yet locals have insisted that the horse deer is an actual animal. The creature looks like a deer with some of the characteristic appearance of a small horse.

It has been more than a decade since a reported sighting has occurred, but now a camera has captured a very clear picture of one such animal.

The animal, also known as the Ebi Lake Red Deer, was filmed by a stationary camera on December 24 near the border with Kazakhstan. The local wetland management bureau captured the footage and released it to state media.

The film footage is perhaps only the second solid verifiable evidence collected about the mysterious creature. In 2004, a specimen was captured and used for DNA analysis. Hair and droppings have reportedly been collected.

The horse deer isn't nearly as exciting as a Bigfoot or a Loch Ness Monster, but it is a case of a cryptid turning out to be real. Locals have reported the existence of the creature for centuries, and only in the past decade or so has science caught up.

Does this mean there's new hope for other cryptids? For their believers, sure. For skeptics, probably not. There are certainly many species known to people that remain undescribed by science because of their rarity or remote habitat. But deer are common and come in many varieties. It is easier to comprehend the existence of a rare deer than the existence of a forest-dwelling hominid such as Bigfoot. Hominids are all believed to be extinct.

Scientists have estimated the horse deer population to be about 110 individuals.

Source: Catholic Online
http://www.catholic.org/news/green/story.php?id=72963

- I FEEL A GREAT DISTURBANCE IN TWITTER DEPARTMENT -

350k Twitter Bots Are Quoting Star Wars and No One Knows Why

Many Twitter users are bots, but researchers have discovered a botnet that gathers the force of more than 350,000 bots.

Dubbed 'Star Wars bots', these accounts were discovered in a small sample of the site and were found to only tweet random lines from Star Wars novels.

Although they have been deactivated or forgotten about by their 'master', researchers warn that if are reactivated, they can wreak havoc on the social media site.

The discovery was made by a team of computer scientist from University College London after taking a one percent sample of the accounts on Twitter. And their findings were published in the journal arXiv.

A Twitter bot is an account that can share posts on its own – it does not need human input. And a botnet is a group of bots that each have a small, yet specific job to carry out.

For example, they can be programmed to generate an automated tweet whenever a new article is published in a news website.

‘In this work we focus on the non-benign bots whose purposes include spamming, manipulating public opinion, and selling bots as fake followers,’ the researchers shared in the paper.

During the study, scientists pulled a one percent sample of the entire Twitter user base, which was around 6 million random English-speaking users. This one percent created 843 million tweets and 20 million of them included a location tags.

When the team plotted the locations of these accounts on a world map, they discovered 3,244 of them were within two rectangles in North American, Europe and parts of North Africa.

Because many of these accounts were located over uninhabited areas such as seas, deserts and frozen lands, the team assumed it was bots. They then hypothesized that the figure laid out two overlapping distributions.

One was tweets posted by real users and the other included fake locations by Twitter bots.

The team says that ‘where the fake locations are randomly chosen in the two rectangles – perhaps as an effort to pretend that the tweets are created in two continents where Twitter is most popular’. And while manually analyzing the tweets from these bots, the team found they consisted of random quotations from Star Wars novels.

It was also found that many of the quotes began or ended with an incomplete word. There are also hashtags inserted in random parts of the post. For example, Dakin Fleury, one of the some 300,000 bots, has nothing but Star Wars quotes in their feed.

‘Luke's answer was to put on an #extra burst of speed. There were only ten meters separating them now. If he could cover t,’ it shared in 2013.

‘This quote was from the book Star Wars: Choices of One, where Luke Skywalker is an important character,’ shared the scientists.

‘We have found quotations from at least 11 Star Wars novels.’

The Star Wars bots only tweeted random lines from the novels, posted no more than 11 tweets and max 10 followers and 31 friends..

Experts believe the bots were also created using a Windows smartphone. Immediately after they were created, these bots began tweeting and shared more than 150,000 post per day.

However, all of these accounts went quite on July 14, 2013, which suggests the bots were orchestrated and controlled by a botmaster. The team believes these bots were designed to keep a low profile, which is why they have gone undetected for so long.

And because they only tweeted random lines from the Star Wars novels, they were not perceived as malicious. Another reason is that the creator deigned each one with ‘normal’ user profiles and some even include a profile picture.

Finally,’ it seems the Star Wars bots were deliberately designed to circumvent many of the heuristics underlying previous bot detection methods,’ the team explained.

‘We were really luck to discover the Star Wars bots by accident. The fact that the bots tagged their tweets with random locations in North America and Europe was a deliberated effort to make their tweets look more real,’ researchers shared in the paper.

‘But this camouflage trick backfired – the faked locations when plotted on a map seemed completely abnormal.’

‘It’s important to note that this anomaly could only be noticed by a human looking at the map, whereas a computer algorithm would have a hard time to realise the anomaly.’

The team warns that although these bots have been deactivated or forgotten by their master, it is possible they could be turned back on and wreak havoc on twitter. Threats include spam, fake trending topics, opinion manipulation, astroturfing attack, fake followers and sample contamination.

Using what they learned in this research, the team has already moved on to another investigate that has led them to a botnet with more than 500,000 bots, which they plan to report on in the near future.

A recent report reveals Twitter has more than 270 million users who actively log in and tweet.

But, according to the latest figures, hidden among these active users are approximately 23 million that don't ever visit the microblogging site.

Instead, they pull information from Twitter automatically using other apps, including news aggregators - and it is unsure how many of these are non-human bots.

This figure does not include the bot accounts that tweet and push information to the site, according to a Twitter spokesman.

But Twitter will not reveal how many of its 271 monthly active users fall into this latter category. An additional six million people use Twitter only through services that let people tweet automatically.

Bots on Twitter range from parody to industry accounts. Elsewhere there are spam bots that tweet malicious or promotional links.

Identified spam accounts are not included in this active monthly users figure, but unidentified accounts may be. In total, Twitter claims around five per cent of all its accounts are false or spam accounts, which at most is 13.5 million.

Source: The Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4114630/The-force-strong-botnet
-Researchers-baffled-350-000-accounts-tweeting-Star-Wars-quotes-locations-make
-strange-symbol.html