The Breakthrough Listen project, which is the widest-scale SETI project started two years ago, has published the preliminary results of its hunt for radio signals from extraterrestrial beings. 11 potentially promising signals are currently being reviewed.

Andrew Siemion of the SETI Center at the University of Berkeley said that the whole world could have access to the research material, as the scientists involved in the project have sent the data, and scientific articles for publication, to the leading astronomical journals of the world.

“We have not yet found any unambiguous trace of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, but we have just begun this search. What we have done in the framework of the Breakthrough Listen allows us to conduct deeper and more systematic searches,” Siemion said.

Two years ago, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner together with cosmologist Stephen Hawking put $100 million into a decadelong search for aliens known as the Breakthrough Listen initiative.

“It was the widest-scale SETI project announced since Project Phoenix in 1995, which itself was the successor of a cancelled 10 year, $100 million SETI effort by NASA,” online publication Astronomy reported.

In October and November last year, the project entered its implementation phase. The scientists and engineers at Breakthrough Listen installed devices they developed to search for extraterrestrial life on the American GBT telescope, its Australian "cousin" at the Parks Observatory and enlisted the support of the scientific team of the world's largest radio telescope, FAST, in China.

Now Siemion and his colleagues have released the preliminary results of their search for aliens from 692 nearby stars. They published the results on the project's website.

In addition, they announced the discovery of 11 potential traces that may point to the existence of aliens. The traces were caught by telescopes in different radio emission ranges.

Everyone who is interested in these “messages from space” can download and analyze the data to help the scientists.

As noted by the project participants, all these bursts of radioactivity most likely have natural origins but nevertheless, their discovery has motivated Breakthrough Listen partakers and made them expand the field of searches.

Source: Sputnik News
https://sputniknews.com/science/201704221052890111-seti-largest-project-reveals
-signals-space/

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I turned on the news Saturday morning and I heard a story that brought back to memory an old story. It was a frightening story that happened long ago which was both chilling and intriguing. This mornings news story is by no means as intense as the one from by gone days, but nonetheless quite frightening.

As you may have heard a Qantas flight from Hong Kong to Melbourne made an emergency landing in the Philippines on Friday (07/25/2008) after a hole appeared in the fuselage and the cabin lost pressure suddenly. One passenger as quoted by CNN reported, "There was an almighty crack, We dropped a bit in the air." According to the Associated Press the plane was at 29,000 feet when the incident happened and then the plane quickly descended to 10,000 feet. As of yet there is no explanation as to what exactly caused the hole to suddenly rip open at 29,000 feet but one report said that there might have been rust on the fuselage in a previous inspection.

This brought to mind an old story that the late Charles Berlitz wrote about in his book “Charles Berlitz’s World of Strange Phenomena” on page 209 in the short article “A Massacre in Flight” Mr. Berlitz describes a story with an eerie similarity.

“Something terrifying happened in the air one day in the late summer of 1939-and to this day the incident is shrouded in secrecy.

All that is known is that a military transport plane left the Marine naval Air Force Base in San Diego at 3:30 one afternoon. It and its thirteen man crew were making a routine flight to Honolulu. Three hours later, as the plane was over the Pacific Ocean, a frantic distress signal was sounded. Then the radio signal died.

A little later the plane limped back to base and made an emergency landing. Ground crew members rushed to the craft and when they boarded, they were horrified to see twelve dead men. The only survivor was the copilot, who, though badly injured, had stayed alive long enough to bring the plane back. A few minutes he was dead, too.

All of the bodies had large, gaping wounds. Even weirder, the pilot and copilot had emptied their .45 Colt automatic pistols at something. The empty shells were found lying on the floor of the cockpit. A foul, sulfuric odor pervaded the interior of the craft.

The exterior of the airplane was badly damaged, looking as it had been struck by missiles…The incident was successfully hushed up and did not come to light for fifteen years, when investigator Robert Coe Gardner learned of it from someone who was there. They mystery of what the crew encountered in midair that afternoon in 1939 has never been solved.”

What is the connection?

Gremlins.

No, not the fuzzy creatures you do not feed after midnight or throw water on.

Or the funky often maligned car from the 70’s.

Since World War 1 pilots have claimed to have seen strange creatures tinkering with their aircraft in mid flight. However the existence of such creatures never became widely known until British pilots in World War 2 began to make such experiences public record. The first published report of these creatures appeared in the April 18th 1942 edition 13 of The Royal Air Force Journal. You can read his account at this web site linked below www.angelfire.com/id/100sqn/gremlins.html

The knowledge of these creatures was popularized by author Robert Dahl in his children’s book “The Gremlins”. However Dahl’s creatures while annoying and destructive were cute little cartoon characters who were seeking revenge for the destruction of their home forest in order to build an airplane factory.

However, WW2 pilot’s descriptions of real encounters with Gremlins lack Dahl’s cute characterization. Many of them witnessed demonic creatures causing havoc with their airplane equipment. Many swore they saw these creatures maliciously tearing apart wiring or instruments before crashes during combat missions over Germany.

Famed folklorist John W. Hazen gave a personal experience with a Gremlin in the 1972 edition of Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend where he writes that upon inspecting a malfunctioning airplane, he witnessed “a parted cable which bore obvious tooth marks in spite of the fact that the break occurred in a most inaccessible part of the plane." Then he heard an unearthly inhuman voice that seemed to be rebuffing an associate which said , "How many times must you be told to obey orders and not tackle jobs you aren't qualified for? — This is how it should be done." Immdiately Mr. Hazen heard a sound that reminded him of a "musical twang" and before his very eyes another cable snapped apart with the teeth marks clearly visible.

But most of us know of Gremlins by the Twilight Zone story “Nightmare at 20000 feet” where a man sees a Gremlin tearing apart the commercial flight he is on and everyone thinks he is insane.

Ever since this episode hit the airwaves in 1963 there have been very few pilots who have come forth with eye witness activity of these creatures. Mostly for fear of ridicule, but many for fear that they will be grounded for a mental evaluation. But these demonic entities still have a fascination with dismantling aircraft in mid-air to this day.

I helped out in a Christian Bookstore owned by one of the members of my congregation for a few months a couple of years ago. His wife had passed away suddenly and he was overwhelmed. One night we began to talk about the paranormal. As an ex-naval officer during the first Gulf War he told me he had seen things he could not talk about. His quote was “I’ve seen things that come straight out of the X-Files.” while working on a certain Aircraft Carrier in the Gulf. I prodded and prodded but he refused to tell me any details about UFOs or what exactly he meant by the comment in connection with the Government conspiracy theme that ran through that Television program. But he did tell me that he and a few fellow servicemen onboard did have encounters with little creatures of amazing power who have a fascination with airplanes. He had never fully seen them himself, but one time he witnessed a little shadowy creature tear a hole in aircraft like it was made out of aluminum foil to get at inside components. The creature dashed over the nose of the plane and disappeared. A pilot friend of his swore that he saw a small impish creature trying to rip off a flap of a F/A 18 Hornet of his wingman on their way to a sortie over Iraq in the late light of the setting sun. One minute it was there and as he turned to double check what he had just seen the creature had vanished. Within a few minutes the co-pilot had to return to the carrier because his plane was becoming unresponsive.

He also told a me a few years ago that he had a few friends who had investigated the fatal crash of Senator Paul Wellstone in 2002 who noticed some very strange markings on the exterior of the craft. It was as if something with claws had torn open the plane in mid flight. Search as I might I can find nothing to back this claim up. But there are many on the web who see conspiracies of varying orders surrounding the Senator’s plane crash.

So what happened as this plane flew from London to Melbourne? Shotty workmanship and maintenance on Qantas’ part?

Or something else?

Oh for the good old days when the only thing we had to worry about when we flew was the poor quality of the food being served in-flight.

Until next time,

Pastor Swope

Source: The Paranormal Pastor
http://theparanormalpastor.blogspot.com/2008/07/gremlins-on-attack.html

Coincidences, bizarre occurences, other incidences that will give you shivers.

With the celebration of Halloween comes the telling of ghost stories. They usually contain bizarre, unexplained and the oftentimes unbelievable coincidences that send shivers up one’s spine. Mine concern the spooky happenings in the realm of air travel, and while I can’t confirm every one of the stories, all are very much alive in the world of flight crews.

I got the idea for this column while I was working an all-nighter last Halloween. The crew gathered in the back galley and told air travel ghost stories. We dimmed the lights and kept our voices low so the sleeping passengers wouldn’t hear us. The following are the top 13 spooky stories. Trick or treat!

    * A 72-year-old flight attendant (yes, she really was 72) always insisted that someday she would die on a layover in Italy. One day she arrived at the terminal to work her usual flight to Rome, but she was sent home because the flight had been canceled. She passed away the very next day. You see, canceled flights can ruin a flight attendant’s plans, too.

    * An especially bizarre story involves a young flight attendant whose family persuaded her to retire after the Lockerbie tragedy. It seems her mother had dreamed her daughter would die in an airplane disaster. The young woman became an accountant, and after years of promotions went to work for a firm in New York. Her office was in the World Trade Center, and she perished on 9/11.

    * When a pair of elderly newlyweds went to Europe for their honeymoon, the husband had a heart attack and died. The wife arranged to have his body brought back in a casket to their new home in Florida. She made the connecting flight but the casket did not; in fact, the airline could not locate it for five days. When the casket was finally found, at the deceased’s hometown airport, it was … empty! One way or another, that man got cold feet.

    * A flight to Europe took off with a crew of four pilots and landed with only three. During a break, one of the pilots wandered off and was never heard from again. The authorities took apart the plane but have yet to solve the case. Authorities determined that the pilot had been suffering from depression and was behind on his alimony payments; they surmised he had slipped off the airplane disguised as a passenger in hopes of starting a new life. But there is no record of him going through customs or immigration, and his bags were all still on board.

    * Many tales of 9/11 coincidences seem to be in circulation these days. The one I find a bit uncanny tells of a father who discussed fears of dying with his son the day before his son was scheduled to fly. His son died on American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the western side of the Pentagon, where, incredibly enough, the father worked (that very side). The father survived. He had taken a rare day off to play a game of golf.

    * Several years ago, a flight crashed shortly after take-off. When authorities recovered the black box, they found that the pilots’ last conversation was about the dating habits of the flight attendants working that day. A few years later, two pilots and an off-duty crew member were talking about the details of that tragedy in the cockpit of their own flight just before take-off. They remarked on how hard it must be for families to hear those final words. Shortly after take-off, their own flight crashed, leaving no survivors. The last sentence was, “So we had better make our conversations good for our families.” I listened to the black box audio of that flight on the Internet, and am sorry now that I did, as it has haunted me ever since.

    * What about the flight attendant who discovered that her husband, a pilot, was cheating with countless co-workers? The husband mysteriously disappeared, but the investigation was not highly publicized, perhaps because of this unsavory coincidence: The pilot’s body was never found, but the flight attendant was famous for bringing homemade sandwiches to work, then generously handing them out to passengers and crew when there was no scheduled meal service. Talk about getting rid of the evidence!

    * I once flew a 767 with an all-male crew of nine flight attendants. Remarkably, all the flight attendants were heterosexual and married. What made this so weird was that both of the male pilots were gay. If you know the airline business, you know that this is truly a one in a million chance.

    * Quite a few years back, before my time, a man shot his gun into the air signaling the end of duck season. The shot pierced a commercial airplane flying overhead, and some pellets hit a passenger in the bottom. The investigation revealed that the victim was, unbelievably, the brother of the man who fired the gun. This story is hard to believe, I grant you.

    * I also remember the story about a superstitious flight attendant who followed strict rules of numerology. She would seldom trade her trips, not wanting to alter fate, and she never went against her readings. So, when offered a trade for one December flight, she declined, even though it would suit her Christmas schedule better. Sadly, that was her last flight: Pan Am Flight 103, which crashed over Lockerbie, Scotland.

    * Two male pilots lost their jobs for flying naked. Apparently, they were playing a joke on one of the flight attendants and it backfired when the wrong crew member entered the cockpit. This may not qualify as the spookiest story, but the mental image is haunting enough.

    * Not telling her husband that she was joining him on his European layover, this pilot’s wife took Seat 1A in first class as a romantic surprise. What she didn’t know was that sitting next to her in 1B was her husband’s mistress. After take-off, he saw them both, and you should have seen his expression. I hear that the wife and the mistress became good friends. I also hear the pilot is paying a lot in alimony.

    * Stopped by the police for speeding on the way to the airport, a woman missed her flight. The airplane crashed and there were no survivors. What makes this story really strange is that the standby passenger who took her place was related to the police officer who gave the woman the ticket. It does have a romantic ending, however, as the police officer and the lucky lady were married two years later. That is one relationship that fate definitely had a hand in.

Some luck is just plane spooky.

Source: MSNBC
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15497228/