Churchill Covered Up UFOs

Something's Really Out There Says UFO expert.

The British government has released a new batch of its once secret UFO files. Among the revelations revealed today is that Winston Churchill covered up reports of UFO sightings, so not to cause mass public panic.

So all those recent "Dr. Who" episodes with the late Sir Winston paling around with the good doctor may have been inspired by a little more than the muse of fiction.

Most of the reported UFO sightings, the Brit government files say, were misidentified objects, normal terrestrial and / or pedestrian things like aircraft lights or meteors, and yes, as always, a small proportion of the sighting could not be explained.

Nick Pope, the former MoD UFO chief, who worked for twenty five years at the British Ministry of Defense, says these latest reports prove that something is really out there. Aliens? Visiting us? He says, he doesn't think so. And he believes there's is alien life. He hedges.

Well, no aliens have formally checked in -- yet, as far as the public knows. See the videos.

The new Brit UFO files are on-line at  nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufo, and can be viewed, download, for free, for the first month. After that there will, what the site says, a small fee. The first batch of Brit MoD UFO files can be assessed for the fee.

Manna, Although Maybe Not From Heaven

I had always heard the phrase "it's like manna from heaven" to denote "a good thing falling into your lap at random."  And "this tastes like manna," meaning "really delicious."  I even (being a good and true atheist) had a vague idea that manna was a thing from the Bible.  

But not until this recent Metafilter post did I learn that manna is a real thing!  In fact, you can buy it online.   No joke.

In Exodus, as the Jews wandered the desert for 40 years, they were sustained by manna which God provided for their food.  "It was like coriander seed, white; and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey."

(I'm going to stop right there and say, I have only the vaguest sense of what that means.  Wafers made with honey.  My mind keeps slipping to the thought of those Crème Wafers that come in three different colors, the waffle crisp long rectangles with the white frosting stuff in between.  And then I picture them being scattered all over the desert floor and I get confused.  And then I want some.  ANYWAY…)

After the dew cleared in the morning, the manna would appear.  "As small as the hoar frost on the ground."  

No one really knows what the biblical manna was.  Theories aside from tree sap include aphid juice, the emerging tendrils of psychoactive mushrooms, and "a kosher species of locust."  (I don't even want to know what that means.  I just don't.  Okay, I peeked!  Gross!)  Maybe the "psilocybin mushroom" theory explains why they wandered in the desert for 40 years, when it would only have taken a year to cross on foot at most.  They were all stoned out of their minds!

Manna had some interesting characteristics.  You could only gather the amount you needed for the day, because if you tried to keep it overnight, it would rot and become infested with maggots.  The only exception to this was the Sabbath.  Manna did not fall on the Sabbath, and you wouldn't have been allowed to gather it then, anyway.  Therefore you had to gather a double ration the day before.  And miraculously, this Sabbath portion would not rot.

The distribution of manna was not even; sometimes you could just reach out your hand and scoop it up, and sometimes you had to go hunting for it.  You could pound it into a bread-like substance, but even so, gentiles could not perceive it.  If they tried to catch it, it would slip through their hands.  Animals, however, could feed and drink manna.  In one tradition, the taste of manna depended on how old you were.  It tasted like "like honey for small children, like bread for youths, and like oil for the elderly" to quote Wikipedia.  

What is sold now as manna is usually the dried sweet sap from various trees.  (Which makes it related to maple syrup, if you think about it.)  

Once the Jews reached Canaan, the fall of manna ceased.  Although it's rumored that one last little bit of manna is saved in a pot, which is kept beside the Ark of the Covenant.

Photo credit: Flickr/erix!

Are Invisiblity Cloaks Even Possible?


When browsing through the shelves of a delightful bookstore near my home, I saw a book that was devoted to the science of “Harry Potter”- I’ve seen books on the science of Star Trek, but never Harry Potter, so it was unusual for me to find Michio Kaku’s article,  "Small-Scale Invisibility Cloaks".


The whole article sounds like crazy-talk, but is actually true. In 2006, some industrious scientists at Duke University created metamaterials, “which could render an object invisible by absorbing all the light that hits it, but only in two dimensions and only at microwave frequencies”.

Now, very small three-dimensional objects can appear to disappear when under an infrared light if they are placed under an invisibility carpet. According to Kaku, when you put the object underneath the carpet, the bump disappears. He believes that this technology can be applied to larger objects or people as well in the future, which is definitely starting to sound more than a little like Harry Potter. The main reason that the technology is able to work is that infra-red light works at a lower frequency than regular light and has a longer wavelength; when light hits the bump, it bounces off.

Don’t get too excited about the magic carpet just yet, however. Kaku mentions a few things about the technology that show that it isn’t quite up to par with JK Rowling’s imagination yet.

 

  • It doesn’t work with light that you can see yet.
  • So far, the object under the carpet is roughly the size of a human hair, so there is quite a ways to go until an actual person can hide under the carpet (or so we are told, anyway!)
  • The carpet has a reflection similar to that of a mirror.


The other Invisibility Cloak material that I’m aware of comes from the use of a special raincoat covered with many small beads. Like the “magic carpet”, the raincoat has a mirror-like reflection and involves the use of light to “make the person underneath the coat disappear”. This technology was first developed in the 1960’s- unfortunately, it is limited in that it requires the viewer to look at the raincoat through an apparatus such as a camera or a movie camera in order for the invisibility effect to be complete. The apparatus is necessary because it is only a computer-generated image. For more information on Invisibility Cloaks, HowStuffWorks has a full-range of introductory-level articles on the topic of “Optical Camouflage”.

Kids See Dead People

What if the whole Bruce Willis scenario in The Sixth Sense were much more than M. Night Shyamalan’s greatest hit film? Caron Goode is playing a true life, though living, role of Wills’s character, investigating the minds of children who might possibly see ghosts.

The psychologist says that her efforts stem from her own childhood experiences, and she’s out to discover whether or not the imaginary friends that so many kids have are actually the spirits of the dead instead. She’s even written a book, Kids Who See Ghosts: How to Guide Them Through Fear, about it.

Haven’t we all entertained this line of thought before (whether or not we actually believed it, of course)? The idea that perhaps children—as well as pets—are much more open to the world around them and, without the lenses of propriety and societal rules we have as adults who’ve spent our lives being indoctrinated and assimilated into our culture where such things are deemed imaginary at best and insane at worst, can possibly see the dead?

I know I have. In fact, I can remember seeing such people as a child myself, and being told that it was just my imagination. Was it? Perhaps. As I grew older, I certainly lost the ability to see such things—though the creepy feeling of being watched, not being alone, and the presence of others certainly remains. We can all probably vouch for that feeling, which can usually be explained away. Of course, some fascination with the “what ifs” out there cause us to entertain our imaginations, too. The “what if” factor does remain, though; if something has not been disproven, it could always still be proven, right?

This translates into my current life with my daughter, who says she sees ghosts—a man and a woman, who sometimes has a dog. A man and a woman did die in our house; they were my grandparents. And my grandmother did have a beloved dog. However, my daughter also loves Scooby Doo, and she hasn’t been all that specific about the details. She has, however, come running into my room afraid of the ghosts, something that Goode says may show truth. She is also afraid to play in her bedroom alone—something that I hope to have remedied once we move from this house, which we hope will be in the near future.

Either way, I honor her tales—whether they be something she actually sees or her imagination—as a part of her and do not tell her to stop making things up, that ghosts are not real, and so on. I’d much rather her know that her mother trusts her, and respects her—imagination or not. My own cousin, at age two, did say he saw a man in his room quite often after my grandfather had been dead for many years, and when he saw a photo of him for the first time, declared it to be “the man in my room.” That room is now my daughter’s.

Spontaneous Human Combustion

When I was a kid, I had this incredibly morbid book about spontaneous human combustion.  It was written in as lurid a fashion as possible, had a collection of glossy photos in a central inset, and put forth the most preposterous theories with great enthusiasm.  I'm pretty sure I bought it out of the nickel box at someone's garage sale.  

(Sometimes I wonder what my parents were thinking, letting an eight year old girl read a book about spontaneous human combustion.  Maybe they didn't notice, or maybe they were just happy that I read books at all.  Certainly I doubt they realized that I was both compelled to read it, and suffering from nightmares where I woke up with half my body burnt and reduced to ash.)

I remember that this book collated a lot of really bizarre and random facts, and tried to collect them as a theory.  For example, each of the victims - so the author claimed - were "angry people."  Some of them were just chronically cranky, and others had recently had some kind of big argument with someone in their life.  Like a wife who fought with her husband, then the husband came back the next day and found her charred remains.

Much was always made of the fact that everything else in the room was untouched by fire or flame, and yet the human bodies had been reduced to ash.  It takes so many thousand degrees to reduce bone to ash, we are told.  How otherworldly it was to examine those pictures of a body-shaped pile of ash in an otherwise untouched recliner, beside a shelf full of undamaged photographs!

Of course, the first thing we can question is the use of the word "spontaneous" in the term "spontaneous human combustion."  A surprising proportion of SHC victims were cigarette smokers.  Many of them had been drinking.  It's not undue to assume that they might have fallen asleep or passed out with a lit cigarette in hand.  In which case, the combustion is hardly spontaneous.

The boring, pedantic, scientific, and probably correct explanation is that the victims died suddenly of a stroke or heart attack while smoking a cigarette.  (Certainly cigarette smoking drastically increases your odds of dying this way.)  The cigarette drops onto the clothes, which begin to smolder.  And then the "wick effect" takes over.

When you burn a candle, you aren't really burning the wick per se.  The wick is a string of cotton which sucks up oil or wax from the candle and feeds it to the fire.  What you see is the candle's wax burning, while the string itself remains fairly unaffected.

The fat of a human body can also slowly be rendered into a flame, with the clothing acting like a wick.  The dead body essentially becomes one big candle, which gradually burns the victim's tissue and bones down to char.  Thus, although Spontaneous Human Combustion is often imagined to take place in one great "WHOOMPF!" of flame, the truth is that it is a long, slow, low-temperature burn.

Photo credit: Flickr/Bob.Fornal

Is Elvis Presley Still Alive?

The King of Rock and Roll would be 75 years old if he were still alive today.  That's what fascinates me about the "Elvis faked his own death" legend: what happened afterward?  

I can believe that Elvis Presley faked his own death.  Although I think the possibility is unlikely.  Let's be honest, surely anyone who wanted to fake their own death would leave a better fake death behind than "died while pooping." 

Something like, "died while rescuing a kitten from a tree" or even "died quietly in his sleep."  Something with a little dignity, you know?  Something better than the existing story, which is that he was found approximately 10 hours after his likely death, face down in a puddle of vomit on his bathroom floor, with his pants around his ankles.  That's just sad.

In his final years, Elvis Presley's life had constricted to virtual self-imprisonment. We take it for granted that celebrities will be pursued by fans and the press, but no one wants to live that way.  At one point Elvis was denied the medical treatment that he needed, because the nearest hospital (in Las Vegas) was overwhelmed by fans.

That's no way to live, and I can totally understand someone opting out of it.  Particularly someone with the money and resources to do anything he wanted.

You probably already know the basics of the "Elvis faked his death" trope.  The mis-spelled headstone at his grave, because Elvis was supposedly too superstitious to lend his "real" name to his headstone.  (This overlooks the fact that Elvis legally changed his middle name to Aaron a few months before his death.  So the headstone was actually spelled correctly.)

Another is that his casket was too heavy, and too quickly deployed, and that it felt "cold," and therefore OBVIOUSLY it was a refrigerated unit containing a wax body inside.  (There's a third possibility: that Elvis, notoriously vain, was actually dead, but his body had been replaced by a better-looking wax replica.)

And of course, there are the sightings.  Elvis sightings have entered our cultural collective unconscious to such an extent that even the official Elvis Presley website uses the term "Elvis sightings" in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, for a page dedicated to listing Elvis references in contemporary media.  

Immediately after his death, there was some intriguing stuff about another singer named Orion.  Orion appeared out of nowhere, and looked and sang a lot like Elvis Presley in a mask.  Orion turned out to be rockabilly musician Jimmy Ellis, who deliberately took on the Orion persona in order to trick people into thinking he was actually Elvis in disguise.

Assuming that Elvis Presley is still alive, I sincerely doubt he would have any interest in performing publicly.  I like to imagine Elvis living in disguise in some tropical paradise, just another random old dude in polyester slacks, shuffling down the sidewalk in Honolulu with a cane in his hand and a happy smile on his face.  It's the least he deserves.

Photo credit: Flickr/hawaii

UFOs Over China!

Maybe… maybe not!  A ton of images and video purporting to show a rash of UFOs over China last week have gone through a flurry of internet activity.  Debunked!  Bunked!  Re-debunked!  It's missiles!  It's a counter-missile system!  It's an optical illusion!  It's UFOs and China doesn't want to admit it!

Here are the facts: something happened to shut down Xiaoshan Airport.  To quote CNN, "Eighteen flights were delayed or rerouted and operations shut down after twinkling lights were spotted above the terminal around 9 p.m. July 7."  Some people thought it was a private aircraft which had gone astray.  Others thought it was something military - an experimental aircraft, perhaps, or who knows what.

What CNN describes as "twinkling lights" has been described by other sources as "a glowing object hovering in the afternoon sky."  

The next day, a UFO was reported hovering over the city of Chongquing for over an hour.  And then all hell broke loose.  I can't even count how many UFO reports have come out of China this month.  Dozens!  Hundreds!  How many of them are just Photoshop trickery?  A lot, probably!

The Chongquing UFO is described as a formation of four glowing lights in a diamond shape, which floated over a park for over an hour.  (Just as a point of information, that's identical to a fake UFO you can build with a few cans of Sterno, a sheet of lightweight plywood, and a garbage bag. You know - the kind of thing you would launch from, say, a park.)

An MIT weapons analyst has taken a look at the evidence for the airport UFO and - perhaps unsurprising, given his specialty - decided that it was probably a ballistic missile headed for the Gobi desert.  Chinese officials have - even less surprisingly - not been very forthcoming with the information.

According to MSNBC it was the work of a missile test.  Why China would be testing missiles by firing them over its own people and airports is left as an exercise for the reader.  Also according to MSNBC the missile was "fired to intercept another missile in flight."  Which is it?  Was China really testing their missile-on-missile system over its own population?  Or were they firing against someone else's missile?  And if so, whose?

MSNBC's report is based largely on a one-line statement given by the Xinhua news agency.  No great surprise that the Chinese government would claim that "oh yeah, it was all on purpose."  Considering the secrecy and lies espoused by the Chinese government on a regular basis, it's no surprise that the UFO-hunting community is going nuts over this.

It's worth contemplating that if the government is telling the truth about this being a military thing, this doesn't exactly spell "good news" for Chinese travelers.  Imagine if a United States Air Force missile wandered over LAX and shut down air traffic while Air Traffic Control tried to figure out what the heck it is.  The sheer volume of incompetence and confusion in this scenario is clearly a bad sign!

Frankly, it probably would have made the government look better if they had just come out and said "Yep, it was aliens."

What Happens After Level 10?

After my Sim reached level 10 in the Ghost Hunter profession* I noticed that his Job Experience bar reset, and began filling up again as he continued to perform his professional duties.  I couldn't help wondering: now what?  

Traditionally, no Sim job has ever had more than 10 levels since the earliest version of the game.  So why was the game encouraging me to maintain his job performance?  What would happen the next time he maxed out his Job Experience bar?

When my Ghost Hunter Sim hit level 10, he was awarded the Key to the City.  This is a silly little decorative item that was given to him by the mayor, who held a ceremony in his honor.  (You may remember this from my last post on the Ghost Hunter career track.)

The next time he maxed out his Job Experience bar, the mayor once again announced that she was holding a ceremony to honor him.  I woke him up from a sound sleep (curse those night shift hours, why can't ghosts haunt during the day?) and sent him down to see what the deal was.

Just like last time, random townie Sims had gathered in celebration. Some threw confetti, while others held up signs with the "ghost" icon on them.  He knelt, and the mayor bestowed upon him the "Paranormal Memento."  (He also got the "Neighborhood Hero" moodlet, which is +50 to mood for a whopping 4 days!)

This turned out to be a fairly large… diorama… thingie.  It's pictured above on the kitchen counter so that you can see the size.  (I obviously need to work out some kind of system for displaying stuff like this!)

The Paranormal Memento is useless, but kinda neat.  It's a spooky miniature graveyard, complete with miniature mausoleum, miniature spooky dead tree, and some miniature gravestones.  And it has actual moving fog effects, which is pretty cool!  

These little tchochkes seem to be analogous to the Talent Badge system from The Sims 2, except with actual things you can put in your house, instead of a dumb badge that only lives on your Sim's info panel.  Technically I suppose they fall into the same category as career rewards.  But unlike the actual career rewards in The Sims 2, these career rewards are a lot harder to obtain, and they don't actually do anything.  

(I miss the career rewards from The Sims 2, which you could get when you were only at level 5.  I especially miss the Cow Plant, which exists in The Sims 3 only as a small decorative item.)

My Sim's Job Experience bar reset again, but I'll tell you the truth, I'm getting pretty bored with hunting ghosts.  Although I suppose I need to suck it up and at least hunt one bar's worth more of ghosts, in the name of research!

* To recap the difference between a Career and a Profession: a Career involves a rabbit hole, so you can only manage your Sim using the drop-down menu on their queue action.  Professions are interactive, and were introduced with the Ambitions expansion pack.

The Psychic Properties of Clutter

Oh clutter, does anyone escape your grasp?  I am considered (both by myself and by others) to be a ruthless, effective, and tireless fighter of clutter.  And yet I can point to six things that belong somewhere else within arm's reach of my keyboard as I type this right now.  

Clutter propagates in the dark, it creeps in on little cat feet, and can even destroy lives.  Philip K. Dick coined the term "kipple" in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

"Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more."

We have an interesting relationship to the type and number of objects in our surroundings, one which I think deserves more scientific scrutiny.  Look at a picture of a perfectly empty living room in a design magazine and you feel relaxed.  Look at a picture of a complete stranger's cluttered closet and you feel trapped, overwhelmed, and exhausted.  

(Don't believe me?  Click this link to view a Google Image Search for the word "clutter" and see how long you can hold out.  I only lasted about two pages of thumbnails before I thought I would have to start breathing into a paper bag.)

Just think about how weird it is to react that way to just pictures!  And it's not even pictures of your stuff - it's pictures of other people's stuff.

It is a truism of the decluttering/organizational experts that clutter doesn't just clog your house, it clogs your mental processes as well.  Open any declutter book and you'll find anecdotes about people who got promotions and lost weight after they took control of the clutter in their homes.  And watch A&E's show "Hoarders" for some excellent examples of the opposite case being true.

I trace our recent obsession with clutter back to the rise in popularity of Feng Shui in the early 1990s.  One of the key tenets of feng shui is that clutter is actively disruptive to your life.  It is said to impede the flow of energy through your home, the way a pile of rubble impedes the flow of a small creek.  

The pinnacle of feng shui is something like a burnished expanse of dining room table, empty but for a small vase that holds a single white orchid.  As opposed to what most of us eat dinner off of, which is… not that.

Even if you don't believe in feng shui as literal truth, it carries a lot of weight as a metaphorical truth.  Imagine taking a plate of food to that imaginary empty dining room table.  You just sit down and eat!  No need to stop and stack a bunch of mail together, oops and it slid off the edge, and as you reach for it you knock over a half-empty and flat can of soda, and the next thing you know your dinner's gone cold before you can even clear a space for yourself.  Talk about clouding the senses and confusing the mind!

Question of the day: does the clutter in your home reflect your state of mind, or create it?

Photo credit: Flickr/[>miguel>>]

The Physics of Cold Spots: Part 2 of 2

Last time we discussed some of the broader issues around the phenomena of cold spots.  This time I wanted to dig down into a more narrow discussion of the physics involved.  Temperature - heat - is energy, and there are several ways to "harvest" heat in order to use it for energy.  But could ghosts be harvesting heat literally out of thin air in order to power their appearances?

Many scientifically minded investigators will cite the Peltier effect as a possible explanation for what's going on when a cold spot appears.  The Peltier effect is a real thing, and in fact it is used by some small refrigeration units and in some specific applications.  But it's incredibly inefficient compared to other methods of cooling.  

To sum up the Peltier effect, if you connect two different metals together and run an electrical current through them, one side will get hot, and the other side will get cold.  This happens because of the different levels of conductivity between the two metals.  (The Peltier effect can also happen on a geologic scale, when two outcroppings of different minerals get electrified thanks to something like seismic activity or a lightning strike.)

To create the Peltier effect all you need is two slabs of metals that conduct at different levels, plus an electrical current.  Because it requires no moving parts, Peltier coolers are used in some military applications.  They can also be found in portable and RV refrigerators, since regular refrigerators have to be kept upright in order to work.

Obviously, the Peltier effect can't literally be responsible for cold spots, because they don't involve slabs of metal.  Interestingly, ghosts are often associated with electromagnetic radiation (EMF) which is basically an electrical current in the air.  So they do have half the equation - electricity - available to them.

However, discussions of cold spots always raise a bigger question.  As we all know, the second law of thermodynamics is such that heat is never destroyed - it just goes somewhere else.  In the Peltier effect, heat is sucked from one slab of metal and emitted from the other.  In a refrigerator, heat is sucked out of the interior and blown out the back.  In an air conditioner, heat is sucked out of your home and blown outside your window.

So if a ghost is sucking the heat out of the air… where is the heat going?

In fact, if cold spots were being caused by ghosts, then we would be associating hot spots with ghosts, as well.  As a ghost moved past you, it would be slowly emitting the heat that it had sucked out of the air.  Which would feel like a WARM breeze moving past you in the night.

I know that your mind just ran a little clip of some FLIR tape of a ghost.  But consider this: FLIR cannot see cold spots in the air, it can only record the temperature of a physical object.  If FLIR cannot see the cold spot caused by a ghost sucking heat from the air, then why would it be able to see the hot spot caused by the ghost emitting that same heat?

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