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‘Mars Rat’ Takes Internet by Storm

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on June 3, 2013
Posted in: Brain Works, Conspiracy, Human Perception, Illusions, Optical Illusion, Perception. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

by Mike Wall via Space.com

A Mars rock that bears a passing resemblance to a rodent is scuttling across the Internet with gusto, even inspiring some fans to set up a Twitter account in its name.

UFO buffs spotted the purported “Mars rat” in a panoramic photo snapped in September 2012 by NASA’s Curiosity rover. Zooming in on a portion of the image reveals what appears to be a rodent crouching between two rocks, its nose to the ground.

Once seen, it cannot be unseen. The “Mars rat” captured by Curiosity’s lens.
CREDIT: NASA | View full size image

“It’s a cute rodent on Mars. Note its lighter-color upper and lower eyelids, its nose and cheek areas, its ear, its front leg and stomach,” Scott Waring wrote at UFO Sightings Daily back in December. “Looks similar to a squirrel camouflaged in the stones and sand by its colors.”

In an update to that post, Waring raised the possibility that NASA flew the rat/squirrel to Mars secretly, as part of an experiment testing out the Red Planet’s ability to support life as we know it.

“Why would they not tell us about it?” Waring wrote. “Because the squirrel would be expected to die eventually and that would get PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] to fight against them in a court of law.”

The Mars rat has now gone viral, jumping from the pages of UFO Sightings Daily to more mainstream publications such as Discovery News, Fox News and a host of other outlets (including, of course, SPACE.com).

The rodent has even picked up its own Twitter account, @RealMarsRat. Just 49 people were following the rat as of Friday afternoon (May 31), but that’s still pretty good for a rodent.

While some people seem to really believe that a squirrel is crawling around on the Red Planet (or was in September, anyway), the Mars rodent is actually an example of a psychological phenomenon called pareidolia.

Pareidolia refers to the tendency of the human brain to perceive animals or other familiar shapes in vague or random images. The phenomenon has fueled a great deal of excited speculation about the Red Planet over the years, most famously after some people saw a humanoid face on Mars in photos taken by NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter in 1976.

And just this March, UFO Sightings Daily reported that an apparent animal, perhaps a rat or a lizard, lurked in another one of Curiosity’s photos.

It’s highly unlikely that a rat, squirrel, lizard or any other organism could survive on the cold, dry Martian surface today, researchers say, though some scientists think the Red Planet may still be able to support microbial life in select underground pockets.

Things were likely different in Mars’ wetter and warmer past, however. Curiosity’s observations led mission scientists to announce earlier this year that microbes could have survived on the Red Planet billions of years ago.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on SPACE.com.

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The Face on Mars

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 18, 2013
Posted in: Brain Works, Educational, Human Perception, Illusions, Mysteries, Optical Illusion, Perception. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 1 comment
A great example of pareidolia

face-on-mars2

Via Relatively Interesting

Back in 1976, the Viking Orbiter 1 acquired some images of the Cydonia region of Mars as part of the search for a potential landing site for the Viking Lander 2.  One of the images included a shot of a region that looked remarkably similar to a face. The image was released to the public by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as part of their public relations effort.

Here it is:

face-on-mars_250px

Shortly after the images were released, some people (mostly in lay literature) argued that the face was artificially created, and that this was concrete evidence for either past or present intelligence on Mars. The rock formation looked so similar to a face – how could it not have been designed by an intelligent architect?

Some believe the face was created by Martians, others say it is a tomb, or part of an ancient city. Others believe that NASA is involved in a conspiracy to cover up the true nature of the Face – all part of a secret space program (then why would they have released the picture in the first place?).

Mac Tonnies goes so far as to say that the Face is a “genuine scientific enigma”. After NASA released new images of the Face in 1998, he claims that the “experts either don’t understand the workings of their own instruments or else feel somehow threatened by the Face’s enduring mystery.” (you can check out his very centered site here)

“Scientific enigma”, the Face is not.

Introducing…. Pareidolia

Humans – all humans – have an innate ability to detect patterns out of seemingly random noise. This ability is particularly strong when it comes to faces. As David Hume once said, “There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good will to everything, that hurts or pleases us.

This phenomenon – detecting something clear and distinct from an apparently obscure stimulus – is called “pareidolia“. Carl Sagan hypothesized that, as a survival technique, human beings are “hard-wired” from birth to identify the human face. This allows people to use only minimal details to recognize faces from a distance and in poor visibility but can also lead them to interpret random images or patterns of light and shade as being faces.

pareidolia-collage_600px

Pareidolia not only applies to the detection of faces, but also to the perception of religious imagery and themes. In 1978, a New Mexican woman found that the burn marks on her tortilla she had made appeared similar to the face of Jesus Christ. Thousands of people came to see the burnt tortilla. Do think that if Son of God wanted to be seen, he would appear on a tortilla? Or the Virgin Mary, on a grilled cheese sandwich? Wouldn’t they pick something a little more majestic?

Revisiting the Face on Mars

But first, let’s revisit the Face on Mars. Back in 1976, the imaging technology was inferior to today’s, and the resolution of the images was significantly lower. Even compared to 1998, the resolution of space images has increased dramatically. Let’s compare the Face from lowest to highest resolution:

MarsFaceComparison

The 1976 version sure does look like a face, and if you strain your eyes, you might still see a face in the 1998 version. But what about the 2001 version?  Not so much.

Let’s look even closer at the 2001 version, just to be sure . . .

MORE . . .

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UFOs Over Texas: Unidentified Floating Fireballs?

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on March 29, 2013
Posted in: Aliens, Debunk, Mysteries, UFO. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 comment

By Benjamin Radford via LiveScience

aliens-ufo_300pxA strange sight in the Texas night sky over the weekend had many people talking about fireballs and alien invasions. But, alas, the real culprit has been identified, a much more Earthly one.

Police in East Liberty County got a 911 emergency call at around 8:30 p.m. on Saturday from a person reporting “red fireballs in the sky.” Responding police officers, along with a dozen locals, described seeing four orange lights moving slowly in a line high in the sky. Police scopes revealed that the objects looked like hot air balloons — complete with flames — but were much smaller and did not have the signature gondola at the bottom.

Even more mysteriously, the lights were estimated to only be a few thousand feet off the ground, and yet they moved silently. No known airplane or helicopter technology could fly that low and remain so quiet. Within minutes the UFOs were gone, having disappeared into the night. They didn’t fly away but instead simply blinked out of existence; some eyewitnesses thought they had vanished behind a passing cloud and would reappear at any moment, but they never did.

Even so, the sighting wasn’t over: A second batch of the strange lights soon appeared, in an identical line and in a more or less identical formation, until they too vanished in the same pattern. Baffled police contacted the National Weather Bureau, the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies, though none of them could shed light on the mystery. No unusual aircraft appeared on radar, and though weather balloons had been launched earlier that day, they were not aloft in the area at that time — and in any event did not match the UFOs description. The National UFO Reporting Center was also contacted, though they had no information to offer.

The Unidentified Flying Objects became IFOs when members of a nearby wedding party informed police that the floating, flaming objects were paper lanterns lit just after their ceremony. Such Chinese lanterns are made of lightweight paper and a candle that provides the heat that lifts the lanterns as well as the light that makes them glow.

That explains why there was no aircraft engine sound, and the flame-like appearance. Each lantern represented a wish made by each of the guests for the new couple. The newlyweds apologized if their wish lanterns scared anyone, and the sheriff took it in stride but noted that the lanterns might pose a fire threat, and asked the public to notify police before lighting such lanterns in the future.

This is not the first time that paper lanterns have sparked UFO reports.

MORE . . .

Also See: UFOs & Psychic Powers: Top 10 Unexplained Phenomena

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Surface of the Sun As You’ve Never Seen It (Geek Alert!)

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on March 19, 2013
Posted in: Astrology, Educational, Fun Stuff, Geeky Stuff, Perception. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

Yes. I am geeking out. :)

To help you appreciate the sheer awesomeness of the following video, consider just how large the Sun is compared to our humble earth. Do note this image only compares the sizes of the Earth and the Sun, it does not depict how close the Earth is to the Sun. If we were actually this close to the sun our popcorn would be popping whether we wanted it to or not.

If the Sun were hollow, it would take approximately 1,000,000 Earths to fill the Sun!
[Source: NASA]
(Click image for larger view)
Click here for another great comparison image.

I recommend viewing fullscreen in HD. Enjoy :)

This extraordinary video looks back on the 3rd year of operation of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Since its launch in 2010, SDO’s data and imagery have exceeded everyone’s hopes and expectations, providing stunningly detailed views of the sun. The observatory has continued to return breathtaking pictures and movies of eruptive events on the sun. These images are more than just pretty. By highlighting different wavelengths of light, scientists can track how material on the sun moves. Such movement, in turn, holds clues as to what causes these giant explosions.

SDO is the first mission in a NASA’s Living With a Star program, the goal of which is to develop the scientific understanding necessary to address those aspects of the sun-Earth system that directly affect our lives and society.

On YouTube: Surface of the Sun As You’ve Never Seen It.

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Why do some people believe the moon landings were a hoax?

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on March 12, 2013
Posted in: Conspiracy, Debunk, Hoax, Moon Landing, Pseudohistory. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . 1 comment

moon_dog_600px

via How Stuff Works

Ever since NASA broadcast its visits to the moon between 1969 and 1972 to millions of people around Earth, conspiracy theorists have debated endlessly over ph­otographs and video of the journey. Judging by the dedication some have to the cause, the subject of whether or not the moon landings were a hoax rivals only the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the presence of Area 51 in popularity. The Fox Network even aired a television special in 2001, nearly 30 years after the last Apollo mission, titled “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?”

Moon-Landing-Hoax-250pxPoring over every single detail for inconsistencies and potential government tampering, people who buy the moon landing conspiracy theory strive to prove NASA never went to the moon — instead, they believe the organization filmed a series of fake moon landings in a studio, complete with props, astronaut costumes and intricate lighting setups.

But why would NASA and the U.S. government pull off such a strange stunt? The moon landings took place during the Cold War and a tense point in the nuclear arms race, an era in which the two world superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union (or what is now Russia), competed for technological superiority. Some believe that because sending astronauts into outer space and onto the moon would be incredibly expensive, the U.S. didn’t have enough money to complete the project. According to the conspiracy theorists, faking the moon landings would be much cheaper — if it were convincing enough, it could still send a message to Russia that the United States had the better technology.

What are some of the claims by the moon landing conspiracy theorists? What have they pointed out, and do their arguments have any validity? And what do scientists have to say about these conspiracy theories? To get answers to these questions and more, put on your tin foil hats and read the next page.

Discovery NASA: Apollo 8 Mission Overview

The Moon Landing Hoax Evidence

So what sort of evidence have conspiracy theorists gathered that might suggest the whole event was a fake? Nearly 40 years of research has given them some interesting points:

1. There aren’t any stars in the background.

One detail doubters often point to is the background of many of the NASA photos. In pictures of the moon’s landscapes, there aren’t any stars in the sky — it just looks like a big, black void of space. Since the moon has no atmosphere, shouldn’t there be millions of stars dotting the background of these photos? If the landings were faked on a studio stage, did the photographers make a huge mistake and just forget to “turn on” the stars?

Unfortunately for conspiracy theorists, the nature of photography strikes down their argument.

MORE . . .

Related: Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked

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Meteorite Fall in Russia Hurts More than 500 People

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on February 15, 2013
Posted in: Astrology. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

via LiveScience

Hundreds of people are reportedly injured, and hundreds of buildings damaged, after a meteorite streaked across the sky above Russia’s Ural Mountains Friday morning (Feb. 15) and exploded in a massive blast.

The meteor explosion was centered around the Chelyabinsk region, which is about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) east of Moscow.

Meteor_300pxMost of the hundreds injured were reportedly hurt by falling glass in the blast, 112 of whom have been hospitalized, due to cuts from the shattered glass resulting from the blast. In addition, an estimated 297 buildings were damaged, including six hospitals and 12 schools, according to translations of updates by the Russian Emergency Ministry.

Scientists think a meteoroid entered the atmosphere above Russia’s southern Chelyabinsk region, where it exploded and broke up into meteorites scattered across three regions of Russia and Kazakhstan, according to news reports. [Photos of Russia's Meteor Fireball Blast]

“I would think that this is likely an exploding fireball (or bolide) event caused by the atmospheric impact of a small asteroid,” Don Yeomans, head of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program, told SPACE.com. “If the reports of ground damage can be verified, it might suggest an object whose original size was several meters in extent before entering the atmosphere, fragmenting and exploding due to the unequal pressure on the leading side vs. the trailing side.”

Basically, Yeomans added, the meteor “pancaked and exploded.”

(A bolide is an extraterrestrial body ranging in size from 0.6 to 6 miles, or 1-10 km across that hits Earth at velocities faster than a speeding bullet, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.)

“This bolide event probably had nothing to do with the upcoming close Earth approach of asteroid 2012 DA14, which is due to pass closely (and safely) past the Earth at 19:24 GMT today,” or 2:24 p.m. ET, Yeomans wrote, adding that the Russian bolide trail did not travel south to north as the asteroid will.

“And the separation in time between the fireball and 2012 DA14 close approach is significant,” Yeomans said.

A large chunk of the space rock has reportedly been discovered in a lake in the Chelyabinsk region, CNN reports.

A report by the Russian television news agency Russia Today showed video of the meteor, which included what appears to be a fireball streaking across the sky from several vantage points. At times the object is so bright it casts shadows.

MORE . . . (includes more video)

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Kepler Space Telescope Data Reveals Billions Of Earth-Like Planets Near Earth

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on February 7, 2013
Posted in: Aliens, Educational, Science. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

r-REDDWARFANDEARTH-large570

via The Huffington Post

alien 1209_200px_200pxIf ET phones home today, his long distance charge might not be as much as people believed when Steven Spielberg‘s classic film came out three decades ago.

That’s because recent data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope suggests that billions of Earth-like planets are much closer than ever before imagined.

“The information we presented today will excite the general public because we now know that the nearest potentially Earth-like world is likely within 13 light years of the sun,” astronomer Courtney Dressing said in an email to The Huffington Post.

“Astronomically speaking, 13 light years is practically next door.”

While we don’t know if intelligent life exists on any of these planets, it raises the chances of that possibility.

Watch this video about the red dwarf suns and Earth-like planets:

The scientific team studied the huge number of red dwarf stars in our galaxy — stars that are smaller and have a longer life span than our own sun.

Just doing the math, the odds of Earth-like planets in our galaxy are, well, astronomical.

alien-photo_200pxScientists estimate 6 percent of the 75 billion red dwarf stars may have Earth-size planets orbiting them at a possible habitable distance. That works out to approximately 4.5 billion Earths out there.

“Before today, it could have been that Earth-like planets did not exist, or that they were so rare that the closest one would be beyond the reach of any telescope we might construct. Thus we would never know whether or not we were truly alone,” astronomer David Charbonneau told HuffPost in an email.

Charbonneau, co-author of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics study, acknowledges the intense interest the public has in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

“I would say that the single greatest question in all of science is ‘Are we alone?’ The announcement today moves the ball downfield significantly toward answering this question.

MORE . . .

Also See: DUI Suspect, Tells Cops ‘Aliens’ Transported Him To Crash Site

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Did NASA delete evidence of UFOs from its photo archive?

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on January 18, 2013
Posted in: Aliens, UFO. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 2 comments

By Annalee Newitz via io9.com

UFOlogists are freaking out today over the removal of several photos from a NASA archive. These photos, which you can see here, have been used by various UFO groups to support their belief that aliens have been visiting Earth and governments are covering it up.

According to The Examiner:

The UFO photos first appeared on the NASA Johnson Space Center website in May 2011 and clearly showed a spacecraft of some advanced design. Without any fanfare, the photos were uploaded and stayed on the NASA website for over a year and half until being recently removed.

alien2Believers say the removal of the photos is tantamount to admitting that NASA is trying to cover up extraterrestrial vistors.

The pictures are gorgeous, by the way. I’m guessing they are pictures of a few satellites, and possibly the Hubble.

If NASA really were involved in an elaborate cover-up, though, it seems unlikely that they’d leave the photos up for over a year before noticing that their ultra-super-top-secret alien ship snapshots were on a public website. Slightly more likely is that they were removed after the space agency realized that they were fueling alien conspiracy theories.

More photos on UFO Sightings Daily

[...]

UPDATE 2: Commenter metoposaurus notes that at least some of these photos are still available on NASA’s websites, just in a different location. NASA identifies these as images of “space debris.” If you want to have a lot of fun, try searching this NASA database for “space debris.” Tons of potential UFOs, people!
Note from iLLumiNuTTi:

As the writer of the above article points out, all these “UFO” pictures weren’t removed by NASA, they were simply moved to another location on the NASA website. I did some digging and they were indeed relocated (links below the images):

Space debris being misidentified as alien craft.

Space debris or a satellite being misidentified as an alien craft by conspiracists.

These images have been relocated to here, here, here, here, here and here.

As usual, conspiracists come up short on research. NASA is not hiding these photos.

Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB)
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Why the Moon Landings Could Have Never EVER Been Faked: The Definitive Proof

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on January 18, 2013
Posted in: Conspiracy, Moon Landing, Skepticism. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

via gizmodo.com

This video is so good, so incredibly brilliant, solid and simple, that you will want to paste it all over your Facebooks and Twitters just to piss off all the IMBECILES who still claim that the Moon landings were faked (those idiots exist, yes). The reason is simple: the technology to fake it didn’t exist.

It’s a very simple argument. It’s not about showing how ignorant the hoaxers demonstrate to be with their idiotic “proofs”, which actually show they don’t know anything about physics, photography or even perspective. Or the fact that simple there’s tons of physical proof that we were there. Or the fact that the Soviet Union was monitoring it too and accepted the American victory in the Space Race.

No, it’s something even more obvious. This video explains why there was absolutely no way to fake it at the time. Even the cameras needed to fake it didn’t exist back then.

It’s completely convincing and undeniable argument and worth watching from beginning to end. I enjoyed it so much that I was giggling at some points. Especially one of them: we have gone from a world in which we couldn’t possibly fake a landing on the Moon but we went there for real to a world in which we are no longer going to the Moon but we can easily fake it.

OH. YOU. IRONY. [Thanks Karl!]

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Sacramento ‘UFO Explosion’ Mystery Revealed

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on January 16, 2013
Posted in: Aliens, Debunk, UFO. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 2 comments

By Lee Speigel via The Huffington Post

The explanation for what many people thought was an exploding UFO above Sacramento is no longer a mystery — it was a weather balloon.

After HuffPost reported how Elijah Prychodzko videotaped a circular, bright aerial object through his telescope over Sacramento on Dec. 20, 2012, the volume of explanations began rolling in for the possible identity of the object.

Those included alien spacecraft, military weapons test, a runaway planet, Doomsday rock headed to Earth and shot down by the Air Force, North Korea’s satellite, and, even, a hoax.

This exploding weather balloon over Tampa Bay, Fla., was recorded on July 2, 2012. It looks nearly identical to the object that exploded over Sacramento, Calif., on Dec. 20, 2012.

This exploding weather balloon over Tampa Bay, Fla., was recorded on July 2, 2012. It looks nearly identical to the object that exploded over Sacramento, Calif., on Dec. 20, 2012 (below).

If the images above and below look similar, it’s because they both show the same type of event as seen through telescopes — the difference being that the picture above was taken over Tampa Bay, Fla., on July 2, 2012, and the one below was the object photographed over Sacramento on Dec. 20.

o-SACRAMENTOUFO-570

This object exploded over Sacramento, Calif., on Dec. 20, 2012.

Many readers speculated that what Prychodzko captured on video was a weather balloon and not something that occurred in deep space.

“Obviously, something of this magnitude (planetary-size space explosion) would have been noticed by government (NASA) and or professional astronomers along with a host of amateur astronomers,” 40-year veteran UFO researcher Frank Warren told HuffPost in an email.

Warren, editor and publisher of The UFO Chronicles website, did a follow-up investigation of the Sacramento video and concluded the object was clearly terrestrial in origin.

“After reviewing several videos of ‘weather balloons bursting’ at altitude, it leaves no question as to what the image in the Prychodzko video really is. Like any case we dig into, one either finds ancillary evidence in support of a claim, none, or just the opposite. This one fell apart rather quickly — research 101.”

In videos of weather balloon explosions — which can be found on the Internet — it looks like something is “orbiting” the main balloon, when, in fact, it’s an instrument package called a radiosonde that swings under the balloon, giving the appearance of being in orbit around the balloon. As the balloon rises, the decreased air pressure causes it to expand until it eventually bursts.

According to NBC News.com . . . MORE . . .

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The Hollow Earth Theory

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on January 3, 2013
Posted in: Conspiracy, Pseudohistory, Pseudoscientific. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . 2 comments

via skeptoid.com

Podcast Listen | Subscribe

hollow_earth_250pxToday we’re going to point the skeptical eye at yet another alternative science that has managed to hang around for centuries despite being obviously wrong, the hollow Earth. There are many different models of hollow Earth theory, and support from equally diverse communities. It is a mind-bending example of how people can mold their world views to fit their beliefs, and then mold science itself to fit the world view.

Today, the prevailing hollow Earth theory states that the Earth is a hollow shell, with its inner surface being much like the outer surface where we live. It has oceans, mountain ranges, and clouds; and hovering at the very center of this hollow ball is a miniature sun that warms the inner-surface residents. Slightly offset from the North Pole and the South Pole are holes that allow travel between the outer and inner worlds. The civilization that lives on the inner surface is more advanced than ours, and they fly in and out through the polar openings in flying saucers, which explains UFO sightings by the outer surface civilization. Only the government knows about the polar openings and the inner civilization, and they suppress this information; ostensibly to prevent other governments from finding out about it and claiming the territory.

To most of us, this sounds like a pretty far-out concept; so many applications of various sciences prove it wrong. Nevertheless, even today, it has its supporters. Many books are available earnestly promoting the theory. Websites such as OurHollowEarth.com, HollowEarthNetwork.com, and HollowEarthTheory.com provide only a starting point for active communities who firmly believe this.

Conspiracy mongering is a big part of most of today’s hollow Earth writings: familiar assertions that the government is covering it up, the proverbial “they” don’t want you to know about it, and that we should all “wake up” and see the truth. But this is the least interesting part of hollow Earth theory, and only its most recently introduced aspect. There is a rich and surprising history behind how this all came to be

MORE . . .

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Magnetic myths

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on December 27, 2012
Posted in: 2012, Apocalypse, Disinformation, Doomsday, Educational, Pseudoscientific, Science. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

by Donald Prothero via Skepticblog
Dec 26, 2012

608139main1_geomagnetic-field-670-560x420
All throughout the long buildup up to last week’s latest failed prediction of an global apocalypse, you would hear people claiming that the earth-shattering catastrophe of Dec. 21 would include “pole shifts” or “changes in the earth’s magnetic field” and all sorts of other sciencey phrases, proclaimed by people with absolutely no idea what they were talking about. The idea of “magnetism” is one of the most popular memes in the lexicon of pseudoscientists and New Agers, since magnets operate “mysteriously” and exert a force at a distance. From the days of Franz Mesmer claiming he had “magnetism” over people, to the trite phrase “animal magnetism,” the concept of magnetism has always been mysterious and misunderstood. Hence the big market for sticking magnets on various parts of your body to “cure” you. All they do is waste money, and possibly demagnetize the magnetic strip on your credit cards. The idea that somehow the earth’s magnetic field will shift abruptly or that the earth’s core will stop rotating (as in the idiotic Hilary Swank movie “The Core”) or even more wildly, that the earth’s rotational pole will change, are all common ideas out there in Wacko-Land.

Among the crazy ideas out there is that somehow the magnetic poles will shift and destroy all electrical devices (this web site), thus destroying civilization. Or this site, which claims that pole shifts will cause earthquakes and hurricanes, and NASA is covering up what’s happening. Or this bizarre post, which freely uses the words “gruesome” and “horror”. Or this site, which cherry-picks items from actual science posts and then completely misinterprets what they mean.

This is just a small sampling of the pseudoscientific garbage all over the internet posted before Dec. 21. Most of us know enough about science and apocalyptic predictions to guess that they are not worth taking seriously, but very few people have bothered to debunk this stuff. Unfortunately, we saw lots of sad consequences of people who did take the ridiculous apocalyptic predictions seriously, often with tragic results.

Among my other specialties, my professional training is in paleomagnetism, and I’ve conducted over 35 years of published research in the field, so I’m pretty familiar with what we do and don’t know about the earth’s magnetic field and how it behaves.

First, some science. The earth’s magnetic field has at least two components, the dipolar field (illustrated above), which makes up about 90% of the magnetism we normally feel, and a non-dipole field, which is normally hard to detect beneath it but makes up at least 10% of the earth’s field. The dipole field is not exactly lined up with the rotational axis of the earth (i.e., there is a small angle between magnetic north and true north), but over geologic spans of time, magnetic north wanders around the vicinity of the rotational pole; this movement known as secular variation. Studies have shown … MORE . . ..

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Scientists suggest we might be overlooking alien communications

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on December 20, 2012
Posted in: Aliens, UFO. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 1 comment

via www.digitaljournal.com

grey1_1A new theory has been put forward in the astrophysics world suggesting people have assumed too much when looking for alien attempts to communicate with Earth.

The theory, proposed by James Benford, his son, Dominic Benford, and Jame’s twin brother Gregory Benford, published in two papers in June, have generated a great deal of excitement in the science world. The Benfords looked at the issue of communications and concluded that aliens, much like humans, would want to economize their resources where possible, and thus they would not send out communications resembling what scientists have expected would be sent. Instead, the scientists suggest, aliens might be as frugal with expensive resources as humans are.

The University of California Irvine said extraterrestrials might have been trying to contact Earth all along, but because scientists were looking for something different, the messages were missed. The trio of scientists believe extraterrestrials might send out short messages, or pulses. James explained, saying

“This approach is more like Twitter and less like War and Peace.”

James is a physicist as well as the founder and president of Microwave Sciences Inc. in Lafayette, California. Dominic is a scientist with NASA, and Gregory is an astrophysicist with the University of California Irvine. The new hypothesis is based on an old adage. Gregory explained …

MORE . . .

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Why the World Didn’t End Yesterday

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on December 16, 2012
Posted in: 2012, Apocalypse, Doomsday, Mayans, Prophecy. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

NASA is so sure the world won’t come to an end on Dec. 21, 2012, that they already released a video for the day after.

Pretend it’s 12/22/12 and enjoy :)

More questions about December 21, 2012? http://www.nasa.gov/2012/

Visit http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/14dec_yesterday/ for more.

Via ScienceCasts: Why the World Didn’t End Yesterday – YouTube.

Mayan_018889_200pxNASA recently released a press release and video for December 22, explaining why the world didn’t end, since they are so confident it will not occur. This video was released several days before the supposed apocalypse that some believe will occur on December 21. This date refers to the “end” of the ancient Mayan calendar that many think signifies the end of the world due to a Mayan prophecy.

NASA already debunked every single possible doomsday and apocalypse claim in a video released earlier this year. But NASA wants to make sure that they are clear the Mayans will be wrong this time and say the entire doomsday scenario is a misconception from the very beginning.

More via Examiner.com.

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Conspiracy: The color of Mars is a government coverup!!!!

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on December 13, 2012
Posted in: Bizarre, Conspiracy, Debunk, Disinformation, Educational, Government, New World Order, Science, Secret Societies. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

By Mason I. Bilderberg

Did you know Mars is NOT reddish in color? It’s true. It looks just like earth!!! Mars has earth colored soil and a beautiful blue sky – just like Hawaii!

I know this because it says so on this conspiracy website:

«This is very interesting. It may come as a surprise to many readers that Mars looks very much like Earth. It’s not red or orange – NASA applies a lens to tint the pictures or they release black and white photos… here’s a real color picture of Mars… blue sky and all… it gets to the point where you ask yourself “what does the government not lie about?”»

They included this image as proof:

marslike earth

Conspiracists believe Mars looks like earth, to include a blue sky – just like Hawaii! The real reason we believe Mars appears reddish is all part of a NASA/government conspiracy.

I can’t believe anybody would believe Mars looks like earth. But i’ll push forward simply for the entertainment value and because there is some interesting facts to be learned – stuff i didn’t know. I love everything space related.

Two facts about Mars:

• Why Does Mars Appear Red?

Mars often appears reddish due to a combination of the fact that its surface is comprised of iron-rich minerals that essentially rust (or oxidize) and that the dust made of these minerals is kicked up into the atmosphere, giving the atmosphere a reddish hue as well. [SOURCE]

• How Did Mars Get its Name?

Mars was named by the Romans for their god of war because of its red, bloodlike color. Other civilizations also named this planet from this attribute; for example, the Egyptians named it “Her Desher,” meaning “the red one.” [SOURCE]

So while the Romans and the Egyptians knew Mars appeared red simply by looking up into the night sky, today’s conspiracists insist our belief that Mars is red is actually a false belief perpetuated by a government coverup.

Maybe i am endowed with an abundance of common sense but couldn’t these conspiracists step outside their mother’s basement, look up into the night sky and see what Mars looks like to the naked eye? I’m just saying.

But i digress …

So i decided to pursue this absurdity to another level. I took the photo featured on the conspiracy website and i decided to find out where it came from. I found the original photo at the NASA website. It really wasn’t hard to find (Even a conspiracist could have found it). I then superimposed the conspiracy picture next to the original NASA photo. The conspiracy photo is on the left, the original NASA image is on the right:

Columbia_Hills_03_small

The conspiracy photo is on the left, the original NASA image is on the right. The NASA image confirms what even the Egyptians knew – Mars has a reddish appearance. So much for that Hawaiian vacation to Mars. [Image Source: (NASA)]

I added the phrases “False Color” and “True Color” to the above image because these are two terms used by NASA to describe how they color correct photos taken by their landers and satellites. They have good reasons for making different color corrections to their photos, but first, let’s understand how NASA calibrates the colors in these Mars photos:

Calibration Targets

via NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

When you adjust the color on your television set, you do so by picking something on the screen that you know should be a certain color (such as grass should be green) and you adjust your set accordingly. This is a form of calibration. You used the color of the grass as a reference point.sundial1_250 Instruments that go to Mars also need to be calibrated so that scientists receive accurate information. There has to be a known reference — a calibration target.

The rover’s calibration targets are objects with known properties. For example, the Pancam calibration target. It is in the shape of a sundial and is mounted on the rover deck. Pancam will image the sundial many times during the mission so that scientists can adjust the images they receive from Mars. They use the colored blocks in the corners of the sundial to calibrate the color in images of the martian landscape. Pictures of the shadows that are cast by the sundial’s center post allow scientists to properly adjust the brightness of each Pancam image. Children provided artwork for the sides of the base of the sundial.

Clapboard-ColorThis is the same process used by Hollywood movie makers. They use a device called a “clapper board” to mark the beginning of a scene or a “take.” I’m sure you’ve seen this used in the movies. Well, at the top of some clapper boards you will see a rainbow of colors. Like the Pancam calibration target on the Mars rover, the colors along the top of the clapper board provide a known color reference that can be used in post production by movie editors to ensure the colors in the final cut are “true” to what was recorded on the movie set.

Speaking of “true colors,” let’s get back to why NASA would choose to creat “false color” photos along with “true color” photos. It’s really not as mysterious as it might sound. Let’s start with a technical definition of both:

True Color

«An image is called a “true-color” image when it offers a natural color rendition, or when it comes close to it. This means that the colors of an object in an image appear to a human observer the same way as if this observer were to directly view the object: A green tree appears green in the image, a red apple red, a blue sky blue, and so on.[1]» [source]

False Color

«False color refers to a group of color rendering methods used to display images in color which were recorded in the visual or non-visual parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. A false-color image is an image that depicts an object in colors that differ from those a photograph (a “true-color” image) would show.» [source]

flir small

Forward looking infrared (FLIR) image.

Here is a classic example of a false color image: A forward looking infrared (FLIR) camera (the image to the right). By creating a representation of wavelengths normally invisible to the human eye, we are able to discern the different temperatures present in this scene.

But there are a multitude of reasons for creating false images. Sometimes colors are enhanced, or even added, to represent some characteristic in the image, such as chemical composition, velocity, distance or to simply enhance the differences between materials. Have you ever increased the contrast on your television or an image on your computer so you can better discern some detail? You’ve just created your own false image!!

The same goes for the moon and Mars. With both planets being mostly uniform in their respective colors, creating false images can help us distinguish something as simple as peaks and valleys. Here is an example using the moon:

MoonTrueFalse02

On the left side is the true color image of the far side of our moon, a mosaic constructed from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images. This is what you would see if you were to directly observe the terrain. Given the uniform color it is very difficult, if not impossible, to accurately judge the peaks and valleys.

On the right side is a false color image of the same side of our moon, a topographic map of the altitude of the Moon’s surface obtained by the Clementine orbiter mission (1994). Measurements made with a laser altimiter. Redder areas are higher, blue/purple areas lower. [source] (more Clementine images here)

In this instance a false color image was generated of the moon to provide a clear, visual representation of the lunar topography.

In the false color Mars image used at the conspiracy website, it’s very possible NASA color corrected the image for no other reason than to better distinguish the size, shape and locations of the rocks.

So to wrap things up, the bottom line is Mars is reddish in color and the moon appears gray. Period. End of story.

I guess my bigger question concerning this conspiracy is, why would the government have any interest in covering up the real color of Mars or the moon (yes, there is a conspiracy out there that the government is covering up the real color of the moon)? I suspect it has something to do with the belief Mars and the moon are actually inhabitable and the Mars/moon color coverup is part of the government’s alien/UFO coverup.

Unbelievable.

Conspiracy Source:

Research Sources:

MOLA-Mars Water_map_wblack_small

No, Mars is not colored like the land of Oz, this is a false color (blue) image created to
show where water ice is buried beneath the martian surface in this Mars Odyssey map. [source]
Click the image to view full size.

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City Lights of the United States 2012

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on December 7, 2012
Posted in: Astrology, Educational, Fun Stuff, Science. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

I am fascinated by anything space related. For a real treat, download the original 6MB image and zoom in on the details. Do this by right-clicking on the image below and “save as” to your computer. Now open the image file with your favorite image viewing program. Zoom in!!! Amazing! Enjoy :)

via The official NASA flickr

Click image to view full size

Click image to view full size

This image of the United States of America at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012. The image was made possible by the new satellite’s “day-night band” of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as city lights, gas flares, auroras, wildfires, and reflected moonlight.

MORE . . .

via The official NASA flickr

The night side of Earth twinkles with light, and the first thing to stand out is the cities. “Nothing tells us more about the spread of humans across the Earth than city lights,” asserts Chris Elvidge, a NOAA scientist who has studied them for 20 years.

This new global view and animation of Earth’s city lights is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite. The data was acquired over nine days in April 2012 and thirteen days in October 2012. It took satellite 312 orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands. This new data was then mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet.

MORE . . .

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NASA Takes on 2012 Doomsday Hokum

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on December 1, 2012
Posted in: 2012, Apocalypse, Bizarre, Doomsday, Fun Stuff, Mayans, Myths, Story Telling. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

via PCMag.com

366427-2012-end-of-earthNASA wants us all to know that it feels very confident in predicting that the world won’t end in 2012, despite what we may have read on the Internet.

The space agency recently saw fit to take its debunking hammer to persistent online tales of a fictional dwarf planet that is supposedly on a collision course with Earth, popular prophecies associated with the Mayan calendar, and other doomsday scenarios that fall apart under minimal scrutiny.

“Contrary to some of the common beliefs out there, Dec. 21, 2012 won’t be the end of the world as we know it. However, it will be another winter solstice,” NASA associates behind a new website called Beyond 2012 wrote Wednesday in a Google+ post.

Some of the more popular apocalyptic theories revolve around a rogue planet called Nibiru supposedly discovered thousands of years ago by the ancient Sumerians, which some believe is going to collide with our planet next month. Variations on this theme call the doomsday rock Planet X or peg the real dwarf planet Eris as the harbinger of death from the skies, while a recent strain of this myth tries to tie the whole thing in with the supposed end of the Mayan calendar on Dec. 21, 2012.

Beyond 2012 is dedicated to debunking such pseudo-science. There is no Nibiru or Planet X that’s been observed by astronomers and if they really were on a path to hit the Earth in a couple weeks, they’d be visible to the naked eye by now. Eris “is real, but it is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto that will remain in the outer solar system; the closest it can come to Earth is about 4 billion miles,” the site explains.

The supposedly abrupt end of the Mayan calendar at the upcoming winter solstice? It’s not “evidence” that ancient Mesoamerican chronometrists had some mystic knowledge of when the world would end—it’s actually just the end of one of the cycles they used in devising their calendar.

Other doomsday hokum countered on the Beyond 2012 site includes a supposedly imminent reversal in the Earth’s rotation, the onset of giant solar storms, and a fanciful array of disastrous events somehow set in motion by a rare alignment of the planets.

MORE (video) . . .

Now lets visit the “higher dimensional” (crazy) side of 12/21/2012 …

Just when you think the 2012 crazy train couldn’t fly any further off the rails, i bring you Tolec from the Andromeda Council. He sets the record straight on all this 2012 stuff (I really love the part where he says “Time will begin to go away throughout all of 2013″). From his video description:
BullShit

The electromagnetic particles that will be flowing & interchanging between the planets during the 12.21.12 alignment will be highly magnified and highly supercharged when they reach Earth. They will penetrate the crust, through the Earth and down into its core. At the actual moment of alignment it will cause the Earth to pause, for only a moment, and this process will completely transform the core of our planet to a completely new kind of energy form & source. This new energy form, in the language spoken on the Andromeda Council biospheres, the language of the Mirach star system in the Andromeda constellation, by the Andromeda Council scientists, is called: “sar”.

This will be the first time cosmic transformational event of this type ever… for a planet. Time will begin to go away throughout all of 2013. And Earth will continue her evolution & transformation process into becoming a higher dimensional world in January 2014.

If you’re still in need of even more crazy, i suggest going over to Tolec’s web page and scroll down to “Time of Transition for Planet Earth.”

There you will learn all about the “vibrational changes” the earth will begin going through starting on 12/21/2012, how the earth will experience “continued geophysical changes, earthquakes, volcanoes going off, wave events, [that] will all continue to happen throughout the last months of 2012, into March 2013 [and beyond] when the final rotation of the 90 degree shift of Earth’s crust happens with the present day East/West orientation of the continents moving into their new North/South orientation” and how, during the year 2013, “every living thing from the largest to the smallest will be offered the opportunity to change, to evolve, into 4D, fourth dimensional life.”

Check it out and enjoy the world of crazy. :)

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No Huge Discovery by Mars Rover Curiosity Yet

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on November 30, 2012
Posted in: Aliens, Educational. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . 2 comments

via LiveScience

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity used its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) to snap a set of 55 high-resolution images on Oct. 31, 2012. Researchers stitched the pictures together to create this full-color self-portrait.
CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems
View full size image

Contrary to rampant speculation, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has not made an earth-shaking find just a few months into its Red Planet mission, agency officials said today (Nov. 29).

Rumors of a big discovery began swirling earlier this month, after an NPR story quoted Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger as saying that the rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument had recently gathered data “for the history books.”

SAM is capable of identifying organic compounds, the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it. So many people assumed that Curiosity had detected organic compounds in the Martian soil.

But that’s not the case, officials said.

“Rumors and speculation that there are major new findings from the mission at this early stage are incorrect,” officials at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., which manages Curiosity’s mission, wrote in a mission update today. “At this point in the mission, the instruments on the rover have not detected any definitive evidence of Martian organics.”

Grotzinger, who is a geologist at Caltech in Pasadena, and several other members of the Curiosity team will hold a press conference Monday (Dec. 3) at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Don’t expect a bombshell announcement.

“The news conference will be an update about first use of the rover’s full array of analytical instruments to investigate a drift of sandy soil,” JPL officials wrote.

MORE . . .

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Doomsday 2012 Hoax: NASA Scientist David Morrison Debunks End Of World Theories

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on November 21, 2012
Posted in: 2012, Apocalypse, Doomsday, Mayans. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 2 comments

via huffingtonpost.com

Is the world going to end right in the middle of the upcoming holiday season? While that wouldn’t be good for retail sales, many people feel that Dec. 21, 2012 is a date that will linger in our minds forever — assuming we all survive the calamities that are supposedly headed our way.

The ancient Mayan civilization calendar is believed to end this year on Dec. 21. And somehow, through word-of-mouth, movies, books, the Internet, etc., a cult-like belief system has sprung up in our culture suggesting any number of awful things will take place on that date.

Some of these include:

  • An unknown planet on a collision path with Earth.
  • A close encounter between Earth and a black hole in deep space.
  • More natural disasters around our planet.
  • A shifting of Earth’s magnetic poles.

But where did all of these rumors actually start?

Many believe it goes back thousands of years to the ancient Sumerian culture who reportedly discovered a twelfth planet they called Nibiru — aka Planet X — which was predicted to have a close encounter with Earth in 2003.

When that didn’t happen, a new Doomsday was moved to December 2012.

On the other hand, there are some who believe the December date heralds not doom and gloom, but a more positive transformative experience for Earth and its inhabitants.

It all sounds rather sketchy, especially to a scientist.

“It’s all a hoax, and it’s based on absolutely no factual information. None of the things that are supposed to happen are real, and so it’s kind of hard to even have a scientific discussion about what they’re worried about because there’s no science there,” said David Morrison, a leading space scientist and director of the Carl Sagan Center for Study of Life in the Universe at the SETI Institute in California.

Watch this Doomsday video with David Morrison

While SETI scientists are involved with the ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence, they also want to quiet any fears the public has about the alleged Doomsday.

To that end, Morrison created a special Doomsday 2012 Fact Sheet in September that’s posted on both SETI and NASA websites.

According to this fact sheet, “opinion polls suggest that one in 10 Americans worry about whether they will survive past December 21 of this year.”

“Think about that. It means when you walk down the street and look around, there are 25 million people who presumably have no stake in anything because their world’s going to end in [December]. That is scary,” Morrison told The Huffington Post.

When Morrison was researching information for his Doomsday fact sheet, he didn’t find anything that confirmed that the Mayans left us any dire predictions.

MORE (VIDEO) . . .

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Are Flat-Earthers Being Serious?

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on November 19, 2012
Posted in: Bizarre, Conspiracy. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . 4 comments

via LifesLittleMysteries.com

A Flat Earth model depicting Antarctica as an ice wall surrounding a disc-shaped Earth.
CREDIT: Creative Commons 1.0 Generic | Trekky0623
View full size image

Members of the Flat Earth Society claim to believe the Earth is flat. Walking around on the planet’s surface, it looks andfeelsflat, so they deem all evidence to the contrary, such as satellite photos of Earth as a sphere, to be fabrications of a “round Earth conspiracy” orchestrated by NASA and other government agencies.

The belief that the Earth is flat has been described as the ultimate conspiracy theory. According to the Flat Earth Society’s leadership, its ranks have grown by 200 people (mostly Americans and Britons) per year since 2009. Judging by the exhaustive effort flat-earthers have invested in fleshing out the theory on their website, as well as the staunch defenses of their views they offer in media interviews and on Twitter, it would seem that these people genuinely believe the Earth is flat.

But in the 21st century, can they be serious? And if so, how is this psychologically possible?

Through a flat-earther’s eyes

First, a brief tour of the worldview of a flat-earther: While writing off buckets of concrete evidence that Earth is spherical, they readily accept a laundry list of propositions that some would call ludicrous. The leading flat-earther theory holds that Earth is a disc with the Arctic Circle in the center and Antarctica, a 150-foot-tall wall of ice, around the rim. NASA employees, they say, guard this ice wall to prevent people from climbing over and falling off the disc. Earth’s day and night cycle is explained by positing that the sun and moon are spheres measuring 32 miles (51 kilometers) that move in circles 3,000 miles (4,828 km) above the plane of the Earth. (Stars, they say, move in a plane 3,100 miles up.) Like spotlights, these celestial spheres illuminate different portions of the planet in a 24-hour cycle. Flat-earthers believe there must also be an invisible “antimoon” that obscures the moon during lunar eclipses.

Furthermore, Earth’s gravity is an illusion, they say. Objects do not accelerate downward; instead, the disc of Earth accelerates upward at 32 feet per second squared (9.8 meters per second squared), driven up by a mysterious force called dark energy. Currently, there is disagreement among flat-earthers about whether or not Einstein’s theory of relativity permits Earth to accelerate upward indefinitely without the planet eventually surpassing the speed of light. (Einstein’s laws apparently still hold in this alternate version of reality.)

As for what lies underneath the disc of Earth, this is unknown, but most flat-earthers believe it is composed of “rocks.” [Religion and Science: 6 Visions of Earth's Core]

Then, there’s the conspiracy theory: Flat-earthers believe photos of the globe are photoshopped; GPS devices are rigged to make airplane pilots think they are flying in straight lines around a sphere when they are actually flying in circles above a disc. The motive for world governments’ concealment of the true shape of the Earth has not been ascertained, but flat-earthers believe it is probably financial. “In a nutshell, it would logically cost much less to fake a space program than to actually have one, so those in on the Conspiracy profit from the funding NASA and other space agencies receive from the government,” the flat-earther website’s FAQ page explains.

It’s no joke

MORE . . .
Also see The Flat Earth Society

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Illusionist David Blaine’s Electrifying Stunt is Shockingly Safe

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on October 2, 2012
Posted in: Science, Stunt. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . 1 comment

via LifesLittleMysteries.com

In his latest stunt, illusionist David Blaine plans to make his body a conduit for an electric current flowing between two high-voltage electrodes for three days straight. The magician says he’ll face off with 1 million volts in what he told the Daily News would be his “most dangerous” feat ever, but at least one MIT physicist won’t be losing sleep over Blaine’s safety, saying the trick seems mostly risk-free.

A trailer for the stunt, which is set to begin on Manhattan’s Pier 54 on Oct. 5, shows Blaine standing at the center of a dark room, his mesh bodysuit lit only by two fluttering arcs of electricity emanating from his outstretched arms.

If the teaser gives any indication of what will actually transpire next month, Blaine’s odds of besting death in the trick he calls “Electrified: One Million Volts Always On” are pretty good.

“He has a conducting suit, all the current is going through the suit, nothing through his body,” said John Belcher, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-investigator on a plasma experiment aboard NASA’s Voyager 2 craft. “There is no danger in this that I see. I would do it, and I am 69 years old and risk-averse. I just would have to take a nap.”

(MORE . . . )

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Curiosity Photos of Mars Teeming with ‘UFOs’ | Mars Anomalies

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on September 13, 2012
Posted in: Aliens, UFO. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . 3 comments

By: Natalie Wolchover via LifesLittleMysteries.com

According to the fringe sector of the Internet, Mars is practically teeming with aliens.

“Mars animal” spotted by one YouTube user.
CREDIT: YouTube | StephenHannardADGUK

Since NASA’s Curiosity rover touched down on the Red Planet two weeks ago and powered up its cameras, it has already managed to photograph several alleged UFOs and other “anomalies” in the surrounding landscape.

From classic flying saucers to an absurdly out-of-place fossilized human finger, here’s a rundown of what UFO believers claim to have found in Curiosity photos so far. [Gallery of Mars 'UFO' Photos]

Horizon anomaly (aka impact cloud)

Speculation about Martians in Curiosity’s midst got off to a running start when the very first sequence of photos taken by the rover raised questions. A hazy, distant object mysteriously appeared and then disappeared in consecutive images of the Martian horizon, perplexing even NASA scientists at first.

But the much-discussed “anomaly” turned out not to be a sign of alien activity, but rather the plume of dust kicked up by the sky crane that delivered the rover close to the Martian surface, then veered off and struck the ground some 2,000 feet (600 meters) away.

“We believe we’ve caught what is the descent stage impact on the Martian surface,” said NASA engineer Steven Sell, sky crane specialist on the Curiosity mission.

Flying saucers (aka dead pixels)

In footage posted to YouTube Aug. 18, user “StephenHannardADGUK” applies a series of filters to a Curiosity image of the nearby rim of Gale crater, revealing what he says are four flying saucer-like objects stationed in the sky. More than 700,000 people have since given the video a gander.

“Four objects caught by Mars Curiosity, very difficult to make out on original image so I have used a few filters to highlight,” he said in the video description. “What are these four objects? UFOs, Dust particles, or something else? As always you decide.”

Experts say the four “objects” are actually just dead pixels in the rover’s CCD camera — single points in the camera’s imager that have lost functionality and register as white.

Keep Reading: Curiosity Photos of Mars Teeming with ‘UFOs’ | Mars Anomalies | LifesLittleMysteries.com.

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Mars Attacks! Well, Maybe… – An Assortment of Mars Conspiracies

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on September 9, 2012
Posted in: Conspiracy, Science Fiction, Story Telling. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . 3 comments

By Patrick Fennelly via Who Forted? Magazine

Is there something on Mars they don’t want us to see, or is it just a big old red desert, as we’re led to believe?

Last week the latest in tip-top technology NASA have soldered together landed on the red planet safely in the latest bid to provide us earthlings with information from our neighbors. Yet, only moments after the Curiosity rover landed, the conspiracy world went abuzz once more with stories about the Martian landscape. Our intrepid robot explorer seemed to photograph a massive crash or explosion in the distance, sparking rumors that it was an alien craft that Curiosity had caught crashing into the Martian surface. But engineers were soon out with their pens and rulers and supercomputers trying to explain what the photographs had shown. And they came back with this explanation; the ‘explosion’ captured by Curiosity was actually its landing device, or ‘Sky Crane’ which helped to lower the rover into the Mars atmosphere, which had severed itself from Curiosity and purposely crash landed, some 2,000 feet away, in the distance, thus causing this pyramid shape of soil and debris flung into the air by the craft. The fact that gravity is 38% less of that on Earth was the reason that Curiosity managed to capture the event. Yet many scientists still claim that it was statistically impossible for the rover to capture its own crash landing. And so more doubt has been cast over what is really going down on the Martian surface, hmmm…

Of course, this isn’t the first theory that Mars was or is inhabited by some extraterrestrial beings. The theories go way back, and involve a whole plethora of dubious yet somewhat enthralling research and imagery, mainly thanks to our recent ‘human’ presence on the red planet. Of course this ‘research’ goes from being in the ‘hmm, that’s kind of interesting’ variety to the, ‘wow that person should be in a padded cell’, end of things. The classic example is the face on Mars in the Cydonia region of the planet as snapped by the Viking 1 Orbiter back in 1976, which has sparked many a debate surrounding the idea that our neighbor Mars was once inhabited. And then the monumentally less impressive ‘skull’ which was just laying about the surface, and not to mention the dead storm trooper that somehow strayed from his pals, a deserter of the Empire, perhaps. My personal favourite though, is what has been dubbed the Mars mermaid, or the ‘Woman of Mars’. What is more than likely an oddly weathered rock formation does look creepily like a woman pointing to something, but to what!? Sadly no follow up pictures were ever snapped, so we’re left wondering.

But it doesn’t end there, oh no. Near the ‘face’ in the same region, Cydonia, the Viking orbiter also photographed what appear to be pyramids.

more: Mars Attacks! Well, Maybe… – An Assortment of Mars Conspiracies | Who Forted? Magazine.

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Will The World End In 2012?

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on August 24, 2012
Posted in: 2012, Aliens, Astrology, Doomsday, Mayans, Story Telling, supernatural, Superstition. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . 2 comments

A NASA Scientist Answers the Top 20 Questions About 2012

PUBLIC CONCERN ABOUT DOOMSDAY IN December 2012 has blossomed into a major new presence on the Internet. This fear has begun to invade cable TV and Hollywood, and it is rapidly spreading internationally. The hoax originally concerned a return of the fictitious planet Nibiru in 2012, but it received a big boost when conspiracy theory websites began to link it to the end of the Mayan calendar long count at the winter solstice (December 21) of 2012. Over the past year, many unrelated groups have joined the doomsday chorus, including Nostradamus advocates, a wide variety of eschatological Christian, Native American, and spiritualist sects, and those who fear comet and asteroid impacts or violent solar storms. At the time of this writing there are more than 175 books listed on Amazon.com dealing with the 2012 doomsday. The most popular topics are the Mayan calendar and spiritual predictions that the disaster in 2012 will usher in a new age of happiness and spiritual growth. Quite a few authors are cashing in with manuals on how to survive 2012.

As this hoax spreads, many more doomsday scenarios are being suggested, mostly unrelated to Nibiru. These include a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field, severe solar storms associated with the 11-year solar cycle (which may peak in 2012), a reversal of Earth’s rotation axis, a 90- degree flip of the rotation axis, bombardment by large comets or asteroids, bombardment by gamma rays, or various unspecified lethal rays coming from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy or the “dark rift” seen in a nearby galactic spiral arm. A major theme has become celestial alignments: supposedly the Sun will align with the galactic center (or maybe with the Milky Way Dark Rift) on December 21, 2012, subjecting us to mysterious and potentially deadly forces.

Unlike most pseudoscience stories, there seems to be no factual core on which the Nibiru- 2012 hoax has been constructed. This is different from, for example, the claims of aliens and a crashed UFO at Roswell, New Mexico. The alien stories are a fabrication, but the core fact is that an instrumented balloon did crash in Roswell on July 7, 1947. There is no similar factual core to Nibiru—just dubious “predictions” from psychics, or the Mayans, or Nostradamus. The rest is pure fiction.

I answer questions from the public submitted online to a NASA website, and over the past two years the Nibiru-2012 doomsday has become the dominant topic people ask about. Many are curious about things they have seen on the Internet or TV, but many are also angry about supposed government cover-ups. As one wrote “Why are you lying about Nibiru? Everyone knows it is coming.” Others are genuinely frightened that the world will end just three years from now. My frustration in answering questions piecemeal motivates this “Twenty Questions” format to organize the facts and shine a skeptical light on this accumulation of myths and hoaxes.

1. What is the origin of the prediction that the world will end in December 2012?

The story started with claims that Nibiru, a supposed planet discovered by the Sumerians, is headed toward Earth. Zecharia Sitchin, who writes fiction about the ancient Mesopotamian civilization of Sumer, claimed in several books (e.g., The Twelfth Planet, published in 1976) that he has found and translated Sumerian documents that identify the planet Nibiru, orbiting the Sun every 3600 years. These Sumerian fables include stories of “ancient astronauts” visiting Earth from a civilization of aliens called the Anunnaki.

Keep Reading: Skeptic » Reading Room » 2012 and Counting.

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Martian Sighting? Strange Pics From Mars Rover Explained

Posted by scorp3j on August 23, 2012
Posted in: Aliens, UFO. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . 3 comments

Via TheBlaze.com.

Over the last couple days, UFO enthusiasts have rallied behind pictures of four orbs that were taken by NASA’s rover “Curiosity” on Mars. But as many of these UFO stories often come to pass, a reasonable explanation has been cited and it could be one that has even caused problems for photographers here on Earth. It’s called “dead pixels.”

The Washington Post reported the group Alien Disclosure Group believed that photos beamed back from Curiosity earlier this week could possibly have captured four flying saucers. They put together this video with all the image and it enhanced with different filters:

Gizmodo describes out what is being seen here …

Keep Reading:: ‘UFOs’ in Curiosity Picture Caused by ‘Dead Pixels’ According to Experts | Video | TheBlaze.com.

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Latest Mars Hoax: Photo of Martian Double Sunset

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on August 17, 2012
Posted in: Astrology, Debunk, Hoax. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

via LifesLittleMysteries.com

The Martian dust has barely had time to settle after the landing of NASA’s Curiosity rover, and already the robotic vehicle has inadvertently generated multiple conspiracy theories and hoaxes. The latest is a fabricated photo of two suns setting on Mars.

As a member of the same solar system as Earth, Mars, of course, orbits a single sun. Nonetheless, the double sunset image, which was supposedly captured in the past few days by the Curiosity rover, has spread around the Web and is causing confusion about just what it could be showing.

If the two suns look oddly familiar, you might be a “Star Wars” fan. Turns out, the image is a photo of an actual Martian sunset taken by NASA’s Spirit rover in 2005 overlain with the double sunset that appears on the planet Tatooine in the film “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope” (LucasFilm, 1977).

Keep Reading: Latest Mars Hoax: Photo of Martian Double Sunset | LifesLittleMysteries.com.

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Photos of Apollo Mission Flags on Moon: Yep, We Really Did Go There

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on August 10, 2012
Posted in: Astrology, Conspiracy, Moon Landing. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

Reblogged from The Color of Lila:

Click to visit the original post

Okay, all you the-moon landings-were-faked conspiracy nuts:  now we have photos taken from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter showing the flags that the Apollo astronauts left behind on their moon landings.

NASA has a nice web page explaining the science that debunks the conspiracy nuts, but a picture is worth a thousand words.  Then again, conspiracy nuts are notoriously committed to their world views…

Read more… 104 more words

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The Secret History Of Aliens On Earth Photo Gallery – 10,000 B.C. – Conspiracies on truTV.com

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on August 5, 2012
Posted in: Aliens, Bizarre, Creatures, UFO. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

10,000 B.C.


Along the Chinese-Tibetan border, the Dropa Stones indicate what some believe to be an ancient alien crash-landing. While exploring some curious caves in the Himalayas, an archeological professor and his students came across small tombs, which held the skeletons of several 4′ 4″ creatures. There were no gravestones but instead hundreds of foot-long disks with holes in the center and grooves spiraling out from the holes. Beijing’s Dr. Tsum Um determined the grooves contained hieroglyphics that told a tale of a group, the Dropas, who crashed on earth. The Dropas attempted to befriend local tribes but were instead killed by the primitive humans who shunned them for their inhuman appearance.

Keep Reading: The Secret History Of Aliens On Earth Photo Gallery – 10,000 B.C. – Conspiracies on truTV.com.

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2012 Doomsday Myths Debunked by NASA

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on July 6, 2012
Posted in: 2012, Apocalypse, Doomsday, Mayans. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

According to a recent poll, 10 percent of people around the globe worry that the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012, as some spurious interpretations of the Mayans’ long-count calendar predict.

The doomsayers cite several different potential agents of apocalypse, including a collision with the supposed rogue planet Nibiru, a catastrophic solar storm or an unfortunate planetary alignment.

But it’s all nonsense, NASA assures us. Here’s a look at some of the most prevalent 2012 doomsday myths, and some NASA-provided reasons why we shouldn’t retreat into our bunkers.

Keep Reading: 2012 Doomsday Myths Debunked by NASA | Space.com.
Related: Ancient Text Confirms Mayan Calendar End Date

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Mickey Mouse Spotted On Mercury!

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on June 15, 2012
Posted in: Fun Stuff, Human Perception. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

The image on the left was just captured by NASA’s Messenger spacecraft, now orbiting Mercury. The image on the right is a famous rodent. I wonder when Disney’s lawyers would sue the solar system for intellectual property theft.

via Mickey Mouse Spotted On Mercury!.

Conspiracy Theory: Did We Go to the Moon?

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on April 21, 2012
Posted in: Conspiracy, Hoax, Moon Landing. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . 1 comment

Professor Steven I. Dutch, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, does a great job loading up our bag of facts to help us fight this ridiculous conspiracy theory!

Go here to learn … Conspiracy Theory: Did We Go to the Moon?

Conspiracy Theory: Did We Go to the Moon?