Stories tagged aliens
Cats and dogs, living together: You need more proof?
Courtesy darkmavisPut a star on your calendars today, Buzzketeers, because science is taking a vacation! And I don’t know about y’all, but I’ll be celebrating by eating my own head and diving into a good book. Literally!
Some of you (the sassboxes) might point out that natural laws apparently still apply, and that scientists the world over continue to fiddle around with their science-tools to learn things about the world. But the day I start paying attention to scientists is the day I give up my lifelong dream of eating my own head.
No, I’m listening to the people who have a more direct influence on my day-to-day life: bookies.
See, it seems that a bunch of bookies are concerned that there’s some chance that an alien spaceship will be landing today in the American desert. And so I’m concerned too.
The idea… Nay, the fact of the impending landing came from the Australian psychic, Blossom Goodchild.
—A little side note: I can’t believe it! My name used to be Blossom Goodchild too! I just changed it to JGordon in junior high. I can’t believe we were both born “Blossom Goodchild”! Amazing!
Anyway, Blossom Goodchild, Aussie supernatural, delivers the secrets of love, light, and laughter by channeling “a native American spirit energy” by the name of White Cloud. I’m not entirely clear on why a native American spirit energy would go to Australia for channeling, but who am I to question the ways of the spirits?
Goodchild, presumably with the help of White Cloud, has started a wave of Internet-enthusiasm by predicting the imminent arrival of a massive space ship full of aliens (or “light beings”), which will supposedly be happening today!
The enterprising residents of Earth, not wanting to be caught with our pants down by light beings, have rushed to prepare… by betting on the arrival! Betting so much, in fact, that bookmakers have had to suspend further all wagers.
There has been no evidence of the coming aliens—no radio transmissions, no detected incoming spaceships, and no precedence—except for the word of an Australian good child, and her wandering spirit. And so it would make sense that the odds are set up against the landing. Yet human gamblers aren’t into odds (who ever won something by betting on a sure thing?) or evidence, and they stand to make a lot of money if (when) the ship arrives. See, we shoot from the hip, and we follow our guts, and the bookies know it, and they’re afraid to take any more bets on the spaceship.
So today’s the day, Buzzers. Try to do something impossible. You won’t be the only one.
Tags : Dr. Edgar Mitchell, a former Apollo 14 astronaut and the sixth man to walk on the Moon has come out publicly to say extraterrestrial beings exist and have visited the Earth. During an interview on a British radio program last week Mitchell confirmed knowledge of NASA and government cover-ups of alien visitations to our planet including the famous incident near Roswell, New Mexico where it has long been rumored (but never confirmed) that a spaceship with alien occupants had crashed in 1947.
At the moment it’s all hearsay, and skeptics want to see some real evidence, but you have to admit Mitchell adds some credibility to the subject. The fact that all this has come out at the same time the new X-Files movie is opening could just be a coincidence or just another piece of the conspiracy. You can decide for yourself.
LINKS
CNN report
New Zealand television report
Letterman's Top Ten Reasons for NASA cover-up
KARE-TV report
God save the queen: From abduction, probing, and public ridicule.
Courtesy .kol tregaskesThat’s kind of a bummer, isn’t it? Right?
Aliens (space aliens) and America used to be like pizza and beer, adenine and thymine, Johnny and June; we were inseparable. We dissected them and hid their crash sites, and they mutilated our surplus cattle and probed our rural drunks.
And now they’ve crossed the pond to shack up with a foxier mistress with a more sophisticated accent: Lady Britannia.
Sure, there was that awesome sighting in Texas in January, but since then all aliens seem to care about is England. Apparently, it has been a crazy year for UFO sightings in Britain.
Dozens of reported UFO sightings across the country have got British extraterrestrial enthusiasts stammering, dropping their h’s, and constructing fresh tinfoil hats. Out of Cadbury egg wrappers. In their spare time, they’re working on theories for the increasing number of encounters, a favorite being aliens’ concern over global warming and what man is doing to the planet. I suppose the best way to warn humanity of the dangers of climate change is to zoom past small towns in the middle of the night, but I have a different theory—the aliens want to take over Earth, but it’s still too cold for them to comfortably inhabit the planet, so they’re idling their high-energy spacecrafts in our low atmosphere to release even more greenhouse gases. They’ve probably picked England because of the low number of firearms in the country—who needs to have the locals taking potshots at you all night?
Anyway, we’ve been dumped. Again.
Good lookin', bad soundin': Radiowaves that get caught up in the Northern Lights are creating some annoying noises that zap out into space.
Courtesy NASANo wonder aliens want to attack the Earth with such regularity in the movies. From out in space, we sound pretty annoying, like that renter in the apartment above you who insists on playing Yoko Ono records at 2:30 in the morning.
You laugh, but new recordings from space show that Earth, our home, makes an array of nasty sounds that ring out across the universe.
Scientists have actually known about this phenomenon since the 1970s. But today we have some audio evidence of this annoying noise. So what’s happening?
There’s a bunch of radiation created high above our planet. Solar winds blow it into Earth’s magnetic field and then things start to get loud. Basically, this radiation gets sucked into the same conditions that cause the Northern Lights. While they look great, they sound horrible – sorta like Brittney Spears.
Earth’s ionosphere keeps the radio waves created in this action from coming down toward us, which is a good thing. That’s because they’re about 10,000 times stronger than any radio signals we have on our planet.
Satellites from the European Space Agency's Cluster mission, however, have now detected strong beams of these annoying radio waves out in space.
Click here to hear a sample of what this space noise sounds like. Personally, I think I’ve experienced this sound, much quieter, after eating a bad burrito.
Where are you going?: I'm going home.
Courtesy MilaNew tests performed on a meteorite found in Australia suggest that life on earth could have had its start in space; it’s possible that the first components of self-replicating genetic material came from outer space.
This particular meteorite only struck Earth about 40 years ago, but new studies confirm that the molecules uracil and xanthine (which are found in our RNA) were present in the meteoritic fragments before human contamination.
Uracil and xanthine are “nucleobases,” and play an important role in the replication of DNA. Some have argued that these molecules could have originally formed on Earth, but these researchers claim that the atmospheric conditions on the planet at the time the first organic molecules are thought to have appeared would have prohibited a terrestrial origin. Going even further, they state that it’s possible—assuming that there are all these vital molecules floating out there on meteors—that life, or at least the key components for life (a big difference I suppose), could be widespread in the universe.
I prefer extraterrestrial life delivery by spaceship, but I guess I’ll take what I can get. Wild.
Junk food or junk science?: Six hours worth of advertising for Doritos chips have been beamed out in to space as a signal to other life forms that there's crispy, tasty, good times available on Earth.
Courtesy ீ ๑ AdamWe can’t escape advertising, can we? It’s there along the roadside, imbedded on the results of our web search and even on the bathroom stall wall. And now it’s off into space.
Six-straight hours of Doritos advertising have been beamed out into space from a European space station located on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Circle. The message is directed at the Ursa Major constellation, which is just 42 light years from Earth. That location was targeted as astronomers figure it has the best chances of hosting a planet that can support life forms, and potential Doritos eaters.
And while the effects of advertising are always hard to measure, these space scientists aren’t expecting the message to have a huge impact on Doritos sales. The actual advertisement has been broken down into a MPEG file that is just a series of “0s” and “1s”. The hope is that any one receiving the message will understand it as a message coming across with some intelligence and to perk the receiver’s curiosity in wanting to see where it came from.
But I ask you, is it really intelligent to try to entice an alien to come 42 light years to Earth in the hope of getting some Doritos? After all, the package expiration date doesn’t come close to lasting that long.
Actually, Doritos made a donation to the space station in exchange for having its advertisement sent into space. But I ask you, what kind of message would you send out into space to encourage intelligent life to come investigate Earth?
This man used to sit in dark, smoky rooms...protecting us: Now look at what you've done to him. He even had to sell his cyanide capsule.
Courtesy laurenatclemsonI’m sorry if this is the wrong forum, but I think it’s about time for some grassroots action, you know what I mean? If we, concerned Buzzers and Buzzketeers, don’t do something soon, we will have allowed a great injustice to be committed, a travesty right under our noses; a massive government conspiracy will crumble on our watch, dozens of jobs will be lost, and countless dangerous secrets will spill into the grubby hands of the unwashed masses. Yuck.
So let’s get our act together, and vote “no” on the Denver extraterrestrial affairs commission ballot initiative. Assuming we live in Denver (a quick check at the window has confirmed that I, in fact, do not live in Denver, so this one has to be up to you guys).
It seems that Denver local Jeff Peckman is hot on the heels of the government’s alien cover-up division, and he’s got a hot injection of video evidence ready for when he catches it.
Five years ago either Peckman or a friend of his (The article doesn’t make this totally clear) was concerned that he may have had a peeping Tom problem. Employing a unique new method for dealing with peeping Toms, Peckman (or, again, possibly his friend) set up a video camera on a tripod in his living room, and pointed it at the window with the night vision setting turned on. Sure enough, the camera caught a sneaky little peeper. However, the little perve turned out to be something other than a mask-free human—a large, smooth, alien looking head appears in the video, scanning the room and blinking.
As of the present time, Peckman has only released a single still frame from the video (which can be seen at the link above), but the irrefutable evidence of alien incursions into the privacy of an American home has prompted him to bring the issue to the highest levels of local government. Pending the collection of 4,000 signatures, Peckman hopes to bring a ballot initiative to the people of Denver, so that they might vote to create an extraterrestrial affairs commission.
The E.A.C. would be composed of 18 members appointed by the mayor, and tasked with defending the city, in the event that aliens, “or their vehicles,” were to arrive in Denver.
Formation of the E.A.C. would be a major blow to the government conspiracy that we have all come to rely upon. Shadowy bureaucrats would be turned out on the streets, and stripped of their abilities to protect a population that, frankly, maybe no longer deserves their tender concern.
A vote for “no” is a vote to keep us all in the blissful dark. Vote “no.”
Let your ballots do the talking.
A quick guide to practical mutilation: I hear it's all about lips and anus, but, really, I'm more of a sirloin kind of guy.
Courtesy YsangkokHey, some of this post is pretty really gross, so skip it if you’re some kind of baby, okay?
I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never given cattle mutilation much thought. I don’t mean that I simply haven’t considered the ups and downs of mutilation, rather that I’ve barely considered it at all.
I know, I know. We’re practically wading our way to work through piles of dead, mutilated cattle, and here I am thinking about TGIF programming, archery, and mustard (or whatever—sometimes I think about other things too, just not cattle mutilation). This, people, is why the most important problems out there never get solved; because we’re all too focused on little things like traffic safety. Well, today at least, I’ll be doing my part to let y’all in the rural Da Vinci Code: cattle mutilation (of course).
What brings cattle mutilation to mind today, of all days, on this sunny Friday? Because those lousy bovine molesters have struck again, this time in sleepy, innocent Saskatchewan.
Last week, outside the village of Stockholm, Saskatchewan, a farmer awoke to find one of her cows dead and mutilated just yards away from her house. Missing its rectum, genitals, navel, udder, lips, tongue, one eye, and one ear, the unfortunate animal could perhaps best be described as “yucky.” Said farmer Harris to her husband, “you don’t even want to see this.”
Was Mrs. Harris right? My sources say no: very probably Mr. Harris did indeed want to see the horribly abused animal outside his house.
A local veterinarian believed the incisions on the cow “took a little bit of skill,” and may have been done with an electric cautery unit, as no blood was found on the scene. In addition to the lack of blood, the scene showed no evidence of a struggle, nor were there any footprints or tire tracks nearby.
What is to be made of this? Difficult to say, but it may be time look behind us. Not for sneaky cattle mutilators, but at history.
Like the Internet, cattle mutilation is a relatively new invention. It’s not certain if this is because our ancestors lacked the necessary tools, or just the imagination. Whatever the reason, this particular brand of animal abuse didn’t surface until the 1960s, when reports of grotesquely mutilated animals (mostly cows) began coming out of the states of Kansas and Pennsylvania (until this point, we had always been pretty kind to cattle). By the mid 70s, cattle mutilation was being reported in 15 states, from North Dakota to Texas, and in 1975 a senator from Colorado, Floyd K Haskell (married to Nina Totenberg, if you can believe it), contacted the FBI to look into the problem, claiming that there had been 130 mutilations in his state alone. The FBI actually did complete an investigation on cattle mutilations, dubbed “Operation Animal Mutilation,” in 1979—more on that in a moment.
The details of reported cattle mutilations vary from case to case, but certain characteristics seem to be quite consistent:
- The removal of eyes, udders and sexual organs
- The removal of the anus to a depth of around 12 inches
- The removal of the tongue and/or lips
- The removal of one ear
- The striping of hide and flesh from the jaw and the area directly beneath the ear
- The removal of soft organs from the lower body
- The presence of incisions and cuts across the body that appear to have been made by a surgical instrument
- Unexplained damage to remaining organs, but no sign of damage to surrounding area
- A lack of predation signs (teethmarks, tearing of skin or flesh, animal footprints)on or around the carcass
- Lack of scavenging
Mutilation of the eye, tongue, genitals, and rectum seem to be the most common characteristics. Also, the animals are often, but not always, drained of blood.
Oh, man.
Who’s mutilating these cowsies? Aliens, obviously, right? Well, if you consider the little research that’s been done on cattle mutilations, aliens are probably the least satisfying answer. What?! I know.
The 1979 FBI investigation concluded, for instance, that the mutilations were “predominately the result of natural predation, but that some contained anomalies that could not be accounted for by conventional wisdom.” “Anomalies” are kind of spooky, but mostly what the feds were talking about falls in line with the opinions of many scientists, veterinarians, and agricultural workers: missing or damaged organs are explained by dehydration, tissue contraction, and the actions of scavenging insects and burrowing parasites; missing eyes are due to bowflies and carrion birds; absence of blood is accounted for by pooling in low points in the body and insect consumption; and the “surgical incisions” are actually tears in the skin and flesh caused by bloating and/or dehydration.
Boooring.
Another school of thought is that “deviant activity” is behind the mutilations; those mutilations that cannot be explained by animal predation are likely caused by deviants who “derive pleasure or sexual stimulation from mutilating animals.” As much as we want to avoid picturing this in our minds, these sorts of attacks are pretty well documented phenomena. They are generally focused on family pets, and are usually not quite so “creative” as most cases of cattle mutilation. However, occasionally deviant attacks are directed at larger animals, like cows or horses, and individuals with sociopathic disorders are known to have mutilated animals in much more elaborate ways, sometimes using surgical instruments.
Cults have also been blamed for the phenomenon, but I feel like I’ve already written a little too much on this post, so I’m not going to get into it.
Then, of course, you have the government conspiracy theories, which are awesome. There’s some thought, by some people, that many of the mutilations occur near nuclear test sights, and that the cattle are actually dissection subjects to determine accumulated levels of radioactive materials in soft tissues. Mutilations nowhere near testing sites are, naturally, control subjects, or red herrings. Government conspiracy theories also involve black helicopters, radiation weapons, lasers, and mad cow disease. Love it, but, you know… can’t the government buy its own cows? No, forget it, whatever.
And finally, of course, aliens. We all know that it’s aliens. They’re mutilating cattle to, um, gather genetic material. It begs the question “What’s so special about cows that you’d travel across the galaxy to gather their genetic material? Because I’ve just been eating them. Also, you know you can get genetic material from anywhere on their bodies, right? You don’t have to cut out their anuses. You seriously were able to build a spaceship?”
Any strong feelings about cattle mutilation out there? Anyone want to defend the aliens? Did anyone read this whole post? Bleh.
It seemed like a good idea at the time: But immediately after this photo was taken, the alien bored its way through her skull and nested in the right hemisphere of the singer's brain. We might learn something from this.
Courtesy aymanshammaThe future of the human race, indeed the future of the planet Earth, has been foolishly gambled on the taste and temper of distant alien civilizations, some scientists say.
This week, NASA began to beam the Beatles’ song “Across the Universe” across the, er, universe. Well, not across the universe exactly—the transmission was aimed at the North Star, 431 light years away. Sir Paul McCartney was enthused over the action, and Yoko Ono had something to say (which I skipped over, because it was weird and boring). Ringo Starr, oddly enough, seems not to have been notified.
The transmission has also raised discussion over just what humans should be broadcasting to other planets, and what potential risks might be associated with such actions. This has been a particularly hot topic among SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) Institute researchers at the “Sounds of Silence” conference at the Arizona State University in Tempe this week. “Before sending out even symbolic messages, we need an open discussion about the potential risks," says one SETI member.
I agree entirely. I’m afraid, however, that the damage may already have been done. As the article points out, transmissions from Earth have long been washing across the universe. Military transmissions have already penetrated deep space, and, more worryingly, old episodes of “I Love Lucy” and “Star Trek” pass through an average of one star system a day. We can only hope that some of the more sensitive aliens haven’t been paying close attention to their television sets—I’m not sure how many aliens they can watch William Shatner punch out, or how cheerfully they can bear Lucy’s cough-syrup addiction, before they decide that the universe might be better off without humanity. Then again, maybe aliens are into that kind of stuff. They might just be on the edge of their seats (or whatever aliens sit on, if they sit), waiting for the next episode of Full House. What will happen to Comet? Is the family safe under Danny’s tentative grip on normal human behavior? And what about Uncle Jessie’s hair? Don’t laugh, people—you all know that things work out for the Tanners, but the aliens are way behind us.
Another SETI researcher sensibly pointed out to those who might harbor serious concern over the Polarisians reaction to “Across the Universe” that "the one thing we know about aliens - if they do exist - is that they are very, very far away."
Yes. That’s true.
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