Presented Without Comment | Wind And Wankpuffins

xkcd

Via FB

Edgar Mitchell, 1930-2016

from a fifth grader | via FB

Bad Reception | The New Yorker | Feb 2016

Wankpuffin is my new favorite word.

Tabloid Apologizes To Aliens For Linking Them To Scientology

The Church of Scientology forced the British tabloid The Sun to apologize for reporting that UFOs were seen flying over the church's British headquarters — but The Sun apologized to the aliens.

It is one of the best newspaper apologies ever.

The Sun says it's sorry for the weekend report "Flying saucers over British Scientology HQ" — flat silver discs were seen hovering by three airplane pilots — explaining, "Following a letter from lawyers for the Church, we apologise to any alien lifeforms for linking them to Scientologists."

As Lawrence Wright reported in his book Going Clear, the Church of Scientology in infamous for aggressively suing its critics for libel — something that's all the more dangerous in Britain, where it's a lot easier to win libel suits. It's so easy that Going Clear was not published in Britain.

The Atlantic Wire

Drake Equation | Calculate The Number Of Alien Civilizations In Three Easy Steps

 

Detail from interactive graphic

Today, we live in an age of exploration, where robots on Mars and planet-hunting telescopes are beginning to allow us to edge closer to an answer.

While we wait to establish contact, one technique we can use back on Earth is an equation that American astronomer Frank Drake formulated in the 1960s to calculate the number of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations that may exist in the Milky Way galaxy.

It is not a rigorous equation, offering a wide range of possible answers. Instead it is more a tool used to help understand how many worlds might be out there and how those estimates change as missions like Kepler, a telescope that is currently searching for Earth-like planets, begin to discover more about our universe. Until ground-based observations, space telescopes and planet-roving robots uncover any tell-tale signs of life, what better way to speculate on how many intelligent alien civilizations may exist than to explore the universe with our interactive version of the equation.

Click here to use the interactive graphic to make your calculation.

 BBC Future via i09

Mad Art Lab | Giger Geiger Counter

After the release of Prometheus, craftmaker Steve D was so inspired by a tweet by Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait that he went out and constructed his own "Giger Counter" using a half-scale model skeleton.

Mad Art Lab via io9

Alien Contact | Humankind's Oldest Story

Woodcut (1566) by Hans Glaser of an event over Nuremberg, Germany on 14 April 1561.

Often described as an UFO sighting, scientists explain it as a representation of the Aurora borealis or "sun dogs."

Wikipedia

UFO skeptics take note: Strange flying objects have been haunting our planet for much longer than many people think. Over 3,000 years ago, in the Egyptian Nile Valley, a man reported looking into the sky to see a "shining disk" descend and tell him to build a new city. On Sept. 11, 1787, in Edinburgh, Scotland, a group of people reported, "a fiery globe larger than the sun" moving eastward in a horizontal direction and dipping below the horizon before exploding behind a cloud. Eight years later, in the Quangxi province of China, a "large star" rose and fell three times, followed by another star that "crashed in a village."

According to Jacques Vallee, the French-born astronomer and co-author (with Chris Aubeck) of the hypnotic new book "Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times," these stories are important not only because they show that flying things have been capturing our imagination for centuries, but because of what they say about our most cherished beliefs and deepest fears. In the book, Vallee and Aubeck list 500 claims of sightings, in chronological order, between the years 1460 BC and 1879, and argue that the commonalities -- references to light, round shapes, erratic flight and terror in the observer -- offer us real insight into human behavior and our need to find explanation for things we cannot explain.

Salon spoke with Vallee from his home in San Francisco about our religious connection to UFOs, the controversy surrounding his own work -- and our endless cultural obsession with flying objects.

Your book calls "alien contact" humankind's oldest story. How so?
I'm not the only one saying that. If you look at the body of scholarship in anthropology and the history of religions, they talk about the idea that the soul is a human space capsule. Certainly the "Book of the Dead" in Egypt, the Bible, the writing of the mystics, in poems of ancient China, and the "Vedas" in India, the contact between man and creatures, entities, divinities, who travel from space is the main story. This includes humans traveling with them and humans being "abducted," to use a modern term. There is a very rich literature exactly about that; it's the oldest story.

More at Salon

Via Boing Boing

President Of Kalmykia Claims Alien Abduction

Russia has never been immune to spies and informers, but the latest claim must have struck President Medvedev as a little bizarre: he has been urged to investigate whether a regional politician passed official secrets to a group of aliens.

The request came after Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the millionaire President of Kalmykia, claimed on state television that he had been visited by aliens at his Moscow apartment several years ago and had spent hours in discussions with them on board their spaceship.

The head of the republic said that the humanoid figures wore yellow spacesuits and gave him a tour of their craft, which he described as a “semi-transparent half-tube”. They had brought him home in the morning, just as his worried driver and two advisers were about to call a citywide search after finding his apartment empty.

“I am often asked which language I used to talk to them. Perhaps it was on a level of the exchange of ideas,” Mr Ilyumzhinov, who is also president of the international chess federation FIDE, told the Vladimir Pozner programme on Russia’s main First Channel.

More at TimesOnline

Via Gizmodo

"The Scientific Case For Alien Life"

MSNBC

For much of the past century, the realm of alien conspiracy theories has been inhabited primarily by academics and recluses, both widely dismissed as crackpots. Despite the billions of dollars poured into its space program, the American government has never even openly discussed the issue. But with the scientific community suddenly coming around to the premise of alien life, is this suddenly a legitimate dialogue?

Over the past year or so, more and more reputable scientists have begun voicing their opinions on extraterrestrial life, legitimizing the kind of discussions previously indigenous to internet chat rooms. The single-biggest contribution to the scientific argument for alien life may have just recently come from noted astrophysicist and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Stephen Hawking. In a recent documentary film, Hawking doesn’t simply share his depiction of alien life, but strongly urges against engaging them. In the Discovery Channel documentary, Hawking refers to these aliens as “nomads looking to conquer and colonize.” And in one sound bite, a concept considered half-baked by many so-called “experts” may have just been validated.

Hawking isn’t the first high-profile scientist to attest to the existence of aliens. Late last year, Lachezar Filipov, director of the Space research Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, stated that aliens were already living around us and watching us without malice or hostility. Part of an Academy publication regarding communicating with other life forms, the ideas espoused by Filipov proved quite controversial among Bulgarian politicians. A toned-down version of this theory was revealed in January by Arizona State University physicist Paul Davies, who believes that some microbes on our planet may be derived from alien civilizations. Shortly after Davies’ public assertion, Cardiff University professor Chandra Wickramasinghe claimed there was new research showing that human life started somewhere other than the planet earth.

In the past year, the search for alien life has become a growing fascination for the scientific community, even resulting in an alien conference hosted at Cambridge University. Part of the reason for this sudden engagement from the scientific community comes from new technology enabling a more-thorough search for other habitable zones in the cosmos. While scientists were previously railing against the idea of alien life forms, the past year alone has seen a variety of scientifically-based alien theories. With this division between science and Star Trek suddenly evaporating, your UFO skepticism could start becoming downright ignorant.

Big Think (lots of links in the original article)

They Walk Among Us

According to a recent poll, twenty per cent of the world's population believes that aliens inhabit Earth disguised as humans.

The Reuters Ipsos poll of 23,000 adults in 22 countries showed that more than 40 percent of people from India and China believe that aliens walk among us disguised as humans, while those least likely to believe in this are from Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands (8 percent each).

However, the majority of people polled, or 80 percent, don't believe aliens in our midst. "It would appear that that there's a modest correlation between the most populated countries and those more likely to indicate there may be aliens disguised amongst them compared with those countries with the smaller populations," said John Wright, Senior Vice President of market research firm Ipsos. "Maybe the it's a simple case that in a less populated country you are more likely to know your next door neighbor better," he said.

More men than women -- 22 percent vs 17 percent -- believe that alien beings are on earth. Most of those believers are under the age of 35, and across all income classes, the survey showed. Of those who do not believe, most are women.

Reuters via Presurfer