Archive for Alt News
My Paranormal Life – 2007 Top Stories
With the end of the year fast approaching it’s time to look back on what made the past year so special, for me a few things stick out, they may not the most paranormal stories of the year but they were huge items that took the paranormal and mainstream web by storm in 2007.
There are loads more big stories from 2007 but frankly I can’t remember them all, feel free to add to the list with a comment.
The Italian Air Force UFO Video was one of the first big ones to hit early on in 07, it may even be from 2006? with its straight forward no nonsense realistic approach it quickly spread across the web as something spectacular. I don’t know what conclusions were made but to me it’s most probably computer generated, I certainly got a whole lot of traffic because of it.
The Drone photos left people thinking to good to be true, but over the weeks as more photos from seemingly different sources surfaced I think people started to wonder what if? Then came the Isaac documents which led to in depth analysis and discussions and then it all dried up. Well apart from the computer generated videos that seem almost as good as the photos.
ZEITGEIST the Movie has gone from strength to strength, with all the different versions floating about it’s hard to gauge just how many people have seen it, maybe in the tens of millions. The movie dares to ask questions about religion, the terrible tragedy of 911 and how and who may be controlling our world. Presenting information in a way that lets you wonder about the truth yourself and to find your own good ideas.
The Haiti UFO Videos spread like butter on my morning toast, but was quick to be debunked by dedicated people who knew their shit, though through all the hype I don’t feel that came across all to well. Something that didn’t catch on like the main videos was the news that the creator had come forward. Seems like every fifth new UFO video on youtube is the haiti one.
The Jacob’s Bigfoot photos I didn’t follow all that much, but it was a huge story, my feed reader was full of headlines for this one and still is for that matter. It gained mainstream media attention, most of the time with a smirk. I still can’t make out what it’s doing or where the head is supposed to be, but I did see some overlays recently that made it make more sense.
The Gas Station Ghost is the baby of the lot, spreading and doing its thing. I find it unique, it’s blue and does some strange things.
There are loads more but I probably don’t remember them because I didn’t follow them, Cryptomundo has a great list of The Top Ten Cryptozoology Stories for 2007.
‘Dark energy’ may mean the end of the Universe
I’m no physics expert, but when I see a story like this one, I can’t help but to laugh. How is it that humans, who will never really understand how the universe came to be, could ever possible begin to fathom how it will end? These scientists have decided the future using a kind of matter (if you accept “dark matter” as a type of matter) that we cannot analyze…
Anyway, my rant is over. Here is the article, please post your thoughts as a comment or in the shoutbox (link is on the front page under the technorati button)
Content from external source:
PARIS, Nov 21 AFP – Astronomers may have unwittingly hastened the end of the Universe by simply looking at it, according to a theory reported in next Saturday’s New Scientist.
The novel idea is being aired by two US physicists, who attack the notion that the Universe, believed to have been created in the “Big Bang” some 13.7 billion years ago, will go on, well, forever.
In fact, the poor old cosmos is in a rather delicate state, they say.
Until recently, a common idea was that the energy unleashed in the Big Bang happened when a “false vacuum” – a bubble of high energy with repulsive gravity – broke down into a safe, zero-energy “ordinary” vacuum.
But recent evidence has emerged that places a cosmic question-mark over this cosy thought.
For one thing, cosmologists have discovered that the Universe is still expanding.
And, they believe, a strange, yet-to-be-detected form of energy called dark energy pervades the Universe, which would explain why the sum of all the visible sources of energy fall way short of what should be out there.
Dark energy, goes the thinking, is a result of the Big Bang and is accelerating the Universe’s expansion.
If so, the Universe is not in a nice, stable zero-vacuum state but simply another “false vacuum” state that may abruptly decay again – and with cataclysmic consequences.
The energy shift from the decay would destroy everything in the Universe, “wiping the slate clean,” says Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
The good news is: the longer the Universe survives, the better the chance that it will mature into a stable state. We are just beyond the crucial switching point, believes Krauss.
The bad news is: the quantum effect, a truly weird aspect of physics that says whenever we observe or measure something, we reset its clock.
Krauss and colleague James Dent point to measurements of light from supernovae in 1998 that provided the first evidence of dark energy.
These measurements may have reset the decay clock of the “false vacuum” back to zero, back before the switching point and to a time when the risk of catastrophic decay was greater than now, say Dent and Krauss.
“Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may have reduced the life-expectancy of the Universe,” says Krauss.
“We may have snatched away the possibility of long-term survival for our Universe and made it more likely it will decay.”
The report appears in next Saturday’s issue of the London-published science weekly.
It says the claim is contested by other astrophysicists and adds reassuringly: “The fact that we are still here means this can’t have happened yet.”
Wormholes on Earth?
Content from external source:
According to a group of mathematicians, it may be possible to create devices with internal tunnels that are invisible to detection by electromagnetic waves—wormholes, in a sense. The group discusses the idea in a paper published in the October 29 online edition of Physical Review Letters. The scientists say that by custom designing the values of two parameters that describe electromagnetic (EM) materials, the electrical permittivity and magnetic permeability, around and inside a cylinder, a novel optical device could be produced. Essentially, most of the device would be invisible to detection by external EM radiation of a certain frequency, with only the ends of the cylinder being visible and accessible to the EM waves. “The chosen values for the permittivity and permeability would cause the coating to manipulate EM waves in a way that is not seen in nature,” explained University of Rochester mathematician Allan Greenleaf, one of the paper’s authors, to PhysOrg.com. Permittivity is a measure of a material’s readiness to become electrically polarized in response to an applied electric field (how well it “permits” the field). Permeability describes how magnetized a material becomes when a magnetic field is applied. Modern EM materials known as metamaterials allow theoretical designs, such as a wormhole, to be physically constructed, at least in principle. Greenleaf and his colleagues, Yaroslav Kurylev of University College in London, Matti Lassas of the Helsinki University of Technology, and Gunther Uhlmann of the University of Washington, use the word “wormhole” in more of a mathematical sense than physical.
That is, the devices would act as wormholes from the viewpoint of Maxwell’s equations, the four fundamental equations that describe the relationship between electric fields, magnetic fields, electric charge, and electric current. For any other frequencies than those for which the permittivity and permeability were designed, the tunnel region would look roughly like a solid cylinder.
Zorgy Awards!
If you haven’t voted yet, head on over to The Other Side of Truth, the home of the 2007 Zorgy awards!
Polls will be open until 12:01 AM (AST), 1 January 2008.
Click here to see last year’s winners.
Aww, Noory throws in the towel…
Content from external source:
Last night on coast to coast Noory said that he didn’t really want to run for President. That is a load off my mind! Though I do have to admit that the fun I could have with Noory running for President could be totally entertaining. Tom Danheiser would be the Karl Rove character, his running mate would probably be Richard C. Hoagland or Dr. Morgus. OK, maybe that doesn’t sound so fun after all. Talk show hosts should not run for President, that only opens the door for scum like Michael Savage and the rest of the neocon radio crowd.
Read: No President Noory
(What a relief!) I couldn’t have put it better myself, lol.
