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Post by WingsofCrystal on Oct 14, 2018 22:43:33 GMT
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Oct 14, 2018 22:47:57 GMT
Hey there, I took myself over to MUFON to have a look at other more recent sightings. Looked through all the picture uploads, decided the Phoenix sighting was pretty good, so followed it up with a weatherbug time-lapse cam. Guess what his image is replicated on the weatherbug cam. This is link to the actual page. I cant seem to capture the frames but they are there for 15 mins or so www.weatherbug.com/weather-camera/?cam=AZSCIAhwatukee is the area the MUFON report came from and the pic from weatherbug is from The Arizona Science Centre Hi thelmadonna,
That is interesting. We saw something like that in Mesa in 2000. Straight line of opaque lights moving slowly. I ran down to the parking area to get a better look but it was gone.
Ahwatukee gets a lot of sightings.
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Oct 15, 2018 12:18:49 GMT
Good morning lovely people,
Guardian
UFO sightings may be falling, but Congress is still paying attention
Nick Pope 15 October 2018
There’s renewed interest in the UFO phenomenon and it’s coming from an unexpected source: the United States Congress.
The Senate Armed Services Committee is looking into a 2004 incident where US Navy pilots flying with the USS Nimitz strike group encountered, chased and filmed fast-moving unidentified objects. Reliable sources say at least two of the military pilots involved have already been interviewed, and a radar operator was subsequently invited to get in touch.
In parallel, the House Armed Services Committee is taking an interest. Records from April show the committee received a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) briefing on the Pentagon’s UFO project, the cryptically-named AATIP. We know so little about AATIP that there’s even dispute over whether the acronym stands for Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program or Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program. The very existence of the project caused a sensation, because until the New York Times broke the story in December 2017, the US government claimed it had not investigated UFOs since the 1960s when sightings were looked at in a study called Project Blue Book.
As noted in the Guardian recently, data from two civilian UFO research organisations show that the number of reported sightings has fallen in recent years. However, there’s no single, global focal point for reports (the Ministry of Defence stopped investigating UFOs in 2009) and statistics will never tell the full story.
It would be better if the phenomenon were assessed and judged not on numbers alone, but by focusing on cases where we have compelling evidence: independently submitted reports from pilots on different flights; visual sightings corroborated by radar; photos and videos regarded as genuinely intriguing by intelligence community imagery analysts. Irrespective of the methodology we use to assess the phenomenon, how can we do so in an even-handed way when the subject has so much pop culture baggage?
A first step in reframing the debate might be changing the language. The term “UFO” has become as obsolete and baggage-laden as the now largely-defunct “flying saucer”. Both are widely, but wrongly, regarded as being synonymous with “extraterrestrial spacecraft”, when self-evidently all the phrase should mean is something in the sky that the observer cannot identify. When the question “do you believe in UFOs?” is misinterpreted as “do you think we’re being visited by aliens?” then we clearly have a problem.
We addressed this in the MoD in the 1990s by replacing “UFO” with “UAP”, for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. It got us increased funding and made a few senior officials take the matter more seriously, because they felt we were looking at a science problem, not a science fiction mystery.
Years later, in 2011, I was one of the briefers at a private gathering in Washington DC, chaired by Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff John Podesta, who has a longstanding interest in the issue. It was reminiscent of an episode of The X-Files and there was even a former CIA director sitting at the back, playing no part in the discussion, but silently taking notes. I briefed attendees on the MoD’s use of the term “UAP” and the message clearly hit home.
During Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, for which Podesta was the campaign chair, she occasionally discussed UAPs and in one interview on the Jimmy Kimmel show she corrected the host for using the term “UFO”. We have yet to learn what Donald Trump thinks about UAPs, but his enthusiasm for a Space Force has certainly created a few conspiracy theories.
When it comes to UAPs, truth really is stranger than fiction. It turns out that AATIP was largely the brainchild of the then Senate majority leader Harry Reid, and that much of the work was contracted out to Bigelow Aerospace, run by former budget hotel magnate (and believer in extraterrestrial visitation) Robert Bigelow. A 2009 letter from Harry Reid about AATIP reads like science fiction in places.
Now, some of the people formerly involved with the project – including the DIA official who ran it, Luis Elizondo – have joined a Public Benefit Corporation called To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, fronted by Tom DeLonge, the former vocalist/guitarist and founder of pop punk band Blink-182. Their mission statement talks about creating a consortium “to explore exotic science and technologies … that can change the world”.
If current US Congressional interest evolves into formal hearings, either specifically on AATIP, or on UAPs more generally, I hope they can get past debates about terminology, and avoid getting bogged down in statistical analyses. I have made clear my willingness to testify on the basis that my experience with the MoD might be relevant.
Focusing on the quality of reports and not simply the quantity should result in a far more meaningful assessment of the phenomenon. Irrespective of the outcome, these might turn out to be the most fascinating Congressional hearings in history.
• Nick Pope worked at the Ministry of Defence for 21 years. From 1991 to 1994 he was posted to a division where his duties included investigating UAP sightings to determine whether they had any defence significance.
www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/ufo-sightings-may-be-falling-but-congress-is-still-paying-attention/ar-BBOoOwe
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Oct 15, 2018 12:25:49 GMT
secureteam10 Published on Oct 15, 2018
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Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Oct 15, 2018 12:37:50 GMT
Guardian
The Da Vinci mystery: why is his $450m masterpiece really being kept under wraps? Jonathan Jones Sunday 14 Oct 2018
When the unveiling of the long-lost Salvator Mundi was cancelled last month, there were cries of fake. But is there more to the controversy surrounding the world’s most expensive painting?
In May 2008, some of the world’s greatest Leonardo da Vinci experts stood around an easel in a skylit studio high above Trafalgar Square. The object they had been invited to scrutinise, in the conservation department of the National Gallery, was a painting on a panel of walnut wood. It showed a long-haired, bearded man gazing straight ahead with one hand raised in blessing, the other holding a transparent sphere.
“There’s a mixture of being excited but not getting caught up in it,” says Martin Kemp, the eminent art historian who was there that Monday. “I try to keep a gravitational pull going, saying, ‘This can’t be right.’” Yet the thrill in the room was tangible. The painting had “presence”, felt Kemp, and there was no dissent.
That day, a long-forgotten old picture was authenticated as Leonardo’s lost masterpiece, Salvator Mundi (Latin for Saviour of the World). Three years later, in November 2011, this portrait of Christ was unveiled for the first time in the National Gallery’s blockbuster Leonardo exhibition. Six years after that, it became the most expensive painting ever auctioned, when it sold at Christie’s for the stupendous sum of $450.3m (£342.1m).
Then, last month, something perplexing happened. Salvator Mundi had been purchased from Christie’s for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Its unveiling was scheduled for 18 September – a big moment. But at the start of September, this was suddenly and mysteriously postponed. “Further details will be announced soon,” said the official statement. There has been no further announcement and my enquiries were met by just a resending of the statement. Kemp admits he’s in the dark but insists: “It isn’t a matter of cold feet.” That’s how it looks, though.
Even as the auctioneer’s hammer went down, a chorus of scepticism was creating uncertainty around Salvator Mundi. Had those experts at the National Gallery been taken for a ride? One insider summed up the situation to me bluntly: “It’s not very good.” Stories have emerged that complicate its provenance or history. Matthew Landrus, an Oxford academic, has even gone public with the claim that, far from being a Leonardo, this work was largely done by his third-rate imitator, Bernardino Luini.
But if the Louvre Abu Dhabi really has got doubts about Salvator Mundi, they will most likely be about its condition. For there really is a problem with this painting and it is there for anyone to see. If the Louvre – both its new outpost and its home in Paris, which has the most sophisticated conservation technology on Earth – has not yet spotted the issue, all its curators need to do is check out an Instagram post that materialised just after the painting’s sale last year.
Thomas Campbell, former director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, wrote: “450 million dollars?! Hope the buyer understands conservation issues.” The accompanying picture shows Salvator Mundi in the middle of its restoration. All the previous repaints have been cleaned off to reveal an image with streaky gaps, including a sizeable few running from top to bottom. The implication was that the painting as sold by Christie’s is over-restored. When challenged, Campbell added: “Was simply remarking, as so many others have, on extensive amount of conservation.”
In fact, the photograph was something of a bombshell, a glimpse of a painting that looks dramatically different from the restored version. Time had left Christ partly bald, with impaired eyes, yet the face was truly beautiful – smooth and harmonious but anatomically precise. It is completely different, in tone and feeling, from the smoky, ambiguous appearance of the painting today, after its full treatment by the respected restorer Dianne Dwyer Modestini.
The image in Campbell’s post was cropped and blurry but the Guardian is today publishing a high-definition version. If the scars of age are even more visible, so is the youthful beauty of Christ. He looks like just the kind of androgynous, long-haired model Leonardo loved to portray and, said his 16th-century biographer Vasari, surround himself with, in a workshop that was the Renaissance precursor to Warhol’s Factory.
It was Martin Clayton, curator of Leonardo’s drawings at the Royal Library in Windsor Castle, who suggested I check out Campbell’s post and drew my attention to the startling differences between the painting after it was cleaned and its appearance now. “Photographs seem to show that, before it was touched up, it was all Leonardo,” he says. “They show the painting mid-restoration – and it looks as if the subsequent retouching has obscured the quality of the face.” Clayton is not questioning the painting’s authenticity. He’s suggesting that a very pure Leonardo has been partly “obscured”.
I took this troubling theory to Robert Simon, the man who discovered Salvator Mundi along with two business partners. They bought this apparently insignificant picture at a Louisiana auction in 2005. Simon is passionate about Leonardo and, when he started to think this was something more than a bad copy, set about carefully researching its provenance, while bringing in Modestini to restore it. “The most important decision was not to treat this as a simple commercial decision,” he says. Instead, the work was carried out in accordance with “a very slow, prepared and not rushed plan”.
It paid off when they showed the partly retouched painting to Nicholas Penny, who was then about to take over as director of the National Gallery in London. “He got it. He said, ‘I think you have an interesting problem: how do you approach something that seems almost impossible?’”
Penny was right. The discovery of a previously unknown painting by Leonardo does seem “almost impossible”. Only about 20 paintings by him survive. Others are known to have been lost or destroyed, but he was never prolific. Those few existing paintings have been treasured, making the reappearance of a forgotten one even less likely.
Penny’s solution was to bring the painting to the National Gallery and set up that expert viewing. Then it was shown for the first time in the uniquely authoritative setting of the gallery’s Leonardo exhibition. In 2013, just a year after the exhibition finished, Simon and his partners sold Salvator Mundi through Sotheby’s to a middleman for a Russian art collector, who later sold it for that record-breaking price.
Yet, even before it reached the National Gallery, the painting had been worked on. Simon confirms that it was partly “in-painted” before being shown to experts, including Penny. Why didn’t he leave the painting in its raw yet beautiful state after it was stripped down? Wasn’t that an incredible object in itself?
“The painting was powerful as it was without further treatment,” he says. “We considered leaving it, considered more limited restoration, as well as a more extensive one.” These were not casual decisions, he insists. “Part of our final decision was made with the understanding that to leave the painting ‘raw’ would inevitably cause viewers to focus on the losses and not on what survived.
“In the end, we decided to do what we felt was best for the picture. That might sound false or corny, but it was out of a profound respect for the painting itself that we felt that bringing it back to life as much as possible was the right way to go.”
Simon absolutely rejects the possibility of any “falsehood” being introduced. “I found [Campbell’s] comments both ill-informed and offensive,” he says. As for the repainting, he regards that as a loaded term. “‘Inpainting’ is the right way to describe what has occurred here – retouching restricted to areas of loss. In the restoration, no original paint was covered.”
more after the jump:
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/oct/14/leonardo-da-vinci-mystery-why-is-his-450m-masterpiece-really-being-kept-under-wraps-salvator-mundi?CMP=share_btn_tw
Crystal
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Post by swamprat on Oct 15, 2018 21:29:59 GMT
That Painting of Trump Having a Diet Coke With Abraham Lincoln Is Now Hanging in the White House By Ryan Teague Beckwith
Image of "The Republican Club" courtesy of Andy Thomas
President Donald Trump liked a painting of him having drinks with Abraham Lincoln, Richard Nixon and Teddy Roosevelt so much that he called the artist on the phone and then put a print of it in the White House.
Called “The Republican Club,” the print of 10 Republican presidents sitting around a table could be seen briefly in the background of Trump’s interview with “60 Minutes” Sunday, and an image of that moment went viral on social media.
As all this was playing out, Andy Thomas was at his home in Carthage, Mo., watching the Kansas City Chiefs play the New England Patriots on TV while working on a painting of a train robbery in the Old West. (It’s a favorite subject of his: “Lots of horses, lots of action.”)
Thomas’ phone began to ring, as friends reached out to tell him, but he assumed they were just pollsters asking about the Missouri Senate race. Finally, his wife came down to show him on the computer.
“I was ecstatic,” he told TIME afterward. “A lot of times gifts aren’t really hung up, they’re just pushed in a closet somewhere. To find out it’s actually hanging is really a treat.”
It’s unclear how the print made its way into the White House, but Thomas said Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California had told him recently that he’d be showing it to Trump.
Thomas is not a very political person, but he’d done a portrait of Issa a few years ago and the two have kept in touch. But he was surprised two weeks ago when he came in from mowing the lawn and his wife and business partner, Dina, told him that Trump would be calling shortly.
“He basically said, ‘most portraits of me I really don’t like,'” Thomas said. “And he’s right. He’s hard to paint. There’s some bad ones out there.”
As he often does, Trump then asked Thomas how he was doing as president and what his friends and neighbors think about him, as well as how he thinks the heated Senate race between Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill and pro-Trump Republican Josh Hawley will end.
Thomas said he was a bit surprised at that turn in the conversation.
“I’m thinking, ‘I’m a damn artist, what is he asking me about this for?'” he recalled.
As a cowboy painter who dabbles in presidential portraits, Thomas said it was nice to hear back from one of his subjects directly. He’d once met a cousin of Bill Clinton’s who told him, secondhand, that he liked the portrait, and Richard Nixon’s niece once praised his painting.
But Thomas was proud that Trump had recognized the work he put into one of the toughest parts of the painting: the president’s smile.
He said he’s found that some presidents have a natural smile: Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama. But others, like Trump, have more of a forced campaign smile that doesn’t look right in a painting. He found it particularly hard to get Nixon right the first time he painted him.
To get Trump’s smile, Thomas said he looked at thousands of photos.
“Trump has that one thing where he sticks his chin up and smiles really big, and it’s great for a caricature but not necessarily flattering to him,” he said. “I had to find a photo where it looked like he’s actually heard something funny, so it looks like a genuine smile.”
time.com/5424453/donald-trump-painting-andy-thomas/
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Post by swamprat on Oct 16, 2018 0:08:02 GMT
OMG! And we wonder why people laugh at us! Aliens created Hurricane Michael Aliens created Hurricane Michael and they left evidence of it in the formation of the storm, according to one bizarre theory.
The grey skull is apparently a sign
By Sean Martin
Published: Mon, Oct 15, 2018
Hurricane Michael slammed into Florida last Wednesday packing winds of up to 155mph.
The strength of Michael made it the third-most powerful to ever hit the United States mainland.
More than 600,000 homes were without power as a result of Michael’s impact, with authorities cautioning it could take days for lines to be restored.
But some believe the mega storm was caused by something more than nature.
UFO hunters believe they have spotted a strange skull in the satellite images of Hurricane Michael, believing this was a sign left by grey aliens.
Conspiracy theory website UFO Sightings Daily believes the shape in the eye of storm resembles an alien skull so similarly that it was no coincidence.
The blog, run by prominent alien hunter Scott C Waring, says that an extraterrestrial civilisation which is monitoring our planet left the sign there as a sort of signature for us to know that it was them who caused it.
Mr Waring wrote on his blog: “Often I say that storms, lightning, tornadoes and even earthquakes are sometimes caused by alien craft.
“Here we have proof that the hurricane was created by aliens too. Greys to be exact were the species that did it. “It was a Tweet from Jim Dickey, a Morning Meteorologist for ABC7 WZVN, that first noticed the face.
“Then it spread from there. He caught this and and told the world about it getting loads of attention.
“Aliens control our planet and in more ways than I can say. They were here long before us, and they will be here long after us.”
However, some people were not convinced of the sighting.
One person posted on a related video: “Actually it is October. That could happen.”
Another simply stated: “Photoshop”.
Hurricane Michael hit land on October 10 as a Category 4 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale, one of the most powerful storms to make landfall in the continental United States since records began.
At least 18 people in four states have been killed.
www.express.co.uk/news/weird/1031702/alien-sighting-hurricane-michael-news-ufo-sighting-weather-news-aliens-extraterrestrial
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Oct 16, 2018 12:42:04 GMT
"OMG! And we wonder why people laugh at us! "
Amen Swamp, Amen.
Good morning fellow searchers,
Guardian
Invasion of the ‘frankenbees’: the danger of building a better bee Beekeepers are sounding the alarm about the latest developments in genetically modified pollinators. By Bernhard Warner
Tue 16 Oct 2018 01.00 EDT
The spring of 2008 was brutal for Europe’s honeybees. In late April and early May, during the corn-planting season, dismayed beekeepers in Germany’s upper Rhine valley looked on as whole colonies perished. Millions of bees died. France, the Netherlands and Italy reported big losses, but in Germany the incident took on the urgency of a national crisis. “It was a disaster,” recalled Walter Haefeker, German president of the European Professional Beekeepers Association. “The government had to set up containers along the autobahn where beekeepers could dump their hives.”
An investigation in July of that year concluded that the bees in Germany died of mass poisoning by the pesticide clothianidin, which can be 10,000 times more potent than DDT. In the months leading up to the bee crisis, clothianidin, developed by Bayer Crop Science from a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, had been used up and down the Rhine following an outbreak of corn rootworm. The pesticide is designed to attack the nervous system of crop-munching pests, but studies have shown it can be harmful to insects such as the European honeybee. It muddles the bees’ super-acute sense of direction and upsets their feeding habits, while it can also alter the queen’s reproductive anatomy and sterilise males. As contaminated beehives piled up, Bayer paid €2m (£1.76m) into a compensation fund for beekeepers in the affected area, but offered no admission of guilt.
The die-off forced a reckoning among European farmers. Hundreds of studies examined the safety of neonicotinoids, known as neonics, and their links to colony collapse disorder (CCD), in which worker bees abandon the hive, leaving the queen and her recent offspring unprotected, to starve. In 2013, the evidence led to a landmark European commission ruling, imposing a moratorium on clothianidin and two other major neonics – the world’s most popular pesticides. This April, Europe went a step further. The commission extended the ban on the trio of neonics to virtually everywhere outside greenhouses, citing evidence that by harming pollinating insects, neonics interfere with the pollination of crops to the value of €15bn a year. Environmentalists cheered the victory. Regulators beyond Europe plan to follow.
more after the jump: www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/16/frankenbees-genetically-modified-pollinators-danger-of-building-a-better-bee?CMP=twt_a-science_b-gdnscience
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Oct 16, 2018 12:46:42 GMT
Crypto Patrick Published on Oct 15, 2018
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Crystal
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Post by HAL on Oct 16, 2018 15:31:12 GMT
Looking down the list of posts every time I log in, shows up what I find a disturbing fact. Maybe I should change my username to 'HAL, Threadkiller'. I appear to be the last poster on many threads. This puts me on the horns of a dilemma. Do I immediately respond to a thread, or wait a few days to let someone else in first. Maybe I should carry a digital bell around with me. HAL Threadkiller. (just trying it on for size)
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Post by ZETAR on Oct 16, 2018 18:31:46 GMT
Looking down the list of posts every time I log in, shows up what I find a disturbing fact. Maybe I should change my username to 'HAL, Threadkiller'. I appear to be the last poster on many threads. This puts me on the horns of a dilemma. Do I immediately respond to a thread, or wait a few days to let someone else in first. Maybe I should carry a digital bell around with me. HAL Threadkiller. (just trying it on for size) HMMM...IMPATIENT FOR A RESPONSE ARE WE? "Do I immediately respond to a thread, or wait a few days to let someone else in first." CARPE DIEM! THE ONLY WAY TO KNOW...ACTUALLY...SINCE YOU'VE BEEN QUITE ADEPT AT NUDGING THE CONVERSATION(S)/DISCUSSION(S) FORWARD...IS TO CONTINUE TO STIR! SHALOM...Z
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Post by Deleted on Oct 16, 2018 19:07:27 GMT
COMING SOON, THE COMET OF THE YEAR: Astronomers are calling Comet 46P/Wirtanen the "comet of the year." Two months from now, on Dec. 16th, the kilometer-wide ball of dirty ice will come within 11.5 million km of Earth--making it one of the 10 closest-approaching comets of the Space Age. Comet 46P/Wirtanen will probably become a naked eye object for several weeks during the holidays. Here's what it looks like now: Continue: www.spaceweather.com/
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Post by HAL on Oct 16, 2018 19:51:55 GMT
Cliff, You there by almost guarantee that in the UK we will have a few days of rain or at least 100% overcast. INT21
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Post by HAL on Oct 16, 2018 19:59:50 GMT
..Scott C Waring, says that an extraterrestrial civilisation which is monitoring our planet left the sign there as a sort of signature for us to know that it was them who caused it...
The crowd who believe that it was HARRP wot dun it will be miffed.
INT21
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Post by thelmadonna on Oct 16, 2018 20:52:52 GMT
Looking down the list of posts every time I log in, shows up what I find a disturbing fact. Maybe I should change my username to 'HAL, Threadkiller'. I appear to be the last poster on many threads. This puts me on the horns of a dilemma. Do I immediately respond to a thread, or wait a few days to let someone else in first. Maybe I should carry a digital bell around with me. HAL Threadkiller. (just trying it on for size) I find it hard to follow who you are replying to sometimes Hal.
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