The Exopolitical Observer

He’s ba-ack: Former senator Mike Gravel will be among those who will probe UFOs. (Charles Dharapak - AP)

This is what a congressional hearing looks like in a some kind of bizarre-o parallel universe: All your favorite past members are there, including former senator Mike Gravel (D-Alaska), and former representatives Darlene Hooley, (D-Ore)., Merrill Cook (R-Utah), Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D-Mich.), and Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif).

And the topic? Extraterrestrials. As in little green men. And whether there’s a conspiracy within the U.S. government to cover up their existence.

A longtime UFO-truther organization called the Paradigm Research Group is holding what it’s calling a “Citizen Hearing on Disclosure,” a five-day event at the National Press Club to explore the matter. The confab, which kicks off on April 29 and was brought to our attention by our pals at Roll Call’sHeard on the Hill, will be styled to resemble a real Hill hearing, complete with witnesses, statements, the whole shebang.

And to give the proceedings the proper air of legitimacy, the hearing’s organizers enlisted a colorful roster of former members to wield the gavel and question the witnesses. Organizer Stephen Bassett tells us the group identified about 100 former members they thought might be up to the task and ultimately settled on a bipartisan panel of six.

The Soviet Union took UFOs seriously. The KGB and the Soviet Defence Ministry had dedicated units collecting and analysing information about paranormal activity. Military experts even claimed to know how to "summon" UFOs and make contact with them.



Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was recently asked an unusual question. A REN TV correspondent asked him, as a former president, if it was true that, together with the nuclear briefcase, the head of state was presented with a classified folder with materials about UFOs.

Dmitry Medvedev said this was true. According to the prime minister, in addition to the folder, the head of state was presented with a report from the secret services, whose task it was to control the aliens on Russian territory. When asked by journalist if there were many aliens living among us, Medvedev refused to elaborate, “so as not to create a panic.” However, he did suggest that those interested in the subject watch a "documentary chronicle" called "Men in Black."

A Kingman, AZ, witness reported watching an object on the ground at a distance that glowed just before lifting off from the desert floor about 3:33 a.m. on April 10, 2013, according to testimony from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.

The witness was looking "north to east across the valley" when a dim light was first noticed that appeared to grow brighter.

"As I watched for approximately 90 seconds, it brightened, lifted off the desert floor, paused and hovered for approximately 33 seconds, and then suddenly flew in a straight path toward the northeast and disappeared into outer-space."

The witness states that he has seen similar objects taking off from the ground level in the same area in the past. No photos or videos were included with MUFON Case 46727. Kingman is a city in Mohave County, Ariz., population 28,279.

Read More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roger-marsh/arizona-desert-ufo_b_3063596.html

The answer to whether or not we are alone in the universe could be right under our nose, or, more literally, inside every cell in our body.

Could our genes have an intelligently designed “manufacturer’s stamp” inside them, written eons ago elsewhere in our galaxy? Such a “designer label” would be an indelible stamp of a master extraterrestrial civilization that preceded us by many millions or billions of years. As their ultimate legacy, they recast the Milky Way in their own biological image.

Vladimir I. shCherbak of al-Farabi Kazakh National University of Kazakhstan, and Maxim A. Makukov of the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute, hypothesize that an intelligent signal embedded in our genetic code would be a mathematical and semantic message that cannot be accounted for by Darwinian evolution. They call it “biological SETI.” What’s more, they argue that the scheme has much greater longevity and chance of detecting E.T. than a transient extraterrestrial radio transmission.

READ MORE: http://news.discovery.com/space/alien-life-exoplanets/could-an-alien-message-be-embedded-in-our-genetic-code-130401.htm

Paper link: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1303/1303.6739.pdf

Yesterday Pope Francis I celebrated his first Easter Mass as the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics. In his first “Urbi et Orbi” speech – Latin for “to the city [of Rome] and the world” – he called for peace in the Middle East; an end to human trafficking and greed; preventing the exploitation of natural resources; and protecting animals by becoming “responsible guardians of creation.” The Pope normally gives two Urbi et Orbi speeches each year where he deals with major challenges faced by the world and Christendom. In a future speech it has been predicted that he will discuss a unique challenge that the world faces according to the authors of a new book. In Exovaticana, Chris Putnam and Tom Horn predict that the new Pope, Francis I, will soon announce the existence of extraterrestrial life, among whom an alien savior will emerge to reinvigorate Christian teachings!

Putnam and Horn, successfully predicted in their last book, the best-selling Petrus Romanus: The Final Pope is Here, that Pope Benedict would resign rather than die in office. They based their prediction on St Malachy’s, Prophecy of the Popes. According to Putnam and Horn, Francis is the final Pope, “Petrus Romanus”, who will oversee the dissolution of the Catholic Church as predicted in St Malachy’s prophecy, by announcing an extraterrestrial savior.

Still wondering about the mystery of flying saucers and 3-foot tall aliens dressed in metallic clothing, which the FBI described in a 1950 memo? The agency has released a statement with details about the famous document.

The memo describing the mysterious UFOs was created in 1950, three years after the Roswell incident, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation claims they are not connected. In a blog post published this week, the agency says it never investigated the mysterious sightings – even though it could not explain what Guy Hottel, former head of the FBI’s Washington, D.C. field office, described.

"An investigator for the Air Force stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico," Hottel wrote in the memo, which was addressed to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. "They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed fliers and test pilots.”

READ MORE: http://rt.com/usa/fbi-ufo-roswell-incident-005/

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Proof of extraterrestrial intelligence could come within 25 years, an astronomer who works on the search said Sunday.

"I actually think the chances that we'll find ET are pretty good," said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View, Calif., here at the SETIcon convention. "Young people in the audience, I think there's a really good chance you're going to see this happen."

Shostak bases this estimation on the Drake Equation, a formula conceived by SETI pioneer Frank Drake to calculate the number (N) of alien civilizations with whom we might be able to communicate. That equation takes into account a variety of factors, including the rate of star formation in the galaxy, the fraction of stars that have planets, the fraction of planets that are habitable, the percent of those that actually develop life, the percent of those that develop intelligent life, the fraction of civilizations that have a technology that can broadcast their presence into space, and the length of time those signals would be broadcasted.

Reliable figures for many of those factors are not known, but some of the leaders in the field of SETI have put together their best guesses. Late great astronomer Carl Sagan, another SETI pioneer, estimated that the Drake Equation amounted to N = 1 million. Scientist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov calculated 670,000. Drake himself estimates a more conservative 10,000.

But even if that lower value turns out to be correct, at the rate they're going, it wouldn't take scientists too long to discover an alien signal, Shostak said.

"This range, from Sagan's million down to 10,000 that's the range of estimates from people who have started and worked on SETI," said Shostak. "These people may know what they're talking about. If they do, then the point is we trip across somebody in the next several dozen or two dozen years."

The SETI quest is set to take a leap forward when the Allen Telescope Array, a network of radio dishes under construction in northern California, is fully operational. By 2015, the array should be able to scan hundreds of thousands of stars for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, Shostak said.

But while humans might be able to discover an alien signal within that timeframe, interpreting what ET is trying to tell us could take much, much longer.

Shostak admitted such a task would be very difficult. An alien civilization may be as technologically advanced compared to us as Homo sapiens are to our hominid relatives Neanderthals.

"We could give our digital television signals to the Neanderthals, and theyll never figure it out. And they're not stupid," he said.

Yet simply having proof that we are not alone in the universe would likely be a world-changing achievement, Shostak added.
------------------

Original Article Here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38727371/ns/technology_and_science-space/