Curiosity Rover Photo shows evidence of air brushing/blurring
Images from the Mars Curiosity Rover have been digitally altered by NASA’s JPL affiliate to cover up objects discovered on Mars. The latest digital alteration was revealed in a November 15 video released on Youtube that showed how an object caught by the Rover had been obscured by removing data to hide something from view. The alteration follows another incident revealed on November 9 of NASA JPL tampering with Rover Curiosity images where an object appears to have been digitally blurred. What is it that NASA doesn’t want the public to see on Mars?
The digital alteration involved an object that has a portion of it removed and replaced by surrounding sand. Close image analysis of the altered object in the November 16 video shows how a straight line portion was changed. This created an unnatural looking effect where no shadows appear where they should for the affected object. Whoever had digitally altered the image had done a sloppy job in hiding evidence of their tampering according to the video description:
The digital alteration follows an even more visually striking case of evidence tampering by NASA, this time blurring what appears to be an artificial object. In the second digital alteration (see slide show), it is clearly seen how an object with straight edges and smooth curves has been blurred using some kind of blurring software. The blurring is easy to see relative to the rest of the environment, and striking evidence of NASA’s JPL altering raw visual data to hide what is being discovered on Mars.
NASA is no stranger to accusations that it has deliberately altered or even destroyed images to hide evidence of artificially created objects found by its spacecraft. Donna Hare worked for NASA contractor Philco Ford, had a “Secret” security clearance, and was shown a picture of a UFO flying over the moon’s surface captured during an Apollo mission by one of her colleagues. She recalled the following conversation:
Hare decided to go public in November 2000 with her whistleblower testimony released through the Disclosure Project.
Other whistleblowers have also come forward to claim that NASA and affiliated government agencies have a policy of destroying or altering photos that reveal artificial structures on the moon or in space. Karl Wolfe, for example, claims that he witnessed NASA, the NSA and the US Air Force cooperating to remove such structures from Apollo and satellite imagery when detected. At a highly classified military facility Wolf says he was shown NASA images by a colleague revealing a base on the far side of the moon:
Yet another whistleblower is Dr Ken Johnston who was a manager of NASA’s Data and Photo Control Department. Johnston claims that he also witnessed moon photos showing artificial structures and was asked to destroy the photos. He refused and was fired by NASA.
The two recent November 2014 cases of digital alteration of Mars Curiosity Rover images are is striking examples of a policy by NASA to hide evidence that some of the objects photographed by its spacecraft and probes are artificial in origin, and have been found on the Mars surface. Together with whistleblower claims that NASA has a decades-long policy of photo tampering with objects that appear artificial, it is not too hard to reach a firm conclusion of what NASA and its JPL affiliate is doing with Curiosity Rover images. NASA is not in the business of discovering extraterrestrial life, but is instead hiding such a discovery from the general public.
Approximate Locations of Centers of Nuclear Explosions
A plasma physicist is advancing a theory in which he claims to have evidence of two ancient nuclear explosions on Mars, events that he believes wiped out an ancient civilization on the red planet.
According to the Daily Mail, Dr. John Brandenburg is set to present his theory at the 2014 Annual Fall Meeting of the American Physical Society in Illinois, which will be held this Saturday. His lecture, Evidence of Massive Thermonuclear Explosions in Mars Past, The Cydonian Hypothesis, and Fermi’s Paradox, will examine the theory, which he also advances in a paper set to be published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle physics.
"Given the large amount of nuclear isotopes in Mars atmosphere resembling those from hydrogen bomb tests on Earth, Mars may present an example of civilization wiped out by a nuclear attack from space,” he wrote.
Brandenburg’s research centers around a high concentration of Xenon-129 in the atmosphere of Mars, as well as an abundance of Uranium and Thorium on the planet’s surface, as Vice notes. He claims that Mars was the site of several “massive radiological events,” which were responsible for the current concentrations of radioactive elements.
Brandenburg, who holds a degree from UC Davis, has previously claimed that Mars was once home to two ancient civilizations, known as Cydonia and Utopia, which possessed a level of technology similar to that of the ancient Egyptians.
“Analysis of new images from Odyssey, MRO and Mars Express orbiters now show strong evidence of eroded archeological objects at these sites,” he wrote. “Taken together, the data requires that the hypothesis of Mars as the site of an ancient planetary nuclear massacre, must now be considered.”
Observers have long claimed to see evidence of ancient civilizations in photos sent back by rovers on the surface of Mars, as the Inquisitr has previously noted. Brandenburg asserts that the infamous “face on Mars,” which was found in the Cydoina region, is an artifact from an ancient alien race.
Brandenburg also believes that his theory could explain the Fermi Paradox, which questions why humanity has yet to contact alien life, despite the mathematically high probability of its existence. Warning that mankind should be wary of such an attack on our own planet, he advocates a manned mission to Mars in order to study any remaining evidence.
The upcoming book Death on Mars: The Discovery of a Planetary Nuclear Massacre is authored by Brandenburg and further details his theories.
Are we alone? Or is the galaxy teeming with other intelligent species? And if the latter, where the heck are they?
These are questions that have perplexed scientists for generations. And they remain open for debate.
But Brian Cox, Britain’s leading celebrity physicist (if you don’t know him, imagine a cross between Neil deGrasse Tyson and pop star Harry Styles) is convinced that we are unique, at least in the Milky Way.
“There is only one advanced technological civilization in this galaxy and there has only ever been one — and that’s us,” Professor Cox, pictured below, declared in the latest episode of his BBC series Human Universe.
His argument, essentially, is that, of the myriad evolutionary paths life could take, most do not lead to intelligence, and he illustrates this by pointing to two pivotal events.
The first was the development of multi-cellular organisms.
We’re so used to a world filled with complex plants and animals that it’s easy to think that nature is all about them.
But single-cell life, such as bacteria, thrived for 2.6 billion years before the first multi-cellular organism evolved. Multi-cellular life was far from inevitable. It was, he argues, a fluke.
“We’re confident this only happened once in the oceans of the primordial Earth.”
His second pivotal event is the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, which opened the way for mammals to rise.
Dinosaurs had dominated the planet for nearly 190 million years, 900 times longer than modern humans have existed, without showing any signs of becoming smart.
And they could still be ruling the Earth if a series of unfortunate cirstances hadn’t left them vulnerable to a rare cosmic collision with an asteroid.
Had those dice landed differently, Earth could look totally different today.
Professor Cox’s conclusion, that intelligent life is so unlikely that it can’t have happened twice, comes at a time when many scientists are leaning the other way.
Since PSR B1257+12 B was discovered in 1992, orbiting a pulsar 1,000 light years away in the constellation Virgo, more than 1,800 exoplanets have been found.
And the likelihood of exoplanets — those which orbit other stars — is a crucial factor in the Drake equation.
US astronomer Frank Drake wrote the equation in 1961 at the world’s first Seti meeting in Green Bank, West Virginia.
The equation is:
N = R * fp * ne * fl * fi * fc * L
It says that the number of civilisations capable of sending a signal that could be detected from Earth (N) is equal to the rate of star formation (R) times the fraction of stars that have planets (fp) times the fraction of planets that could support life (ne) times the fraction that do support life (fl) times the fraction that develop intelligent life (fi) times the fraction that develop technologically advanced civilisations (fc) times how long those civilisations survive.
Many scientists, though not presumably Professor Cox, are hopeful that it will eventually yield a result greater than one.
“Do we believe there is life beyond Earth?” former astronaut and Nasa Administrator Charles Bolden said at a Washington conference, according to the Daily Mail.
“I would venture to say that most of my colleagues here today say it is improbable that in the limitless vastness of the universe we humans stand alone.’
Professor Cox has been at pains to emphasise on Twitter since the episode’s broadcast that his limit on alien civilisations applies only to our galaxy, not the whole universe.
Scientists have presented their initial observations of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in seven articles published Thursday in the journal Science. Among the more surprising finds: images of ripples and dunes on the comet's surface, unexpected given that the comet lacks an atmosphere (and therefore wind) and experiences very little gravity.
Above: High-resolution data show evidence of dune-like structures, via Thomas et al.
Nicolas Thomas, a professor of experimental physics at the University of Bern in Switzerland and lead author of the paper do
Some of the dune-like structures can be seen in the image at the top of this post. Below, images acquired in the Hapi region show ripple structures (which aren't uncommon here on Earth, or Mars, for that matter), rocks with wind tails, and rocks with moats, which Thomas' team says "provide further support for localized gas-driven transport":
ulated over thousands of years that say the best explanation is that the earth is a more or less spherical ball rather than being flat, and if you are going to contradict that view then you had better have some pretty good evidence of your own that says why all those other observations should be ignored.
John Podesta, former senior advisor to Barack Obama, former Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton, and future chair of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is offering some reflections on his most recent stint in the White House.
Number one on the list — aliens:
Podesta was out of the big time politics game briefly early in the Bush years, and lent his considerable prestige to a coalition pushing the oddball cause of greater disclosure of federal information about UFOs:
Soon afterwards, he founded the Center for American Progress which quickly emerged as a key pillar of center-left infrastructure in Washington. I worked for a while at CAP, and can testify that while there were a lot of in-house jokes about Podesta and UFOs (including an alien-themed holiday party one December) there was approximately zero institutional effort expended on the cause.
But in a personal capacity, Podesta continued to lend a hand. He participated in a couple of UFO-themed TV shows and wrote the forward to a book about UFOs that was published in 2010.
Then he went back to the White House where, once again, there was no progress on the UFO disclosure front. It's genuinely too bad. As a former Chief of Staff, Podesta presumably has had access to highly classified information and knows what he's talking about when he says the public deserves to know what's in these files. I hope — though I don't actually expect — that he'll use his influence in the emerging Clinton campaign to push this in a more serious way.
Wise has discussed his theory on his blog, published the details in a 95-page Kindle single, and written about it for New York Magazine.
In short, he thinks that the plane landed on a remote runway in Kazakhstan and might be part of a larger plot Russia orchestrated but has yet to fully play out.
It's been nearly a year since the Boeing 777 went missing during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and searchers still haven't brought forth any wreckage from the plane. Malaysia has officially declared the incident an "accident" and presumes that all 239 people on board are dead.
Investigators have not offered any conclusive explanation as to what happened to the plane after it vanished from radar, leaving plenty of opportunities for crazy theories to gain ground. People have speculated that the plane was shot down or hijacked, and some wondered if the aircraft had landed on some remote runway for unknown reasons.
Here are the flight paths, based on the last satellite signal recieved from the plane, investigators were initially considering:
Here are the main premises from Wise's theory, based on what he wrote for New York Magazine:
Someone tampered with the satellite data. The British satellite company Inmarsat was thrust into the MH370 story when it reported it had recorded a series of pings from the missing plane that could give clues as to its location. Inmarsat reportedly had equipment on board the plane and received "keep alive" ping signals from the Boeing 777 after it disappeared. Wise thinks someone tampered with this data.
To tamper with the data, someone snuck into the electronics and equipment compartment on the plane. The compartment can reportedly be accessed through a hatch in the first class cabin. Wise wrote that the perpetrators knew that Inmarsat would discover the now-incorrect data and interpret it to mean that the plane flew south and crashed into the Indian Ocean.
Contrary to the Inmarsat data, the plane actually flew north to Kazakhstan. Investigators were considering Kazakhstan as a possible destination for the plane early on, but they quickly dispelled that theory and focused on the Indian Ocean. After throwing out the "tampered with" data and analyzing the delay between the transmission and reception of the Inmarsat satellite pings, Wise put the plane in Kazakhstan.
After flying north, the plane landed on a remote runway that lies just past the final satellite ping from the plane. Wise wrote that a runway in an area called Baikonur Cosmodrome would fit a Boeing 777. The area is supposedly consistent with the satellite data, if the last ping came at the start of the plane's descent.
Once the plane landed, it either hid somewhere or refueled to take off again. Whoever hijacked the plane would have had 90 minutes to do so before the sun rose, according to Wise. The area is so remote that it's possible no one would have spotted the plane.
And a closer look of the general area from Google Earth:
Screenshot / Google Earth
To carry out this plan, whoever hijacked the plane had help from Russia, which reportedly leases the runway the plane would have landed on. Wise wrote that the runway was built for a Russian space shuttle and noted that the country has " technically advanced satellite, avionics, and aircraft-manufacturing industries."
"Why, exactly, would Putin want to steal a Malaysian passenger plane?" Wise doesn't have a clear motive established for Russia, but suggested that maybe President Vladimir Putin wanted to carry out a show of power (which would mean that the plot is not yet finished) and a number of other possibilities.
There were three ethnic Russians on board MH370. Two of them reportedly had Ukrainian passports from Odessa and, according to Wise, might have been secret agents. Wise wrote that he found photos of the men online, and they looked like the type who "might battle Liam Neeson in midair." The Russian citizen was reportedly sitting in first class near the hatch that led to the equipment compartment where someone might be able to tamper with the satellite data.
To his credit, Wise admits that his theory sounds a bit out-there. Conspiracy theorists often cherry-pick data and information that fits their theories and ignore what is inconvenient.
"The more I discovered, the more coherent the story seemed to me. I found a peculiar euphoria in thinking about my theory, which I thought about all the time," Wise, who wrote a book on the subject, explained. "One of the diagnostic questions used to determine whether you’re an alcoholic is whether your drinking has interfered with your work. By that measure, I definitely had a problem."
In New York Magazine, Wise concludes: "My gut tells me I’m right, but my brain knows better than to trust my gut."
It was near Green Bank, W.Va., in 1960 that a young radio astronomer named Frank Drake conducted the first extensive search for alien civilizations in deep space. He aimed the 85-foot dish of a radio telescope at two nearby, sun-like stars, tuning to a frequency he thought an alien civilization might use for interstellar communication.
But the stars had nothing to say.
So began SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a form of astronomical inquiry that has captured the imaginations of people around the planet but has so far failed to detect a single “hello.” Pick your explanation: They’re not there; they’re too far away; they’re insular and aloof; they’re zoned out on computer games; they’re watching us in mild bemusement and wondering when we’ll grow up.
Now some SETI researchers are pushing a more aggressive agenda: Instead of just listening, we would transmit messages, targeting newly discovered planets orbiting distant stars. Through “active SETI,” we’d boldly announce our presence and try to get the conversation started.
Naturally, this is controversial, because of . . . well, the Klingons. The bad aliens.
“ETI’s reaction to a message from Earth cannot presently be known,” states a petition signed by 28 scientists, researchers and thought leaders, among them SpaceX founder Elon Musk. “We know nothing of ETI’s intentions and capabilities, and it is impossible to predict whether ETI will be benign or hostile.”
This objection is moot, however, according to the proponents of active SETI. They argue that even if there are unfriendlies out there, they already know about us. That’s because “I Love Lucy” and other TV and radio broadcasts are radiating from Earth at the speed of light. Aliens with advanced instruments could also detect our navigational radar beacons and would see that we’ve illuminated our cities.
“We have already sent signals into space that will alert the aliens to our presence with the transmissions and street lighting of the last 70 years,” Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in California and a supporter of the more aggressive approach, has written. “These emissions cannot be recalled.”
That’s true only to a point, say the critics of active SETI. They argue that unintentional planetary leakage, such as “I Love Lucy,” is omnidirectional and faint, and much harder to detect than an intentional, narrowly focused signal transmitted at a known planet.
These critics add that it’s bad form for scientists to attempt such interstellar communication without getting permission from the rest of humanity. Plus there’s the question of what, exactly, a message to the stars ought to say.
Thus one of the greatest scientific mysteries — Are we alone in the universe? — leads to a thorny political and cultural question: Who speaks for Earth?
‘A waste of time’
This discussion about the proper protocols of communicating with aliens is not the most mainstream scientific debate ever concocted. But it got a lot of attention here in San Jose at the annual meeting of the ultra-mainstream American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Astronomer Jill Tarter, a pioneer of SETI who is neutral about the more active approach, organized a symposium on the topic. Before the symposium, two advocates of the idea, Shostak and Douglas Vakoch, appeared at a press briefing alongside science-fiction writer David Brin and planetary scientist David Grinspoon.
“Active SETI is a reflection of SETI growing up as a discipline,” said Vakoch, a clinical psychologist who is the SETI Institute’s director of Interstellar Message Composition. “It may just be the approach that lets us make contact with life beyond Earth.”
But Brin, a signer of the petition protesting the campaign for active SETI, said we don’t know what’s out there and shouldn’t presume that aliens are benign. He said there are roughly 100 scenarios to explain why we haven’t heard from the aliens so far. About a dozen of those scenarios are unpleasant, he said.
The zodiacal light, left, and the Milky Way, right, are seen from the region of Salgotarjan, northeast of Budapest, on Feb. 17, 2015
Vakoch countered that Brin was being inconsistent, because he collaborated on a message that will be carried into space by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft after its fly-by of Pluto later this year.
“No one is going to get it!” Brin interjected. (The spacecraft is very slow in the galactic scheme of things and will journey for eons into the void of interstellar space.)
As the scientists debated one another, a white-haired, bespectacled man in the back of the room listened quietly: Frank Drake.
He is 84 years old, the beloved dean of the SETI field. He is the Drake of the famous Drake Equation, the formula he scribbled down in 1961 in advance of a meeting in Green Bank. His equation offers a technique for estimating the abundance of communicative civilizations.
He parked himself on a bench in a corridor and, bracketed by a clutch of reporters, held forth for 30 minutes. He said he thinks it’s too soon to engage in active SETI. We don’t know enough.
“I think it’s a waste of time at the present. It’s like somebody trying to send an e-mail to somebody whose e-mail address they don’t know, and whose name they don’t know.”
Odds of someone out there
When Drake plugs his estimates into the Drake Equation (and who is more entitled to do so?), he comes up with 10,000 alien civilizations that we could detect if we looked in the right places with the right techniques.
“It’s 10,000 that we can detect. There are a lot more,” Drake clarifies. “A lot more young ones that can’t be detected because they don’t have the technology, and there are older ones that have technology that is so good that they don’t waste any energy.”
The Drake Equation has endured despite being rather ungainly at first glance:
N=R*· f p · n e · f l · f i · f c · L
It’s not as complicated as it looks. The number (N) of detectable civilizations is the product of seven factors: the rate of star formation (R*), the fraction of stars with planetary systems (f p ), the average number of habitable planets per planetary system (n e ), the fraction that actually have life (f l ), the fraction that have intelligent life (f i ), the fraction with communicative civilizations (f c ) and the average longevity of the communicating phase of such civilizations (L).
Exoplanets — outside our solar system — were first discovered in 1995. NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope and other observatories in space and on the ground have found more than 1,000 planets in the years since. Astronomers say it’s likely that our galaxy has tens of billions of “habitable zone” planets. And of course (channeling Carl Sagan) our galaxy is just one of billions and billions of galaxies.
But after the first three factors in the Drake Equation, we enter the murk. How many of those potentially habitable planets out there actually have life? No one knows, because we don’t yet know how life began on Earth. How likely is it that simple, microbial life will evolve into complex, multicellular organisms and eventually into creatures with large brains? We don’t know, because we have only the one data point of life on Earth.
Do intelligent creatures tend to be communicative and potentially detectable? No idea. And finally, there’s that ominous “L” at the end of the equation: Do technological civilizations tend to survive a long time?
“Those factors are just completely unknown. It’s a great way to organize our ignorance,” Tarter says.
Why, a reporter asked Tarter, should we try to pick up signals from an alien civilization?
“We’re curious how many different ways there are to do this thing called life,” she said. “And we’re curious if it’s possible for us to have a long future.”
That’s because we’d most likely find a very old civilization, not a young one. It’s a matter of statistical probabilities. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. If we pick up a signal, it is unlikely to be from a civilization that has only recently become communicative.
Tarter isn’t discouraged by SETI’s null result to date. She says our ability to detect signals, though much improved since 1960, remains limited.
“We’ve explored one eight-ounce glass of water out of the ocean,” she says.
But you hear something different from Geoff Marcy, an astronomer who has found many of those exoplanets, and who also came to San Jose to discuss results from the Kepler mission. Marcy — who, like David Brin and Elon Musk, signed the petition to protest efforts in active SETI — said it is striking that we have found all these distant planets but no evidence at all of intelligent civilizations.
“The absence of strong radio beacons, television broadcasts, robotic spacecraft, obelisks on the moon — all of those absences add up to give us the suggestion that our galaxy is not teeming with technological life,” Marcy said.
Planetwide decisions
After the active SETI symposium at the AAAS convention in San Jose, the interested parties reconvened for a Valentine’s Day workshop at the SETI Institute up the road in Mountain View. Bottom line: No one’s going to be beaming signals to the aliens anytime soon.
“We need tools to enable true global deliberation and then action,” Tarter said in an e-mail summarizing the workshop. She pointed out that this active SETI issue echoes another debate that got a lot of attention at the AAAS meeting: whether to inject aerosols into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight and combat global warming. No one’s going to do that, either, in the near future, but suddenly people are discussing these basic issues of planetary management and global decision-making.
Rogue alien-hunters can always go it alone, of course — and they have. For example, a Russian astronomer, Alexander Zaitsev, has repeatedly beamed messages to nearby stars. Even NASA has gotten into the act, beaming the Beatles song “Across the Universe” toward the star Polaris in 2008 (“I see that this is the beginning of the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets across the universe,” Yoko Ono said, according to the NASA news release).
Frank Drake has dabbled in active SETI himself. It was just a stunt, a proof-of-concept, on April 16, 1974, at the dedication ceremony of the rebuilt Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. He transmitted an encoded message — one that described the elements that make up DNA, the planets in our solar system, the size of a human being, etc. — toward a star cluster in the constellation Hercules. The star cluster is about 25,000 light-years away.
The odds that anyone will get that message are vanishingly small, but Drake did catch grief from Britain’s Astronomer Royal at the time, Sir Martin Ryle, who thought it was reckless. Drake shrugs and says, “Anyone who’s even 100 years ahead of us [in technology] could detect our run-of-the-mill transmission.”
Drake said he doesn’t worry, as some do, that we would become depressed by contact with a superior civilization. Children aren’t depressed by the company of adults, he says. He compared SETI to doing research on ancient civilizations on Earth, such as the Greeks and the Romans.
“We’re going to do the archaeology of the future,” Drake says. “We’re going to find out what we’re going to become.”
Secret Organizations Controlling The World
Knights Templar
One of the oldest secret societies of all, the Knights of Templar was certified by the Roman Catholic Church in 1129.
The Templars have been accredited for financing building projects across Europe and for creating the concept of safe deposit and banking activities.
There are a few secret societies that are believed to be descendants of the Knights of Templar, but the Freemasons are believed to be the true descendants of the Templars.
Freemasons
Believed to be the true descendants of the Knights of Templar, The Freemasons are a secret society focused on moral uprightness and fraternal friendship.
The Freemasons have been accused of secretly manipulating and/or controlling politics.
Skull & Bones
Founded by William H. Russell at Yale University in 1832, the Skull and Bones society is believed to be the masterminds behind the idea of the nuclear bomb and the J.F.K. assassination.
The Bilderberg Group
This society is filled with extremely influential members from various sectors including education, defense and politics just to name a few.
The idea of the creation of such an organization was an effort to take on anti-American activities in Western Europe.
Club of Rome
Unlike many of the organizations on this list, The Club of Rome is concerned with world wide economy, education, environment, resource consumption, etc.
This secret society was created by Aurelio Peccei and Alexander Christakis in 1968 and gained international attention after publishing a report "Limits to Growth."
Illuminati
Probably the most famous secret society on planet Earth, the Illuminati are blamed for everything from political manipulation to controlling the ins and outs of our very lives.
The Illuminati was created by professor Adam Weishaupt of University of Ingolstadt on May 1, 1776. They are also considered the creators of the New World Order.
Knights of Columbus
This organization was founded by a Catholic priest by the name of Michael J. McGivny. Knights of Columbus is considered the largest Catholic fraternal service group in the world.
This group is a multi-billion dollar non-profit group that is vested in the maintaining rules such as unity, charity, patriotism and fraternity.
The Thule Society
The Thule Society was founded by a person named Rudolf von Sebottendorf on August 18th, 1918. The Thule Society is most known for sponsoring the Duetsche Arbeiterpartei, a group that later became the Nazi Party.
SOURCE
Just a list of groups hell bent on ruling the world
Close encounters of the FOURTH kind. That's when a person claims to have been kidnapped by a UFO and its reportedly otherworldly occupants.
Of course, there's no tangible evidence that anyone has ever been taken aboard an extraterrestrial spacecraft. But there are those who claim they've been abducted, and their stories are chilling.
Travis Walton's terrifying account is the stuff movies are made from, and he joins us on the HuffPost Weird News podcast to talk about that day 40 years ago, when the then 22-year-old logger says he was knocked unconscious, and woke up to find he was surrounded by ETs aboard their ship.
"It was a metallic, glowing disc, making some very strange sounds," Walton told us. "The closer I got to it, the more scared we all got and they were swearing at me to get away from there, and when I got up close, it suddenly got louder and started to move.
"I jumped for cover and then jumped up to run back to the truck, and that's when this blast of energy hit me, and I just felt this numbing shock go through my body. But the crew said it threw me through the air 10 or 20 feet and I landed in a way that they were immediately certain it had killed me, and they fled."
The incident began on Nov. 5, 1975, after a long day of work in the Sitgreaves National Forest near Heber, Arizona. Walton and six other loggers were heading home when they suddenly saw a 40-foot-diameter shiny disc hovering in the air.
Walton first told his extraordinary story in a 1978 book, "The Walton Experience," which became a 1993 film, "Fire In The Sky." His account has just been turned into a candid do
Walton reveals the terrifying details of his experience at the hands of several "non-human" beings, and his feelings of suffocation and the fear that he was dying as the event unfolded.
"When I was first able to focus my eyes good enough, I was still on the table. And as soon as I saw this face, and knew it wasn't human, I tried to hit it away from me. They were much smaller than me, and I think that's the reason they gave up. Once they found out they couldn't control me, they split. I was absolutely terrified."
Walton was declared missing for five days, during which time his logger buddies fell under suspicion of foul play. When Walton finally turned up again, not knowing how long he'd been gone, an intense investigation was underway, including multiple polygraph, physical and psychological tests.
He tells HuffPost about little known aftermath details, including subsequent research in the forest area which has shown an unusual growth rate in trees in the immediate vicinity of the encounter.
"About 15 years later, it was discovered that the trees nearest to where [the UFO] hovered had been producing wood fiber at 36 times the rate it had in the 85 years before that," Walton says. "More recently, a complete core sampling revealed that this thickened growth was only on the side of the trees towards, or in the direction that the craft had been."
Walton addresses the stigma that he and so many other people -- who claim encounters with possible alien beings -- are generally considered unreliable wackos.
"The scientific evidence of the likelihood of intelligent life in our vicinity has become so overwhelming that the people who believe that we're alone in the universe -- those are the kooks."
To commemorate the 40th anniversary of his close encounter, Walton will speak at the November Skyfire Summit in Arizona. On the agenda is a road trip to the exact spot where this four-decade-long controversy began.
