How to Watch NASA's Probe Smack the Moon

By Joe RaoSPACE.com Skywatching Columnistposted: 06 October 200903:16 pm ET

Get ready for a unique cosmic collision! Early this coming Friday morning (Oct. 9), NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) will end its mission with a bang — literally.

Currently carrying with it the upper stage of the rocket that launched it on its way to the moon on June 18, the game plan is to send that spent rocket motor on a course to smash into the lunar surface. But just not anywhere on the lunar surface, but to a thoroughly scrutinized crater called Cabeus that lies near the moon's south pole and is enveloped in perpetual darkness. The hoped-for resultant effects will be to find hidden water ice frozen inside the crater.

And for seasoned skywatchers here on Earth, it should also produce a visible cloud of ejected material. However, only knowledgeable amateur astronomers with the right equipment will be a able to detect the event. Others can watch the event live on NASA TV.

Smackdown!

The general belief among astronomers is that over the last few billion years, the moon has been bombarded by countless numbers of comets. The water from most of these comets completely sublimated away but if any settled at the bottom of a crater near the moon's poles, these permanently shadowed regions can keep the water from disappearing, remaining as ice for a very long time.

Cabeus is a relatively flat crater about 60 miles in diameter on the moon's south pole that scientists believe may be one of those special cases that might hold water ice in its perpetually shadowed top soil. NASA initially selected a different target for LCROSS, the nearby crater of Cabeus A, but switched to the larger Cabeus because data suggested it had a higher likelihood of containing hidden water ice.

The impact is scheduled to occur this Friday, Oct. 9 at 11:30 UT. That's 7:30 a.m. EDT; 4:30 a.m. PDT. To convert Universal Time to your local time, go here.

Impact will happen less than 10 hours after the spent LCROSS Centaur rocket motor is released and its Shepherding Spacecraft maneuvers into position to trail the Centaur en route to the lunar surface. The 5,000-pound Centaur, is expected to slam into Cabeus at a sharp angle at a speed of 5,600 mph (9,010 kph).

If all goes according to schedule, the Shepherding vehicle, carrying nine science payloads, will follow the Centaur's plunge into the moon, beaming back data live to the Earth. Like a bullet hitting sand, the Centaur's explosive collision is expected to create a crater roughly 60 or 70 feet wide and perhaps as much as 16 feet deep, in the process dredging up approximately 385 tons of lunar dust and soil — enough to fill nearly 18 school buses. In addition to recording the collision, the Shepherding Satellite will fly through the regolith plume thrown up by the collision, just before it too slams into the lunar surface some four minutes later, kicking up its own smaller plume of debris.

But before it's sacrificed in the cause of science, the 1,500-pound Shepherding Spacecraft will utilize its specialized sensors and will look for water's telltale chemical signature within the larger debris plume created by the Centaur, possibly in the form of ice, hydrocarbons or hydrated materials.

How to watch

NASA wants the amateur astronomer community to join in a "citizen scientist" program. Jennifer Heldmann heads the LCROSS observing campaign. "We would like to have as many eyes and instruments watching the impact as possible because this is the way we'll get the most data and the most information as possible."

Those who live to the west of Mississippi River will have the best opportunity because the sky will still be dark. Those living east of the Mississippi will still have the moon in the sky, but either dawn twilight or — in the case of those living along the Atlantic Seaboard — sunrise will have occurred, making for a much brighter sky background. A dark backdrop will be an important prerequisite, since it's estimated that when the debris plume forms on it will be no brighter than a sixth-magnitude star (the threshold of naked-eye visibility), and quite likely even fainter.

If you want to attempt to see the impact yourself, here are some important points to be aware of:

First, you're going to need a moderately large telescope, somewhere on the order of at least 10 to 12 inches of aperture. Smaller telescopes will probably not be able to do the job and you will definitely not see anything using binoculars. You'll likely need to use magnifications in the 250 to 500-power range to have a legitimate chance of getting a glimpse of the dim impact plume.

Keep in mind that high power dilutes the brightness of an image, as well as aggravates any unsteadiness of detail. As a general rule of thumb that the maximum amount of magnification for any telescope is 50-power per inch of aperture.

"But wait a minute," you may protest, "my telescope comes with a special Barlow lens, that the manufacturer promises will double or even triple the magnification of my eyepiece."

True enough. In fact, that aforementioned 500-power is likely achieved by pushing the scope's highest power eyepiece with that very same Barlow lens, which ultimately will result in a dim, impossibly fuzzy image. If you're a beginner, you need to understand that that using a Barlow lens is similar to enlarging a photograph. The negative — like a telescope's image — contains only so much detail, which can be blown up only so far before all you can see is fuzz! So, if you have a 3-inch department store telescope — even if it is blessed with perfect optics — the claim of 500-power is more than three times the limit of the most practical magnification that it can provide.

The impact will take place at the lunar south pole, or on the lower limb of the moon along the dark portion immediately adjacent to the terminator (the line that separates the illuminated day side and the dark night side of the Moon). Try to keep the very bright sunlit portion of the moon out of the field of view as much as possible.

The plume is expected to be in the shape of a "V" but it will be exceedingly small in size relative to the moon itself. According to NASA's Brian H. Day, the dusty material is only expected to rise about 6 miles (10 km) above the lunar surface. From Earth, that would be equal to about one-quarter of 1 percent of the moon's apparent size or about 5.2 arc seconds.

To try and get an idea of just how large this is, point your telescope toward Jupiter which conveniently shines in the southern part of our current evening sky. Jupiter's disk currently measures 45-arc seconds in diameter; so the dust plume from LCROSS would appear only about 1/9 as large as that!

And the plume — if and when it's visible — will not last very long. The best guesstimates are that it will last no more than 2 minutes.

You can get more detailed viewing tips from NASA here.

Observatories expected to participate in the study include the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope, Hawaii's Keck and Gemini telescopes, the Magdelena Ridge and Apache Ridge observatories in New Mexico, the MMT Observatory in Arizona and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) now circling the moon.

Lastly, you can watch the event live here on NASA TV, beginning at 6:30 a.m. EDT/3:30 a.m. PDT.

Source: SPACE.com

Sasquatch Sightings Continue Throughout Northwest British Columbia, Canada

Published: October 01, 2008 5:00 AM Updated: October 07, 2008 2:18 PM
Bigfoot appears to be on the move through the wilds of Northern B.C.
A rash of three sightings between late July and August have brought about speculation from paranormal specialists as to what the creature might be up to.
In addition to Houston sightings, Larry Sommerfield, a self-proclaimed sasquatch hunter from Terrace has a cast in his possession that he says is a sasquatch print.
Though he wouldn’t tell The Terrace Standard how he came into possession of the cast, it is 16 inches long, 10.5 inches wide and has four toes.
“I don’t know why there is so much activity but I have a researcher friend in Saskatchewan, who thinks it may have something to do with increased bear sightings” Brian Vike, director of Houston British Columbia Canada (HBCC) UFO Research said. “There seems to be a lot more bear sightings nearing hibernation and as the animals move down from the mountains, maybe something else large and hairy is moving too.”
A second hand report received by Vike, about a sighting in the Morgan subdivision, indicates that another Houston resident saw the enigmatic creature in late July, around the same time as Delores Harrie.
“I haven’t been able to connect with the other lady yet, but she is a very credible witness,” Vike said.
Harrie reported a Sasquatch sighting at her home on Buck Flats Road on July 28 to Vike. She made the report 29 days after the sighting simply because she didn’t not know who she should tell.
“It was my neighbour who said Brian was the person to talk to,” Harrie said.
Since her incident, one of the woman’s friends reported a sighting on Telkwa High Road in Moricetown on Aug. 27 and over the summer there have been sightings in Campbell River on Aug. 31.
At the time of the sighting, Harrie heard something crashing outside near her house and her dogs were anxious to get outside.
“I am becoming much more aware of being out here,” Harrie said, adding her home is surrounded by trees and bluffs. “I mean it could have been a moose or something, but you never know.”
At 5:45 a.m. that morning of July 28, Harrie heard her dogs barking at the door. When she went down to investigate she saw that someone or something was rattling the door handle.
She eventually opened the door and the dogs were out like a shot, sniffing out something on he east side of her property.
When she looked out at the side of her house, she saw a creature that was walking on two legs.
“It was huge and it had long hair, not fur — kind of like the kind you see on an ox and a reddish brown, the colour of the trees that are killed by the pine beetle,” said the woman. “And it moved so fast, by the time I opened my door it had run from the porch to the other side of the house.”
Once outside, the dogs pursued the creature it continued along a dried-up ravine and disappeared into a forested area. Her oldest dog didn’t return for three hours.
“I was worried but what do you do, tell people your dog is chasing bigfoot?” she asked. “I drove up and down the road, looking for him and eventually he came back.”
When she went out later that day, she found the area had markings where something very heavy had laid down the grass along the path.
“She was very obviously upset and there was a sighting on Buck Flats near Silverthorne Lake three years ago,” said Vike. “And another one in a different area near the lake.”
When Vike investigated the property, he stood in the same area on the east side of the house where the women had seen the creature in attempt to gauge it’s height.
“I am just over six feet and when I stood there she said she could only see the top of my head,” said Vike. “Whatever the heck she saw that morning, she was able to see from the head to the chest, making it at least seven or eight feet.”
Brian also found that the treed area she indicated the creature disappeared into had disturbances on the path where the grass had been laid down, as if something very heavy had slipped and possibly fallen.
“The creek there is dried up but the ground is still very swampy so I figured I would be able to find some impressions,” said Vike. “I also found what could have been a track with maybe a couple of toes visible but I just can’t be sure.”
Vike didn’t find any other evidence such as hair but he did say that there have been other sighting this summer.
Harrie doesn’t know why the creature would choose to go onto her property, but the experience has left her a little shaky.
“I used to only lock my door once in a while, now I lock it all the time,” she said.

Source: Houston Today

Sasquatch Sighted In The Nass Valley, British Columbia

Date: Approx:2006 ?

Time: Around Midnight.

I never knew you were looking into the Sasquatch too, two years ago we (my husband, our two sons, and I) were driving home from the Nass Valley. It was approximately midnight when I seen something along a hillside. I was driving, but tried to watch this thing, when my oldest son leaned forward from the backseat and yelled "look, a Sasquatch" and than my 2nd oldest son said "holy smokes". Our car lights hit the creature when we rounded the corner and it looked right at us and than bent down (because it was on two feet) and just like, laid down and disappeared.

Read More at HBCC Research

A Question of Paradigm, not Evidence

Whether the existence of extraterrestrials is an irrefutable fact or just a compelling theory, the media would do well to start telling the story

by Martin Keller

Given that the mainstream scientific community can’t even agree if the poor orbiting mass called Pluto is a planet, it may seem a strange time to ask people to consider whether or not extraterrestrial life has visited our troubled planet-especially since the mere mention of unidentified flying objects conjures stereotypes, reinforced in the media, that undermine credibility.
It’s hard to imagine, however, that even the most hardened of cynics wouldn’t be compelled by information published on the subject over the past 10 years. Sometimes raising as many unsettling questions as it answers, this serious research not only deserves notice, it demands consideration. The problem is that, no matter what mainstream science reporters are covering -from stories on nasa to promises of space tourism-they routinely ignore the subject altogether.
Detractors ought to consider the legacy of the late astronomer and physicist J. Allen Hynek, an investigator on government-sponsored studies of UFOs from the late ’40s through the ’60s, who went from being a skeptic to something of a UFO advocate before he died in 1986. What made him abandon his academic and political prejudices about a subject that usually draws jeers? It was no doubt information like that contained in an unofficial document from the RAND Corporation, a generally conservative think tank, titled ‘UFOs: What to Do?’
Written in 1968 and publicly released in 1997, the study tracks sightings from the 1500s to the modern era, including ‘the large number’ of UFOs spotted near atomic and military installations. While the report recounts how certain government agencies recommended handling such sightings (read: ridicule and denial), there’s also speculation that there could be as many as 100 million intergalactic civilizations more advanced than our own.
Hynek eventually concluded that there was an embarrassment of evidence for the existence of UFOs. Given that more substantiation has since accrued, one can’t help but wonder how-media neglect notwithstanding-meaningful discussion about the existence of the extraterrestrial has been stifled for so long.
In 1997, retired colonel Philip J. Corso, a member of President Eisenhower’s national security team and an Army intelligence officer in Korea, published an explosive book called The Day After Roswell (Pocket Books) that offers an intriguing take on the question. The author claims that materials recovered from a crash site in New Mexico in the late ’40s were seeded to corporate interests that patented the technologies-including lasers, integrated circuitry, fiber-optic networks, accelerated particle beam devices, and the Kevlar material in bulletproof vests-ostensibly to hide the original source.
Corso also argues that there are two space programs: the one that we read about and the one that is already using off-planet technology recovered and reverse-engineered for advanced military and commercial purposes-including a Star Wars system he claims has already been deployed to fend off extraterrestrials.
Richard M. Dolan, author of UFOs and the National Security State: An Unclassified History, Volume One 1941-1973 (Keyhole Publishing, 2000), says it’s difficult to follow up on claims such as Corso’s because, while classified documents created by government agencies can occasionally be ferreted out, proprietary information held by businesses and global corporations is hard to come by. Since the military and the federal government rely on subcontractors to do some of their most sensitive work, using special-access projects (SAPs) and unacknowledged special-access projects (USAPs), secrets are easier to keep. Dolan’s next work, scheduled for publication in early 2007, will explore the history of SAPs and USAPs since 1973.
Writing on his website, author and astrophysicist Bernard Haisch points out that a SAP ‘is for programs considered to be too sensitive for normal classification measures. . . . They are protected by a security system of great complexity. Many of the SAPs are located within industry funded through special contracts.’ Much of his analysis is based on ‘In Search of the Pentagon’s Billion-Dollar Hidden Budgets,’ an article by Bill Sweetman in the highly regarded British publicationJane’s International Defence Review.
‘Even members of Congress on appropriations committees (the Senate and House committees that allocate budgets) and intelligence committees are not allowed to know anything about these programs,’ Haisch writes. ‘Moreover, Freedom of Information Act requests cannot penetrate unacknowledged special access programs.’
In Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (HarperCollins, 2004), New Yorker contributor Seymour Hersh reports that one SAP, used to recruit operatives, has been linked to military torture in Iraq. The desired effect is the same: to avoid scrutiny and sidestep opposing elements that exist in the CIA and Pentagon.
‘The granddaddy of all USAPs is the UFO/ET matter,’ writes Steven Greer in his book Extraterrestrial Contact: The Evidence and Implications (Crossing Point, 1999). Greer-who says USAPs are a top-secret, compartmentalized project that not even the commander in chief has the power to access-founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI). Since the early ’90s, working under the assumption that the USAP model exists, Greer and CSETI associates have met often with high-level officials of the U.S. and other governments, including former CIA director James Woolsey.
In May 2001 CSETI held a press conference at the National Press Club at which it produced an impressive list of witnesses from the government, the military, and the private sector-along with a ream of documents and film footage-establishing, as noted in Greer’s book Disclosure (Crossing Point, 2001), that ‘we are indeed being visited by advanced extraterrestrial civilizations and have been for some time.’ Among the witnesses was John Callahan, who, when he was division chief of the Accidents and Investigations Branch of the Federal Aviation Administration, headed a 1986 investigation of a Japanese 747 that was chased for 30 minutes by a UFO (the incident was captured on radar and recorded). Not surprisingly, major media outlets all but ignored the press conference and failed to scrutinize the supplementary material.
There are a number of reasons the media avoid these topics, argues Terry Hansen in The Missing Times: News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up (Xlibris, 2001), including historical precedent, national security, and psychological resistance. (Consider, the author writes, that ‘for five years, the editors of Scientific American refused to acknowledge the aviation achievements of the Wright brothers because the magazine had been told by trusted authorities that manned, heavier-than-air flight was a scientific impossibility.’)
In 2006 one would hope for a better, more enlightened investigative media climate than the one that existed at the dawn of aviation. If the claims by Corso and others are true, and other crash retrievals of and technological transfers from extraterrestrial spacecraft since the ’40s have continued, imagine what mind-boggling innovations have yet to be revealed-and who stands to profit.

Martin Keller is a freelance writer and publicist who lives in Minneapolis. He worked pro bono as a public relations liaison for the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence from 1992 to 1997.

Source: Soul-Centered Healing

Source 2: UTNE Reader

DON'T LEAVE EARTH WITHOUT IT

Photo - Alien Quarters
Not the actual image.

The chairmen of the Bulgarian Foundation on Cosmic Intelligence Research has unveiled a new unit of currency to be used between extraterrestrials and Earthlings. The "galactos"—a three-gram coin made out of chrome and nickel—was unveiled last week at a conference on UFOs in Sofia, Bulgaria. "We are offering the galactos as a means of payment between planets. It will represent the Earth in financial relations in the cosmos," Kiril Kanev told the conference. He now awaits an official response to his proposal from the Bulgarian prime minister. (Yahoo News)





My Source Boise Weekly

UFOs in Bucks County, PA - Fox News

I found this story at ALIEN CASEBOOK where you can go to read about it.

Plasma Life Forms - Aliens From a Parallel Earth

The Basic Plasma Metaphysics Theory in 3+1 Dimensions

According to plasma metaphysics (Jay Alfred, Our Invisible Bodies, 2006), the physical-dense Earth is gravitationally coupled to a counterpart dark matter Earth composed of low density plasma. This “sister” Earth was co-accreted with the physical-dense Earth about 4.6 billion years ago from dark matter components in the embryonic Solar System. Plasma life forms evolved on this counterpart Earth, just like it did on the visible planet. These life forms were as varied in scale, structure and intelligence as carbon-based life forms Ilcolando as different as a microbe from a whale; a mosquito from a tiger; a giraffe from a crocodile; an ant from a human being. Their degrees of intelligence and awareness were as different as a centipede’s awareness to the awareness and intelligence of homo sapiens. Homo sapiens evolved carbon-based bodies that formed symbiotic relationships with some of these plasma life forms (indicating a type of symbio-genesis). Some of these plasma life forms have interacted with us in the past (intentionally or unintentionally).
The entities that we have identified as ghosts, angels, demons, deities (for example the Marian apparitions in the atmosphere), aliens (associated with UFO sightings in the atmosphere), fairies, sightings of the recently deceased (on the surface of the Earth) and balls of light which appear to go through physical barriers (without contracting) are all plasma life forms from this counterpart Earth.

Read More about:

Properties of Bioplasma Bodies
Behavior of Plasma Life Forms
Biomechanics of Plasma Life Forms
Parallel Plasma Earth - The Habitat of Plasma Life Forms
Types of Encounters with Plasma Life Forms
Why do some people see it and some don’t?
Where did the Aliens go after I took the Medication?
How do they go through Walls?
Why is there Electromagnetic Interference?
What about the Marks on the Body?
Should I move towards the Light?
Can you get me a Plasma Gun?
But, seriously, are they Real?

Find the Answers at Iron Fan
Just another Blogpico.com weblog



So, why do they not land at the White House?

The SETI Institute’s program objective in trying to find intelligent life outside Earth is to some extent misguided. The aliens that are most frequently encountered and that can be considered “intelligent life” do not travel at light speed within our low energy physical universe nor do they have Mesothelioma attorneys technology to undertake intergalactic or interstellar travel. They are co-inhabitants of the Earth system - which includes the visible Earth and its dark matter counterpart. (It is therefore not surprising that they often express concern about the health of the planet. Why would a distant extra-terrestrial civilization be so concerned about our little planet?)
Although they co-evolved with us, they are likely to have evolved at a faster rate. V N Tsytovich of the Russian Academy of Sciences argues that helical dust structures in plasma would have a “faster evolutionary rate” in his 2007 paper on plasma life forms. This is also supported by Jay Alfred’s concept of “accelerated morphogenesis” of bioplasma bodies (see Jay Alfred, Our Invisible Bodies, 2006). Hence, this plasma-based civilization could be expected to be more advanced than us.
Nevertheless, despite the headstart, this civilization would also be probably struggling to understand parallel universes and may not be as capable of controlling their technology or society to the extent that we imagine. They would face difficulties in interacting with us as we do in trying to interact with them. As a civilization they would have government, political and social structures; and culture. They are likely to be superior in communications technology using bioplasma bodies since they would obviously be more familiar with these types of bodies compared to us. This includes the ability to communicate with bioplasma bodies that are coupled to our carbon-based bodies. We may interpret this as telepathy.
Based on current technology it is unlikely that the world will believe of any interactions with these aliens even if they were caught on camera talking to the President of the United States. All that would be reported in the media is the sighting of a “ghost” at the White House. (These aliens are ghost-like as they are plasma life forms, just like ghosts.) Communication would be intermittent and weak due to incompatible technology on both sides of the energy curtain separating carbon-based life forms from plasma-based life forms. Medical doctors will opine that they are hallucinations and the case will then be lumped-up with all the other “ghost stories” and shelved away. Perhaps our neighbors on “sister Earth” are quite acquainted with human nature and our feeble scientific attempts to understand them. Maybe they even fear that we will harm them with our growing technological sophistication.

© Copyright Jay Alfred 2008
Jay Alfred has been researching on plasma life forms since 2001. He is the author of three books on a new field called “plasma metaphysics”. The books include amazon.com/Our-Invisible-Bodies-Scientific-vidence/dp/1412063264Our Invisible Bodies, Brains and Realities and Between the Moon and Earth which are available on Amazon online bookstores. Plasma metaphysics is the application of plasma and dark matter physics to the study of plasma life forms and their corresponding habitats. This includes the study of bioplasma bodies which co-evolved with carbon-based bodies on this planet.

Find all the interesting answers to the questions above at
Iron Fan Just another Blogpico.com weblog

EXTRATERRESTRIAL UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT KNOWN AS ET UFO

July 28th
Let it now be known that as of this day, we on earth recognize that ET UFO is the abbreviation for extraterrestrial unidentified flying objects as opposed to any other typical UFO created on earth.

This request is made by a born American female named Theresa Janette Thurmond Morris, a simple writer with extraordinary DNA.

Read More....