Jun 24, 2020 07:27 PM
(This post was last modified: Jun 24, 2020 09:27 PM by C C.)
Senators want public to see Pentagon UFO reports, citing "inconsistent" information sharing
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-pentago...-regulate/
INTRO: The Senate intelligence committee is aiming to regulate a Pentagon UFO program so that the public is better informed of its activities and the country's intelligence branches can more easily share information. The panel said Tuesday that it "supports the efforts of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force," officially confirming the program's continued existence, in a provision to the annual intelligence authorization bill.
In December 2017, the Pentagon acknowledged funding a secret multi-million dollar program to investigate sightings of UFOs, although it said it had ended in 2012. "The New York Times" reported at the time, however, that it was still up and running. The Senate's focus on the program stems less out of a concern over extraterrestrials, and more from the threat posed by real-world U.S. adversaries, such as China... (MORE)
Scientists made a list of every place aliens could be hiding
https://gizmodo.com/scientists-made-a-li...1844137865
EXCERPTS: A team searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence has put together an Exotica Catalog, which lists every known type of celestial object, regardless of whether we understand it or not. The Exotica Catalog was put together by researchers from Breakthrough Listen, a decade-long program seeking to find signs of intelligent life in the universe. It ambitiously includes “one of everything” in astronomy. Incredibly, the catalog lists over 700 distinct targets, ranging from asteroids, comets, and planets through to pulsars, galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters. The point of the catalog is to “expand the diversity of targets surveyed in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI),” according to the team’s paper, but the compendium could be leveraged for other purposes.
“In the future, it might also benefit students or members of the public who are trying to get a big-picture overview of astronomy or are trying to decide what to study,” Brian Lacki, a Breakthrough Listen researcher from the Department of Astronomy at the University of California Berkeley and first author of the paper, wrote in an email to Gizmodo. “Some of the objects on the lists were things I didn’t learn about until grad school or later, or even until we were compiling the catalog.”
Lacki hopes the catalog will inspire scientists to explore some of the more esoteric or mysterious aspects of astronomy, but its primary purpose is to assist SETI researchers and astrobiologists.
Various classification schemes have been attempted before, but nothing on this scale. [...] Fascinatingly, the new catalog also includes some technological objects in space, all of which belong to us. These include the Voyager probes, the New Horizons spacecraft, weather satellites, and even an automobile in the form of Elon Musk’s red Tesla Roadster. Kinda makes you wonder about all the weird stuff aliens might have tossed into space, some of which might even make it into this catalog some day.
The Exotica Catalog further signifies the ongoing shift away from traditional SETI strategies, in which scientists search for “familiar” alien signatures (such as radio emissions), and the shift toward Dysonian SETI, in which scientists look for extraterrestrial technosignatures, that is, signs of alien technology: stuff like Dyson shells (a star surrounded by solar panels), industrial waste, gigantic space habitats, beacons, and things we can’t even imagine. A driving motivation for Lacki when compiling this catalog was the idea that some alien intelligences might be exceptionally different from us, and by consequence, we’re looking for them in the wrong places... (MORE - details)
RELATED (Forbes): Scientists move to find alien civilizations using technosignatures
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-pentago...-regulate/
INTRO: The Senate intelligence committee is aiming to regulate a Pentagon UFO program so that the public is better informed of its activities and the country's intelligence branches can more easily share information. The panel said Tuesday that it "supports the efforts of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force," officially confirming the program's continued existence, in a provision to the annual intelligence authorization bill.
In December 2017, the Pentagon acknowledged funding a secret multi-million dollar program to investigate sightings of UFOs, although it said it had ended in 2012. "The New York Times" reported at the time, however, that it was still up and running. The Senate's focus on the program stems less out of a concern over extraterrestrials, and more from the threat posed by real-world U.S. adversaries, such as China... (MORE)
Scientists made a list of every place aliens could be hiding
https://gizmodo.com/scientists-made-a-li...1844137865
EXCERPTS: A team searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence has put together an Exotica Catalog, which lists every known type of celestial object, regardless of whether we understand it or not. The Exotica Catalog was put together by researchers from Breakthrough Listen, a decade-long program seeking to find signs of intelligent life in the universe. It ambitiously includes “one of everything” in astronomy. Incredibly, the catalog lists over 700 distinct targets, ranging from asteroids, comets, and planets through to pulsars, galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters. The point of the catalog is to “expand the diversity of targets surveyed in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI),” according to the team’s paper, but the compendium could be leveraged for other purposes.
“In the future, it might also benefit students or members of the public who are trying to get a big-picture overview of astronomy or are trying to decide what to study,” Brian Lacki, a Breakthrough Listen researcher from the Department of Astronomy at the University of California Berkeley and first author of the paper, wrote in an email to Gizmodo. “Some of the objects on the lists were things I didn’t learn about until grad school or later, or even until we were compiling the catalog.”
Lacki hopes the catalog will inspire scientists to explore some of the more esoteric or mysterious aspects of astronomy, but its primary purpose is to assist SETI researchers and astrobiologists.
Various classification schemes have been attempted before, but nothing on this scale. [...] Fascinatingly, the new catalog also includes some technological objects in space, all of which belong to us. These include the Voyager probes, the New Horizons spacecraft, weather satellites, and even an automobile in the form of Elon Musk’s red Tesla Roadster. Kinda makes you wonder about all the weird stuff aliens might have tossed into space, some of which might even make it into this catalog some day.
The Exotica Catalog further signifies the ongoing shift away from traditional SETI strategies, in which scientists search for “familiar” alien signatures (such as radio emissions), and the shift toward Dysonian SETI, in which scientists look for extraterrestrial technosignatures, that is, signs of alien technology: stuff like Dyson shells (a star surrounded by solar panels), industrial waste, gigantic space habitats, beacons, and things we can’t even imagine. A driving motivation for Lacki when compiling this catalog was the idea that some alien intelligences might be exceptionally different from us, and by consequence, we’re looking for them in the wrong places... (MORE - details)
RELATED (Forbes): Scientists move to find alien civilizations using technosignatures