Subject: Cons. Journal. Part 5. 
Dec. 27, 2011.

  This discusses messages from space.

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"Then, from there, the hydrogen - a lighter-than-air gas -
allowed these creatures to take to the skies and then control
their flight by burning off the excess gas in the form of flame.
Anyone seeing this would be seeing the closest thing to the
image of the dragon that we all know and love. Dickinson's
theory is an excellent one, and may well be a perfect
explanation for sightings of real dragons - in times past, and
perhaps today, I believe."

I leave the final word to Freeman: "The dragon has its teeth
and claws deep into the collective psyche of mankind, and its
not about to let go. Our most ancient fear still stalks the
earth today. Beware: this is no fairytale. When your parents
told you that there were no such things as dragons, they lied!"

Source: Mysterious Universe
http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2011/11/chasing-the-dragon/

- CALLING OCCUPANTS OF INTERPLANETARY CRAFT
DEPARTMENT -

Alien Probes Could be Within Solar System, Say Researchers

The Fermi paradox asks why, if intelligent life is common, no
technological civilizations have ever been observed.

As human beings send out probes into outer space, it's notable
that we've never discovered evidence of other civilizations
doing the same. Is this a sign that there really isn't anybody
out there?

Not necessarily, say two postdoctoral researchers at Penn
State, who have approached the problem mathematically. They say
we simply haven't looked in enough places to be certain that no
extraterrestrial artifacts exist in our solar system.

"The vastness of space, combined with our limited searches to
date, implies that any remote unpiloted exploratory probes of
extraterrestrial origin would likely remain unnoticed," say
Jacob Haqq-Misra and Ravi Kumar Kopparapu.

Alien probes, like ours, would be small and could be hidden in
a variety of places. In the asteroid belt, for example, they
would probably go unnoticed.

"Extraterrestrial artifacts may exist in the solar system
without our knowledge simply because we have not yet searched
sufficiently," say Haqq-Misra and Kopparapu. "Few if any of the
attempts would be capable of detecting a 1 to 10 meter probe."

The two researchers used a probabilistic method to determine if
we have looked closely enough anywhere in the solar system to
definitively say there are no nonterrestrial objects here.

They calculated how much of the solar system would need to be
thoroughly searched, and conclude that most searches to date
haven't been fine enough to rule out - well, anywhere really.

"The surface of the Earth is one of the few places in the solar
system that has been almost completely examined at a spatial
resolution of less than three feet," said Haqq-Misra and
Kopparapu.

Even here, there are still caves, jungles and deserts as well
as the ocean floor and subsurface areas that have not been
explored. However, says the team, there's a high probability
that no nonterrestrial artifacts exist here.

The moon has been searched to some extent, and the Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter should soon be able to tell us if there
are any nonterrestrial objects on the moon.

Mars, though, is still mostly unsurveyed and the researchers'
confidence in the probability of no nonterrestrial artifacts is
low. Similarly, locations like the Earth-moon Lagrange points,
the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt might also shelter probes.

"Searches to date of the solar system are sufficiently
incomplete that we cannot rule out the possibility that
nonterrestrial artifacts are present and may even be observing
us," say Haqq-Misra and Kopparapu.

"The completeness of our search for nonterrestrial objects will
inevitably increase as we continue to explore the moon, Mars and
other nearby regions of space."

STRANGE SIGNALS FROM OUTER SPACE

There is the possibility that we may have already detected an
extraterrestrial presence in our solar system, but failed to
understand the significance of these mysterious events.

Official records state that the first radio transmissions
directed specifically at the stars were dispatched from Arecibo,
Puerto Rico, in 1974. But this was not, in fact, our earliest
attempt to attract the attention of other worlds. Well before
the term 'extraterrestrial intelligence' was coined, two men had
received intelligent signals - at a time when theirs were the
only functioning radio sets on the planet earth.

The first man was the eccentric genius Nikola Tesla. In 1899 he
was working his own, employing dangerously high voltages in an
attempt to develop a means of transmitting energy by radio and
thus eliminate the need for wiring systems. Throughout that
long, hot summer he loosed artificial bolts of lighting into the
sky from a 200-foot (60-metre) tower at his base in Colorado
Springs - in an intelligible sequence. The began a mystery that
still puzzles scientist. Having succeeded in making the lights
and other electrical equipment work without wiring, Tesla saw
his radio equipment inexplicably begin to register signals - in
which, he later said he could discern 'a clear suggestion of
number and order not traceable to any cause then known to me.'
He was entirely familiar with the natural phenomena of solar
disturbances, earth currents and aurora borealis, and he
dismissed them all, adding: "The feeling is constantly growing
on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one
planet to another.'

At the time of Tesla's startling 'other worlds' announcement,
Guglielmo Marconi was developing radio as a means of
communication, busily sending the letter V in Morse code to his
fellow workers over a 50-mile (80-kilometre) distance. And by
1921 he, too, had announced that he had received inexplicable
signals, which he quickly identified as some kind of cipher. He
later noticed a very strange feature. Within the cipher, there
appeared a measured recurrence of the Morse V he had been
transmitting to his assistants back in 1899.

In the New York Times of September 2 1921, Marconi was reported
as believing that the mysterious signals, or some of them,
originated on Mars. Incredible as it seems, no one made the
connection with the signals Tesla had received 22 years earlier.

Freak signal continued to come in throughout the 1920's and
1930's particularly on the 30,000-metre wavelength. And in the
late 1930's a new factor entered the puzzle: a wave of reports
of strange aircraft - today we would call them UFOs seen in the
skies of Scandinavia and northern Europe. During the sightings,
short-wave receivers in the 'flap' area would alive with strange
cries and voices. The language used caused many a headache for
philologists, because what they heard often seemed to be a
mixture of Swedish and other tongues. But, if translated setting
aside rigid rules of grammar, it often seemed to have some kind
of intelligible sequence, even if its actual meaning remained
obscure.

The dawning of the space age brought with it more strange
phenomena. On 16 May 1963, in his Mercury capsule above Hawaii,
astronaut Gordon Cooper was talking to mission control on a
special frequency channel when extraneous voices broke in. Later
examined on tape, these were found to correspond to no language
known on Earth. The phenomenon was repeated on the Apollo VIII
Borman-Lovell-Anders mission on 21 December, when UFOs were seen
in the lunar orbit and more voices broke into the communications
channel with mission control.

This, not unnaturally, caused some consternation back on Earth.
The frequency channel they were using is such that it is
virtually impossible for any amateur operator to intrude.
Controllers were left with a problem that they could not
explain, but at the same time could hardly ignore - the security
risk was too great.

But, as far back as the 1927, two Americans, Taylor and Young,
had taken such phenomena seriously enough to try and locate the
source of the radio signals They had identified an echo-
periodicity of 0.01 seconds originating from a distance of
between 1800 and 6250 miles (2900 and 10,000 kilometres), and
were comparing their observations with those of Marconi. By
December 1928, a number of scientist were interested Jurgen Hals
of Philips's Eindhoven laboratories in Holland had discussed his
findings with Professor Carl Stormer of Oslo, mentioning three-
second delays he had experienced with an experimental radio
transmitter. After another year, on 28 October 1929, Dr van der
Pol, also of Philips, confirmed that he had noted further odd
echoes from a planned emission of impulses at the same time
every morning. It was van der Pol's analysis of the delay
between emissions and the receipt of their echoes, always on the
same wavelength, that effectively excluded ideas that they may
have been bouncing off the moon or the inner Van Allen belt, or
that they might have been somehow stored and reflected from
layers of ionized gas.

A Scottish science writer, Duncan Lunan, studied the records of
these anomalous radio echoes over a period of some years, and
eventually came up with the assertion that they originated from
an alien space probe. He also commented on the misfortune that
the signals 'happened to be received at a time when they would
as a matter of course be attributed (by a majority of people) to
some natural phenomenon.'

Part 5.

John Winston.  johnfw@mlode.com