Giza Death Star

A Website of Alternative Thinkers & Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

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GET YOUR SPACE ARCHAEOLOGY DEGREE NOW

I'm always astonished at what the regular readers of this website find and pass along.When Daniel and I started this site, we little imagined that it would grow into this community-driven site that it did, as more and more people started sending articles. And I'm glad that they did, because not only does this site's readership-and-article-submitting community find out more than I ever could, what they find is invariably fascinating. So a huge thank you to you all.

But every now and then, something gets passed along that's just plain... well... delicious. It's the sort of thing that just invites all sorts of high octane speculation done not even at the end of the twig, but in thin air. In this case, it may be appropriate to invoke Mark Twain's observation about the theory of evolution, and apply it to today's high octane speculation, because it returns wholesale dividends of speculation for a minimum investment of fact.

This particular article, however, is not an article, but rather a professional job-offering posting of the type one often encounters when looking for jobs on the internet in...oh...say, astrophysics:

Harlan J. Smith McDonald Observatory Postdoctoral Fellowship

Now, probably very few of us, if any, are looking for jobs in astrophysics or astronomy, so we might have missed this opportunity for the speculation de jour so thanks to K.M. for spotting and sharing it. What caught K.M.'s - and my - attention when we read this posting was this:

Harlan J. Smith McDonal Observatory Postdoctoral Fellowship

...

This Fellowship is open to anyone who has their PhD in Astronomy or closely allied field or will receive it by 31 August 2020. Applicant’s research interest may be in any area of astronomy and astrophysics. Preference will the given to applicants in the following fields: Galactic archaeology, stellar astrophysics, and near-field cosmology. More info can be found at... (emphasis added)

...and &c &c and so on and so forth.

Now, things like "stellar astrophysics" and "near-field cosmology" are things that one expects to find in a grocery shopping list for PhDs seeking fellowships at an astronomical observatory to "make their name".  But "galactic archaeology"?!?  It's like leaving your home with a grocery list full of the usual items, and then encountering an item like "8 x 12 original Rembrandt painting, or reasonable forgery thereof, in oil, preferably on canvas but will take wood." The oddity of the item is its specialization, and rarity.

Galactic archaeology?  No thinking small here... No obelisks on the Moon arranged in peculiarly regular patterns, or faces and pyramids on Mars, or oddly rectilinear features on Phobos, or eerie resemblances between Iapetus and George Lucas's Death star from his Star wars movies which just happens to have three neat parallel ridges running around its entire equator in a completely explicable-through-entirely-natural-geophysical-processes manner.  That's much too small and ordinary... we need someone with a research background in galactic archaeology...

Now, granted, this phrase might stand for something as trivial as stellar and galactic history. But if so, it's a mighty peculiar usage of the English to convey the idea.

The absolute strangeness of this particular shopping list item (needless to say) has me in Mark Twain mode of getting wholesale dividends of speculation for a minimum investment of fact. So what, if anything, is going on here? Well first, we have a kind of backhanded admission that there are strange things out there that are indicative of someone having built them. Archaeologists do not ordinarily spend time trying to dig up entirely natural things that are not of intelligent origin. There are people that like digging up entirely natural things, but they're called geologists (and so on), not archaeologists. S0 perhaps looking at all these weird extraterrestrial anomalies, they have come to the conclusion that this "someone" did not come from inside this solar system, and hence, need someone to look for "likely places" that "they" came from: "dig here," only in this case the tools aren't shovels and brushes, but optical and and radio telescopes and spectroscopy.

But since we're already flailing away wildly in thin air like Wile E. Coyote, let's just kick over the restraints and get really wild.  Suppose the tools available to spot likely places to "dig" were much farther along than meets the eye. What if tomography, for example, has advanced sufficiently to do it long distance with great accuracy, and unencumbered by the velocity of light? I mean, heck, if we're willing to ponder longitudinal waves in the medium capable of disintegrating planets, then the same stuff might give relatively accurate pictures of what lies beneath another planet's surface. I know that sounds far out and highly improbable (which it is), but after all, the Russians were going to send a probe to Mars equipped with radar tomography to take a peek beneath the surface of the Martian moon Phobos and the planet itself, after the European Space Agency snapped some very unusual photos of the moon, and then the Russian probe mysteriously failed, with some in the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos claiming sabotage. In my opinion, they were planning to do some extraterrestrial archaeology, and someone else did not want them to do it.

And as we're falling to the canyon floor like Wile E. Coyote, we might as well pass from "high octane speculation" into "really wild and crazy high octane speculation." What if some of the tools in our Galactic Archaeologist's toolbox include not just the usual spectroscopy and our "longitudinal wave tomography" but the ability to actually "go there" and "have a look"?

Just a thought.

See you on the flip side...

 

 

 

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METAMATERIALS: OPTICAL AND SONIC INVISIBILITY

G. B. found this fascinating article about metamaterials, and it vaulted right to the top of this week's blogs and high octane speculation, for reasons that will become apparent:

Study says ancient Romans may have built “invisibility cloaks” into structures

In spite of its sensational headline, the reality here is a bit more mundane. Or is it? It's that question that we're concerned with in today's high octane speculation. Actually, today we're getting a "two for one special" because there's actually two high octane speculations I want to advance. So let's dive in.

Metamaterials have created the possibility for creating "invisibility cloaks" by bending light so severely around an object that the object itself cannot be seen:

Falling within the broader class of photonic band gap materials, a "metamaterial" is technically defined as any material whose microscopic structure can bend light in ways it doesn't normally bend. That property is called an index of refraction, i.e., the ratio between the speed of light in a vacuum and how fast the top of the light wave travels. Natural materials have a positive index of refraction; certain manmade metamaterials—first synthesized in the lab in 2000—have a negative index of refraction, meaning they interact with light in such a way as to bend light around even very sharp angles.

That's what makes metamaterials so ideal for cloaking applications—any "invisibility cloak" must be able to bend electromagnetic waves around whatever it's supposed to be cloaking. (They are also ideal for making so-called "super lenses" capable of seeing objects at much smaller scales than is possible with natural materials, because they have significantly lower diffraction limits.) Most metamaterials consist of a highly conductive metal like gold or copper, organized in specific shapes and arranged in carefully layered periodic lattice structures. When light passes through the material, it bends around the cloaked object, rendering it "invisible." You can see anything directly behind it but never perceive the object itself.

Unlike Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, metamaterials really do exist, at least in the laboratory, but they are typically limited to specific wavelengths: microwaves, for example, or infrared light, and even certain frequencies of sound waves. Getting them to work with visible light is a much tougher challenge, although in 2017, French physicists demonstrated a proof-of-principle metamaterial using thin layers of gallium nitride (the blue light-emitting element in LCDs) carved into pillars of varying shapes to delay the flow of visible light through the material. Metamaterials also sometimes cast a telltale shadow, since they do absorb some of the light shining through them. (Emphasis added)

So, to our first high octane speculation: At the time when I was writing The Giza Death Star, my first foray into the bizarre alternative research field, I speculated that some of the crystal arrays of resonators that I speculated might have once existed within the "Grand Gallery" of the Great Pyramid were a special kind of crystal with unique indices of refraction able to so bend light that they were, in effect, "black crystals", able to absorb light without reflection or refraction so "severely" that they were a kind of "crystal black hole" as far as light was concerned, a kind of "black crystal". Under certain conditions of stress, these "black crystals" might emit massive bursts of photons (and phonons). I even speculated that in order to do so, these crystals would have to have an index of refraction that would "spiral" or "rotate" light into the crystal, perhaps being a special kind of liquid crystal. But in any case, I was, at the time, completely unaware of metamaterials and the research behind them, so I was quite intrigued when I read this article, for it suggests that my idea back then might be remotely possible. Indeed, the fact that metamaterials can both bend light around them, as well as absorb a certain amount of light, suggests that there is a boundary layer or condition around the metamaterial outside of which light is bent, and inside of which light is absorbed. If we were discussing black holes, we would call this boundary layer the event horizon: inside that horizon, light itself cannot escape, outside it, things are bent around it. The structure, in other words, appears to be similar, and in my thinking back then, this may be an indicator that there is a connection of some sort between these types of crystalline structures and gravity and anti-gravity.

Additionally, let us recall something I mentioned in my book Secrets of the Unified Field, namely, that when one digs long and hard enough into the background of the so-called Philadelphia Experiment, the infamous 1943 experiment allegedly meant to render naval ships invisible to radar, the key personage was physicist Arnold Sommerfeldt, a friend and colleague of Einstein's, who experimented precisely with refraction indices. In my attempt to reverse engineer a rationalization for the experiment, the US Navy allegedly thought that if one could change the index of refraction from incoming radar signals via electromagnetic means (again, brought about by the interferometry of three magnetic degaussing coils around the three spatial axes of the ship), one might "bend" the radar around the ship making it "radar invisible." As the story goes of course, the Navy achieved far more than it had bargained for, and the experiment rendered the entire ship optically invisible, not just radar invisible.

But there's something else in this article that caught my attention, and it's this:

It may also be possible to use metamaterials to lessen the damage caused to buildings and other infrastructure from earthquakes, by redirecting so-called Rayleigh waves, the more shallow, surface seismic waves that typically inflict the worst structural damage. Per Physics World, "The idea is to surround a building with a lattice of holes or solid objects within the soil. When seismic waves within a certain range of wavelengths pass through the lattice, multiple reflections in the lattice interfere with one another destructively to create a band gap that results in a significant reduction in the shaking of the building."

...

Co-author Stephane Brûlé, a civil engineer at a Lyon-based company called Menard, demonstrated the possibility of this kind of large-scale acoustic and seismic cloaking a few years ago with colleagues from the Fresnel Institute in Marseille. The researchers drilled a periodic array of boreholes into topsoil and discovered that sound waves reflected most of their energy back toward the source when they encountered the first two rows of holes. Brûlé noticed a similar foundational structure while on holiday in Autun (a town in central France), thanks to an aerial photograph of the semicircular structure of a Gallo-Roman theater buried under a field.

When Brûlé superimposed a more detailed archaeological photograph of the theater's structure over an image of one of the invisibility cloaking metamaterials he and his Fresnel colleagues had made in the lab, the ancient theater's pillars lined up almost perfectly with the microscopic elements in the metamaterial. He discovered similar overlap with images of the foundational structure of the Roman Colosseum and other, fully enclosed amphitheaters from the same era.

Roman engineers may not have done this deliberately; they could have just been lucky, according to Brûlé. Or they might have noticed over the centuries that certain structures were more resistant to earthquake damage than others and modified their designs accordingly. "Rigorously, we cannot say more for the moment," he told Physics World. (Emphasis added)

Clearly, however, the ancients, long before the Roman Empire, had some sort of knowledge of how to design buildings  to shield them from earthquake damage. The Great Pyramid, for example, sits on top of five "sockets" that allow the building to quiver and move during earthquakes (and indeed, which allow it to quiver and move in the day to day mechanics of nature earth vibrations), placing the entire pile of granite and limestone (quartz bearing rock) under constant stress, making it a constant emitter of photons and phonons from the billions of tiny quartz crystals embedded in the blocks from which it constructed. Other ancient engineering such as the massive pre-Incan walls at Sacsayhuaman in Peru have blocks of stone cut into irregular patterns and held together merely like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle without mortar between the blocks, allowing the pieces of blocks of the wall to move during earthquakes, and then to settle back into their original positions after the vibrations are over, keeping the wall intact.

But this article now suggests that by constructing a deliberate lattice work in the earth, seismic waves can through interferometry be bent around a building, and even reflected back on its source, in a kind of interferometry-induced acoustic phase conjugation. And this of course brings us to our second high octane speculation, for it suggests something that I speculated upon in my Lulu book Microcosm and Medium, namely, that the placement of buildings themselves, if filled with a suitably powerful acoustic wave generator, using the buildings as resonant cavities, could perhaps induce seismic waves which, through interferometry, might induce such vibrations. Scale that idea up, and one might have an "earthquake" producer which would work via interferometry to produce  a conjunction of acoustic seismic surface waves at a point sufficiently strong enough to cause an earthquake. Modulate an "intention" on those waves, and one has either a very powerful "defensive" or "offensive" "Tiller grid"...

See you on the flip side...

 

U2 CAN DO ARCHEOLOGY

Last Friday I blogged about an interesting story that tended to confirm my hypothesis that one of the covert motivation for American (and Russian) interest in the Middle East is archeology, and the possibility that perhaps they are "looking" for '"something" they suspect might be there. It's always been in my mind that the explanation for the post-9/11 American invasion of Iraq, for example, might have been justified on precisely those grounds. We were told that we were looking for "weapons of mass destruction" in order to deny their acquisition to Saddam Hussein. Of course, the public narrative then was that those WMD's were the usual stuff, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. And of course, everyone now knows we did not find any. But I suspected them and continue to suspect that included in that list were possibly weapons of a wholly different sort, exotic and ancient. On that hypothesis, we may have been looking for those, or for information about them.  The presence of great power archeological interest, cloaked behind the usual geopolitical narratives, has been a feature of the region since the 19th century: Britain, France, and Germany have been crawling all over the area with their archeological teams for a long time, and in fact Hussein's government had teams of French and German archeologists in the country prior to the US invasion, teams that we (the US and UK) warned to get out because we were coming in. If there was a hidden archeological agenda to the invasion, then it's a handy way of removing rival teams of diggers from the field.

So last Friday you'll recall I blogged about the fact that apparently the Russian presence in Syria is not complete geopolitically motivated, but perhaps archeologically as well, since according to the article I referenced in that blog, Russian military and intelligence units have basically taken over the site at Palmyra, and allowing few any entrance, including the Syrians themselves.

In response to that story, yet another regular reader here, we'll simply refer to this reader as "X", spotted these two stories, which tend to go even further in corroboration of my "geopolitical-archeological hypothesis" for various Middle Eastern interventions:

Declassified U2 spy plane images reveal ancient sites

Near Eastern Landscapes and Declassified U2Aerial Imagery

Obviously, using the celebrated high altitude U2 spy plane and the early spy satellites to take pictures of archeological sites is an idea that's been around for a while, but what is revealing about the second article is a gold mine of statements that suggests that this was a very deliberate effort on the part of the aircraft and the whole high altitude reconnaissance progam, and the early spy satellites. Consider this statement from the second article, from page 114:

The geographic index presented here (Figure 8) is a roughly accurate but still incomplete guide to photographic coverage. Because the main camera was only turned on once the plane left Turkish airspace or approached its first target, the start of the mission near Adana (i.e., the start of the tracking film coverage) is not coincident with the start of frame acquisition by the main camera system. For example, Mission 1480 (October 7, 1958) was already 1:42 into its mission before its main camera was turned on; it had already traveled across southeastern Turkey and the length of Iraq before capturing its first frames near Ahwaz in southwestern Iran. Likewise, Mission 1455 (August 12, 1958) took off and circled over eastern Turkey for 1:08 before initiating main camera photography at the Syrian border. The spatial index we have created of Middle East U2 missions available at NARA shows several patterns (Figure 9). By far the densest U2 coverage among the available missions occurred over Syria, with riverine parts of Iraq taking second place. Most of the available mission sflew a similar path: east from İncirlik across southern Turkey or northern Syria/Iraq, then south along the Tigris River or Zagros Mountains through Iraq/Iran, then west across the eastern panhandle of Jordan or southern Syria, and finally north across western Syria, back to İncirlik.

Or to put it country simple: in this instance the u2 flight appears to have little if anything to do with Cold War reconnaissance of the Soviet Union or its missile and air bases, and everything to do with taking pictures of various archeology-rich regions of Syrian and Mesopotamia. Indeed, as the article points out in a map accompanying this statement, this flight took the U2 over two ancient Assyrian cities, namely, Ninevah(!) and Khorsabad. And to underscore this point, the authors of the second article include, in their Figure 8, on page 115 of the article, a coverage map of u2 flights, and it takes little imagination to see once again that the targeted areas are as much about archeology as they are about the militaries of Syria and Iraq. In fact, a case could be made that since these flights are in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the militaries of those two countries would not be so well developed, that the primary purpose of the flights was archeological in nature.

And as the end of the first article notes, these spy-satellite and high altitude photo reconnaissance flights could also aid in the discovery of archeological sites that are much more difficult to get to... like, say, the Amazon basil, or Antarctica perhaps. Indeed, if my high octane speculation about the motivations for great power archeological are true, one might go so far as to advance the end-of-the-twig speculation that these technologies may have been developed with the deliberate intention not only of keeping eyes upon the Soviet Union, but on "others", and also for the purpose of spying out archeological sites and "areas of interest" for boots on the ground.

See you on the flip side...

 

ARCHEOLOGICAL INTERVENTION?

For some time I've been proposing the speculation that the U.S. military intervention in Iraq and Syria, and that the US-sponsored "Arab spring" in Egypt, has had, as its deepest and most covert reason, the control of sites of antiquities, and a quest, perhaps, to discover information about lost, ancient high technology. When the looting of the Baghdad museum occurred shortly after American forces reached that city, my suspicions went into the red zone, and I believed then, and believe now, that the looting was "an inside job",  and done precisely to acquire information. Iraq, in other words, made me extremely suspicious that the  archeological effort was as high on American priorities as any publicly stated reasons at the time about "weapons of mass destruction." Indeed, I've entertained the possibility - and still do entertain it - that these "weapons of mass destruction" that we were hunting for(and supposedly never found) were not the type that everyone was thinking of (atomic,biological, and chemical), but of a very different, much more exotic, and very ancient sort. In my scenario, we were being told a truth, but a partial truth containing much misdirection. Then came Syria, a country with its own rich antiquities, and then the push for military action against Iran, yet another country with rich antiquities.

Central to my speculations here is an old Babylonian "epic" called the epic of Ninurta, which I included in my book The Cosmic War, in its entirety, because I wanted people actually to be able to read something that academics regarded as an "epic." Well, Homer it is not. It's about as exciting as reading the index to the Sears catalogue, because that, in effect, is what it is, an inventory of "stuff" associated with an ancient "war of the gods", and potentially the fabled Babylonian "Tablets of Destinies". Certain features of the text suggest that it is describing a technology of some sort. Granted, that's a highly speculative hypothesis, and the whole idea of invading countries for the ultimate hidden purpose of acquiring access to, or information about, such putative things seems, at first glance, outrageous. But then again, if such things did exist, then they would give anyone who acquired them an immense technological leverage, to such an extent that one might indeed risk military interventions simply in order to acquire it, and prevent others from doing so.

Thus far, however, this has been an entirely argued speculation, depending a lot of dot-connecting, and speculation along the way about each data point. In other words, it's a very "iffy" proposition. But now there's a very intriguing story out there that was spotted by F.L.M. and passed a long, and to my mind, it tends to corroborate my wild high octane speculation about military interventions having an ultimately archeological purpose:

Russian Troops Protect Secret Biblical Dig In Syria

What's very interesting in this article is the following set of statements:

In Palmyra, according to the sources, the Russian soldiers and intelligence worked for a duration with Syrian regime mercenaries and soldiers. During that period, they were partners in robbing and selling archeological artifacts according to their power and military presence; however, this partnership did not last long as Russians revealed their intentions fast. They excluded the regime and singled out power for themselves in the heart of the historical city which is considered a museum full of treasures and antiquities rare to find in the world.

Maybe the Russians singling out power for themselves explain even if late the secret behind Moscow rushing to participate in unprecedented effective force to recapture the city. Moscow plunged effective ground troops accompanied by intensive and violent air raids.

The size of losses Russians suffered on the Palmyra front can give a clear idea of the Russian rush momentum. Russians suffered the biggest loss in Palmyra since its direct and immediate intervention in the Syrian war.

Our private sources clarified the Russians fenced their camp in the heart of the historical city and banned any regime personnel or mercenaries from entering or coming close to the area under penalty and accountability.

This procedure came in tandem with arrival of 3 foreign experts who started moving between Palmyra landmarks with guards and intensive protection. They resided in the Russian camp located in camels’ racetracks and cemeteries extendıng to the theater and Bel Temple.

The sources said the experts are communicating with Russian exclusively via an interpreter. Their work is limited to mostly searching for Jewish engravings that might be a document to place Palmyra on the lıst of Jewısh cities according to what they are seeking. (Emphases added)

In other words, if this article's assertions are true, there was a definite archeological motivation behind the Russian intervention in Syria, and that intervention included placing a well-known and famous archeological site under the control of "intelligence," in this case, presumably Russian military intelligence. I cannot help but draw the parallel here to Iraq prior to America's post-9/11 invasion of that country, for it will be recalled that prior to that invasion, both France and Germany had teams of archeologists digging around Iraq for Saddam Hussein, and Germany, it is rumored, had a heavy presence of its BND intelligence agency in that country.  That in and of itself is not surprising, since there had been an German intelligence network operating in that country during World War Two which helped stage the coup in Iraq, and forcing the British to spend military resources to put it down. (Indeed, I've strongly suspected that since the story of the Baghdad Museum looting was first broken by the German media that the whole looting may have been a German operation, with individuals wearing American uniforms.)

There's an additional factor here, and that's the presence of an ancient Jewish community in Palmyra, which again might imply that the Russians are looking for "something." And given Russian's "alliance" with Iran, it is perhaps pertinent to note that Russia, with its own vast oil and natural gas reserves, hardly needs Iran's. So it that "alliance" more to prevent the West/America from gaining access to Iran's antiquities sites? (And by the same token, and since we're on the subject: does Russia have archeological teams exploring Iran?)

Whatever one makes of these questions and speculations, this article does appear to corroborate my original "archeological intervention" suspicions, moving it up just a notch or two.

See you on the flip side...

DARPA LOOKING FOR TUNNELS FOR TECH AND TRAINING

My inbox was flooded last week and over the long weekend with various versions of this story, and there's so many people to thank for sending it that it would be impossible to list all their initials. Suffice it to say: "thank you!"

What's the story? It seems that our "friends" at the Diabolically Apocalyptic Research Projects Agency (and again, thanks to J.B. for providing that one!) are looking for underground corridors and so on. Here's RT's version of the story, and as one might imagine, its assessment of "totally not suspicious" might represent the tongue-in-cheek intelligence assessments of the Sluzhba vneshney razvedki Rossiyskoy Federatsii as they pondered the whole thing:

‘Totally not suspicious’: DARPA freaks people out with urgent request for underground complex

The request, as the article points out, came in a most unusual manner for an agency of the federal goobernment: it was made not in a contract offering or a notice on DARPA's website, but in a tweet:

“Attention, city dwellers! We're interested in identifying university-owned or commercially managed underground urban tunnels & facilities able to host research & experimentation,” the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) tweeted on Wednesday, sparking a wave of alarming theories ranging from zombie and alien invasions, to psyops and the end of the world.

And sure enough, when one visits DARPA's website, there's a screen capture of the tweet:

‘DARPA tweet

So, DARPA tweeted on August 28th, 2019, that it needed underground complexes to "host research and experimentation" by August 30th, a margin of only two days. Now if you've ever watched those goobernment websites where contract notices are posted, and tried to follow one through the labyrinth, you'll be aware that the process usually moves at the speed of evolution encompassing several geological ages (but hey, they've got your back on health care). But here DARPA wants to hear from you in two days. And that implies that there's some urgency involved in the matter.

The RT article concludes with an outline of various scenarios being debated:

DARPA dismissed one person’s theory they wanted to store monsters down there by responding with a reference to the sci-fi Netflix show ‘Stranger Things’: “Please. Demogorgons are such a Department of Energy thing.”

Many were amused that DARPA would even make such a request on social media. Others offered up their own basements, and some speculated that the tweets themselves were some sort of experiment, pointing out the US government is likely already well aware of the country’s underground structures.

DARPA is the US Department of Defense arm responsible for the development of emerging military technologies, and has a long history of coming up with crazy (and terrifying) ideas.

An article by Matt Novak at Gizmodo had a bit more information:
Why Does Darpa Need a Huge Underground Facility by Friday?

Here's where it gets interesting (citing from most of Mr. Novak's article):

Gizmodo reached out to Darpa and the agency confirmed that the turnaround time was short, but said that it was originally posted last week. That’s still incredibly short notice for a government agency that needs a large space for its experiments. Darpa wouldn’t explain why they needed an underground facility so quickly.

“Complex urban underground infrastructure can present significant challenges for situational awareness in time-sensitive scenarios, such as active combat operations or disaster response,” a Darpa spokesperson who asked to remain nameless told Gizmodo by email.

“DARPA is interested in exploring this domain for researchers to analyze and enhance approaches to improve situational awareness and response times in emergency scenarios,” the Darpa spokesperson continued. “Locations submitted could help the research community identify relevant sites for further field experimentation to accelerate their development of such technologies.”

...

Darpa is currently hosting the Subterranean Challenge, which is a bit like their old Robotics Challenge from 2015 only for mapping and traversing underground environments. Darpa’s “Urban Circuit” challenge is happening in February of 2020, so we can guess that this underground location might be for that, but we don’t know for sure. And it would be strange to only organize something like that on a week’s notice.

Darpa simply isn’t telling us much. In fact, Darpa is making us a bit nervous by its responses on Twitter. When someone said that the urgent need for a tunnel, “sounds both exciting and ominous,” Darpa replied, “even to us.”

(Emphases added)

So... it would appear at first glance that DARPA's sudden request is related to that story that came out a few months ago that the US military was to begin combat training in underground facilities, implying that they sensed a a potential danger that had to be addressed. DARPA's entry into this subterranean warfare theater implies that they have or are developing "technologies" to "analyze and enhance approaches to improve situational awareness", perhaps things like robot drones to map complex labyrinthine underground structures with their tunnels, tubes, corridors, rooms, and so on.

The real question is why? And why the seeming urgency?

Like Wile E. Coyote, I intend to run right off the twig on this high octane speculation, or rather, speculations, because I have three basic versions, and as one might have guessed from my assigning this blog to the "Giza and Archaeology" file, I suspect one of them might be archaeological in nature.  Suppose one has come across vast, interconnected underground facilities somewhere, that one suspects are (1) boobytrapped, and (2) potentially still occupied. Such facilities might be found in - oh, I don't know - Germany, for example, or Antarctica. In that case, one would need to develop technologies to map the layout and spot any potential boobytraps lovingly placed by the Waffen SS, or by ancient Atlanteans, or whomever. Of course, I jest (partially), but the point is clear: technology could both explore dangerous facilities and save lives. And of course, the use of such technologies would also require training humans to use them in such environments, and to do so when time is precious. This seems to me to be the most apparent explanation. And the allusion to the Waffen SS was to underscore the main point: such underground facilities are typical for black projects research in any country, and such facilities have check points, and boobytraps. According to some individuals, there are underground facilities in Germany to this day that have not been explored precisely because of the fear of boobytraps.

Ok, if that's so, then what are the other two possibilities? (This is the part where I've not only run to the end of the twig, but right off of it, and am now, like Wile E. Coyote, suspended in midair, arms and legs flailing wildly, with not a shred of corroborative or supportive evidence to support my speculation.)  If one looks at the implications of DARPA's tweet, at Mr. Novak's article, and my parsing of what he indicated were DARPA's responses to Gismodo's inquiries, there are other potential contexts and scenarios in which this combination of mapping robot-drones and humans operating in an unknown artificial environment and under time constraints would be useful: large spaceships, and facilities not  even on this planet, for if one stops and thinks about it, the technologies and training that are implied are viable or applicable in a variety of contexts, and hence, I would not be a bit surprised to learn that the human component of this training and experimentation will be run through a variety of scenarios along the lines I've outlined. And there's the fact of the recent creation of "the space force" to be considered, which I suspect is related to this announcement that DARPA is seeking elaborate underground structures.

And there's one more feature to note about these speculative scenarios I've advanced; they all fit the conditions of that last sentence cited above:

When someone said that the urgent need for a tunnel, “sounds both exciting and ominous,” Darpa replied, “even to us.”

See you on the flip side...

 

 

 

 

AI STUDY: THERE’S A THIRD UNKNOWN ANCESTOR IN THE HUMAN GENOME

Mr. V.T. spotted another intriguing story this week, and it concerns an intriguing finding in the latest computer data-crunching of the human genome:

AI Finds Traces of a Lost Species in Human DNA

Now, needless to say, I have some high octane speculation to advance about this, but first, let's find out what "this" is:

New research published last week in Nature Communications suggests a yet-to-be discovered hominin interbred with modern humans tens of thousands of years ago. This mystery species eventually went extinct, but an AI developed by researchers from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE) and several other European institutions found traces of its existence in the DNA of present-day people with Asian ancestry. A press release issued by the Centre for Genomic Regulation said it’s the first time deep learning has been used to explain human history, “paving the way for this technology to be applied in other questions in biology, genomics and evolution.”

The mystery hominin is likely a hybrid species of Neanderthals and Denisovans, according to the new research. Neanderthals, who lived in Europe, and Denisovans, who spread to Siberia, southeast Asia, and Oceania, were a closely related group of early humans, diverging from a common ancestor around 744,000 years ago. When anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) spilled into Eurasia from Africa, they commingled and interbred with both Neanderthals and Denisovans, which we know through genetic research. In addition to the generous amount of DNA left behind by the Neanderthals, scientists have extracted Denisovan DNA from a well-preserved finger bone found in a Siberian cave. Today, we find traces of these extinct species in the DNA of non-African humans, though only Asians retain genetic remnants of the Denisovans.

But as the new research suggests, modern humans, in addition to interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans, interbred with a third, albeit unknown, species.

There you have it: some unknown hominid/humanoid species interbred with humans about three quarters of a million years ago, and that species in turn was "likely a hybrid species of Neanderthals and Denisovans". And that would make us a hybrid of a hybrid. Moreover, this would appear to be the case in "the DNA of present-day people with Asian ancestry." And that leaves some questions unanswered: is the same property found, or not found, in non-Asian human populations? Is it found in Africans? Caucasians? If so, to what degree? And if not, why not?

I find the story extremely intriguing, not only for what it is saying, but what it is (perhaps) not saying, as exemplified in the following story that was shared by Mr. B:

China clones gene-edited monkeys

Now, Mr. B., when he shared this article, wondered just how far China is really in the techniques of cloning: cloning monkeys is not that far removed from cloning humans, and the significant thing here is that the monkeys in question had already been "gene-edited" for the express purpose of studying specific things. Indeed, recent months revealed the story that one Chinese geneticist had indeed tampered with the genome of a human baby. He was quickly denounced by the Chinese government, but I suspect less because he had done so, and more because he had revealed he had done so. With all of the ancient stories indicating some sort of ancient "genetic engineering project", from the Bible's Nephilim to the Apocrypha's "watchers" to Mesopotamia's Annunaki, one wonders if we're looking, perhaps, at yet another twist in that story? And given the story earlier this week of Biophotons and consciousness, one also has to wonder if our linguistic abilities are somehow "hardwired" into the human genome? And while we're on that, one also has to wonder if, in fact, the multitude of human languages might be somehow connected to an ancient "Tower of Babel" moment of history, if the multitude of langauges was genetically manipulated?

Of course, all that's very high octane speculation indeed. And there's not a shred of indication in either article that any connection to those ancient stories is intended or operative. But sooner or later, I suspect, some sort of interdisciplinary effort will have to be undertaken in that respect. And there's another "high octane speculative possibility" here, namely, that "they" really are thinking in those terms...

... they're just not telling us.

See you on the flip side...

WHAT’S THE NEW US EMBASSY IN BAGHDAD REALLY FOR?

I'm constantly amazed at the resourcefulness of the Gizar community for spotting the strange and unusual story, and this is one of those cases. When the story first came in, I read it, shrugged my shoulders, and thought, "well, that's interesting but hardly blog material." The story kept coming in in various articles that people were sending, and so I thought, "wait a minute, there's something going on and they're spotting it and I'm not." Now before we get to what finally made me consider this story, I'd better tell you what the story is about; it's about the new, and apparently, very large US Embassy in Baghdad, which, as embassies go, is not only huge, and hugely staffed, but apparently the hub of some sort of vast transportation enterprise:

The Secret Logistics of America’s Global Deep State

Now, I rarely count how many versions of an article people send me, but this time I did, and the total number of people who sent in some version of this story were around 23, as far as I can tell. Considering that I get an average of about 100-150 emails a day (best guesstimate), that places this story near the all-time high for people noticing it and bringing it to my attention. So what caught people's attention? This:

The world's largest embassy is situated in the Green Zone and fortified by three walls, another barrier of concrete slabs, followed by barbed wire fences and a wall of sandbags. It covers an area of 104 acres, six times larger than UN headquarters in New York and ten times larger than the new embassy Washington is building in Beijing – which is just 10 acres.

[Editor's' Note: The ten-acre US Embassy in Beijing is the second largest overseas construction project in the history of the Department of State — and the 104-acre US Embassy in Iraq is the largest.]

So, America's largest diplomatic mission is surrounded by high concrete walls, is painted in black, brown and grey and is completely isolated from its environment. … The United States announced several months ago that between diplomats and employees, its embassy would include 16,000 people after the pullout of US forces. (Emphases in the original)

But wait. That's not all:

More than a million kilograms of cargo were shipped from Baghdad to different parts of the world, reveals US embassies procurement documents.

Mysterious cargo shipments from the US Embassy in Baghdad to other American embassies and consulates around the world have been revealed on a Wikileaks' database. Procurement orders of US embassies are public documents, but Wikileaks put them in a searchable database making it easier to analyse.

The database displaying worldwide US embassy orders of goods and services reveals Baghdad as a postal and shipping centre for tonnes of freight.

So, we have a 104 acre embassy, with apparently over 16,000 employees, and it's a "post office" shipping things to just about everywhere apparently. In fact, over a million kilograms gives a whole new meaning to the immunity of a "diplomatic pouch" I suppose. And under the cover of the "diplomatic pouch" one could smuggle, I mean, ship...well, just about anything. We'll get back to that, because it's part of today's high octane speculation. As the article itself notes, the shipments include "containers" and, it argues, weapons. And all this, let us remember, under the aegis, apparently, of the US Department of State:

On 2 July 2017, the great investigative reporter Dilyana Gaytandzhieva headlined "350 Flights Carry Weapons Diplomatic for Terrorists”, and provided documentation of the US CIA’s intricate global network, which secretly “sends $1 billion worth of weapons” through many countries to jihadists in Syria to take down Syria’s Government. Iraq was mentioned 6 times in the original publication of her article, and is mentioned 9 times in the 29 April 2018 updated version. That secret US supply of weapons to jihadist groups to overthrow Bashar al-Assad and his secular, non-sectarian, Baathist Party, is a secret operation, just like the US State Department’s Baghdad Embassy’s operations are, and that Embassy could even be this particular operation’s headquarters.

Then, Mr. S.D. weighed in on the whole affair, and sent along another article:

The U.S. art market for stolen antiquities from Yemen must be shut down

Mr. S.D. wondered, as did a few others who sent along the story, if in fact part of those "containers" contained not weapons, but antiquities. Some even included articles about British Petroleum's recent discovery of yet another vast pool of oil beneath the Gulf of Mexico, putting to rest, they speculated, the narrative that the USA needed Middle East oil: if the USA is awash in oil, why is it still in the Middle East? Well, most regular readers here are aware of my own high octane speculation that the whole "weapons of mass destruction" and "we need to secure the oil" explanation was a bit of a cover story, to gain permanent access and control over the antiquities of the region. Dr. Heather Lynn has speculated that oil, and oil companies, were the cover for a similar "antiquities acquisition" scheme in Syria. So, Mr. S.D. wondered, is the war in Yemen really about the same thing?

But there are other possibilities, though I remain persuaded that antiquities is at least part of the agenda, after all, the US-sponsored Arab spring occurred in countries laden with antiquities, Lybia, Egypt, and of course, "their" sights have also focused on Iran, and Turkey, recent victim of a coup plot which Sultan Erdogan has always maintained was an American attempt to overthrow his regime, also has antiquities. Think only of Gobekli Tepi. And the allegations that antiquities trafficking was in part the funding mechanism for terrorist activity is fairly certain. But antiquities are probably only part of a wider agenda. A few months ago, stories began to circulate from the former Soviet republic of Georgia that local American consulates were also involved in covert bio-weapons programs and testing. Again, "shipments" were observed going in and out of the facilities, and the Georgian and Russian journalists covering the story speculated that bioweapons were being positioned for an eventual war with Russia. And all of it, again, under the aegis of the Department of State.

So what's going on? I suspect the speculation of the article, and of all the people sending the story, is true: some sort of vast logistics operation is under way using embassies. Literally anything could be being shipped, from weapons, antiquities, to more salacious cargoes, including drugs and humans, engraving plates for currencies, securities, you name it.

There's more to this story, I'm sure, and I don't know about you, but I suspect we'll be hearing more about it. The only problem is, this story is of such a nature that it will require a careful eye for connecting dots.

See you on the flip side...

 

 

THE ARCHEOLOGY WARS CONTINUE IN SYRIA

Mr. C.D.M. spotted this story on China's Xinhua news agency site, and I want to talk about it for today's high octane speculation:

Syria condemns "illegal excavations" by U.S., France, Turkey in northern Syria

This is, by now, a familiar pattern, or rather, interpretation of events: terrorist groups traffic in illegal artifacts as a means of funding their operations, and behind such groups, one has state actors: France, the USA, and so on:

The Syrian Foreign Ministry on Monday condemned what it called the "illegal excavations" in historic sites in northern Syria by the United States, France and Turkey, state news agency SANA reported.

The excavations are being carried out in the northern cities of Manbij and Afrin in Aleppo Province as well as in ancient sites in the northern cities of Idlib, Hasakah and Raqqa.

The ministry said it has information that the illegal excavation work has been increased in the areas where the aforementioned forces have a presence and a clout over local militia groups.

The pattern is as old as western imperialism itself: the Middle East has been plundered by a kind of "archeology imperialism" by France (think of Napoleon Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt, occasion of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and its deciphering by Champollion), Prussia-Germany (think of the Prussian Academy's drawings of the actual entrance to the Great Pyramid and its strange markings or glyphs, or Von Schliemann's discovery of Troy. Von Schliemann, it might be added, challenged the assumptions of the day that Troy was a fiction invented by Homer, but rather that it actually existed, and used clues in Homer to find it.). Or, more recently, think of the Baghdad Museum looting, and the alleged recovery of its artifacts, a story which never seems to mention the still-unaccounted for cuneiform tablets, or the recent story of Hobby Lobby trying to acquire some tablets under highly questionable circumstances.  I'm on record both on this website and in a few of my books as advancing the theory that the Baghdad Museum looting was more than a bit suspicious. I've even entertained the idea that the G.W. Bush administration's argument that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, when none were subsequently forthcoming from the American invasion of that country, may have been a bit of very clever misdirection: the USA may have been looking for weapons of mass destruction, but didn't find any of the conventional chemical, atomic, or biological variety, which is what most people think when they encounter the phrase or recall the story. But ancient weapons of mass destruction, or information about them, is off most people's radar. But that is, indeed, one of the agendas that I think is at work, perhaps to discover the ancient Tablets of Destinies referred to in Mesopotamian texts in contexts that suggest some sort of weapon of mass destruction was at work. I have entertained that a similar agenda is covertly at work behind the space program, with probes to the Moon, Mars, and most recently, the curiously named asteroid Bennu (which is also, I might add, a curiously shaped asteroid which intriguing "stuff" on its surface).

So, it should come as no surprise, if this covert "imperial archeology" game is indeed at work, that Syria would enter the picture, and how better than to conduct such an agenda than under the cover of terrorist groups trading in artifacts to fund their operations? It's a useful "cut-out" and cover story for such an agenda.  So is it going on in Syria?

Well, consider this. In a remarkable little book The Sumerian Controversy: A Special Report: The Elite Power Structure behind the Latest Discovery Near Ur, Dr. Heather Lynn recounts the strange power structure behind the excavations near Tell Khaiber in southern Iraq, a power structure that included an oil company in Texas(!) (p. 23), with connections to the widely known accounting firm Price Waterhouse and Lorne Thyssen of the German Thyssen family (p. 25), which of course had connections to Prescott Bush, whose son GHW was a Texas oilman, and whose own son, G.W., launched the Iraq invasion. Among some of the tablets found at the site, some allegedly contained information about Babylonian bloodlines. (p. 36).  Oh and did I mention that the oil company in question also had a significant block bought by... the Russians. You just can't make this stuff up.

So do I suspect that a similar network might be at work in Syria to explore and "recover" artifacts?

Yes I do.

See you on the flip side...

 

OF FOSSILS AND STRUCTURES AND TIRE TRACKS… IN ANTARCTICA

When Mr. M.S. sent me the link for the following video about the discovery of several  "somethings" in Antarctica, I was, at first, inclined to hit the "delete" button, as I do with about 99% of videos people send me. Sorry folks, it's just the reality of things: I simply do not have the time to watch videos from hundreds of people. But every now and then, one manages to pique my curiosity sufficiently that I have to watch. In this case, I was floored, flabbergasted, stunned, shocked; and there was more than just a queasy anxiety in the pit of my stomach, for if true, then it's definitely confirmation that "something" is "up" down there.

But first, let me hedge today's blog around with multiple riders, caveats, exemptions, exceptions, and cave legentibus: (1) I have no idea of the reliability of the site from which the video came; I did watch several other videos from the same site, just to get a "feel" for it, and I come away with some ambivalence, though I did not detect any intention willingly to dissemble, but that is a purely subjective assessment, and the reader may disagree; (2) the video links yet another video about "high Antarctic strangeness" that I also watched and will link below, which seems to "confirm" the anomalies found in the first video; (3) if true, what is shown in both videos is nothing less than stunning, and it tends to confirm my suspicions - stated most recently for example on the Richard Dolan Show - that the high strangeness going on in Antarctica may be due to the fact that they "found something"; if these videos are showing genuine anomalies, then that hypothesis has just been confirmed, and in spades; (4) this, however, must always be tempered by the fact that in today's digital age, anything can be "photoshopped". The question then becomes, who photoshopped what is seen, and why.  That said, I'd be remiss on a website that specializes in high octane speculation and "the weird" not to pass this along. Finally, an apology to readers: the videos will require about thirty minutes of your time. Again, I pass them along for their intrinsic prima facie interest.

That said, here is the video sent by Mr. M.S.:

And here is the second video that the above video referred that I also investigated:

Now, if you've managed to make it through both videos, there are a number of things that stand out to my mind, and which form the focus of my daily dose of high octane speculation. Again, for the sake of argument, let us assume that the anomalies highlighted in both videos is genuine. What, then, emerges? Firstly, I note that the anomalies for the most part, as far as I can tell, fall within the general regions that were either "invaded" or that were explored by aerial photogrammetry mapping missions by Admiral Richard Byrd in the well-known Operation High Jump, 1946-1947. Let me underscore that once again: they are within the general regions in which Operation High Jump took place. A careful and detailed examination of this correspondence I did not do; and thus this remains a merely qualitative "first glance" assessment.  Secondly, what is also interesting and intriguing to me is that the author of both of these videos, who calls himself "Florida Maquis" and who did a great deal of yeoman's work on these videos, also did yet another video in which he examines other Antarctic anomalies which fall within the general region explored by the 1938-1939 German expedition in the region they called Neuschwabenland, otherwise known as Queen Maud Land. Thirdly, if these anomalies are genuine, then my hypothesis that the reason for all the recent strangeness in Antarctica, from the sudden visit of former Secretrary of State John Kerry to the visit of Patriarch Kiril III of Moscow, to Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin - who incidentally made several strange tweets on his Twitter account both prior to and after his visit, one of which was a tweet that was quickly taken down that what was down there was "pure evil" - assumes a context that they did not have before: they were most probably down there have a first hand look at these anomalies for themselves. The sudden interest of Turkey in Antarctica would also make sense, because if these anomalies are genuinely there, then it stands to reason that there is a lot of quiet discussion taking place in the background by the "powers that be."

The anomalies themselves are worth commenting on: again, if genuine, then they are showing three basic classes of "things" there: (1) structures indicating an intelligent origin; (2) fossil-like remains that are quite large; and (3) anomalies both on or beneath the land surface, and beneath the coastal waters, whose exact nature is unknown, but which in some cases exhibit recurring rectilinearity. With respect to the last class, recall that Russia was going to send elements of its Baltic Fleet to Antarctica, along with a "spy ship" to do coastal explorations off the continent.

To put all this high octane speculation as succinctly as possible: if the anomalies are indeed genuine, than we now have clear evidence that there may once have been some sort of civilization on the continent, but of a very bizarre nature, given the "fossils" displayed in the second video. The author of the videos, "Florida Maquis", also points out that these anomalies are not necessarily visible from a simple Google Earth search, but rather, that one can only view them in the professional version, and even then, only by using the time stamp feature, which, he maintains, is a simple but effective way that "the powers that be" have been hiding things; something might be visible, or hidden, in the year (to pick a date at random) 2011, that will not be visible in the same area if one only looks at 2018, which as he also correctly points out, most people will do.

Which brings me to a second high octane speculation: let us assume - again only for the sake of argument - that the anomalies uncovered by "Florida Maquis" were indeed photoshopped and injected into the Google Earth (pro version) data stream. The question then becomes "who did it" and "why"? Here, I suspect, a team of delinquent hackers playing an elaborate practical joke on the rest of us, while possible, is only barely so. If such occurred, in my opinion it would be much more likely that it would come from "much higher up." The question then becomes "why", and here I suspect that the reason is simply to create both a misdirection, and to keep attention focused on Antarctica, but to misdirect it. Why be concerned, for example, about Lockheed-Martin's presence in Antarctica, if there are large "fossils" of a large "something" to be found there?

When all is said and done, I am left with that same queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach that these pictures may be genuine, rather than a faked deception and misdirection, for if genuine, they explain a lot of the strange history of that continent in the decades immediately prior to World War Two, and ever since. In other words, if one assumes their genuineness, then they explain much of the hidden reasons for the recent strange interests and activities there. If one assumes for the sake of argument that these anomalies are genuine, then they explain the presence and associations of Aldrin, Kiril III, John Kerry, and many others in and with Antarctica. For the moment, my vote is on the genuine side.

See you on the flip side...

1536242536810

YOU DON’T SAY: RUSSIAN SCIENTISTS SAY GREAT PYRAMID FOCUSES ...

I suspect that as soon as Ms. M.K. and Mr. S.D. sent along the following articles, that they knew I'd blog about them. Well, here I am, blogging about them. Now, for those of you in Harvard yard or MIT, you're fully entitled to reserve me a first class seat in a rubber room on this one, because once again, like the goat that I am, i'm going to run right out to the end of the twig of High Octane Speculation on this one.  I might, and probably will, find myself like Wile E. Coyote, flailing away madly with all four limbs and making great progress, until I realize there is nothing beneath me, and plummet into the canyon below. The Observer principle in modern physics can be a bitch.

Capricorns speculating...

Now the two articles in question are these, one from the UK's famous tabloid, The Daily Mail, and the other from Russia's Sputnik online magazine:

Secrets of the Great Pyramid of Giza continue to unravel as scientists discover it can focus electromagnetic energy through its hidden chambers

Blast From the Past: Great Pyramid 'Concentrator' of Radio Waves – Study

Now, color me surprised. This comes a merely a near two decades after Chris Dunn's study, The Giza Power Plant, and almost the same amount of time after my Giza Death Star trilogy, in which both of us argued essentially the same thing. For Dunn, certain properties of the Great Pyramid suggested to him that the machine was designed to modulate acoustic information into microwaves.  I expanded the idea and elaborated a hypothesis that the structure was a coupled harmonic oscillator to the structure of local space. Either way, one has the idea that it was a manipulator of electromagnetic energy either as a primary or secondary function of its purpose. (Oh, by the way: to the good folks at the Daily Mail, the picture in your article is not the Great Pyramid, it's the other large pyramid at Giza, though people often get confused on that score.)

One must not assume that I'm chastising the Russians for being "late to the game" here. I'm not. In fact, as I pointed out in The Giza Death Star Deployed, the Russians were doing all sorts of classified experimental research into "pyramid power" during the Soviet era, research which only came to light after the fall of the Soviet Union. One of the people involved was Ukrainian physicist Dr. Volodomyr Krasnoholovets, who published some very interesting papers in topology with Michael Bounias, and whose work was made known to Great Pyramid enthusiasts by the American biophysicist, Dr. John DeSalvo's Great Pyramid of Giza Research Association. And if you're familiar with the "psychic research literature," this program of research may have been based on the Czechoslovakian research of the late 1960s and 1970s that was disclosed in Ostrander's book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain.

So, no high octane speculation there. What intrigued me was this comment in the Daily Mail article:

Scientists have found that the famous pyramid can concentrate electric and magnetic energy in its chambers and below its base, giving rise to distinct pockets of higher energy.

This is accompanied by some graphs of the showing concentrations of energy below the structure itself, a feature which I particularly find fascinating, since I outlined in those Giza Death Star books a hypothetical case that the structure was deliberately designed to oscillate the Earth, and to project energy into it.  It literally "moves the Earth," an intriguing hypothesis if one grants Mr. Dunn's hypothesis that it was designed, in part, to modulate acoustic information into the radio-microwave end of the spectrum.

While all that was high octane speculation at the time we were advancing it, it now appears that it may no longer be so "high" in its octane, but merely speculation which, at this point, may have been pointing in the right direction.

So where's the high octane speculation here?

Well, I have to wonder about the timing of this release. As I outlined in The Giza Death Star Destroyed, the research of the Soviet era that was known at that time said pretty much the same thing as this latest Russian study. This latest study is adding some new details, but not changing the overall picture. But perhaps the Russians are trying to send messages with this latest release, the message being, perhaps, that they know a whole lot more than they're really saying, and they're producing the graphs and charts to drive the point home.  Now that I've crawled to the end of the twig, permit me to run right off of it, for I to this day find it intriguing that the two books of mine that have been published in Russia are precisely The Giza Death Star, and The SS Brotherhood of the Bell. Perhaps, indeed, the Russians are sending messages...

See you on the flip side...

THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO “HMMM….”: MACH THRUSTERS, ...

Mr. P.J. spotted this article and shared it with me this past week, and I have to express my deep gratitude, for this is one of those papers that makes you go "Hmmmm..." Indeed, as we shall see, there are many things in this paper that make you go "hmmm", and many of them probably weren't even intended to do so by its authors. Needless to say, I have to indulge my penchant for high octane end-of-the-twig-beyond-the-weight-of-evidence speculation.

First things first, though, so here's the paper:

SP2018_016 Page 1 The SpaceDrive Project – First Results on EMDrive and Mach-Effect Thrusters

What caught my attention here was not the usual attention on the so-called EM thruster, a device which claims to generate thrust by the interaction of microwaves in a conical waveguide, but rather, the focus on the Mach thruster, which derives its thrust from the acoustic cavitation of crystals! Here's the essence of the idea, from the paper itself:

The second concept to be studied in detail is the so-called Mach-Effect thruster which is being developed by J.F. Woodward since the 1990s and more recently by H. Fearn [19]–[22]. It is based on one interpretation of Mach’s principle (inertia here is due to mass out there), that inertial mass is due to the gravitational interaction with the whole universe [23]. Woodward and others showed that linearized general  relativity theory with time-varying solutions and Sciama’s analysis altogether leads to mass fluctuations that can be up to 11 orders of magnitude higher for typical devices than classically expected from E=m.c² [24].
    In the Mach-Effect thruster, a stack of clamped piezo crystals is excited using a frequency in the tens of kHz range. According to Woodward, this energy oscillations leads to transient Machian-mass variations that can lead to time-averaged stationary thrusts if they are properly pushed and pulled with the correct frequency and phase. This is believed to happen thanks to the piezoelectric and electrostrictive material properties of piezo crystals. Although at much smaller amplitudes, electrostriction happens at twice the applied frequency and at a 90° phase shift, which is required for stationary thrust [22],[24]. A large brass reaction mass can amplify this effect. A schematic sketch of the thruster as well as an actual thruster and a corresponding ANSYS odel is shown in Fig. 11. We are working on analytical as well as finite element models to accurately predict the oscillation movements on the thruster (verified using laser vibrometry) in order to predict and enhance the thrust produced. (Emphasis added)
Of course, all sorts of science fiction, and science factoid, came flooding into my mind reading this. On the science fiction side, one could not help but think of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek series of science fiction television series, in all its various morphologies from the original series to Deep Space Nine, with their constant reference to "di-lithium crystals" being somehow a key or crucial component to warp drive engines, and hence to the ability to transit whole star systems in a few days' time. One was never told, of course, how exactly crystals operating in anti-matter/matter reactors worked, but nevermind, this was science fiction. Sit back, enjoy the show, and eat your popcorn. (Maybe "dilithium" simply referred to the matter and antimatter versions of the element? Oh, nevermind... back to the popcorn.)
What's much more intriguing is the idea that acoustic cavitation of piezo-electric crystals can produce mass variations that "can lead to time-averaged stationary thrusts if properly pushed and pulled with the correct frequency and phase." Indeed, one wonders if plasmas, with their own unique semi-lattice structures, could do the same (Dr. Ronald Richter, anyone?) The idea of direct relationships between crystals, mass, and gravity and the local lattice structure of a particular local space is, of course, roughly the idea I was getting at in the various pyramid books. One wonders if, indeed, thus pulsed Machian piezo-electric thrust effect could generate longitudinal waves in the medium. My guess is yes, but that's a long story. The bottom line here is the connection of piezoelectric effect, acoustic cavitation at the proper resonate frequencies, and the resulting pulsed inertial mass effect leading to thrust. One wonders, indeed, if this principle could be coupled the concept of warp drive, ala Miguel Alcubierre and Dr. Harold White, and "scaled up" to produce the requisite mass-energy conversions necessary for a practical warp drive, which, if that were the case, would be a pulsed phenomenon, and hence, capable of producing those shadowy longintudinal waves in the medium. (And that in turn, of course, would raise the dreaded weaponization potentialities).
It's that relationship that leads me to my really high octane speculation at the end of today's twig. To get there, let's look at a statement toward the end of this paper:
The SpaceDrive project aims at developing cutting-edge measurement equipment to thoroughly test the latest EMDrive and Mach-Effect thruster models, the two most promising revolutionary thruster concepts that are presently under investigation at various labs. Our thrust balances shall provide the necessary resolution and investigate electromagnetic and thermal artefacts to obtain reliable measurements in order to confirm or refute the claimed thrusts.
     First measurement campaigns were carried out with both thruster models reaching thrust/thrust-to-power levels comparable to claimed values. However, we found that e.g. magnetic interaction from twisted-pair cables and amplifiers with the Earth’s magnetic field can be a significant error source for EMDrives. We continue to improve our measurement setup and thruster developments in order to finally assess if any of these concepts is viable and if it can be scaled up.
     In addition, a number of complementary experiments are carried out to investigate e.g. Machian-mass variations with an alternative rotary setup. (Emphasis added)
In other words, when the experiments were performed on the EM and Mach-crystal thrusters, results commensurate with prior claims for the devices were indeed measured, but these engineers are concerned that some of these readings are effects of inadequate shielding from the power cables to the devices. A proper concern. But what intrigued me about their concluding remarks was not this, but rather, the remark about re-performing the experiments under conditions were the thruster assemblies are in rotation, a clear clue that they are aware of potential torsion effects that could render the thrusters more efficient.
This got me to thinking, and those thoughts are the subject of today's end-of-the-twig high octane speculation. What other way might there be to make the thrust of these crystal structures more efficient? Crystals grow in such a way that their lattice defects, I believe, are responses to the minute variations in the structure of local space-time. In this sense, they are records of those variations. For this reason, crystals grown in outer space, in zero or near zero gravity, are found to be "purer" in the sense that these lattice defects - screw defects, displacement defects, and so on -  are not nearly so prevalent. So I have to wonder if such crystals as used in these Mach thrusters, if grown in such conditions, might generate either an amplifying, or damping, effect on the resulting thrust, or, to restate the speculation in a slightly different form, if crystals grown in a certain local region will enhance the thrust effect of such devices when they are used in that region. I suspect that we may eventually discover that these things are the case.
But if so, wouldn't that restrict their potential use outside the region in which they were grown? Yes, possibly.
But that's where modifiable crystals - liquid crystals, even plasmas - might come in.
In any case, that's today's high octane end of the twig speculation.
See you on the ...
... oh, by the way, did you notice another odd thing? Consider this:
We gratefully acknowledge the support for SpaceDrive by the German National Space Agency DLR (Deutsches Zentrum fuer Luft- und Raumfahrttechnik) by funding from the Federal
Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) by approval from German Parliament (50RS1704). We would also like to acknowledge the support from J. Heisig, W. Stark, C. Holzapfel, J. Woodward and H. Fearn for their contributions to the ongoing experiments.
...Hmmm.... I've always wondered why modern Germany isn't very interested in rockets.
See you on the flip side...

 

WHAT IF THERE REALLY WAS A VERY HIGH CIVILIZATION IN THE MISTS OF ...

So many people have sent me this story over the last few days, that it would be hazardous to ignore it, and impossible to thank everyone. It's easy to see why it has caught people's attention, for the story - in various versions - has been appearing in the lamestream corporate controlled media and their approved organs; major magazines have run some version of it. What really caught my eye was when it finally made the pages of Scientific American. Of course, the idea of a very ancient high civilization - human or otherwise - based on this planet in the mists of prehistory is usually derided and even lampooned by contemporary academic orthodoxy. That's not saying much, in an age when the academy is busily transforming itself into the quackademy.

Such ideas are fantasy, "Atlantis theories," and so on. We were always told that there's no evidence of anything in pre-history resembling either an industrial or other sort of technological civilization. To be sure, there was the odd "factoid" or two in Sir Flinders Petrie's Pyramids and Monuments of Giza, or a transatlantic anomaly in Ignatius Donnelly or Hapgood's Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, there might even - as some alleged - be weird connections between Cydonia on Mars and Silbury Hill in England(!). It was all dismissed as "coincidence", if it was given even that dignity.

Something has therefore changed, if lamestream corporate media sources - or journals like Scientific American - are willing even to talk about the theory. The questions are: what changed, and why? We'll get back to that, because it forms today's high octane speculation.

Here's the article, shared by so many people I cannot thank you all:

Could an Industrial Prehuman Civilization Have Existed on Earth before Ours? A provocative new paper suggests some ways to

Now, of course, the paper is not admitting of the actual existence of such a civilization, but merely suggesting a way to find out. The bets are still being hedged, in other words. What intrigued me here was that two new proposals are being advanced. The article begins with a stunning paragraph whose implications are immediately apparent if one wants to entertain the premise as being true for the sake of argument:

One of the creepier conclusions drawn by scientists studying the Anthropocene—the proposed epoch of Earth’s geologic history in which humankind’s (sic.) activities dominate the globe—is how closely today’s industrially induced climate change resembles conditions seen in past periods of rapid temperature rise. (Emphasis added)

The implicit presuppositions here are (1) previous eras of climate change resemble the current era (2) some of the current era's change is industrially driven, with the unstated conclusion hovering in the spaces between the lines: (3) therefore, previous eras of such change might be a potential indicator of some prior industrial civilization. The hidden premise here is that such prior civilizations had a similar physics, technology, and energy-financial system to our own. I've written a great deal of speculation to the contrary, but at least the overall basic idea is now being seriously entertained.

That, folks, in and of itself, is a revolution.

The article goes on to explain how, in this case, the openness to the question even occurred:

The canonical example of a hyperthermal is the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a 200,000-year period that occurred some 55.5 million years ago when global average temperatures rose by 5 to 8 degrees Celsius (about 9 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit). Schmidt has pondered the PETM for his entire career, and it was on his mind one day in his office last year when the University of Rochester astrophysicist Adam Frank paid him a visit.

Frank was there to discuss the idea of studying global warming from an “astrobiological perspective”—that is, investigating whether the rise of an alien industrial civilization on an exoplanet might necessarily trigger climate changes similar to those we see during Earth’s own Anthropocene. But almost before Frank could describe how one might search for the climatic effects of industrial “exocivilizations” on newly discovered planets, Schmidt caught him up short with a surprising question: “How do you know we’re the only time there’s been a civilization on our own planet?”

Frank considered a moment before responding with a question of his own: “Could we even tell if there had been an industrial civilization [long before this one]?”

"Would such traces even be detectable today?" becomes the central question. And here's where it gets even more intriguing, for it turns out that the ability of artifacts of such a civilization to survive in the geological record is...well...small:

Today, less than 1 percent of Earth’s surface is urbanized, and the chance that any of our great cities would remain over tens of millions of years is vanishingly low, says Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester in England. A metropolis’s ultimate fate, he notes, mostly depends on whether the surrounding surface is subsiding (to be locked in rock) or rising (to be eroded away by rain and wind). “New Orleans is sinking; San Francisco is rising,” he says. The French Quarter, it seems, has much better chances of entering the geologic record than Haight–Ashbury.

“To estimate the odds of finding artifacts,” Schmidt says, “The back-of-the-envelope calculation for dinosaur fossils says that one fossil emerges every 10,000 years.” Dinosaur footprints are rarer still.

“After a couple of million years,” Frank says, “the chances are that any physical reminder of your civilization has vanished, so you have to search for things like sedimentary anomalies or isotopic ratios that look off.” The shadows of many prehuman civilizations could, in principle, lurk hidden in such subtleties.

Or to put this point country simple and with the elegant observation of Stanton Friedman regarding UFOs: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Indeed, the article even cites this statement of Mr. Friedman without noting that he has made it many times over the course of many years and many UFO-related investigations, but seems unaware of its origin and the context in which it was originally made (or, perhaps, does know, but simply is unwilling to "go there").

In this respect, the article goes on to point out that if such a civilization had energy requirements similar to our own, and had developed a similar technology reliant upon so-called fossil fuels, then its likely longevity would be very short relative to the long periods of the geological record - just as ours is - and would leave a very small footprint there. (And of course, I and others would argue, and have argued, that this ancient civilization shows all the signs of having a very different physics and understanding of energy, and hence its footprint might be very different.)

Of course, all of this falls far short of admitting the existence of such a civilization; it merely raises questions of how one might go about looking for it.

So what and why is this apparent change happening? I suspect that, in one sense, the pressures to entertain the idea are becoming - if not overwhelming - then at least heavy enough to be dealt with. After all, if one really has followed the stories from space and the rich lore of anomalies and anomalous "structure" on nearby celestial bodies, and couples that with the growing body of literature and evidence of similar anomalies on this planet, that maintaining the simple "academic" and "scientific" dismissal and denial of such possibilities is becoming increasingly difficult.

That's only part of the "why", however, for I strongly suspect that the other question at work here is "how do we reassert control over the narrative"? For that is what I suspect may be going on here. What we might be seeing emerge, in other words, is a limited hangout, a fall-back position, a "marketing scheme," to keep the narrative firmly in the hands of the scientific priesthoods and orthodoxies and gatekeepers, for notably, the template by which the whole hypothesis is to be examined and entertained is that of our own current civilization. This provides a tight control on the types of data to be admitted and discussed: current alleged climate change, and earlier periods, current paradigms of energy, "fossil fuels" and so one; what is carefully excluded on such an approach is any viewpoint that looks at the past and its monuments as possibly embodying very different paradigms of energy and technology.

And another thought - the most highly end-of-the-twig-no-extant-evidence-speculation of them all - occurs to me in connection with the question "why now?" I cannot resist the thought that perhaps maybe someone learned something in their private and hidden translations of some of those old looted and recovered cuneiform tablets.

There... I said it.

See you on the flip side...