Sunday 27 June 1999

New guide leads you to best places to see UFOs

Isn't it about time you got yourself some good ol' alien abduction insurance, tuned into radio UFO and hit the road - or the skies, your choice - to check out for yourownself all of those mysterious phenomena-type things that the government is trying to keep you from learning about?
Friends, we're not just full of glowing swamp gas when we tell you that this here book - UFO USA: A Traveler's Guide to UFO Sightings, Abduction Sites, Crop Circles, and Other Unexplained Phenomena (Hyperion, $12.95) - is loaded with locations pertinent to crop circles, unaccounted-for lights, non-human intelligences and extraterrestrial biological entities. It's enough to spin your saucers.

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These are some of the favorite sites of editor David Borgenicht:

Rachel, Nev.
Nicknamed the Extraterrestrial Highway by clever state tourism promoters, Highway 375 cuts through tiny Rachel and some of the Mojave Desert's most desolate turf. Nearby, the off-limits Area 51 is the site of a "supposed secret military base near Groom Lake, about 90 miles north of Las Vegas, and ostensibly where scientists have studied fallen alien spacecraft." Don't miss the Little A'Le'Inn, Rachel's only motel/bar.

Roswell, N.M.
In July 1947, officials from a nearby military base announced that a UFO had crashed outside town. The next day, officials updated the statement, saying the object was an experimental weather balloon. That didn't stop UFO buffs, not to mention local promoters, from making the most of the incident - whatever it was. Today the town throws a yearly UFO festival and draws tourists with its UFO museum and shops peddling T-shirts with messages such as "I was abducted by aliens and all I got was this stupid T-shirt."

Hudson Valley/Pine Bush, N.Y.
Waves of UFO sightings, "including saucers and boomerang-shaped objects hovering over the nearby nuclear power plant," make the region "one of the best sky-watching areas in the northeast." Unlike in Roswell, however, locals haven't embraced UFOs as a civic theme. Best vantage points are on Searsville and Drexel roads.

Sedona, Ariz.
The massive rust-colored swirls of rock that make this area so visually stunning are said to contain high amounts of electromagnetic energy. "It's thought these same forces attract UFOs. A good place to watch for them is on the road to the airport on a high mesa." Along the way, you'll likely encounter new-agers, crystal-gazers and other devotees of woo woo. "You're odd in Sedona if you haven't seen a UFO."

Los Angeles
Head straight for Griffith Park Observatory, where a range of telescopes provides ideal stargazing on clear nights. "There's been on-again, off-again UFO activity around Los Angeles." Even if you don't get lucky with a saucer sighting, "you'll definitely see a lot of unidentified walking objects in L.A."

Gulf Breeze, Fla.
In 1987 a contractor took some snapshots of what was purported to be a UFO. The photos' authenticity is still debated, but they haven't been debunked, either, and Gulf Breeze has become "one of the hottest UFO hot spots." Watchers routinely meet at Shoreline Park in search of the otherworldly.

La Grange, Ga.
UFO sightings date to 1938, when a local teen reported seeing a domed saucer in broad daylight. "There have been dozens of photographs, videos and witness reports of saucers or tube-shaped ships, as well as fireballs moving across the sky." Among the prime sky-watching spots: Roosevelt State Park in Pine Mountain, around the lakes near West Point Dam and along the Troup-Heard county line. Viewing is best after 10 on weeknights.

Siler City, N.C.
About 10 miles south of town is the Devil's Playground, a 30- or 40-foot circle that is stripped of vegetation. "(Some) believe nothing will grow there because it was a well-used UFO landing spot. Others say nothing will grow there because people keep trampling over it looking for a UFO landing spot."

Anti-aging from MotherNature.com

NASA telescope seeks to uncover Big Bang records


Monday 21 June 1999
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Link to NASA's newest space telescope is set for launch tomorrow on an archaeological expedition to uncover a fossilized record of the birth of the universe.
Mounted atop a Boeing Delta 2 rocket, the $120 million telescope will search out the chemical remnants of the "Big Bang," the primordial explosion scientists think created the universe 12 billion to 15 billion years ago.
Targeting stars, galaxies and the gasses swirling between them, the 1 1/2-ton telescope is expected to provide information on the elemental makeup of the universe just moments after it began.
That, in turn, will help astronomers understand how stars are born, how galaxies evolve, and the way chemicals first were created and then distributed throughout the universe.
The telescope-carrying satellite is NASA's Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, known as FUSE.
The 18-foot-tall spacecraft carries a sophisticated spectrograph - a device that breaks ultraviolet light into component colors. Those colors reveal the chemical makeup of objects being targeted by the telescope and the interstellar gasses between them.
FUSE's archaeological dig will center on the beginning of time. In this case, the sought-after fossils are evidence of a hydrogen isotope - deuterium - created solely in the Big Bang. Spewed into interstellar space, deuterium is constantly consumed by stars as they are born, evolve and eventually destroyed in supernova explosions. These explosions reseed interstellar space with new generations of stars, which then continue to deplete the universe's stock of deuterium.
By studying stars in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies with FUSE, scientists intend to determine how fast deuterium is disappearing. Getting a good handle on the rate of consumption will enable them to work backward mathematically, pinning down the amount of deuterium and other matter present just after the Big Bang.
As a result, astronomers will be able to tackle some of the most important questions in cosmology, such as:
-- What conditions were like in the minutes following the Big Bang.
-- How do stars and planets form from the matter embedded in interstellar gasses.
-- Do the Milky Way and other galaxies have vast cosmic fountains that spew hot gasses and matter, ultimately giving birth to sun-like stars and planetary systems.
FUSE is the first such project to be designed, managed and operated entirely by a college, in this case Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Naturopathic Medicine from MotherNature.com

Eureka! Ancient Manuscript to be Restored


Sunday 20 June 1999
In 1906, Danish classicist Johan Ludvig Heiberg opened an old book in the private library of the Metochion of the Holy Sepulcher in Istanbul and began to scrutinize it with a magnifying glass. Heiberg had found seven treatises in the original Greek by Archimedes, regarded as the greatest mathematician of antiquity and one of the greatest in history, perhaps without equal before Sir Isaac Newton. One of the treatises had been lost for nearly a thousand years.
Over the years it had been moved at least five times, deliberately defaced, scorched in a fire, threatened by an earthquake and battered in political upheavals ranging from the Fourth Crusade to World War I.
The 10th-century copy of the Archimedes text was overwritten nearly 300 years later by someone, probably a monk, who needed parchment for a how-to manual on the prayers and rites of the Greek Orthodox Church. The monk scraped the Archimedes from the goatskin parchment, tore the pages in half, turned them 90 degrees and rebound them in a different order.
Archimedes was born around 287 B.C. in Syracuse, Sicily, and died in 212 or 211 B.C., when the city was sacked by Roman legions. Legend holds that he was killed because he talked back to a Roman soldier who accosted him as he worked on a mathematical problem - infuriating the soldier by, in effect, telling him, "Don't bother me."
Archimedes tales
This was only one of many tales, real and fanciful alike, spread about Archimedes, renowned in his lifetime for his Edison-like genius as an inventor, tinkerer, physicist and practical engineer. As a student in Alexandria, Egypt, he devised the Archimedean screw, a corkscrew-like scoop cranked inside a pipe to remove water from flooded fields, still used today.
He also is credited with inventing a variety of war machines - catapults, grappling hooks and the like - that kept the Romans at bay for several years. He is said to have built a "missile thrower" able to hurl tree trunks with enough force to collapse the sides of enemy ships.
Some tales are a stretch
Discounted, however, is the story that Archimedes was able to burn ships with sunshine reflected from mirrors embedded in a hillside. And although he understood and developed the math associated with levers and fulcrums, he probably did not say, "Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth."
Also too good to be true, historians believe, is his most famous quote. Asked by King Hieron II to determine whether a new crown supposedly made of gold had been adulterated with base metal, Archimedes decided to immerse it in a pail of water and weigh the overflow. The inspiration reportedly occurred while he was taking a bath, prompting him to jump up and run naked through town shouting "Eureka!" ("I've found it!").
But the science that informed Archimedes' gimmicks was no joke. The crown trick is an application of "Archimedes' principle" - that a solid, when immersed in water, will appear to be lighter by the weight of the water it displaces. That mathematical proof is presented in "On Floating Bodies" - a treatise unknown in Greek until the discovery of the palimpsest.

Herbs from MotherNature.com

Nobel Winner To Head UP Search For Life In Space

20 MAY 99
SAN FRANCISCO-- Link to NASA's scientific search for alien life now has a world- famous director, a Nobel laureate.
Baruch Blumberg, who won the 1976 Nobel for physiology and medicine will be the new head of the Astrobiology Institute.
Best known for his work in developing the hepatitis B vaccine. The number of people worldwide afflicated with hepititis B has plunged dramatically since Blumberg's discovery.
The search for possible life on Mars and other worlds has attracted growing attention from NASA in recent years, and Blumberg should bring powerful and committed leadership
The Astrobology Instutite was founded last year. It is more a virtual organization than a physical one. using computer networks it ties together researchers at NASA centers, universities and other institutions. Its researchers study not only the possiblity of alien life but how life began on Earth.

HOME PC Users Can Help Search For Extraterrestrial Life

17 May 99
The Planetary Society starts distributing a special computer program tomorrow that will allow computer owners to monitor radio whispers from outer space.
Called the SETIhome project--"search for extraterrestrial intelligence"--the program will use the idle power of personal computers to analyse radio signals collected by radio telescopes.
The Pasadena, California - based society says you can download the program from two Web sites: [Plantary Society] or [SETIhome]
The computer program will work like a screen saver. It will automatically download a small segment of radio noise from the SETI Web site, then search the data for radio signals.
When the analysis is completed, the data will automatically go back to SETI headquarters.
The screen-saver image will show the analysis under way and a map of the part of the sky being scanned.


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