Psychics Say Apollo 16 Astronauts Found Alien Ship

Over the past 50 years, billions of dollars have been spent visiting our nearest neighbor in space, the moon. It’s the only extraterrestrial body humans have ever walked on. Besides the United States and Russia, Japan, China, India and the European Space Agency have all sent robotic spacecraft moonward.

Probably the most prolific of these missions, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), is stockpiling close to 1 million pictures of the lunar surface that are so sharp, you could see a coffee table nestled among the boulders.

Astrobiologist and physicist Paul Davies recently said that LRO’s public-accessible photos should be perused by a citizen science program to look for any alien artifacts left on the moon.

But why bother? says a group of parapsychology sleuths who accuse NASA of hiding evidence of aliens on the lunar surface. Their wild tales sound like an amalgamation of Hollywood sci-fi movies: “Apollo 18,” “Minority Report” and “Alien.”

They say that a psychic technique called remote viewing allows people to take an armchair visit to other planets. The mind-travelers draw images of alien-looking things that are supposedly transmitted from a definitely out-of-body experience (potentially) millions of miles from Earth.

In the 1960s, when psychoactive drugs became widely popular, I assumed that claims of tripping to other worlds were purely imaginary. Consider this remote viewing experience reported in a discussion forum:

“…i relaxed in my chair, and pointed myself up there. I saw 6 or seven aliens looking right at me grinning and smiling. they had red eyes like the reddit alien but no antenna. As soon as I saw these creatures i immediately felt hurt …”

The roots of remote viewing can be traced to several U.S. Government sponsored parapsychology studies from the 1970s to 1990s. When funding was canceled in 1995, an executive summary concluded that the remote viewing test results were at best “vague and ambiguous.”

Government involvement (and gullibility) alone doesn’t legitimize what is clearly a pseudoscience that ranks alongside astrology, ghost hunting, and “telekinetic” spoon-bending.

As with any pseudoscience, there are no physical underpinnings to the outlandish claims of remote viewing. In other words, no natural particles or fields capable of carrying information into the human brain, independently from the five senses, have ever been quantitatively measured in a physics laboratory.

And, as is typical of a pseudoscience, remote viewing claims contradict fundamental physics such as the speed of light barrier and causality.

Censored Spaceship

But pseudoscience dies hard. A group called Transception Incorporated, self-described as an Austin, Texas based psychic R&D operation, sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden that nominates the Apollo 16 crew for the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.

But there are strings attached.

This is a very transparent quid pro quo because the medal is being recommended for astronauts John Young and Charles Duke allegedly coming upon an extraterrestrial “shipwreck” on the surface of the moon during their third lunar surface excursion on April 23, 1972. A prerequisite for the award is that the crew is “released from secrecy” about what they really saw on the moon.

A variety of “shipwreck elements” — described as “structures, people/aliens, biological technology, and their plight” — were reportedly seen through remote viewing by six experts at Transception.

The “wreckage” suspiciously looks a lot like just a big boulder, dubbed “house rock” (NASA video clip above). And, you’d expect to find big boulders on the edge of an impact crater.

Simply look at the high resolution images posted here from the public-accessible Apollo archives. A photo mosaic of the alleged spaceship (above) is either a boulder or a fossilized alien vehicle.

The alleged crash site, as seen in the Lunar Orbiter photo on the left, is pretty bland-looking for a purported disaster location. It’s like looking for a capsized cruise liner and just seeing a shoal of rocks.

If you listen to the audio transmission, the astronauts should get an Academy Award for acting instead — if the conspiracy theorists are right. The crew never says “holy cow! look at that spaceship!” Instead, they say, “look at the size of that rock!”

Besides the Apollo photos, you can easily go online and peruse LRO image of the Apollo 16 landing site and go looking for the alleged spaceship on the rim of North Ray Crater.

But wait! As is typical of any pseudoscience, when reality doesn’t fit the far-out claims, true believers turn to paranoid allegations of government cover-ups, monolithic global conspiracies and media censorship.

Supporters of the crashed spaceship tale say that NASA simply deleted the evidence from the Apollo 16 photos (and they would probably say the same for the LRO data). Because the Apollo images are recorded on photographic emulsion, not digital data, manipulating them would be no small trick.

Photo trickery allegations are a convenient back door for conspiracy buffs that is big enough to sail the Titanic through.

The Pluto Challenge

For any readers who think I’m being scientifically elitist, narrow-minded or protective, I’m presenting one simple challenge. Will somebody please remote view the icy dwarf planet Pluto for me from a close-up distance?

You must draw a map of both hemispheres that has detailed information about the coordinates and sizes of major features: impact basins, crater fields, ice flows, outcrops, tectonics rifts, cryovolcanoes, whatever — even crashed spaceships.

The best pictures of Pluto to date, from the Hubble Space Telescope, only show variations in color and reflectivity across Pluto’s surface, but not topography.

I’ll leave the details to the remote viewers, who by their claims can supposedly do a better job than Hubble or any other spacecraft. (But, still, no peeking at the Hubble pictures!)

Please send me your detailed drawings and I’ll gladly publish them here. And, in 2015 we will be able to validate — or invalidate — this remote sensing experiment by seeing real close up photos from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it zooms by Pluto at 36,000 miles per hour.

If your drawings match the New Horizons photo maps, then we could have saved ourselves $650 million and a 10-year cruise to the remote planet. Source: Discovery Science

Related:

ANALYSIS: SETI to Scour the Moon for Alien Footprints?

WATCH VIDEO: Enjoy our top 5 lunar moments; astronauts singing, dancing and falling over… on the moon!

PHOTOS: Apollo 18: Myths of the Moon Missions

BLOG: New Photos Show Astronauts’ Treks on the Moon

1900 Magazine Looks 100 Years Into The Future

Some people can see further than others

 In 1900 civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins Jr wrote an article for The Ladies Home Journal, called ‘What May Happen in the next Hundred Years’; and remarkably, some of his predictions were right on the money. Watkins, who worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad, consulted with ‘the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning’, to come up with the predictions.

He warned the reader that some of the predictions may seem ‘strange, almost impossible’, but each prediction came from experts in their respective fields. The experts it seems, were on to something.

Among the 28 predictions made in the article, several came remarkably close to reality 100 years later, while some were way off the mark. Among them;

Digital colour photography – “Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence, snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later…. photographs will reproduce all of nature’s colours.”

Americans will get taller – “Americans will be taller by from one to two inches.” In 2001, Americans were 1.76cm taller than their predecessors of 100 years earlier.

Mobile phones – Watkins wrote, “Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn.”

Pre-cooked meals – “Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishment similar to our bakeries of today.”

1886 March - Ladies Home Journal

Population growth – There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America [the US].”

This prediction was slightly off the mark, but they were on the right track. In 2001, the US population had only hit 280,000,000. The prediction was also not based on general population growth, but on the experts’ belief that both Nicaragua and Mexico would become part of the United States.

Tanks – The experts foresaw wars where “huge forts on wheels will dash across open spaces at the speed of express trains of today.”

Watkins also appeared to have something of an obsession with fruit. He looked forward to the day when vegetables would be grown under artificial light (true) and fruits such as strawberries and pears would be twice the size they were in 1900. (also true)

Radio & Television – “Man will see around the world. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span.”

Watkins also predicted a form of radio. “Grand Opera will be telephoned to private homes, and will sound as harmonious as though enjoyed from a theatre box”, he said.

Very fast trains – “Trains will run two miles a minute normally. Express trains one hundred and fifty miles per hour.”. While most trains don’t quite get up to this speed (especially in Sydney), today’s very fast trains are now able to go considerably faster than 150 mp/h. The experts also predicted faster travel by boat and ‘airships’.

Air Conditioning – “Hot or cold air will be turned on from spigots to regulate the temperature of a house”.

Not everything went quite how Watkins predicted, however.

Among those predictions that didn’t quite come to fruition was the belief that the letters X, C and Q would be eliminated from the alphabet, (unnecessary, Watkins said). Instead, Watkins believed we would all be spelling simply by sound.

Watkins also predicted people would walk ’10 miles a day’, leaving our major cities virtually free of traffic, which he believed would be “below or above ground when brought within city limits.”

The article also predicted big changes for the animal kingdom. He claimed the only animals we would see were the ones kept in zoos, while rats, mice, cockroaches and mosquitoes would be extinct. This prediction, we kind of wish would come true. Source: 7 News

The man who survived being struck by bolt 7 times and then commits suicide

Is this the most unluckiest man in the world?

The odds of being struck by lightning for an ordinary person over the period of 80 years have been roughly estimated as 1 in 3000. Yet, between 1942 and 1977, U.S. park ranger Roy Sullivan defied all odds after being hit by lightning on seven different occasions, surviving all of them. Sullivan is recognized by Guinness World Records as the person struck by lightning more recorded times than any other human being, and gained a nickname “Human Lightning Conductor” or “Human Lightning Rod”. He died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 71 over an unrequited love. Source: Odee

• 1,525,000,000 miles of telephone wire a strung across the U.S.
  
• 101 Dalmatians and Peter Pan (Wendy) are the only two Disney cartoon features with both parents that are present and don’t die throughout the movie.
  
• 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
  
• 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.
  
• 123,000,000 cars are being driven down the U.S’s highways.
  
• 160 cars can drive side by side on the Monumental Axis in Brazil, the world’s widest road.
  
• 166,875,000,000 pieces of mail are delivered each year in the U.S.
  
• 27% of U.S. male college students believe life is “A meaningless existential hell.”
  
• 315 entries in Webster’s Dictionary will be misspelled.
  
• 5% of Canadians don’t know the first 7 words of the Canadian anthem, but know the first 9 of the American anthem.
  
• 56,000,000 people go to Major League baseball each year.
  
• 7% of Americans don’t know the first 9 words of the American anthem, but know the first 7 of the Canadian anthem.
  
• 85,000,000 tons of paper are used each year in the U.S.
  
• 99% of the solar systems mass is concentrated in the sun.
  
• A 10-gallon hat barely holds 6 pints.
  
• A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
  
• A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off.
  
• A company in Taiwan makes dinnerware out of wheat, so you can eat your plate.
  
• A cow produces 200 times more gas a day than a person.
  
• A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.
  
• A dragonfly has a lifespan of 24 hours.
  
• A fully loaded supertanker travelling at normal speed takes a least twenty minutes to stop.
  
• A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue.
  
• A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can.
  
• A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
  
• A hard working adult sweats up to 4 gallons per day. Most of the sweat evaporates before a person realizes it’s there.
  
• A hedgehog’s heart beats 300 times a minute on average.
  
• A hippo can open its mouth wide enough to fit a 4 foot tall child inside.
  
• A hummingbird weighs less than a penny.
  
• A jellyfish is 95 percent water.

Heroic Exploration: Well and Truly Dead?

enior Astronomer, SETI Institute

7 Amazing Psychic Predictions (That Came True)   Tana Hoy predicts Oklahoma City Bombing   American Tana Hoy is a psychic medium who claims to not only hear guides and spirits, but to see them physically as well. Hoy was doing a live radio program in 1995 in Fayetteville, NC, when he predicted a deadly terrorist attack on a building in Oklahoma City. Just 90 minutes later, tragedy struck at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building when Timothy McVeigh and his accomplices orchestrated what was the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil prior to 9/11/01. Hoy had also reported his prediction to the FBI four months before the attack.   Jeffrey Palmer predicted volcano eruption, tsunamis, and Hurricane Katrina   Australian psychic Jeffry R. Palmer makes a lot of predictions, some of which come true, and some of which do not. Palmer accurately predicted the December 26, 2004 Indian Ocean volcano eruption and ensuing tsunamis off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. Over 230,000 people in fourteen countries were killed during these devastating natural disasters. Palmer also accurately predicted the discovery that Korea was testing nuclear weapons, but he gained international recognition for predicting 2005′s Hurricane Katrina, a storm that claimed 1,836 lives and is still among the top five deadliest hurricanes in the history of the U.S.   Edgar Cayce predicts everything from both World Wars to Presidential deaths   American Edgar Cayce, sometimes referred to as “The Sleeping Prophet,” is perhaps the most well-known psychic of the twentieth century. Cayce was able to put himself in a meditative state, during which he could answer questions about time, space, reincarnation, spirituality, and current and future events — all with startling accuracy. Cayce is credited with predicting the start and end of World Wars I and II, the end of The Great Depression, the deaths of sitting Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.   Jeane Dixon   Jeane Dixon was an astrologer in the 1960′s who became both a syndicated columnist and a pseudo-celebrity when First Lady Nancy Reagan sought her advice during Ronald Reagan presidency. Dixon is most famous for accurately predicting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the death of Martin Luther King. Dixon’s hit or miss predictions inspired a mathematician to coin the phrase, “The Dixon Effect,” which claims that people tend to remember the accurate predictions while ignoring a large number of inaccurate predictions.   Mark Twain   Famed American writer Mark Twain (nee Samuel Clemens) is not known for his psychic predictions, yet he made several startling predictions during his lifetime that proved to be eerily accurate. First of all, Twain predicted his own death; he was born in 1835 when Halley’s Comet was visible, and he predicted that he would die when Halley’s Comet was visible again. Sure enough, Twain died in 1910 when the comet was again visible in the night sky. Twain also foresaw his brother’s death, having a prophetic dream in which he saw his brother laid out in a coffin resting between two folding chairs in his sister’s living room. A few weeks later, his brother Henry was killed in a boating accident, and when Twain entered his sister’s parlor he saw that his brother had been arranged just as he’d envisioned in his dream, complete with a specific flower arrangement resting on his chest.   Psychic Twins predict 9/11   Terry and Linda Jamison are twins who “share one soul,” and they claim that they predicted the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001 while giving an interview on a morning radio program in 1999. The twins also claim to have predicted several major advances in medical research, including this research study in 2011, as well as advances in Alzheimer’s Disease, Wiki-Links leaks, and a number of natural disasters across the globe.   Nostradamus predicts Napoleon, Hitler, and 9/11   No article about psychic predictions would be complete without mentioning fourteenth century French physician Nostradamus. Nostradamus published over a thousand psychic predictions, and historians have now determined that over half of them have come true today. Perhaps the most notable of his predictions are about the three “anti-Christs” who would come to have significant effects on society, as a whole. The first is thought to be about Napoleon, a vicious ruler often called a “butcher” even by his supporters: “An Emperor shall be born near Italy. Who shall cost the Empire dear, They shall say, with what people he keeps company He shall be found less a Prince than a butcher. ” The second anti-Christ, whom Nostradamus referred to as, “a man stained with murder…the great enemy of the human race…one who was worse than any who had gone before…bloody and inhuman,” is thought to be Adolph Hitler: “Out of the deepest part of the west of Europe, From poor people a young child shall be born, Who with his tongue shall seduce many people, His fame shall increase in the Eastern Kingdom. Adolf Hitler, who was known to be a skilled public speaker who seduced millions of his countrymen into performing unspeakable acts of hatred, was born in Austria of poor parents. Nostradamus even predicted that Hitler would die alone, and that “The greater part of the battlefield will be against Hister.” (Note that he was just one letter off from actually calling Hitler by name). Some people think that the third anti-Christ is either Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden, since Nostradamus predicted that he would come from the Middle East: “Out of the country of Greater Arabia Shall be born a strong master of Mohammed… He will enter Europe wearing a blue turban. He will be the terror of mankind. Never more horror. ” Moreover, Nostradamus discusses events that sound shockingly like the attacks against Americans on September 11, 2001: The sky will burn at forty-five degrees. Fire approaches the great new city. In this phrase, Nostradamus refers to a great city in the new world of America near forty-five degrees latitude. Experts agree this could only be New York. “The sky will burn at forty-five degrees. Fire approaches the great new city. By fire he will destroy their city, A cold and cruel heart, Blood will pour, Mercy to none.”

15 Failed Predictions about the Future  ”It will be years –not in my time– before a woman will become Prime Minister.” –Margaret Thatcher, October 26th, 1969.   She became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom only 10 years after saying that, holding her chair from 1979 to 1990. But she wasn’t all that wrong since she is the only woman to have held this post. Maybe she should have added the word “again.”    “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” –Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.   It may sound ridiculous now, but the prediction was actually true for about ten years after it was made. Almost every forecaster would settle for a ten year limit on the testing of their forecasts. Of course, by the 1980s and the advent of the PC, such a statement looked plain daft.    “That virus [HIV] is a pussycat.” –Dr. Peter Duesberg, molecular-biology professor at U.C. Berkeley, 1988,   By 2006, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS and the World Health Organization estimated that AIDS has killed more than 25 million people since it was first recognized on December 1, 1981.    ”Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.” –Associates of Edwin L. Drake refusing his suggestion to drill for oil in 1859.   Only one hundred fifty years passed by since the first attempt to dig out oil from the ground met such contempt, and now the whole world is trying to look for unimaginable places to satiate the thirst for money that is propelled and sustained on this black gold.    “A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.” –New York Times, 1936.   10 years later, in 1946, the first American-built rocket to leave the earth’s atmosphere was launched from White Sands, attaining 50 miles of altitude. NOTE: according to our readers “the first rocket to leave the Earth’s atmosphere was actually the German V2.”    ”Reagan doesn’t have that presidential look.” –United Artists Executive, rejecting Reagan as lead in 1964 film The Best Man   Before becoming the 40th President of the United States in 1981, Ronald Reagan pursued an acting career, but spent the majority of his Hollywood career in the “B film” division. In 1964 he was rejected for a part in a movie with presidential candidate theme due to “not having the presidential look”.    ”The singer [Mick Jagger] will have to go; the BBC won’t like him.” — First Rolling Stones manager Eric Easton to his partner after watching them perform.   We can only wonder what Sir Michael Philip “Mick” Jagger, Golden Globe, Grammy Award-winning English singer-songwriter, rock musician and occasional actor, has to say about it now.    “Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.” –Dr Dionysys Larder (1793-1859)   It may sound impossible to Dr Larder, professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at the University College London back in the 1800, but in 1939 the first high speed train went from Milan to Florence at 165 km/h (102.5 mph). Thankfully no one died. Nowadays these trains go at 200 km/h (125 mph) and faster.    “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” –Lord Kelvin, 1895.   This was said by Lord Kelvin (British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society) only eight years before brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright took their home-built flyer to the sandy dunes of Kitty Hawk, cranked up the engine, and took off into the history books.    ”There will never be a bigger plane built.” –A Boeing engineer, after the first flight of the 247, a twin engine plane that holds ten people.   What would this engineer say if he saw the current largest passenger plane on earth, the Airbus A380? The Airbus A380 has 50% more floor space than arch rival Boeing’s 747 Jumbo, with room for duty-free shops, restaurants and even a sauna, and can provide site for up to 853 people.    ”Taking the best left-handed pitcher in baseball and converting him into a right fielder is one of the dumbest things I ever heard.” – Tris Speaker, baseball hall of famer, talking about Babe Ruth, 1919.   Ruth has been named the greatest baseball player in history in various surveys and rankings, and his home run hitting prowess made him a larger than life figure in the “Roaring Twenties”. He became the first player to hit 60 home runs in one season (1927), a record which stood for 34 years until broken by Roger Maris in 1961. Ruth’s lifetime total of 714 home runs at his retirement in 1935 was a record for 39 years, until broken by Hank Aaron in 1974.    ”Ours has been the first [expedition], and doubtless to be the last, to visit this profitless locality.” —- Lt. Joseph Ives, after visiting the Grand Canyon in 1861.   More than a century later, five million people annually visit this “profitless locality,” by car, foot, air, and on the Colorado River itself.    ”If excessive smoking actually plays a role in the production of lung cancer, it seems to be a minor one.” –W.C. Heuper, National Cancer Institute, 1954.   In 1964 the United States Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health began suggesting the relationship between smoking and cancer, which confirmed its suggestions 20 years later in the 1980s. Nowadays, it’s well known that long-term exposure to tobacco smoke is the most common causes of lung cancer.    ”You better get secretarial work or get married.” –Emmeline Snively, advising would-be model Marilyn Monroe in 1944.   In 1944, Marilyn Monroe was discovered by a photographer who encouraged her to apply to The Blue Book modeling agency. She was told by Snively, director of the Modelling Agency that she should became a secretary, besides they were looking for models with lighter hair. So Marilyn dyed her brunette hair to a golden blonde. She finally signed a contract with the agency. And of course, became Blue Book’s most successful model.    ”Read my lips: No new taxes.” –George Bush, 1988.   That pledge was the centerpiece of Bush’s acceptance address, written by speechwriter Peggy Noonan, for his party’s nomination at the 1988 Republican National Convention. It was a strong, decisive, bold statement, and you don’t need a history degree to see where this is going. As presidents sometimes must, Bush raised taxes. His words were used against him by then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton in a devastating attack ad during the 1992 presidential campaign.

A New Use For Telescopes