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Can AI Take a Joke?

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Large neural networks, a form of artificial intelligence, can generate thousands of jokes along the lines of “Why did the chicken cross the road?” But do they understand why they’re funny?

Using hundreds of entries from the New Yorker magazine’s Cartoon Caption Contest as a testbed, researchers challenged AI models and humans with three tasks: matching a joke to a cartoon; identifying a winning caption; and explaining why a winning caption is funny. 

In all tasks, humans performed demonstrably better than machines, even as AI advances such as ChatGPT have closed the performance gap. So are machines beginning to “understand” humor? In short, they’re making some progress, but aren’t quite there yet.

“The way people challenge AI models for understanding is to build t0ests for them – multiple choice tests or other evaluations with an accuracy score,” said Jack Hessel, Ph.D. ’20, research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). “And if a model eventually surpasses whatever humans get at this test, you think, ‘OK, does this mean it truly understands?’ It’s a defensible position to say that no machine can truly `understand’ because understanding is a human thing. But, whether the machine understands or not, it’s still impressive how well they do on these tasks.”
Hessel is lead author of “Do Androids Laugh at Electric Sheep? Humor ‘Understanding’ Benchmarks from The New Yorker Caption Contest,” which won a best-paper award at the 61st annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, held July 9-14 in Toronto.

Lillian Lee ’93, the Charles Roy Davis Professor in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, and Yejin Choi, Ph.D. ’10, professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and the senior director of common-sense intelligence research at AI2, are also co-authors on the paper.

For their study, the researchers compiled 14 years’ worth of New Yorker caption contests – more than 700 in all. Each contest included: a captionless cartoon; that week’s entries; the three finalists selected by New Yorker editors; and, for some contests, crowd quality estimates for each submission.  

For each contest, the researchers tested two kinds of AI – “from pixels” (computer vision) and “from description” (analysis of human summaries of cartoons) – for the three tasks.

“There are datasets of photos from Flickr with captions like, ‘This is my dog,’” Hessel said. “The interesting thing about the New Yorker case is that the relationships between the images and the captions are indirect, playful, and reference lots of real-world entities and norms. And so the task of ‘understanding’ the relationship between these things requires a bit more sophistication.”

In the experiment, matching required AI models to select the finalist caption for the given cartoon from among “distractors” that were finalists but for other contests; quality ranking required models to differentiate a finalist caption from a nonfinalist; and explanation required models to generate free text saying how a high-quality caption relates to the cartoon.

Hessel penned the majority of human-generated explanations himself, after crowdsourcing the task proved unsatisfactory. He generated 60-word explanations for more than 650 cartoons.

“A number like 650 doesn’t seem very big in a machine-learning context, where you often have thousands or millions of data points,” Hessel said, “until you start writing them out.”

This study revealed a significant gap between AI- and human-level “understanding” of why a cartoon is funny. The best AI performance in a multiple choice test of matching cartoon to caption was only 62% accuracy, far behind humans’ 94% in the same setting. And when it came to comparing human- vs. AI-generated explanations, humans’ were preferred roughly 2-to-1.

While AI might not be able to “understand” humor yet, the authors wrote, it could be a collaborative tool humorists could use to brainstorm ideas.

Other contributors include Ana Marasovic, assistant professor at the University of Utah School of Ca.

AR #109

Self Fulfilling Skepticism

Brendan D. Murphy

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Whistleblowers Say U.S. Military has Alien Craft

LESLIE KEAN and RALPH BLUMENTHAL·June 5, 2023

SOURCE: https://thedebrief.org/intelligence-officials-say-u-s-has-retrieved-non-human-craft/

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A former intelligence official turned whistleblower has given Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General extensive classified information about deeply covert programs that he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.

The information, he says, has been illegally withheld from Congress, and he filed a complaint alleging that he suffered illegal retaliation for his confidential disclosures, reported here for the first time.
Other intelligence officials, both active and retired, with knowledge of these programs through their work in various agencies, have independently provided similar, corroborating information, both on and off the record.

The whistleblower, David Charles Grusch, 36, a decorated former combat officer in Afghanistan, is a veteran of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). He served as the reconnaissance office‫’‬s representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2019-2021. From late 2021 to July 2022, he was the NGA’s co-lead for UAP analysis and its representative to the task force.

The task force was established to investigate what were once called ‫“‬unidentified flying objects,” or UFOs, and are now officially called ‫“‬unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAP. The task force was led by the Department of the Navy under the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. It has since been reorganized and expanded into the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office to include investigations of objects operating underwater.

Grusch said the recoveries of partial fragments through and up to intact vehicles have been made for decades through the present day by the government, its allies, and defense contractors. Analysis has determined that the objects retrieved are ‫“‬of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures,” he said.

In filing his complaint, Grusch is represented by a lawyer who served as the original Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG).

“We are not talking about prosaic origins or identities,” Grusch said, referencing information he provided Congress and the current ICIG. “The material includes intact and partially intact vehicles.”

In accordance with protocols, Grusch provided the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review at the Department of Defense with the information he intended to disclose to us. His on-the-record statements were all “cleared for open publication” on April 4 and 6, 2023, in documents provided to us.

Grusch‫’‬s disclosures, and those of non-public witnesses, under new protective provisions of the latest defense appropriations bill, signal a growing determination by some in the government to unravel a colossal enigma with national security implications that has bedeviled the military and tantalized the public going back to World War II and beyond. For many decades, the Air Force carried out a disinformation campaign to discredit reported sightings of unexplained objects. Now, with two public hearings and many classified briefings under its belt, Congress is pressing for answers.

Christopher Mellon, who spent nearly twenty years in the U.S. Intelligence Community and served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, has worked with Congress for years on unidentified aerial phenomena.
‫“‬A number of well-placed current and former officials have shared detailed information with me regarding this alleged program, including insights into the history, governing documents and the location where a craft was allegedly abandoned and recovered,” Mellon said. “However, it is a delicate matter getting this potentially explosive information into the right hands for validation. This is made harder by the fact that, rightly or wrongly, a number of potential sources do not trust the leadership of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office established by Congress.”

But some insiders are now willing to take the risk of coming forward for the first time with knowledge of these recovery programs.

Jonathan Grey is a generational officer of the United States Intelligence Community with a Top-Secret Clearance who currently works for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC), where the analysis of UAP has been his focus. Previously he had experience serving Private Aerospace and Department of Defense Special Directive Task Forces.

“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said. “Retrievals of this kind are not limited to the United States. This is a global phenomenon, and yet a global solution continues to elude us.”

At the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Grusch served as a Senior Intelligence Capabilities Integration Officer, cleared at the Top Secret/Secret Compartmented Information level, and was the agency‫’‬s Senior Technical Advisor for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena analysis/Trans-Medium Issues. From 2016 to 2021, he served with the National Reconnaissance Office as Senior Intelligence Officer and led the production of the NRO director’s daily briefing. Grusch was a GS-15 civilian, the military equivalent of a Colonel.

Grusch has served as an Intelligence Officer for over fourteen years. A veteran of the Air Force, he has numerous awards and decorations for his participation in covert and clandestine operations to advance American security.
According to a 2021 NRO Performance Report, Grusch was an intelligence strategist with multiple responsibilities who  “analyzed unidentified aerial phenomena reports” and “boosted congressional leadership Intel gaps [in] understanding.” He was assessed by the reconnaissance office‫’‬s Operations Center Deputy Director as an “adept staff officer and strategist” and “total force integrator with innovative solutions and actionable results.”

Grusch prepared many briefs on unidentified aerial phenomena for Congress while in government and helped draft the language on UAP for the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act, spearheaded by Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Marco Rubio and signed into law by President Biden in December 2022. The provision states that any person with relevant UAP information can inform Congress without retaliation, regardless of any previous non-disclosure agreements.

In his statements cleared for publication by the Pentagon in April, Grusch asserted that UFO “legacy programs” have long been concealed within “multiple agencies nesting UAP activities in conventional secret access programs without appropriate reporting to various oversight authorities.”

He said he reported to Congress on the existence of a decades-long “publicly unknown Cold War for recovered and exploited physical material – a competition with near-peer adversaries over the years to identify UAP crashes/landings and retrieve the material for exploitation/reverse engineering to garner asymmetric national defense advantages.”

Beginning in 2022, Grusch provided Congress with hours of recorded classified information transcribed into hundreds of pages which included specific data about the materials recovery program. Congress has not been provided with any physical materials related to wreckage or other non-human objects.

Grusch’s investigation was centered on extensive interviews with high-level intelligence officials, some of whom are directly involved with the program. He says the operation was illegally shielded from proper Congressional oversight and that he was targeted and harassed because of his investigation.

Grusch said that the craft recovery operations are ongoing at various levels of activity and that he knows the specific individuals, current and former, who are involved.

“Individuals on these UAP programs approached me in my official capacity and disclosed their concerns regarding a multitude of wrongdoings, such as illegal contracting against the Federal Acquisition Regulations and other criminality and the suppression of information across a qualified industrial base and academia,” he stated.

Associates who vouched for Grusch said his information was highly sensitive, providing evidence that materials from objects of non-human origin are in the possession of highly secret black programs. Although locations, program names, and other specific data remain classified, the Inspector General and intelligence committee staff were provided with these details. Several current members of the recovery program spoke to the Inspector General’s office and corroborated the information Grusch had provided for the classified complaint.

Grusch left the government on April 7, 2023, in order, he said, to advance government accountability through public awareness. He remains well-supported within intelligence circles, and numerous sources have vouched for his credibility.

“His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence,” said Karl Nell, the retired Army Colonel who worked with Grusch on the UAP Task Force.

In a 2022 performance evaluation, Laura A. Potter, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Headquarters, Department of the Army, described Nell as “an officer with the strongest possible moral compass.”

Grusch is represented by Charles McCullough III, senior partner of the Compass Rose Legal Group in Washington and the original Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2011. At that time, McCullough reported directly to the then-Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, and oversaw intelligence officers responsible for audits, inspections, and investigations.

In May 2022, McCullough filed a Disclosure of Urgent Concern(s); Complaint of Reprisal on behalf of Grusch with the ICIG about detailed information that Grusch had gathered beginning in 2019 while working for the UAP Task Force.
An unclassified version of the complaint provided to us states that Grusch has direct knowledge that UAP-related classified information has been withheld and/or concealed from Congress by “elements” of the intelligence community “to purposely and intentionally thwart legitimate Congressional oversight of the UAP Program.” All testimony Grusch provided for the classified complaint was provided under oath.

According to the unclassified complaint, in July 2021, Grusch had confidentially provided classified information to the Department of Defense Inspector General concerning the withholding of UAP-related information from Congress. He believed that his identity, and the fact that he had provided testimony, were disclosed “to individuals and/or entities” within the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community outside the IG’s office. He did not allege that this information was improperly disclosed by any member of that office.

As a result, Grusch suffered months of retaliation and reprisals related to these disclosures beginning in 2021. He asked that details of these reprisals be withheld to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation.

The Intelligence Community Inspector General found his complaint “credible and urgent” in July 2022. According to Grusch, a summary was immediately submitted to the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines; the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The complaint was drafted and signed by McCullough and his managing partner. It ended with Grusch’s signature attached to his statement that “I do solemnly affirm under the penalties of perjury that the contents of the foregoing paper are true and correct to the best of my knowledge.”

A whistleblower reprisal investigation was launched, and Grusch began his communication with the staff of the Congressional intelligence committees in private closed-door sessions. According to Grusch, certain information which he obtained in his investigation could not be put before Congressional staffers because they did not have the necessary clearances or the appropriate investigative authority.

A representative of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence told us in March that the committee members are not able to comment on the content of a complaint or confirm the identity of a complainant.

“When you have multiple agencies nesting UAP activities in conventional SAP/CAP programs, both as recipients of exploitation-related insights and for operational reasons, without appropriate reporting to various oversight authorities, you have a problem,” Grusch said, referencing the highly secret Special Access Programs and Controlled Access Programs.

Grusch’s willingness to take risks and speak out appears to be emboldening others with similar knowledge who believe in greater transparency.

Jonathan Grey, the intelligence officer specializing in UAP analysis at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, is speaking publicly for the first time, identified here under the identity he uses inside the agency.

NASIC, headquartered at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, is the Department of Defense‫’‬s primary Air Force source for foreign air and space threat analysis. Its mission is to “discover and characterize air, space, missile, and cyber threats,” according to the agency‫’‬s website. “The center‫’‬s team of trusted subject matter experts deliver unique collection, exploitation, and analytic capabilities not found elsewhere,” the website states.

Grey said that such immense capabilities are not merely relegated to the study of the prosaic.  “The existence of complex historical programs involving the coordinated retrieval and study of exotic materials, dating back to the early 20th century, should no longer remain a secret,” he said. “The majority of retrieved, foreign exotic materials have a prosaic terrestrial explanation and origin – but not all, and any number higher than zero in this category represents an undeniably significant statistical percentage.”

It is unusual for an Air Force insider to come forward, as the Air Force has been less forthcoming than other agencies with regard to UAP.

“A vast array of our most sophisticated sensors, including space-based platforms, have been utilized by different agencies, typically in triplicate, to observe and accurately identify the out-of-this-world nature, performance, and design of these anomalous machines, which are then determined not to be of earthly origin,” Grey said.

Mellon, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, has been instrumental in arranging classified briefings for members of Congress and other officials about UAP, which include references to exotic retrieved materials. The first briefing he facilitated on retrievals of unexplained objects was provided to staff members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Oct. 21, 2019, and to staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee two days later, as reported by The New York Times.

Mellon says that once the members of Congress gain greater awareness of the information provided to their staff and the Inspector General, they will be in a position to quickly determine the truth if they have the will to do so.

“This is an unprecedented oversight challenge for the committees, but I believe we have leaders in Congress who are up to the task,” Mellon said.

Classified briefings are often presented for Jonathan Grey and his team at NASIC. “High-level, classified briefing materials exist in which real-world scenarios involving UAP, as evidenced by historical examples, are made available to Intelligence Personnel on a need-to-know basis,” he told us. “I have been the recipient of such briefings for almost a decade.”

The National Defense Authorization Act for FY2023 tasked the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, with establishing for the first time a secure mechanism for the authorized reporting of sensitive information to defense channels.

In addition, the legislation asks for reporting on “material retrieval, material analysis, reverse engineering, research, and development” involving unidentified anomalous phenomena currently and going back decades.

Dr. Garry Nolan, a Professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University and a renowned inventor and entrepreneur with more than three hundred published papers, has started over half a dozen companies based on technologies out of his laboratory. Nolan has previously applied some of those technologies to the analysis of exotic materials, publishing the first peer-reviewed paper examining such materials.

“Human civilization was utterly transformed by something as small as a grain of silicon or germanium—creating the underpinning of the integrated circuits that underly computation and now even artificial intelligence,” Nolan said.

Studying even small samples of purported anomalous material could lead to currently inconceivable benefits for humanity, he said. “What might be represented here could be hundreds of technology revolutions ahead of us. It could be more transformative for humanity than what the microprocessor accomplished. Imagine what we could do with even a grain of knowledge about how they operate.”

To encourage potential witnesses to come forward, the whistleblower legislation forbids any federal employee from retaliating against anyone providing authorized disclosure.

“Whistleblowing is essential to the checks and balances of our government – and no federal employee should feel discouraged from stepping forward due to fear of retaliation,” Rep. Andre Carson told us. In May 2022, Carson presided over the first open Congressional hearing on UAP since 1968.

The case of David Grusch marks a crucial test of these new whistleblower protections and their ability to protect future whistleblowers who decide to come forward.

AR #55

Underwater Bases & Alien Civilization

By David H. Childress

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Conscious-Like Activity Found In the Dying Brain

Reports of near-death experiences—with tales of white light, visits from departed loved ones, hearing voices, among other attributes—capture our imagination and are deeply engrained in our cultural landscape.

The fact that these reports share so many common elements begs the question of whether there is something fundamentally real underpinning them—and that those who have managed to survive death are providing glimpses of a consciousness that does not completely disappear, even after the heart stops beating.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, provides early evidence of a surge of activity correlated with consciousness in the dying brain.

The study, led by Jimo Borjigin, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Molecular & Integrative Physiology and the Department of Neurology, and her team is a follow up to animal studies conducted almost 10 years ago in collaboration with George Mashour, M.D., Ph.D., the founding director of the Michigan Center for Consciousness Science.

Similar signatures of gamma activation were recorded in the dying brains of both animals and humans upon a loss of oxygen following cardiac arrest.

“How vivid experience can emerge from a dysfunctional brain during the process of dying is a neuroscientific paradox. Dr. Borjigin has led an important study that helps shed light on the underlying neurophysiologic mechanisms,” said Mashour.

The team identified four patients who passed away due to cardiac arrest in the hospital while under EEG monitoring. All four of the patients were comatose and unresponsive. They were ultimately determined to be beyond medical help and, with their families’ permission, removed from life support.

Upon removal of ventilator support, two of the patients showed an increase in heart rate along with a surge of gamma wave activity, considered the fastest brain activity and associated with consciousness.

Furthermore, the activity was detected in the so-called hot zone of neural correlates of consciousness in the brain, the junction between the temporal, parietal and occipital lobes in the back of the brain. This area has been correlated with dreaming, visual hallucinations in epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness in other brain studies.

These two patients had previous reports of seizures, but no seizures during the hour before their deaths, explains Nusha Mihaylova, M.D., Ph.D., a clinical associate professor in the Department of Neurology who has collaborated with Borjigin since 2015 by collecting EEG data from deceased patients under intensive care unit treatment. The other two patients did not display the same increase in heart-rate upon removal from life support, nor did they have increased gamma activity.

Because of the small sample size, the authors caution against making any global statements about the implications of the findings. They also note that it’s impossible to know in this study what the patients experienced because they did not survive.

“We are unable to make correlations of the observed neural signatures of consciousness with a corresponding experience in the same patients in this study. However, the observed findings are definitely exciting and provide a new framework for our understanding of covert consciousness in the dying humans,” she said.

Larger, multi-center studies including EEG-monitored ICU patients who survive cardiac arrest, could provide much needed data to determine whether or not these bursts in gamma activity are evidence of hidden consciousness even near death.

Additional authors on this paper include Gang Xu, Duan Li, Fangyun Tian, Peter M. Farrehi, Jack M. Parent and Michael Wang Paper cited: “Surge of neurophysiological coupling and connectivity of gamma oscillations in the dying human brain,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2216268120

AR #106

Near Death Experience Before Moody

by Michael Tymn

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Enormous Batch of JFK Records Released

by Zach Schonfeld

The National Archives has released thousands of records related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy. The release of 12,879 new files, the largest dump since 2018, comes nearly six decades after Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, becoming the fourth U.S. president to have been assassinated while in office.

Lawmakers in 1992 passed legislation requiring all remaining government records about the assassination to be released by Oct. 2017, unless they posed certain risks to national defense or intelligence, but former President Trump and Biden both issued extensions.

That set off a legal challenge filed by the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a nonprofit that curates an online collection of the assassination records, arguing the extensions were unlawful based on the 1992 legislation.

Biden issued the most recent extension, which lasted one year, arguing that the coronavirus pandemic impeded agencies’ ability to review the records by the earlier deadline.

The president’s order on Thursday stated that almost 16,000 records remained redacted, and Biden approved the release of more than 70 percent of them.

But an unspecified “limited” number of records that remain the subject of review were not included in the batch, and Biden’s order gives federal agencies and the National Archives until May 1, 2023, to make recommendations about whether they must still be kept private.

Biden ordered the remaining records to be publicly released by June 30, 2023, unless they meet narrow exceptions.
“Agencies shall not propose to continue redacting information unless the redaction is necessary to protect against an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations that is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure,” Biden’s order states.

The National Archives had released various batches of documents in recent years, with the most recent dump of 1,491 files being published exactly one year ago. 

The Archives had previously released roughly 55,000 total documents since the deadline originally imposed by Congress.

Referenced story link:
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3776939-national-archives-releases-thousands-of-jfk-assassination-records/

AR #88

JFK Sought UFO Files

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HAARP is Back and Aiming at Jupiter

Gakona, Alaska’s massive ionosphere-trained antenna array has returned to the spotlight, with the biggest target yet, in its sights—the planet Jupiter, by way of Earth’s moon.

Back in the 1990s the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) was launched, ostensibly as an ionospheric research program funded by the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In Angels Don’t Play this HAARP, the best-selling book by Atlantis Rising Magazine columnist Jeane Manning and Dr. Nick Begich, argued that HAARP might actually be an attempt to weaponize weather utilizing advanced psychotronic (parapsychological) technology. Manning and Begich were not alone in their opinion.


According to Wikipedia, one Russian military journal even wrote that such ionospheric testing would “trigger a cascade of electrons that could flip Earth’s magnetic poles.”
The Alaska state legislature and the European Parliament held hearings about HAARP, the latter citing environmental concerns.


Former Governor of Minnesota, ex-professional wrestler, and documentary maker Jesse Ventura questioned whether the government was using the site to manipulate the weather or to bombard people with mind-controlling radio waves. An Air Force spokeswoman said Ventura made an official request to visit the research station but was rejected. “He and his crew showed up at HAARP anyway and were denied access,” she said.


In 10 days worth of unprecedented experiments in October, 2022, researchers attempted what they called a ‘Jupiter bounce,’or “Interplanetary Ionosonde.” According to a statement from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the experiment was “the largest active remote sensing operation in history,” and was intended to test HAARP’s ability to bounce signals off  the ionosphere of Jupiter, and also to determine how well receivers at the University of New Mexico’s Long Wavelength Array could receive such reflected signals.
The stated purpose was to test the coordination of military and scientific facilities intended for eventual study of near-Earth asteroids, especially those that could be a hazard to Earth.


Knowing an asteroid’s composition can influence the type of defense to be used, the statement said.


The experiment consisted of transmitting a signal from HAARP to the moon and receiving the reflected signal at the California and New Mexico sites. 


The possibility of ‘psychotronics’ manipulation first made news in the 1970s, when many reports surfaced suggesting that the U.S. government had developed, and actually deployed, psychotronic weapons that made mind control of targeted individuals, and even large groups, possible. Much research, and even news reports argued for the seriousness of the topic, but the idea was relentlessly ridiculed by the mainstream media, and has since been relagated to the realm of fringe conspiracy theory—not to be taken seriously by the public. Still, there were many, including the Princeton University Anomalies Lab, the Stanford Research Institute, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and others, who took the subject very seriously and devoted considerable research to it.


According to NASA, HAARP consists of 180 antennas designed to transmit signals into the ionosphere, which extends from 30 miles (48 kilometers) to 600 miles (965 km) above sea level and is seen as the area where Earth’s atmosphere meets space. The ionosphere plays an important role in radio transmission, as it reflects radio waves. Many satellites occupy this region of the atmosphere, which is heavily influenced by solar weather.

AR #65

Weather Goes to War

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Robert Schoch Lost Ancient Mysteries

Special Collector’s Edition, Robert Schoch, Ph.D. presented by The Atlantis Rising Research Group

Explore the planet’s greatest mysteries with the courageous and renowned geologist who challenged conventional Egyptology with undeniable evidence of water weathering for the Great Sphinx, proving that pre-flood civilization existed thousands of years earlier than once believed.

  • 309  fully indexed pages
  • 21 chapters personally researched and written by Dr. Schoch (previously published exclusively by Atlantis Rising Magazine)
  • Huge collection of spectacular photographs, personally taken by Dr. Schoch and his wife Catherine Ulissey, and published here in full-size HIGH-RESOLUTION for the first time.

—————————————————————————–

Chapters include:
• Return to the Great Sphinx of Egypt
• Easter Island
• The Underground Cities of Cappadocia
• Gunang Padang
• India’s Ajanta Caves
• Gobekli Tepe
• Nazca
• Newgrange
• Tiwanaku
And many more…

Download PDF 309 pages, 8.5 x 11 format

Stunning Photography in High-Resolution!

The Quest for Lost Ancient Secrets
with Robert M. Schoch, Ph.D.

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Muon Scanning for Hidden Chambers in Great Pyramid

If all goes according to plan a team of scientists will soon use the latest High Energy Physics (HIP) technology to scan the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza by imaging cosmic-ray muons. The goal is to see more deeply into the Great Pyramid than ever before and to reveal its actual internal structure. The project is named the “Explore the Great Pyramid (EGP) mission.”

The pyramids of the Giza plateau have fascinated visitors since ancient times and are the last of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world still standing. Half a century ago Luiz Alvarez and his team first used cosmic-ray muon imaging to look for hidden chambers in Khafre’s Pyramid (the second pyramid). Advances in instrumentation for High-Energy Physics (HEP) have now made a new survey called ScanPyramids, to make important new discoveries at the Great Pyramid (Khufu) utilizing the same basic technique that the Alvarez team used, but with even more modern instrumentation.

The Exploring the Great Pyramid Mission plans to field a very-large muon telescope system that will be transformational with respect to the field of cosmic-ray muon imaging. The team plans to field a telescope system that has upwards of 100 times the sensitivity of the equipment  recently used at the Great Pyramid. It will image muons from nearly all angles and will, for the first time, produce a true tomographic image of such a large structure.

Hidden Chambers in Egypt

Robert Schoch, Ph. D.

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Library of the Lost

By J. Douglas Kenyon

‘Ivan the Terrible’–or, for Russian traditionalists, “the Formidable” or “Fearsome”–earned his dubious reputation. Ivan IV Vasilyevich, the first self-termed ‘Tsar’ of Russia, the mentally unstable tyrant who ruled Russia from 1533 to 1547, led the motherland into costly wars, murdered his own son, and, five centuries later, attracted the admiration of another Russian mass murderer Josef Stalin, but despite centuries of digging, one of the great mysteries of Ivan the Terrible remains buried somewhere deep beneath the Kremlin.

The “Golden Library,” or Lost Library of the Moscow Tsars, was assembled by Grand Duke Ivan III (the Great), father of Ivan IV. Responsibility for its unexplained disappearance, however, is attributed to the son. In Atlantis Rising Magazine #66, writer Steven Sora told the story.

In the middle of the fifteenth century Constantinople was about to be invaded by the Asian hordes, and the greatest treasures of the city needed to be protected at all costs. Sophia Palaiologina, the emperor’s niece, was hastily married to the young Ivan III, soon to become ruler of Russia. Sophia’s entourage with the treasures of Byzantium, including Constantinople’s library, possibly the greatest outside the Vatican, would ultimately make it to Moscow via Rome. Chronicles still preserved in Moscow tell how one hundred carts of rare books struggled overland. Included were works from Asia, Africa and Europe in Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin and Egyptian, with early editions of Pindar, Polybius, Tacitus and Cicero, the poems of Kalvos, the works of Virgil and “Lives of the Twelve Caesars” by Suetonius. Considered one-of-a-kind, many were hand written. Several hundred jewel encrusted volumes were intended as gifts for Emperors. The value of the collection, then and now, is beyond calculation.

One of Ivan III’s greatest achievements was beginning construction of the Kremlin. Under his direction the vaults of the “Liberia,” as the library came to be known, were built underground. Italian architect Ridolfo (Aristotle) di Fioravanti was given responsibility for constructing a hidden vault deep beneath the Kremlin. From here, it is believed, three hundred underground tributaries of the Muscovy River once flowed. The architect would close off such waterways and then line the walls with brick. To this day, no one knows just how many such rooms and tunnels exist within the labyrinth.

When Ivan IV ascended to the throne he began a ruthless assault on the Russian aristocracy known as the Boyars who he believed had mistreated and ignored him during his youth. To achieve his purposes, Ivan vastly expanded the subterranean city he had inherited. The labyrinth beneath the Kremlin now included secret prisons and torture chambers designed to break the power of the  elite. After stripping the boyars of their wealth, Ivan turned his attention to the Russian population. The Massacre of Novgorad saw over thirty thousand Russians killed and the city nearly depopulated. He would beat his daughter-in-law until she miscarried and then kill his son who tried to stop him.

The reign of terror did not end until Ivan’s death. As Ivan had been losing his mind, Russia, distracted by other issues, had lost track of the library’s location, and it has not been recovered since. Some think that Peter the Great, over a century later, may have found and moved the library. But, as far as we know, the great maze beneath the Kremlin was too much even for Peter.

Stalin, it is said, wished to create one of the world’s greatest subway systems, and built upon the original Kremlin network. The massive tunneling of his Moscow subway, is still evident in seemingly endless escalators descending apparently to the very bowels of the earth. All excavations were executed with special care in hopes that one of the library’s secret rooms might be uncovered. No such rooms were ever found, however. Even a secret subway intended for the protection of rulers and generals never produced any Byzantines treasures.

In the 1960s Nikita Khruschev also pursued development of the subterranean domain beneath the Kremlin, extending the subway system and perhaps merging at lease some of  its secret routes with the public metro. Khruschev too, it seems, dreamed of uncovering the famed library, and instructed project managers to take all necessary steps to locate and preserve with care the library of Ivan. But instructions notwithstanding, all the dictator’s men could not uncover what the Tzar’s men had covered.

Nearly five centuries after Ivan the Terrible, it is clear that the ability of tyrants to destroy great achievements, still does not translate into an ability to preserve them.

#66

Lost Library of Ivan the Great

By Steven Sora

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Dawn of Humanity Pushed Back 30,000 Years

The age of the oldest fossils in eastern Africa widely recognised as representing our species, Homo sapiens, has long been uncertain. Now, dating of a massive volcanic eruption in Ethiopia reveals they are much older than previously thought.

The remains – known as Omo I – were found in Ethiopia in the late 1960s, and scientists have been attempting to date them precisely ever since, by using the chemical fingerprints of volcanic ash layers found above and below the sediments in which the fossils were found.

An international team of scientists, led by the University of Cambridge, has reassessed the age of the Omo I remains – and Homo sapiens as a species. Earlier attempts to date the fossils suggested they were less than 200,000 years old, but the new research shows they must be older than a colossal volcanic eruption that took place 230,000 years ago. The results are reported in the journal Nature.

Approximate location of the Omo Kibish Formation marked in red. Image: NASA.

The Omo I remains were found in the Omo Kibish Formation in southwestern Ethiopia, within the East African Rift valley. The region is an area of high volcanic activity, and a rich source of early human remains and artefacts such as stone tools. By dating the layers of volcanic ash above and below where archaeological and fossil materials are found, scientists identified Omo I as the earliest evidence of our species, Homo sapiens.

“Using these methods, the generally accepted age of the Omo fossils is under 200,000 years, but there’s been a lot of uncertainty around this date,” said Dr Céline Vidal from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, the paper’s lead author. “The fossils were found in a sequence, below a thick layer of volcanic ash that nobody had managed to date with radiometric techniques because the ash is too fine-grained.”

As part of a four-year project led by Professor Clive Oppenheimer, Vidal and her colleagues have been attempting to date all the major volcanic eruptions in the Ethiopian Rift around the time of the emergence of Homo sapiens, a period known as the late Middle Pleistocene.

Researchers at the Omo Kibish geological formation in southwestern Ethiopia

Researchers at the Omo Kibish geological formation in southwestern Ethiopia. Credit: Al Deino 

The researchers collected pumice rock samples from the volcanic deposits and ground them down to sub-millimetre size. “Each eruption has its own fingerprint – its own evolutionary story below the surface, which is determined by the pathway the magma followed,” said Vidal. “Once you’ve crushed the rock, you free the minerals within, and then you can date them, and identify the chemical signature of the volcanic glass that holds the minerals together.”

The researchers carried out new geochemical analysis to link the fingerprint of the thick volcanic ash layer from the Kamoya Hominin Site (KHS) with an eruption of Shala volcano, more than 400 kilometres away. The team then dated pumice samples from the volcano to 230,000 years ago. Since the Omo I fossils were found deeper than this particular ash layer, they must be more than 230,000 years old.

“First I found there was a geochemical match, but we didn’t have the age of the Shala eruption,” said Vidal. The samples were sent to co-authors Dr Dan Barfod and Professor Darren Mark at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC) in Glasgow so they could measure the age of the rocks.

“When I received the results and found out that the oldest Homo sapiens from the region was older than previously assumed, I was really excited,” said Vidal.

Omo Kibish Formation in southwestern Ethiopia.

Omo Kibish Formation in southwestern Ethiopia. Credit: Céline Vidal.

“The Omo Kibish Formation is an extensive sedimentary deposit which has been barely accessed and investigated in the past,” said co-author and co-leader of the field investigation Professor Asfawossen Asrat from Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, who is currently based at BIUST in Botswana. “Our closer look into the stratigraphy of the Omo Kibish Formation, particularly the ash layers, allowed us to push the age of the oldest Homo sapiens in the region to at least 230,000 years.”

“Unlike other Middle Pleistocene fossils which are thought to belong to the early stages of the Homo sapiens lineage, Omo I possesses unequivocal modern human characteristics, such as a tall and globular cranial vault and a chin,” said co-author Dr Aurélien Mounier from the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. “The new date estimate, de facto, makes itthe oldest unchallenged Homo sapiens in Africa.”

The researchers say that while this study shows a new minimum age for Homo sapiens in eastern Africa, it’s possible that new finds and new studies may extend the age of our species even further back in time.

“We can only date humanity based on the fossils that we have, so it’s impossible to say that this is the definitive age of our species,” said Vidal. “The study of human evolution is always in motion: boundaries and timelines change as our understanding improves. But these fossils show just how resilient humans are: that we survived, thrived and migrated in an area that was so prone to natural disasters.”

Reproduction of the Omo-Kibish skull, Musée des Civilisations Noires de Dakar (Sénégal). Credit: GuillaumeG

“It’s probably no coincidence that our earliest ancestors lived in such a geologically active rift valley – it collected rainfall in lakes, providing fresh water and attracting animals, and served as a natural migration corridor stretching thousands of kilometres,” said Oppenheimer. “The volcanoes provided fantastic materials to make stone tools, and from time to time we had to develop our cognitive skills when large eruptions transformed the landscape.”

“Our forensic approach provides a new minimum age for Homo sapiens in eastern Africa, but the challenge still remains to provide a cap, a maximum age, for their emergence, which is widely believed to have taken place in this region,” said co-author Professor Christine Lane, head of the Cambridge Tephra Laboratory where much of the work was carried out. “It’s possible that new finds and new studies may extend the age of our species even further back in time.”

“There are many other ash layers we are trying to correlate with eruptions of the Ethiopian Rift and ash deposits from other sedimentary formations,” said Vidal. “In time, we hope to better constrain the age of other fossils in the region.”

The research was supported in part by the Leverhulme Trust, the Cambridge-Africa ALBORADA Research Fund and the Natural Environment Research Council and the National Environmental Isotope Facility. Céline Vidal is a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.

tion.

Issue #123
The Australian Americans,

Steven & Evan Strong


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Is Math Just a Mental Construct?

Is math an artificial construct created my number-crazed nerds, or is it essential to reality?

For one math professor at Australian Catholic University, the answer is clear. Sam Baron has written a new paper for the University of Chicago Journal arguing that “humans didn’t invent mathematics, it’s what the world is made of” (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/716181). In an online article for the Conversation he calls it, “Pythagoras’ revenge” and provides plenty of evidence.

One example is ‘the honeycomb conjecture.” The reason bees in hives produce a hexagonal honeycomb, is because the six-sided form is the most efficient shape for tiling the plane. If you want to fully cover a surface using tiles of a uniform shape and size, while keeping the total length of the perimeter to a minimum that is the way to go. Charles Darwin, indeed, reasoned that bees have evolved to use this shape because it produces the largest cells to store honey for the smallest input of energy to produce wax. The honeycomb conjecture was first proposed in ancient times, says Baron, but was formally proved in 1999 by mathematician Thomas Hales.

He cites many other examples including Cicadas, prime numbers, soap films, and gear design. You can read his article at: https://theconversation.com/pythagoras-revenge-humans-didnt-invent-mathematics-its-what-the-world-is-made-of-172034.

Another case we might add: children who haven’t yet learned the basic rules of arithmetic, like place value and the addition table, nevertheless can easily solve illustrated problems involving approximate addition and subtraction of symbolic numbers between five and 98. According to a study from the University of Nottingham and Harvard, the children performed well above chance, and, in the process, astonished teachers accustomed to the great struggles often experienced by children in this area (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature05850). Dr. Camilla Gilmore who led the work says we may now be able learn new strategies for teaching primary mathematics and “making it fun.”