Russian Regional President Says He Has Visited Alien Space Ship

Mr Ilyumzhinov made the claims in a TV interview

Richard Galpin

BBC

A Russian MP has asked President Dmitry Medvedev to investigate claims by a regional president that he has met aliens on board a spaceship.

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the leader of the southern region of Kalmykia, made his claim in a television interview.

MP Andre Lebedev is not just asking whether Mr Ilyumzhinov is fit to govern.

He is also concerned that, if he was abducted, he may have revealed details about his job and state secrets.

The MP has written a letter to Mr Medvedev raising a list of his concerns.

In his letter he says that – assuming the whole thing was not just a bad joke – it was an historic event and should have been reported to the Kremlin.

He also asks if there are official guidelines for what government officials should do if contacted by aliens, especially if those officials have access to state secrets.

Mr Ilyumzhinov said in an interview on primetime television that he had been taken on board an alien spaceship which had come to planet Earth to take samples – and claims to have several witnesses.

He has been president of Kalmykia, a small Buddhist region of Russia which lies on the shores of the Caspian Sea, for 17 years.

The millionaire former businessman has a reputation as an eccentric character.

As president of the World Chess Federation, he has spent tens of millions of dollars turning the impoverished republic into a mecca for chess players – building an entire village to host international tournaments.

Signs of Neanderthals Mating With Humans

Johannes Krause MPI-EVA

The Vindija cave in Croatia where three small Neanderthal bones were found.

NICHOLAS WADE

NY Times

Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.

The biologists, led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have been slowly reconstructing the genome of Neanderthals, the stocky hunters that dominated Europe until 30,000 years ago, by extracting the fragments of DNA that still exist in their fossil bones. Just last year, when the biologists first announced that they had decoded the Neanderthal genome, they reported no significant evidence of interbreeding.

Scientists say they have recovered 60 percent of the genome so far and hope to complete it. By comparing that genome with those of various present day humans, the team concluded that about 1 percent to 4 percent of the genome of non-Africans today is derived from Neanderthals. But the Neanderthal DNA does not seem to have played a great role in human evolution, they said.

Experts believe that the Neanderthal genome sequence will be of extraordinary importance in understanding human evolutionary history since the two species split some 600,000 years ago.

So far, the team has identified only about 100 genes — surprisingly few — that have contributed to the evolution of modern humans since the split. The nature of the genes in humans that differ from those of Neanderthals is of particular interest because they bear on what it means to be human, or at least not Neanderthal. Some of the genes seem to be involved in cognitive function and others in bone structure.

“Seven years ago, I really thought that it would remain impossible in my lifetime to sequence the whole Neanderthal genome,” Dr. Paabo said at a news conference. But the Leipzig team’s second conclusion, that there was probably interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans before Europeans and Asians split, is being met with reserve by some archaeologists.

A degree of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals in Europe would not be greatly surprising given that the species overlapped there from 44,000 years ago when modern humans first entered Europe to 30,000 years ago when the last Neanderthals fell extinct. Archaeologists have been debating for years whether the fossil record shows evidence of individuals with mixed features.

But the new analysis, which is based solely on genetics and statistical calculations, is more difficult to match with the archaeological record. The Leipzig scientists assert that the interbreeding did not occur in Europe but in the Middle East and at a much earlier period, some 100,000 to 60,000 years ago, before the modern human populations of Europe and East Asia split. There is much less archaeological evidence for an overlap between modern humans and Neanderthals at this time and place.

Dr. Paabo has pioneered the extraction and analysis of ancient DNA from fossil bones, overcoming daunting obstacles over the last 13 years in his pursuit of the Neanderthal genome. Perhaps the most serious is that most Neanderthal bones are extensively contaminated with modern human DNA, which is highly similar to Neanderthal DNA. The DNA he has analyzed comes from three small bones from the Vindija cave in Croatia.

“This is a fabulous achievement,” said Ian Tattersall, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, referring to the draft Neanderthal genome that Dr. Paabo’s team describes in Thursday’s issue of Science.

But he and other archaeologists questioned some of the interpretations put forward by Dr. Paabo and his chief colleagues, Richard E. Green of the Leipzig institute, and David Reich of Harvard Medical School. Geneticists have been making increasingly valuable contributions to human prehistory, but their work depends heavily on complex mathematical statistics that make their arguments hard to follow. And the statistical insights, however informative, do not have the solidity of an archaeological fact.

“This is probably not the authors’ last word, and they are obviously groping to explain what they have found,” Dr. Tattersall said.

Richard Klein, a paleontologist at Stanford, said the authors’ theory of an early interbreeding episode did not seem to have taken full account of the archaeological background. “They are basically saying, ‘Here are our data, you have to accept it.’ But the little part I can judge seems to me to be problematic, so I have to worry about the rest,” he said.

In an earlier report on the Neanderthal genome, the reported DNA sequences were found by other geneticists to be extensively contaminated with human DNA. Dr. Paabo’s group has taken extra precautions but it remains to be seen how successful they have been, Dr. Klein said, especially as another group at the Leipzig institute, presumably using the same methods, has obtained results that Dr. Paabo said he could not confirm.

Dr. Paabo said that episode of human-Neanderthal breeding implied by Dr. Reich’s statistics most plausibly occurred “in the Middle East where the first modern humans appear before 100,000 years ago and there were Neanderthals until 60,000 years ago.” According to Dr. Klein, people in Africa expanded their range and reached just Israel during a warm period some 120,000 years ago. They retreated during a cold period some 80,000 years ago and were replaced by Neanderthals. It is not clear whether or not they overlapped with Neanderthals, he said.

These humans, in any case, were not fully modern and they did not expand from Africa, an episode that occurred some 30,000 years later. If there was any interbreeding, the flow of genes should have been both ways, Dr. Klein said, but Dr. Paabo’s group sees evidence for gene flow only from Neanderthals to modern humans.

The Leipzig group’s interbreeding theory would undercut the present belief that all human populations today draw from the same gene pool that existed a mere 50,000 years ago. “What we falsify here is the strong out-of-Africa hypothesis that everyone comes from the same population,” Dr. Paabo said.

In his and Dr. Reich’s view, Neanderthals interbred only with non-Africans, the people who left Africa, which would mean that non-Africans drew from a second gene pool not available to Africans.

NASA Announces Wednesday Media Teleconference About Search For Extraterrestrial Life

 

Hat Tip Rogue Government

~NASA

MEDIA ADVISORY : M10-064

NASA Announces Wednesday Media Teleconference About Search For Extraterrestrial Life

WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a news media teleconference at 1:30 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, April 28, to discuss the status of agency-sponsored astrobiology research, including the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life and the study of how life began on Earth. Topics also will include the quest for evidence of life on Mars, the habitability of other celestial bodies, and future technology research.

This week, NASA and scientists from around the world are gathering at a biennial meeting near Houston to celebrate 50 years of astrobiology research. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe. Scientists gathered to share new data and insights, initiate and advance collaborations, plan new projects, and educate the next generation of astrobiologists.

The teleconference participants are:
Mary Voytek, astrobiology senior scientist at NASA Headquarters, Washington
Steve Squyres, researcher, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
Bill Schopf, researcher, University of California, Los Angeles
Jack Farmer, researcher, Arizona State University, Tempe, Ariz.
John Peters, researcher, Montana State University, Bozeman

To obtain call-in information, journalists should e-mail their name, media affiliation and telephone number to:

dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov
Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live on NASA’s website at:

http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio
For more information about NASA astrobiology activities, visit:

http://astrobiology.nasa.gov

Why intelligent life in the universe is likely to be hostile

(NaturalNews)

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking recently made headlines by explaining that even though extraterrestrial intelligence very likely exists in the universe, we probably don’t want to meet aliens any time soon. “If aliens ever visit us,” Hawking said, “I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

I agree completely. In fact, I’ve been considering writing an article on this subject for quite some time, but thought it would be construed as “too pessimistic” by many readers. But now that Hawking has opened the door on this topic, here’s my take on it.

The most successful societies are the conquerors

Sad as it may seem, peaceful societies never accomplish much in the way of spreading their culture, expanding their reach or populating new lands (or planets). All the really peaceful cultures on planet Earth — Tibetan Buddhists, Amazonian tribes, Native American Indians, Indigenous Australians — were unilaterally wiped out by far more aggressive and violent cultures.

The Earth today is dominated by those religions and cultures that were expansionary and aggressive in their ways. Aggressive populations always tend to destroy peaceful populations, taking over their lands and resources, eventually ruling their people.

In looking at the universe, it’s not difficult to realize that peaceful, docile planetary populations are extremely unlikely to ever visit other planets. They’re not looking to expand and they’re quite content with where they are. So happy aliens, so to speak, are almost certainly not the kind of aliens we are likely to see zipping around the universe and arriving at our doorstep.

Angry, war-like aliens, on the other hand, are always looking to expand and conquer. They are the ones who will “succeed” in the universe because they will constantly expand their reach, take over other planets, and exploit more resources to drive their war machines.

These are the aliens we are far more likely to meet. That’s Stephen Hawking’s point, too.

What happens when alien conquerors discover Earth?

If you believe there are intelligent extraterrestrials zipping around the universe at faster-than-light travel, then you quickly realize it won’t take long before they discover Earth — a luscious planet filled with water, one of the most precious resources in the known universe. Earth also contains various precious metals, too, that would likely be extremely important for alien technologies.

Just as the U.S. invades other countries to acquire supplies of oil, extraterrestrial aliens may decide to invade planet Earth to take our water, metals or even our DNA. This is not an outlandish thought: It’s actually the most likely context of any meeting with aliens.

We should assume, in other words, that if aliens actually come to visit Earth, they will almost certainly be looking to exploit our planetary resources for their own continued imperialistic expansion because only the expansionary aliens are likely to find us in the first place.

And in such an encounter, it is extremely likely that alien weapons technology would vastly out-perform our own defensive technologies, essentially leaving our planet defenseless. A few Patriot missiles, in other words, won’t stop alien anti-matter blasters or whatever they happen to be firing our way. (Or they could probably just unleash an engineered pandemic to wipe us out without destroying the natural habitat on the planet.)

It’s also extremely likely that these expansionary, imperialistic aliens won’t value human life. Do modern American soldiers value the lives of Iraqi civilians? Did the crew of Christopher Columbus value the lives of Native American Indians? Not at all: The legacy of Columbus that’s not taught in history lessons is that the man was a slaughterer of Native American Indians who engaged in the most heinous crimes against the “savages.” That America actually continues to celebrate the Columbus Day holiday is yet another powerful demonstration of how our culture worships violence, destruction and expansionary imperialism.

Earthlings will likely be considered “savages” by any sufficiently-advanced alien race. We should expect to be treated by them no more compassionately than the way in which we have treated indigenous populations that inhabit our own planet.

What about an enlightened alien race?

It would seem more optimistic, of course, to suppose that some extraterrestrial intelligence might be “enlightened.” They would come to us in peace, the thinking goes, and they would share their technology with us to cure cancer, end all disease, or whatever.

This is some fairly naive thinking, actually. If you look around our own planet, you see that the peaceful “enlightened” societies like the Tibetan Buddhists are routinely overrun (murdered, imprisoned, etc.) by far more aggressive and militaristic societies like the Communist Chinese. If you look at the history of planet earth (or even just the more recent history of North America), enlightened populations haven’t fared very well. Most have been all but eradicated from the face of our planet, in fact, or placed on desolate reservations that were only chosen because they were perceived to have no value in terms of natural resources.

Peace, in other words, doesn’t get you anywhere in the physical universe (although it probably scores you karma points in other ways). Given any collection of neighborhoods, towns, cities, nations or worlds, those who are most militaristic, violent and expansionist are the most likely to end up dominating (and populating) the available living spaces.

Natural selection on the scale of the entire universe, in other words, favors those who destroy others. Because of this unfortunate reality, we should only really expect to meet intelligent extraterrestrials who are looking to destroy us. This isn’t a radical idea… it’s actually the most logical conclusion.

I’m not advocating all this, by the way. It’s just a sad reality of our physical universe. I wish the more enlightened civilizations were more successful, but I don’t see any evidence of that.

Besides, Earthlings aren’t really enlightened yet either. We are still basically an infantile race of arrogant men with silly ideas about medicine, nature, sustainability and technology. As we haven’t yet learned to value the life of plants and animals on our planet, why should we expect some alien race to value our lives?

Has the invasion already begun? (Humor section)

Here’s a radical idea: What if the aliens have already arrived and are working among us to destroy the human population right now in preparation for alien colonization?

This horrifying idea is portrayed quite dramatically in the recent television series “V” which is actually a remake of a series of the same name from the 1980’s in which alien reptilian visitors were taking over Earth by posing as earthlings. See Wikipedia.

In the V series, aliens that look like humans take over key positions in politics, health care and law enforcement, then they methodically enslave the human race.

The reason I mention this is because some writers and public speakers such as David Icke have, for years, claimed that a reptilian race of aliens already lives among us, and that people in key positions of power are actually reptilians. Obama is a reptile, the thinking goes, and so was Bush.

It’s hard to know what to make of such assertions. It would seem that if such lizard people actually existed, somebody would have snapped a photo of one by now, or a video would have appeared on YouTube. Or a lizard skull would have been apparent on a CT scan somewhere along the line.

Unless, of course, you think that the reptilian alien conspiracy goes so deep that key information censors on the internet (Google) are actually reptilian aliens themselves.

Come to think of it, the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, do look a little bit like iguanas (http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pag…), but that’s probably just coincidence.

Or is it?

Huge Object on Nasa Stereo Ahead COR2

Huge object on the latest Stereo Ahead COR2

http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/beacon/

Direct links to the 5 days of mpegs.

Right click and save as and then watch them in the order of days etc.

http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/browse/2…0_cor2_512.mpg
http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/browse/2…1_cor2_512.mpg
http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/browse/2…2_cor2_512.mpg
http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/browse/2…3_cor2_512.mpg
http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/browse/2…4_cor2_512.mpg

Stephen Hawking warns over making contact with aliens

BBC

Mr Hawking says it is ‘perfectly rational’ to believe in aliens Aliens almost certainly exist but humans should avoid making contact, Professor Stephen Hawking has warned. In a series for the Discovery Channel the renowned astrophysicist said it was “perfectly rational” to assume intelligent life exists elsewhere. But he warned that aliens might simply raid Earth for resources, then move on. “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” he said. Prof Hawking thinks that, rather than actively trying to communicate with extra-terrestrials, humans should do everything possible to avoid contact. He explained: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.” The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like Stephen Hawking In the past probes have been sent into space with engravings of human on board and diagrams showing the location of our planet. Radio beams have been fired into space in the hope of reaching alien civilisations. Prof Hawking said: “To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.” The programme envisages numerous alien species including two-legged herbivores and yellow, lizard-like predators. But Prof Hawking conceded most life elsewhere in the universe is likely to consist of simple microbes. In the recent BBC series Wonders of the Solar System, Professor Brian Cox, a physicist from the University of Manchester, also suggested life may exist elsewhere within our solar system. He said organisms could be present under the ice sheet that envelops Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Professor Cox added: “Closer to home, the evidence that life could exist on Mars is growing. “We will only know for sure when the next generation of spacecraft, fine-tuned to search for life, are launched to the moons of Jupiter and the arid plains of Mars in the coming decades.”

Former Canadian Defence Minister Paul Hellyer Discloses UFO’s!

Modern Psychedelic Scientists Find Data in Countercultural Past

Alexis Madrigal

Wired

SAN JOSE, California — A sprawling Holiday Inn by the San Jose Airport does not seem like the right place for a conference on the new science of psychedelic drug therapies.

Yet, last week, the stucco-walled hotel played host to a mèlange of playful scientific researchers, serious drug self-experimenters, and roving bands of hippies in handmade-looking clothing. The scene was as strange as you’d expect at a conference called “Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century.”

Scientists and doctors studying the medical uses of psychedelics are trying to figure out what to do with the cultural heritage of their drugs. There is a lot of baggage associated with LSD, for example, that new pharmaceuticals don’t carry: There are no Jay-Z songs about Zoloft. On the other hand, the vast numbers of experiences drug users have had with psychedelics could be a dark dataset that, with the right filters, helps aid the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

For the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which organized the conference, the event was the most visible result of their attempt to meld the world of Jerry Garcia with that of the Surgeon General.

“Things were so polarized in the ’60s. I think over the 40 years, the counterculture and the culture have changed. The culture is more receptive and the counterculture is more patient,” said Rick Doblin, a Harvard public policy Ph.D.-holder and the president of Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. “I think the vast majority of the people at the conference appreciate the scientific model and want to see the research move forward and think it’s a vehicle for change. There are a few that are into crystals and astrology, and then there are the vast majority, who are more scientific thinking.”

Outside the scientific sessions, there was more than a whiff of grooviness around. Outside the main ballroom, beyond a slatted fence, a “smoking area” and traveling tea room sat in a parking lot. Three young hippie women in classic garb wandered barefoot around the psychedelic art exhibits, and two young guys wandered around asking “Anyone know where the greens are?” There was software for tracking astrological phenomenon for sale and various herbal drinks that came in vials. People played the didgeridoo next to hot tubs under the intoxicating San Jose sun. It did not seem as if it would be difficult to conduct an uncontrolled experiment or two with a little help from some friends.

But inside the PowerPoint-illuminated conference rooms, people spent their days listening to scientific sessions. While there were hundreds of sessions, the lead-off hitter was Michael Mithoefer, a psychiatrist, who delivered an update on his work with MDMA, the main ingredient in the street drug ecstasy, to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. Mithoefer, supported by a few million dollars from MAPS, has a plan to push his drug-assisted therapy techniques through the lengthy clinical trial process. By about 2012, they hope to enter the last phase of clinical trials on MDMA. If that study works out, they’ll emerge on the other end with the same Food and Drug Administration stamp of approval given to Cialis and antibiotics and protease inhibitors.

The results look good, although they have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Patients who underwent two eight-hour therapy sessions and took MDMA showed much better short- and long-term clinical outcomes than people who just received a placebo and the therapy. At least in the early study, MDMA did much better than Zoloft in treating PTSD, Mithoefer said.

Based on the pioneering work of psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, Mithoefer’s work is the test case for the re-medicalization of psychedelic drugs. Mithoefer remarked that psychedelic research presentations are usually confined to tiny rooms in back hallways of scientific conferences. But there were hundreds watching him talk Friday. “This does mean something,” Mithoefer said. “The tide is turning a little bit.”

In 1970, Richard Nixon passed the Controlled Substances Act, which grouped the psychedelics and marijuana with heroin as drugs that had no medical value and had a high potential for abuse. It had a chilling effect on research in the area, though it didn’t seem to slow down the supply of drugs for amateur experimenters.

With official research lagging, unorthodox information networks grew up to spread the word about psychedelic practices and theory. The vast numbers of psychedelic drug users created enormous amounts of vernacular knowledge about how and why they work on the human mind. And a lot of that knowledge sits on the website, Erowid.org, where tens of thousands of people have posted their experiences with a bewildering array of substances.

Doblin, it turns out, went to college with Fire and Earth Erowid, the couple that runs the website. MAPS has supported Erowid financially and Doblin considers the site a valuable source for which psychedelics are most likely to be approved by the FDA for medical use.

“How do we decide which ones are the best? There are people who have tried all the drugs and they send in their reports to Erowid, etc,” Doblin said. “We have drugs we believe work, we just have to prove that they work.”

It’s exactly that knowledge that Doblin said was going to enable his small nonprofit to push MDMA through the FDA clinical trial process, which pharmaceutical companies say can cost $500 million, by their own accounting, which includes the high cost of the many failures.

“For us the advantage we have is this 5,000-year history with psychedelics and this whole underground work with MDMA. We have identified the successes through these unusual processes because the drugs are being used outside of medical knowledge,” Doblin said. “There has been a filtering of which drugs are the best,”

Fire Erowid agreed. She noted that researchers like Mithoefer are working with at most a couple of dozen people. Erowid has many thousands of reports. “The public knows so much more that’s not in the current scientific literature,” Erowid said.

The Erowid-MAPS connection provides a conduit for the informal knowledge of the psychedelic scene to enter the official record.

“It’s not about leaving the counterculture behind, but weaving it in,” said Brad Burge, a Ph.D. student at the University of California at San Diego who is studying the way MAPS works. Burge argued in an editorial for the group’s magazine that MAPS “exists somewhere between the sterile objectivity of clinical psychopharmacology and the passionate creativity of psychedelic counterculture.”

Both Burge and a fellow Ph.D. student, University of California at Berkeley’s Katie Hendy, are interested in how the use of psychedelics in clinical settings might change medicine itself.

“How is this research changing what pharmaceuticals are?” Hendy asked. To her, the very way the drugs operate could challenge the notion of what medicines are appropriate for treating our brains. Unlike Prozac or other pharmaceuticals that take weeks to work and often have subtle effects, psychedelics like psilocybin produce powerful and acute states of consciousness.

Burge had a similar perspective on the possibilities of psychedelics to change psychotherapies. “What MAPS wants to do is not so much to erase the line between spiritual growth and psychotherapeutic treatment, as to point out that there may not have ever been a difference in the first place,” Burge wrote.

But how to incorporate those elements of the counterculture remains a political, legal, and strategic question. What’s interesting about this conference is that most of the people are not self-styled counterculturists. They are wearing department store pants and dresses and wearing high heels. People take pains to indicate that this is a field that dots its i’s and crosses its t’s. It’s what makes this weird suburban location makes sense: If a Holiday Inn is good enough for podiatrists, it’s good enough for psychedelic researchers.

Mithoefer himself is a good symbol of the conference itself. From the front, his round glasses and stolid demeanor seem to make him the model of prudence and good sense. But when he turns, you notice a sly ponytail flicking around the neck of his sports coat. At the psychedelic science conference, there is a party in the back.

Even if the psychedelic researchers are now trying to go through official routes, many of them have their roots in a decidedly more adventurous camp.

“When I started at New College of Florida in ‘71, there was a nudist colony at the pool. That’s what I walked into as a college freshman,” Doblin said. “I have an appreciation of the responsible, beneficial use outside of medical contexts.”

Even Grof, an impeccably dressed Czech researcher with caterpillar eyebrows, who is considered a godfather of the more scientific side of psychedelic research, has a decidedly existential take on the potential of psychiatrics.

“The human drive for transcendence is even more powerful than the urge to have sex,” Grof said.

For him, the resurgence of psychedelic science is a welcome corrective to what happened during the Timothy Leary-led rise of LSD use. Leary’s and his followers’ attitudes sparked a backlash that robbed psychiatry of some of the best tools that they had for understanding consciousness and helping people.

Now, a couple of generations later as Grof nears 80 years of age, they might finally get a chance to use them again.

Images: Alexis Madrigal/Wired.com.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/04/the-new-psychedelic-science/#ixzz0ltwMtjbU

Planet X and Sumerian Tales on Coast to Coast AM

Researchers Jason Martell and Erik Poltorak (Parker) shared their expertise in Sumerian history, ET visitations and modern and ancient reports of Planet X. Appearing in the 2nd hour, Martell noted the recent findings of Japanese astronomers at Kobe University who have posited that an Earth-sized ‘Planet X’ could be moving through our solar system on a highly elliptical orbit. Martell also discussed the ‘Nemesis’ theory which suggests that a Planet X orbits a second sun (a failed star or Brown dwarf) and may dislodge comets and send them towards Earth.

The ancient Sumerians knew about Planet X and described it as a “red glowing planet,” whose inhabitants came to Earth to mine gold to repair their dwindling atmosphere, said Martell, summarizing the work of Zecharia Sitchin. The webmaster of Sitchin’s website, Erik Poltorak joined the show in the 3rd hour. He discussed stories from ancient Sumerian tablets, which were copied, borrowed, and reinterpreted across cultures, including being used in the Bible. For instance, the Sumerians described “Adamu” as the first man, created by Enki (a ruler from Nibiru or Planet X).

There is evidence that our solar system has been bombarded by Nibiru’s many passages through it, Poltarak stated. He and Martell took calls from listeners during the last hour.

National Geographic – Black Holes Contain Wormholes?

National Geographic

A supermassive black hole sits inside the galaxy Centaurus A, seen in an artist’s conception.

Ker Than

National Geographic News

Published April 9, 2010

Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe.

In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe—from the microscopic to the supermassive—may be doorways into alternate realities.

According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole is actually a tunnel between universes—a type of wormhole. The matter the black hole attracts doesn’t collapse into a single point, as has been predicted, but rather gushes out a “white hole” at the other end of the black one, the theory goes.

(Related: “New Proof Unknown ‘Structures’ Tug at Our Universe.”)

In a recent paper published in the journal Physics Letters B, Indiana University physicist Nikodem Poplawski presents new mathematical models of the spiraling motion of matter falling into a black hole. His equations suggest such wormholes are viable alternatives to the “space-time singularities” that Albert Einstein predicted to be at the centers of black holes.

According to Einstein’s equations for general relativity, singularities are created whenever matter in a given region gets too dense, as would happen at the ultradense heart of a black hole.

Einstein’s theory suggests singularities take up no space, are infinitely dense, and are infinitely hot—a concept supported by numerous lines of indirect evidence but still so outlandish that many scientists find it hard to accept.

If Poplawski is correct, they may no longer have to.

According to the new equations, the matter black holes absorb and seemingly destroy is actually expelled and becomes the building blocks for galaxies, stars, and planets in another reality.

(Related: “Dark Energy’s Demise? New Theory Doesn’t Use the Force.”)

Wormholes Solve Big Bang Mystery?

The notion of black holes as wormholes could explain certain mysteries in modern cosmology, Poplawski said.

For example, the big bang theory says the universe started as a singularity. But scientists have no satisfying explanation for how such a singularity might have formed in the first place.

If our universe was birthed by a white hole instead of a singularity, Poplawski said, “it would solve this problem of black hole singularities and also the big bang singularity.”

Wormholes might also explain gamma ray bursts, the second most powerful explosions in the universe after the big bang.

Gamma ray bursts occur at the fringes of the known universe. They appear to be associated with supernovae, or star explosions, in faraway galaxies, but their exact sources are a mystery. (Related: “Gamma-Ray Burst Caused Mass Extinction?”)

Poplawski proposes that the bursts may be discharges of matter from alternate universes. The matter, he says, might be escaping into our universe through supermassive black holes—wormholes—at the hearts of those galaxies, though it’s not clear how that would be possible.

“It’s kind of a crazy idea, but who knows?” he said. (Related: “Are Wormholes Tunnels for Time Travel?”)

There is at least one way to test Poplawski’s theory: Some of our universe’s black holes rotate, and if our universe was born inside a similarly revolving black hole, then our universe should have inherited the parent object’s rotation.

If future experiments reveal that our universe appears to rotate in a preferred direction, it would be indirect evidence supporting his wormhole theory, Poplawski said.

Wormholes Are “Exotic Matter” Makers?

The wormhole theory may also help explain why certain features of our universe deviate from what theory predicts, according to physicists.

Based on the standard model of physics, after the big bang the curvature of the universe should have increased over time so that now—13.7 billion years later—we should seem to be sitting on the surface of a closed, spherical universe.

But observations show the universe appears flat in all directions.

What’s more, data on light from the very early universe show that everything just after the big bang was a fairly uniform temperature.

That would mean that the farthest objects we see on opposite horizons of the universe were once close enough to interact and come to equilibrium, like molecules of gas in a sealed chamber.

Again, observations don’t match predictions, because the objects farthest from each other in the known universe are so far apart that the time it would take to travel between them at the speed of light exceeds the age of the universe.

To explain the discrepancies, astronomers devised the concept of inflation.

Inflation states that shortly after the universe was created, it experienced a rapid growth spurt during which space itself expanded at faster-than-light speeds. The expansion stretched the universe from a size smaller than an atom to astronomical proportions in a fraction of a second.

The universe therefore appears flat, because the sphere we’re sitting on is extremely large from our viewpoint—just as the sphere of Earth seems flat to someone standing in a field.

Inflation also explains how objects so far away from each other might have once been close enough to interact.

But—assuming inflation is real—astronomers have always been at pains to explain what caused it. That’s where the new wormhole theory comes in.

According to Poplawski, some theories of inflation say the event was caused by “exotic matter,” a theoretical substance that differs from normal matter, in part because it is repelled rather than attracted by gravity.

Based on his equations, Poplawski thinks such exotic matter might have been created when some of the first massive stars collapsed and became wormholes.

“There may be some relationship between the exotic matter that forms wormholes and the exotic matter that triggered inflation,” he said.

(Related: “Before the Big Bang: Light Shed on ‘Previous Universe.'”)

Wormhole Equations an “Actual Solution”

The new model isn’t the first to propose that other universes exist inside black holes. Damien Easson, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, has made the speculation in previous studies.

“What is new here is an actual wormhole solution in general relativity that acts as the passage from the exterior black hole to the new interior universe,” said Easson, who was not involved in the new study.

“In our paper, we just speculated that such a solution could exist, but Poplawski has found an actual solution,” said Easson, referring to Poplawski’s equations.

(Related: “Universe 20 Million Years Older Than Thought.”)

Nevertheless, the idea is still very speculative, Easson said in an email.

“Is the idea possible? Yes. Is the scenario likely? I have no idea. But it is certainly an interesting possibility.”

Future work in quantum gravity—the study of gravity at the subatomic level—could refine the equations and potentially support or disprove Poplawski’s theory, Easson said.

Wormhole Theory No Breakthrough

Overall, the wormhole theory is interesting, but not a breakthrough in explaining the origins of our universe, said Andreas Albrecht, a physicist at the University of California, Davis, who was also not involved in the new study.

By saying our universe was created by a gush of matter from a parent universe, the theory simply shifts the original creation event into an alternate reality.

In other words, it doesn’t explain how the parent universe came to be or why it has the properties it has—properties our universe presumably inherited.

“There’re really some pressing problems we’re trying to solve, and it’s not clear that any of this is offering a way forward with that,” he said.

Still, Albrecht doesn’t find the idea of universe-bridging wormholes any stranger than the idea of black hole singularities, and he cautions against dismissing the new theory just because it sounds a little out there.

“Everything people ask in this business is pretty weird,” he said. “You can’t say the less weird [idea] is going to win, because that’s not the way it’s been, by any means.”