In the first half, former assistant professor, and lecturer with NASA's Johnson Space Center, Rod Pyle shared updates on Mars, interplanetary exploration, and the fate of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. The Mars rover Opportunity was officially declared dead recently after it stopped responding to recovery commands, but Pyle noted that the craft surpassed its planned longevity of three months by a walloping 56 times. Most remarkably, Opportunity discovered evidence for the history of water on the Red Planet-- small nodules or spheres found in a crater that were nicknamed blueberries, he said. Currently, NASA has the InSight lander on Mars, which is examining geophysical properties of the planet.
The moon, he cited, has a lot of useful resources which makes it valuable as a launching pad for further space exploration in our solar system. NASA is considering building a space station in lunar orbit, and getting bids from private industry for different aspects of the project, he reported. Private enterprise is making inroads, he continued, commercializing the arena, transporting materials to orbit, and beginning to build an infrastructure that will pave the way for people to transport to and from the moon. Exploration of Mars by humans is a little further out, Pyle suggested, as the effects and dangers from longer periods traveling in space (let alone colonizing a new planet) are still being studied and understood.
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In the latter half, one of the world's leading historians of the UFO phenomenon, Richard Dolan, discussed the latest news on UFOs and disclosure, as well as classic cases from the Project Blue Book era and earlier. Just last month, the Defense Intelligence Agency announced that it had funded research on things like warp drive, invisibility cloaking, traversable wormholes, and many other areas considered to be fringe by mainstream science. This was part of its AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification) program, which was revealed to the public at the end of 2017. A number of intriguing papers were commissioned by AATIP, including 'Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering' by Hal Puthoff, which ponders new and innovative ways to navigate through interstellar space.
Among the older cases Dolan reviewed was the Gorman UFO "dogfight" in which Lt. George Gorman, a veteran pilot with the Air National Guard, encountered a strange object in the air near Fargo, ND in 1948. He saw a small craft moving very fast past him and chased after it. The object was blinking, and as he got closer the lights became steady, before it pulled into a sharp left bank. At one point, the UFO was coming straight at him on a collision course, and he dove beneath it. Eventually, the craft shot straight up and seemed to disappear. Dolan recounted the Eastern Airlines encounter also from 1948 (in which a rocket-like craft shot straight up, and made unusual movements), as well as the Flatwoods Monster case of 1951 and the photographing of the Lubbock Lights in 1951.
News segment guests: John M. Curtis, Mish Shedlock