Scientists discover mysterious sphere in Colombia, sparking UFO speculation
Scientists have made a remarkable discovery of a sphere that some believe to be an unidentified flying object (UFO).
The sphere, according to social media page @Truthpolex, was spotted March 2 flying over the town of Buga, Colombia, before it landed. Jose Luis Velazquez, one of the researchers studying the three-layered sphere, noted that it shows "no welds or joints," characteristics normally indicative of human manufacture, which further bolstered his belief in its extraterrestrial origin.
Julia Mossbridge, the executive director of the Institute for Love and Time (TILT), and a member of the University of San Diego Department of Physics and Biophysics, told Fox News Digital she remains skeptical of its extraterrestrial origins.
"It looks to me like a really cool art project," she said, urging caution in drawing immediate conclusions.
Ufo Footage Captured By Us Navy Shows Mysterious Aircraft Launching From Sea, Expert Says
Mossbridge framed the mysterious object as part of a "bigger picture" in which humanity must confront its own limitations.
Read On The Fox News App
"We are entering a time when we don't have the control that we thought we had," she said, noting that prior "grandiose" beliefs in total mastery blind us when "something shows up that doesn't fit our model of the world.
"If an artist is doing this, why is that? Well, I think it's partly the same reason. It's because we're learning that we don't understand what's in our skies, what's in our waters. And there's something going on that's essentially bigger than us," she said.
Former Defense Official Makes Earth-shattering Ufo Revelation As Unexplained Drones Leave Millions On Edge
She says sightings of unexplained objects have been around for decades.
"Frankly, we've been looking at UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) for decades, and the federal government has admitted that there are things that we don't understand, but we are investigating them," she said.
Mossbridge said the coalition of individuals working to find answers, such as the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, the UAP Disclosure Fund and the Galileo Project, are made of people of "all political persuasions."
"They are all trying to get rigorous information themselves, not necessarily waiting on the federal government, about what's going on in our skies, what's going on in our waters and actually trying to get international cooperation around these things," she said. "Because, for instance, the sphere in Colombia is in a different country. So, what are the rules about how we deal with something that's interesting that's found there?"
Pentagon Solves One Of Its Highest-profile Ufo Mysteries
Mossbridge urged thorough vetting before declaring anomalies in mysterious discoveries.
"Before you decide something's anomalous or a UFO, bring the object to a group like the Galileo Project," she said.
She said experts can determine if the material is "clearly non-human-made."
Despite her misgivings about the discovery in Buga, she said it doesn't "discount all the other objects that are of extraterrestrial origin."Original article source: Scientists discover mysterious sphere in Colombia, sparking UFO speculation
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Times
21 hours ago
- New York Times
How Astronomers Will Deal With 60 Million Billion Bytes of Imagery
It was not that long ago that astronomers would spend a night looking through a telescope, making careful observations of one or a few points of light. Based on those few observations, they would extrapolate broad generalizations about the universe. 'It was all people could really do at the time, because it was hard to collect data,' said Leanne Guy, the data management scientist at the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Rubin, located in Chile and financed by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, will inundate astronomers with data. Each image taken by Rubin's camera consists of 3.2 billion pixels that may contain previously undiscovered asteroids, dwarf planets, supernovas and galaxies. And each pixel records one of 65,536 shades of gray. That's 6.4 billion bytes of information in just one picture. Ten of those images would contain roughly as much data as all of the words that The New York Times has published in print during its 173-year history. Rubin will capture about 1,000 images each night. As the data from each image is quickly shuffled to the observatory's computer servers, the telescope will pivot to the next patch of sky, taking a picture every 40 seconds or so. It will do that over and over again almost nightly for a decade. The final tally will total about 60 million billion bytes of image data. That is a '6' followed by 16 zeros: 60,000,000,000,000,000. Rubin's 3.2 Gigapixel Camera At the heart of the Rubin observatory is the largest digital camera in the world, a supercooled grid with hundreds of high-resolution sensors. See how the camera works. By The New York Times PERU BOLIVIA BRAZIL ANDES MTS. PARAGUAY Vera C. Rubin Observatory URUGUAY Santiago ARGENTINA CHILE Atlantic Ocean Pacific Ocean By The New York Times Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Geek Wire
a day ago
- Geek Wire
The Rubin Observatory is throwing a big party to reveal its first pictures — and you're invited
After more than 20 years of planning and construction, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is ready for its grand opening, and the world is invited. The observatory in the foothills of the Chilean Andes features a monster of a telescope, with an 8.4-meter-wide (28-foot-wide) mirror, coupled with what's said to be the world's largest digital camera. It will survey the night sky every night for at least 10 years, producing about 20 trillion bytes of data every 24 hours. It would take you more than three years of watching Netflix, or over 50 years of listening to Spotify, to use that amount of data, according to the Rubin team. The first images and videos are due to be unveiled on Monday, during a 'First Look' webcast that will be shared online and at more than 300 in-person watch parties across the globe. What will the images look like? Mario Juric knows, but he isn't telling. 'I cannot tell you what's on them, but I can tell you we just finished them, and they look amazing,' Juric, a member of the Rubin team and the director of the University of Washington's DiRAC Institute, says on the Fiction Science podcast. 'I did not spend a day doing what I was supposed to be doing, because I just spent it browsing through the images. … I could teach an entire class by just zooming in on different parts of this image and explaining what this object is.' There could be a lot of teachable moments ahead: The observatory's Simonyi Survey Telescope is expected to detect millions of previously unseen celestial bodies in our solar system, potentially including a hypothetical world known as Planet X or Planet 9. It'll serve as an early warning system for transient cosmic phenomena such as supernovas or gamma-ray bursts. And it could help scientists shed new light on the mysteries behind dark energy and dark matter. Mario Juric (UW Photo) The dark matter angle is particularly apt, because the observatory is named after the late Vera Rubin, an astronomer who analyzed the rotation rates of galaxies to come up with some of the most solid evidence we have that invisible dark matter exists. Even before Rubin died in 2016, her fellow scientists were laying the groundwork for the observatory that would eventually bear her name. In 2003, they started discussing potential sites for what was then called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST. Juric recalls attending one of the early discussions in Seattle. At the time, astronomers were just finishing up a successful project known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. 'People were asking, what do we build next? What's the next major step in this idea to go and digitize the cosmos?' Juric says. 'And the idea was to build something like Rubin.' In 2008, the project received a $30 million boost from Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi and the company's co-founder, Bill Gates. Eventually, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy kicked in hundreds of millions of dollars to support the observatory's construction in Chile. Turning data into discoveries The observatory's Simonyi Survey Telescope features a unique three-mirror design that maximizes the instrument's field of view. It's made to move across a swath of sky in just a few seconds, allowing the LSST Camera to capture a 3,200-megapixel image in 15 seconds and then switch to take the next image five seconds later. That speed makes it possible for the observatory to map the sky in high resolution every three days. It takes less than 60 seconds to transfer each image over fiber-optic cables from Chile to the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California for an initial round of processing. The flood of imagery is distributed to data centers around the world, and scientists can access and filter the data through an online portal. Astronomical data analysis is the specialty of UW's DiRAC Institute. Its name is an acronym, standing for Data-intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology. Astronomers have traditionally been 'physicists who look up,' Juric says, but he argues that working with Rubin's rush of data will require a new set of skills — the kinds of skills that are being taught at the DiRAC Institute. 'You now need to become a data scientist, and you need to become a really good statistician,' he says. 'That's the kind of background that you're going to need to make sense out of all these data that Rubin is going to deliver to us.' A software tool that Juric helped develop, known as Sorcha, hints at the enormity of the task ahead. Sorcha makes predictions about how much data will be generated by the Rubin Observatory, and how many discoveries could be made as a result. 'The number that I like to quote is, it took all of mankind about … 225 years to discover the first one and a half million asteroids. And in less than two years, Rubin is going to double that, and then go on and triple that a few years later,' Juric says. University of Washington astronomer Zeljko Ivezic, director of Rubin construction, joyfully raises his fist in the observatory's control room in Chile after seeing the first on-sky engineering data captured with the LSST Camera. (Credit: RubinObs / NOIRLab / SLAC / DOE / NSF / AURA / W. O'Mullane) Are there anomalies ahead? What about Planet 9, which astronomers have been trying to detect on the edge of the solar system for more than 10 years? 'If it's out there, we have something like a 70 or 80% chance to find it,' Juric says. 'Even if we don't directly notice it, my guess is in about three years or so, that's how much time it will take us to accumulate this data to sufficient precision [that] we'll confidently be able to say whether it is there and just really, really hard to find — or whether this whole thing has been just us astronomers hoping a little bit too much.' There's even a chance that the Rubin Observatory will pick up evidence of alien signals. Some astronomers, including UW's James Davenport, have speculated that Rubin could detect anomalous patterns that might be associated with extraterrestrial spaceships. 'The nice thing with this telescope is, we're going to collect so much data that we'll be able to go and look for these rare, unusual, anomalous signals. And who knows, maybe one of them is an E.T. shining a laser at us,' Juric says. 'It'll be fun.' The fun begins at 8 a.m. PT on Monday when the First Look webcast goes online. 'A couple of days after that, on the 26th, we're going to have an extended version of that for the general public on the UW Seattle campus, at Kane Hall,' Juric says. 'We really invite everyone here from Seattle or the Pacific Northwest, however far you want to drive, to come over and see that with us in person.' The in-person event on June 26 will start at 7 p.m. and feature an hourlong presentation about Rubin's first images. Speakers will include Juric as well as UW astronomer Zeljko Ivezic, director of Rubin construction; and Andrew Connolly, who was the DiRAC Institute's founding director and is now the director of UW's eScience Institute. Juric expects the fun, and the hard work of discovery, to continue for at least the next decade. 'Rubin should have the kind of impact that when we look at textbooks 10 years from now, almost every textbook has to change something because Rubin has added to that piece of human knowledge,' he says. 'It's a fairly high bar to meet, but it is a big, expensive telescope. That's what we're aiming for: It's got to be transformational.' Check out the Rubin Observatory website for more information about the project and for links to the First Look webcast on June 23, plus a list of watch parties. You can also learn more about the University of Washington's DiRAC Institute and find out how to register for the free UW presentation at 7 p.m. on June 26. My co-host for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writer who is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and lives in San Francisco. To learn more about Phetteplace, visit her website, Fiction Science is included in FeedSpot's 100 Best Sci-Fi Podcasts. Check out the original version of this report on Cosmic Log to get Juric's thoughts on the connections between science fiction and the Rubin Observatory's future discoveries. Stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts and Podchaser. If you like Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe to get alerts for future episodes.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Scientists Say This 10-Second Test May Predict How Long You'll Live
Our society is obsessed with longevity. Our cultural focus on working out, eating whole foods, and managing stress isn't just about improving our health now, it's about increasing lifespan and improving quality of life for years to come. And while some people turn to psychics or mediums to ask, 'When will I die?' a new study published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology suggests there may be a simple, science-backed test to gain insight—one you can try at home. The sitting-rising test is simple. To complete it, study participants sat on a non-slippery flat surface barefoot with clothes that didn't restrict their movements. A researcher told the participants, "Without worrying about the speed of movement, try to sit and then rise from the floor, using the minimum support that you believe is needed." Basically, people were expected to go from standing to sitting down with their legs crossed, and back up again, while using as little support as possible. For the study, researchers at the Exercise Medicine Clinic in Rio de Janeiro enlisted 4,282 adults between the ages of 46 and 75. After evaluating participants' health markers, the researchers had them perform the sitting-rising test. Each person's performance was scored from zero to five for sitting and zero to five for rising (totaling up to 10), based on how easily and independently they could complete the participants could cross their legs while sitting, they couldn't use the sides of their feet, hands, forearms, knees, or the side of their leg for support as they lowered to the ground or stood up. Each time they did, one point was subtracted from their score. Participants also lost half a point for being wobbly. If the individual completely failed at sitting or rising from the floor without external help, they were given a 0. After 12 years, researchers followed up with participants and found that 665 had died. Death rates rose sharply among those with lower sitting-rising test (SRT) scores: just 3.7 percent of people who scored a perfect 10 died, compared to 42.1 percent of those who scored between 0 and 4. They also discovered that despite other health factors, low scorers had a 3.8 times higher risk of death from natural causes and were also six times more likely to die from heart-related issues. While the study doesn't directly prove that a perfect score guarantees longevity, the authors say that health professionals can use the SRT to tailor exercise plans and gain important insights into survival prospects for middle-aged and older adults, whether healthy or with medical conditions. Scientists Say This 10-Second Test May Predict How Long You'll Live first appeared on Men's Journal on Jun 20, 2025
