Are the Dead Sea Scrolls historical documents or collectible items? How you answer that question may determine how you feel about new revelations that fragments of scrolls in private collections that their owners have paid millions for are probably fakes ... well-made forgeries, but fakes nonetheless. One of the victims of these frauds is the Museum of the Bible, which is scheduled to open in Washington DC in November 2017. In a new article in Dead Sea Discoveries by paleographer and Dead Sea Scrolls expert, Dr. Kipp Davis, many of the "scrolls" to be displayed in that facility are questionable at best, fakes at worst.

Forgeries have been a problem with the Dead Sea Scrolls since the first ones were found in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds in a cave near what is now known as the Qumran site. Eventually, 11 (some say 12) caves were found housing some 900 manuscripts and up to 50,000 fragments in forms ranging from full scrolls to minute pieces. As they contain the contents of the Hebrew Bible, competition between scholars and collectors to possess the scrolls was immediately fierce, costly and fraught with frauds. Eventually, carbon dating of the leather they were written on eliminated fakes that weren't around 2,000 years old.

Australian Aborigines probably observed the cyclical changes in the brightness of pulsating red giant stars such as Antares, Betelgeuse, and Aldebaran. They integrated their observations into their oral traditions - cultural narratives that served as a system of laws, social rules, and general knowledge transmission.

European astronomers realized that red giants changed in brightness in 1596, when David Fabricius registered the variability of the star Mira. Johannes Hevelius went on to calculate the amplitude and periodicity of Mira's changes in 1662. But the oral traditions of Australian Aborigines could go much further back in time: they have inhabited the fifth continent for more than 65,000 years. Research examining oral tradition for geological events, such as volcanic eruptions or meteorite impacts, have shown that such oral traditions can survive for thousands of years.

Duane Hamacher (Monash University and University of Southern Queensland, Australia), found new references to variable stars after reinterpreting the accounts of 19th- and 20th-century anthropologists and ethnologists, who recorded some of the Aboriginal oral traditions. His results are being published in a new study in the Australian Journal of Anthropology.

According to Hamacher, anthropologists sometimes misinterpreted Aboriginal accounts in the past, wrongfully assuming them to refer to planets in the solar system rather than stars.

"Many anthropologists had limited training in astronomy, so misidentifications, conflated terminology, and errors were not uncommon," Hamacher says. "Mars and Antares are often mixed up because of their comparable brightness and occasional close proximity."

Hamacher found two oral traditions that referenced the variable stars Betelgeuse, Antares and Aldebaran. Their changes in brightness carried important weight in the narratives and helped encode certain social rules, such as signaling to the tribe when to celebrate initiation rituals.

This is the first clear evidence of indigenous peoples observing and recording stellar variation in oral traditions. The only widely accepted record of a pulsating variable comes from an Egyptian papyrus called the Cairo calendar, which predicted good and bad luck periods throughout the year, dated around 1200 B.C. A statistical analysis of those periods revealed that they followed the variation of the eclipsing binary star Algol.

WSU researchers document one of planet's largest volcanic eruptions

Gases from Inland Northwest blocked out sun, cooling planet

Washington State University researchers have determined that the Pacific Northwest was home to one of the Earth's largest known volcanic eruptions, a millennia-long spewing of sulfuric gas that blocked out the sun and cooled the planet.

Only two other eruptions - the basalt floods of the Siberian Traps and the Deccan Traps - were larger, and they led to two of the Earth's great extinctions.

The Antikythera mechanism was for years one of the world's greatest unsolved mysteries. The strange, intricate device was found in 1902 in a shipwreck off of the Greek island of Antikythera. For over a century, the device's construction and intended use puzzled historians and archaeologists. Coins and other artifacts found at the shipwreck were dated to the first century, but the Antikythera mechanism's construction appeared to be far more advanced than any other technology known from that time.

In the last decade, new 3D scanning technologies have allowed researchers to peer into the inner workings of the device like never before. It is now believed the device was one of the world's first analog computers and was used to chart astronomical events like lunar and solar cycles and eclipses. The shipwreck on which the device was found is still the subject of scrutiny, with new discoveries being made. Last year, bone fragments belonging to the human occupants of the ship were located and are still undergoing DNA testing to determine their ancestry. Now, researchers from the Greek Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities and Sweden's Lund University have made another groundbreaking discovery among the Antikythera shipwreck that could revolutionize Greek history.

A 1972 report for the Defense Intelligence Agency spends about four pages describing and worrying about "suggestology," and the name is the least ridiculous part about it.

Described in the report as "a new 'ology' defined by the communist countries as the scientific study of suggestion," suggestology was supposed to allow humans to tap into "the unknown reserves, powers and abilities of the human mind." According to the report, "in some areas it overlaps with parapsychology" which is a bit of an understatement.

Archaeologists studying clothing worn by ancient Vikings have found evidence of a link between the Nordic tribes and Islam.

Researchers from Sweden's Uppsala University examined garments uncovered at 9th and 10th-century burial sites. They found that what they thought were typical Viking Age patterns in silver bands and embroidered clothing, were actually Kufic characters invoking both 'Allah' and 'Ali,' two central figures in the Islamic faith.

Kufic, an ancient Arabic script dating back to the 7th century, appeared in Viking Age chamber graves and boat graves in areas around the capital Stockholm. Astonishingly, the same characters can also be found in mosaics on burial monuments and mausoleums in Central Asia.

Annika Larsson, researcher in textile archaeology at the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History at Uppsala University, believes that the presence of the Kufic characters at two different grave sites suggests that Viking funeral customs were influenced by Islam.

"Presumably, Viking Age burial customs were influenced by Islam and the idea of an eternal life in Paradise after death,"Larsson told the university's website.

"Grave goods such as beautiful clothing, finely sewn in exotic fabrics, hardly reflect the deceased's everyday life, just as little as the formal attire of our era reflects our own daily lives. The rich material of grave goods should rather be seen as tangible expressions of underlying values."

As discussed in a number of previous posts, Mars became captured in a geostationary orbit 36,000 km above Mt. Kailas, in the TransHimalayas, for 14.4 years and then was released into a planetary orbit for 15.6 years. This 30-year cycle was repeated one hundred times between 3687 and 687 BC, and observed by one hundred generations of mankind who incorporated observations of these events in ancient texts. In the Rig Veda the capture periods were called kalpas and 'days of Brahma'. In Egyptian myth they were called 'inundations' due to the tidal effect of Mars (Horus on the Horizon), which drew the Nile waters across eastern Egypt, increasing the fertility there.

During each kalpa, Mars exerted a continuous tidal effect on the Deccan Traps volcanism, drawing the subsurface asthenosphere rock upward producing an additional 20-meter thick layer, 'traps' meaning steps. Therefore, the Deccan Traps represent a geological clock covering approximately 3000 to 687 BC, herein dubbed the Vedic Period. It is impossible to drill through the many layers of the Deccan Traps. Instead, different provinces have been dated, where older sections of the traps are exposed.

This has proven difficult for several reasons. Most significantly, the 'Trap' rocks do not give the ancient dates that geologists expected, because they are less than 6,000 years old. Geologists maintain that potassium-argon, (K-Ar), dating does not work because the isotope ratios of argon in the atmosphere have changed.

That is true, because the entire atmosphere of the Earth changed during the Vedic Period due to the influx of the entire Martian atmosphere.

To overcome this apparent obstacle, geologists have reverted to using the thin layers of material between the actual steps, called 'separates', assuming it is also of earthly origin. But these thin layers comprise material from Mars which fell from the atmosphere between kalpas. Although the (U-Pb) in zircons in the separates have a wide range of ages, those with the ages supporting the hypothetical Cenezoic period are chosen, thereby justifying the age of deepest layers of the Deccan Traps at 66 million years BP. The 'separate'layers are proof that there was significant time between each of the one hundred rock layers.

Comparing testimony from Vietnamese women and American soldiers, Gina Marie Weaver, in her book Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in The Vietnam War, finds that rape of Vietnamese women by American troops during the US invasion of Vietnam was a "widespread", "everyday occurrence" that was essentially "condoned", even encouraged, by the military, and had its foundation in military training and US culture.

She explores why US rape in Vietnam was so common, and why this aspect of US behavior has been virtually "erased" from "narratives of the war". She stresses the issue is also important as rape in the US military continues at a high level today, having been mostly transferred away from foreign populations and onto female American soldiers.

Rape of Vietnamese women by US troops "took place on such a large scale that many veterans considered it standard operating procedure."

It was "systematic and collective"; an "unofficial military policy". One soldier termed it a "mass military policy." Indeed, rape followed by murder of Vietnamese women was "so common that American soldiers had a special term for the soldiers who committed the acts in conjunction: a double veteran".

German investigative journalist Patrik Baab and former Pentagon adviser Robert Harkavy have released a bombshell book, revealing the links between the murders of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, West German politician Uwe Barschel and former CIA director William Colby. Baab told Sputnik what their groundbreaking research has uncovered.

Baab and Harkavy's book, 'In the Spider Web of the Secret Services: Why Were Olaf Palme, Uwe Barschel and William Colby Murdered?', takes aim at the CIA's suspected involvement in the officials' deaths. Based on secret documents from seven different intelligence agencies, conversations with former agents, toxicology reports, and consultations with experts, the book seeks answers to long-standing questions about who was responsible for what have become among the most high profile political death and suspected suicide cases of the 20th century.

Speaking to Sputnik Deutschland, Baab, a renowned television journalist in his native Germany, said that there was a common thread tying all three of the officials' deaths together.

Ancient symbols on a 3,200-year-old stone slab have been deciphered by researchers who say they could solve "one of the greatest puzzles of Mediterranean archaeology".

The 29-metre limestone frieze, found in 1878, in what is now modern Turkey, bears the longest known hieroglyphic inscription from the Bronze Age. Only a handful of scholars worldwide, can read its ancient Luwian language.

The first translation has offered an explanation for the collapse of the Bronze Age's powerful and advanced civilizations.

The script tells how a united fleet of kingdoms from western Asia Minor raided coastal cities on the eastern Mediterranean.

It suggests they were part of a marauding seafaring confederation, which historians believe played a part in the collapse of those nascent Bronze Age civilisations.