Welcome to Sott.net
Tue, 03 Oct 2023
The World for People who Think

Secret History
Map

Question

Film has unique view of Oak Island

Beverley Ware
South Shore Bureau
Mon, 28 Jan 2013 04:15 UTC
Oak Island
© Herald News
Oak Island has been the site of numerous excavations to recover treasure believed by many to be buried there.
Bridgewater - Petter Amundsen looks upon the beautiful fresh snow that has blanketed the world around the Evangelical Lutheran chapel, where he plays the organ.

It's an incongruous setting, given the conversation in which he is engrossed.

Amundsen is in Norway, where his day job as chapel organist means he has played for King Harald V and Queen Sonja. But he's talking about what has gripped his heart for the last 10 years - uncovering the secrets of Oak Island in Mahone Bay.

His efforts culminated in a film released in Norway last year that will be shown in London this spring, but the amateur cryptologist is making plans to show it beforehand in Nova Scotia.

The film will debut in 40 theatres in England beginning April 23, though Amundsen would like a screening in Chester on April 13, a year to the day after its release in Norway.

Amundsen has made three trips to film on Oak Island since 2003, the most recent in 2011. He believes the movie will generate interest in Oak Island and boost tourism in the region.
      Read More...
Sherlock

Crop circles are no hoax, concludes historian after studying Google Earth's new 1945 overlay

Sara C Nelson
Huffington Post
Tue, 29 Jan 2013 10:15 UTC
Image

A crop circle in Halesowen. Greg Jefferys estimates this one to be about ten meters in diameter. He points out the shadow on its south east perimeter corresponds precisely with the shadows cast by the trees and hedges and that the quality of the image is high enough to show there are no tracks through the grain crop leading to or from the crop circle
Crop circles dating back to 1945 are proof the phenomenon is no modern hoax, a Tasmanian historian claims.

The mystery of the increasingly intricate patterns was supposedly solved after several high-profile cases were revealed to be the work of artists and mischief-makers armed with barrels, planks of wood and plenty of spare time.

Credit for the hoaxes has been laid largely at the feet of pranksters Dave Chorley and Doug Bower, who in 1991 announced they had been pulling the wool over people's eyes since 1978.

(FYI, crop circles have also been blamed on unusual weather patterns, top secret military experiments and, er, stoned wallabies.)
      Read More...
Rocket

The NAZI origins of NASA


Brasscheck TV
Wed, 30 Jan 2013 07:11 UTC
Full spectrum dominance: The Nazi-American race to control space

Operation Paperclip was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) program used to recruit the scientists of Nazi Germany for employment by the United States in the aftermath of World War II (1939/45). It was executed by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), and in the context of the burgeoning SovietAmerican Cold War (1945/91) one purpose of Operation Paperclip was to deny German scientific knowledge and expertise to the USSR.

Although the JIOAs recruitment of German scientists began after the European Allied victory (8 May 1945), US President Harry Truman did not formally order the execution of Operation Paperclip until August 1945. Truman's order expressly excluded anyone found to have been a member of the Nazi Party, and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism. Said restriction would have rendered ineligible most of the scientists the JIOA had identified for recruitment, among them rocket scientists Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, and the physician Hubertus Strughold, each earlier classified as a menace to the security of the Allied Forces.

To circumvent President Trumans anti-Nazi order, and the Allied Potsdam and Yalta agreements, the JIOA worked independently to create false employment and political biographies for the scientists. The JIOA also expunged from the public record the scientists' Nazi Party memberships and régime affiliations. Once bleached of their Nazism, the US Government granted the scientists security clearance to work in the United States. Paperclip, the projects operational name, derived from the paperclips used to attach the scientists new political personæ to their US Government Scientist JIOA personnel files.
      Read More...
Info

Did rise of ancient human ancestor lead to new stone tools?

Tia Ghose
LiveScience
Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:00 UTC
Ancient Tools
© PNAS
Scientists have unearthed more than 350 ancient tools in Konso, Ethiopia that were used by humans' ancient ancestors. The tools, which span roughly 1 million years of evolution, show a gradual progression to more refined shaping.
Scientists have unearthed and dated some of the oldest stone hand axes on Earth. The ancient tools, unearthed in Ethiopia in the last two decades, date to 1.75 million years ago.

The tools roughly coincided with the emergence of an ancient human ancestor called Homo erectus, and fossilized H. erectus remains were also found at the same site, said study author Yonas Beyene, an archaeologist at the Association for Research and Conservation of Culture in Ethiopia.

Collectively, the finding suggests an ancient tool-making technique may have arisen with the evolution of the new species.

"This discovery shows that the technology began with the appearance of Homo erectus," Beyene told LiveScience. "We think it might be related to the change of species."

The findings were described today (Jan. 28) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
      Read More...
Bizarro Earth

Destruction of Timbuktu manuscripts is an offence against the whole of Africa

Jonathan Jones
Guardian
Mon, 28 Jan 2013 12:32 UTC
Image
© Photograph: Sebastien Cailleux/Corbis
Libraries like the Ahmed Baba institute were rescuing Africa's history from oblivion.
This was an assault on world heritage comparable with the demolition of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2001

The reported destruction of two important manuscript collections by Islamist rebels as they fled Timbuktu is an offence to the whole of Africa and its universally important cultural heritage. Like their systematic destruction of 300 Sufi saints' shrines while they held Timbuktu at their mercy, it is an assault on world heritage comparable with the demolition of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2001.

The literary heritage of Timbuktu dates back to the 15th and 16th centuries when the gold-rich kingdoms of Mali and Songhai traded across the Sahara with the Mediterranean world. It took two months for merchant caravans to cross the desert, and while gold and slaves went north, books were going south.
      Read More...
R2-D2

Scientists strive to save dying spoken language of Jesus


RT.com
Mon, 28 Jan 2013 12:25 UTC
Image
British scientists are attempting to preserve the Aramaic language spoken by Jesus and tied to Hebrew and Arabic.

Professor of linguistics at the University of Cambridge, Geoffrey Khan, has begun a quest to record the ancient language that's been around for three thousand years before it finally disappears.

Prof Khan decided to record the language after speaking to a Jew from Erbil in northern Iraq. "It completely blew my mind," Khan told Smithsonian.com.
      Read More...
Info

Mass human sacrifice? Pile of ancient skulls found

Tia Ghose
LiveScience
Fri, 25 Jan 2013 14:24 UTC
Mexican Artifact
© Christopher Morehart
An artifact depicting Tlaloc, a Pre-Columbian water god, was found at the human sacrifice site at Lake Xaltocan, Mexico.
Archaeologists have unearthed a trove of skulls in Mexico that may have once belonged to human sacrifice victims. The skulls, which date between A.D. 600 and 850, may also shatter existing notions about the ancient culture of the area.

The gruesome find, described in the January issue of the journal Latin American Antiquity, was located in an otherwise empty field that once held a vast lake, but was miles from the nearest major city of the day, said study co-author Christopher Morehart, an archaeologist at Georgia State University.

"It's absolutely remarkable to think about this little nothing on the landscape having potentially evidence of the largest mass human sacrifice in ancient Meso-America," Morehart said.
      Read More...
Sherlock

Archeologists revise image of ancient Celts: 2,600-year-old grave suggest they were much more sophisticated than previously thought

Richard A. Fuchs
DW.de
Thu, 24 Jan 2013 11:30 UTC
The Celts were long considered a barbaric and violent society. But new findings from a 2,600-year-old grave in Germany suggest the ancient people were much more sophisticated than previously thought. The little Bettelbühl stream on the Danube River was completely unknown, except to local residents. But that changed in the summer of 2010 when a spectacular discovery was made just next to the creek.
Image
Not far from the Heuneburg, the site of an early Celtic settlement, researchers stumbled upon the elaborate grave of a Celtic princess. In addition to gold and amber, they found a subterranean burial chamber fitted with massive oak beams. It was an archeological sensation that, after 2,600 years, the chamber was completely intact.

The wooden construction was preserved by the constant flow of water from the Bettelbühl stream. "In dry ground, the wood wouldn't have had a chance to survive over so many centuries," said Nicole Ebinger-Rist, the director of the research project handling the find.
      Read More...
Sherlock

28,000 year-old bone and ivory art from Siberia

K. Kris Hirst
Ask.com
Thu, 24 Jan 2013 09:12 UTC
A late 2012 article in the journal Antiquity featured the well preserved and extensive bone and ivory artifacts recovered from the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Sites, six 28,000 year old sites located above the Arctic Circle in far eastern Siberia. Yana RHS is important for a number of reasons, not the least is its age and location, east of the Verkhoyansk Range in Siberia, and thus close enough in time and space to be a candidate site for the initial colonists of the Americas. Putting the article in Antiquity allowed the researchers to show off color images of the artifacts, some of which lead archaeologist Vladimir V. Pitulko was kind enough to let me use in this new photo essay.
Image
© Vladimir V. Pitulko and Antiquity
28,000 Year Old Ivory plaques with complex patterns of dots, dashes and lines, from Yana RHS.
      Read More...
Blackbox

300-million-year-old tooth wheel found in Russian coal: scientists


Huffington Post
Wed, 23 Jan 2013 18:35 UTC
Tooth wheel
The Earth was so young 300 million years ago, the first land animals had yet to evolve into dinosaurs, most scientists believe.

If that's the case, how do you explain the discovery in Russia of a piece of a gear shift -- a common machine part -- embedded into a hunk of 300-million-year-old coal. Has this artifact been correctly identified? And if so, who could have made this thing? And for what purpose?

According to Komsomolskaya Pravda, a resident of Vladivostok -- near the borders of China and North Korea -- named Dmitry, recently noticed something odd about a hunk of coal he had obtained to heat his home during the winter.

A metallic-looking rail or rod was pressed into the coal, prompting Dmitry to contact biologist Valery Brier, in the seaside Primorye region.
      Read More...
Revolt! T-shirts