Reverend Elijah H. Hankerson, Roswell Base Chaplain may have helped those who saw the aliens

I found this story by Anthony Bragalia on ufocon.blogspot.com interesting:

The enormity of suddenly being confronted with sky-fallen craft and beings from another world near Roswell, NM in July of 1947 was no doubt spiritually shattering. The psychological impact of such an event had to have been deep and lasting. Everything must have come into question relative to man’s place in the universe. Newly-acquired information indicates that the Roswell Base Chaplain at the time -Reverend Elijah H. Hankerson- may have provided needed support to those that were not prepared to deal with such a momentous event. There are three telling elements to the Hankerson saga:

- Just days after the crash Reverend Hankerson was shipped out of Roswell Army Air Field and was replaced by a Catholic priest of higher rank
- Hankerson and his wife Annie kept from their children the fact that he was ever even stationed at Roswell. The family is stunned.
- Hankerson may have made a “silent confession” to them at the end of his life, possibly hinting at his involvement

… The role of a Chaplain at Roswell was an aspect that was not considered or examined by early Roswell researchers. Though military officers, ranchers and others were contacted about their possible knowledge of event surrounding the 1947 crash, no one ever considered the Chaplain, and what he knew. Given the significant role that a Chaplain would have played, I decided to track down any information that might lead to the identity of the Roswell Army Air Field Base Chaplain at the time.

Recently, through working with the US Army Chaplain Corps -and with assistance from the Executive Director of the US Army Chaplain Museum at Ft. Jackson, SC- I have conclusively identified the Base Chaplain at RAAF in July of 1947 as Reverend Elijiah H. Hankerson. Rev. Elijah Hankerson was a Black man and a National Baptist. Hankerson began his military career in 1944 and passed in 1990. However, I have located and contacted his daughter- Esther.

Elijah and his wife Annie lived off-base at 601 E. Summit in Roswell. Though Hankerson is mentioned in the RAAF Yearbook, he is not pictured.

Hankerson was replaced as Base Chaplain of RAAF on July 10, 1947 (just days after the event.) Hankerson was shipped out to a location in the South Pacific after the crash. He was replaced by a Catholic Priest, Captain/Father William B. Benson. Benson spoke five languages. His appointment to the base to replace Hankerson was sudden and not planned. The timing of this is interesting, to say the least. Less than a week after the crash, Hankerson was told he had to leave- and base officials brought in someone new.

… Asked if there is anything that he ever said during his life that would possibly indicate his knowledge of the Roswell incident, Esther thought about it and replied, “Yes, there is. Towards the end of his life in 1990, before he became entirely unable to speak, he said some things over and over that made no sense at the time. But they do now.”

Asked what it was that her father said that she found unusual, Esther replied: “There were a few things that he kept repeating as he drifted in an out. My father kept saying over and over “I’m just a Man. But in my Father’s house there are many mansions.” When she asked him “what do you mean?” he replied to her, “Dear, knowing too much is not always a good thing.” This was something she did not understand at all. Her father had a PhD and was also a Doctor of Divinity. She said that her father kept on referring to “the Universe and man’s place in it. He kept on repeating to us, “I’m just a Man, but the Universe, oh the Universe…”

She never knew what to make of these statements, they made no sense- until now. Clearly upset by the implications, Esther said, “Oh dear God, I’m realizing that he was trying to say something to us without saying. My father kept his oath till the end!”

via The UFO Iconoclast(s).

Elvis Presley’s hair to be auctioned, will the King be Cloned?

A clump of Elvis Presley’s hair, given to Gary Pepper as president of the Tankers Fan Club to give to Elvis fans, is one of over 200 Elvis items going up for auction on Sunday, Oct. 18 Photo: AP

Elvis Presley ranch up for sale for £4.1m

Elvis Presley Photo: AP

The singer’s locks were shorn off in 1958 as he prepared for Army service.

More than five decades later, the clippings are being offered to the biggest fan with the deepest pockets.

The ”large quantity” of Elvis’s hair is one of more than 200 lots going under the hammer this Sunday at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers in Chicago.

Other items on sale include an Elvis Presley Pez dispenser, dolls and clothes worn by the rock-and-roll great.

The collection was amassed by Presley enthusiast and president of one of the singer’s fan clubs Gary Pepper. Mr Pepper died in 1980, handing his Elvis memorabilia over to his nurse in the process.

They will now be distributed to fans via the auction.

The shorn locks have an estimated sale price of 8,000 dollars (£5,030) to 12,000 dollars (£7,500).

The auction house quotes celebrity hair expert John Reznikoff as stating that the strands appear to be those of the King.

On Leslie Hindman Auctioneers’ website, Mr Reznikoff said: ”The hair appears to match the hair in my collection in coarseness and colour… this is more than likely a genuine lock of Elvis’ hair, short of a DNA test proving otherwise.”

via Elvis Presley’s hair to be auctioned – Telegraph.

It may be possible to clone people from hair samples in the future. Perhaps by then we will have moved on to other planets. Imagine an entire planet of Elvis clones. What would a planet run by your own clones be like?

Invading giant snakes threaten U.S. wilderness areas

Burmese pythons and other giant snakes imported as pets could endanger some of America’s most important parks and wilderness areas if they are allowed to multiply, according to a report released on Tuesday. Wildlife experts say the Burmese python is distributed across thousands of square miles in south Florida. There could be tens of thousands in the Everglades, a wildlife refuge that is home to the Florida panther and other endangered species.

via Invading giant snakes threaten U.S. wilderness areas | Oddly Enough | STV News.

New Pterosaur: “Darwin’s Wing” Fills Evolution Gap

It may seem as unlikely as a jackalope, but this newfound pterosaur “hodgepodge” is the real deal, paleontologists say.

Scientists at the U.K.’s University of Leicester initially saw images of the flying reptile fossils earlier this year, and “our first thought was, Oh dear, it looks like a fake,” said study co-author David Unwin.

That’s because the 160-million-year-old creature has the big head of its descendants, while the rest of its body—including its very long tail—seems cobbled together from more primitive forms of the predators.

But later studies of more than 20 fossil skeletons, unearthed from an ancient lakebed in northeast China, convinced the team that the crow-size pterosaur was a real find.

The newfound fossil’s sharp teeth and long jaws, as well as its presumed awkwardness on the ground, mean it may have hunted like a modern-day hawk, Unwin said.

As shown in this artist’s rendering, the predator likely chased after other small animals, such as gliding mammals and feathered dinosaur species, that had started to take to the air.

Unwin and colleagues named the new species Darwinopterus, which means “Darwin’s wing,” in honor of the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species.

“We like to think that if Darwin was around … he’d be happy to have a pterosaur named after him,” Unwin said. (Related pictures: “7 Major ‘Missing Links’ Since Darwin.”)

Pterosaurs ruled the skies of the Mesozoic era, which lasted from about 250 to 65 million years ago. But there is a gaping evolutionary hole between the smaller, ancient pterosaurs and more modern ones, which grew to gargantuan proportions and, unlike their ancestors, could walk. (See a picture of a giant pterosaur.)

“Our new pterosaur is great, because it jumps right in that gap that we’ve known about,” said Unwin, whose research appears today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Thomas R. Holtz, Jr., a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, said that Darwinopterus “is a really cool creature, because it links the two major phases of pterosaur evolution.”

Pterosaurs were as diverse and as crucial to their ecosystems as modern-day birds, added Holtz, who was not involved in the research.

“If we were around in the Mesozoic,” he said, “there would be people who were pterosaur specialists in just the way we have ornithologists” today.

via ODD NEW PTEROSAUR: “Darwin’s Wing” Fills Evolution Gap.

Physicists Measure Elusive ‘Persistent Current’ That Flows Forever

Physicists at Yale University have made the first definitive measurements of “persistent current,” a small but perpetual electric current that flows naturally through tiny rings of metal wire even without an external power source.

The team used nanoscale cantilevers, an entirely novel approach, to indirectly measure the current through changes in the magnetic force it produces as it flows through the ring. “They’re essentially little floppy diving boards with the rings sitting on top,” said team leader Jack Harris, associate professor of physics and applied physics at Yale. The findings appear in the October 9 issue of Science.

The counterintuitive current is the result of a quantum mechanical effect that influences how electrons travel through metals, and arises from the same kind of motion that allows the electrons inside an atom to orbit the nucleus forever. “These are ordinary, non-superconducting metal rings, which we typically think of as resistors,” Harris said. “Yet these currents will flow forever, even in the absence of an applied voltage.”

Although persistent current was first theorized decades ago, it is so faint and sensitive to its environment that physicists were unable to accurately measure it until now. It is not possible to measure the current with a traditional ammeter because it only flows within the tiny metal rings, which are about the same size as the wires used on computer chips.

via Physicists Measure Elusive ‘Persistent Current’ That Flows Forever.

From ancient life to alien life: Living where the sun don’t shine

MODERN life is powered by the sun. But photosynthesis, the process that converts sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into plants, is a mere 2.4 billion years old. Life itself goes back at least 3.5 billion years. Before photosynthesis, the energy must have come from something else. Without understanding what that something was, it is impossible to know how life on Earth got going. Moreover, there are those who think that whatever did power Earth-bound life before photosynthesis might also power it on other planets. Which is why, on October 7th, a mission was launched from Cape Canaveral—not from the rocket pads in the north of the cape, but from the docks at its south.

The good ship Cape Hatteras, crewed by Chris German of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), in Massachusetts, and his colleagues, will act as a base for the exploration of a region of inner, rather than outer space—specifically, the Mid-Cayman Rise, a submarine mountain range that lies under almost 7km (about 4 miles) of water near Grand Cayman island in the Caribbean. When it gets there, Cape Hatteras will launch Nereus, an unmanned submarine, named after an ancient Greek sea god, that is capable of withstanding the pressure at such depth (it went down 11km on a previous expedition).

The Caribbean may seem an unlikely place to study extraterrestrial life, but this is no junket. The reason for going there is that the Mid-Cayman Rise is part of the 60,000km-long system of mid-ocean ridges that zigzags around the planet like a network of giant zip fasteners which open up regularly to reveal the liquid rock beneath. Moreover, it is a particularly unusual part of that network—one which some believe may also reveal what the earliest life on Earth looked like and thus give hints about how life might develop elsewhere. …

via From ancient life to alien life: Living where the sun don’t shine | The Economist.

Great ball of fire! Video reveals explosive magnetic power of the Sun

Dramatic eruptions on the Sun have been captured in rare footage by two Nasa spacecraft.

Filmed over two days, the images show large glowing clouds of gas bursting from the Sun’s surface and held aloft by the star’s twisted magnetic fields.

These huge solar prominences are several times larger than the Earth and are caused by the solar activity cycle. It is one of the most spectacular events that the twin STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) craft have observed.

solar prominences

The solar prominence is viewed in profile from Stereo Ahead (which did not photograph the whole star), while the filament is shown as a dark patch from Stereo Behind

Seen against the brilliant solar surface in visible light, they appear as dark filaments because they are relatively cool compared with the Sun’s core. But they are bright themselves when viewed against the blackness of space

The Sun is a huge ball of magnetized gas and as it rotates the heat churns its subsurface layer creating enormous bubbles. The Sun’s magnetic field becomes increasingly tangled and every so often large magnetic loops of gas burst out.

via Great ball of fire! Video reveals explosive magnetic power of the Sun | Mail Online.

Evidence of Evolution and Extremes of Denial

But despite the excitement from the paleontology community, another group of researchers, many of them with advanced degrees in science, are unimpressed by Ardi, who they believe is just another ape — an ape of indeterminate age, they add, and an ape who cannot be an ancestor of modern man for a range of reasons, including one of singular importance: God created man in one day, and evolution is a fallacy.

“What creationists believe about human origins we get from the Bible,” said David Menton an acclaimed anatomist and also a creationist. “The creation of the world takes place on page one of the Bible. If you throw out the first page of the Bible you might as well throw out the whole thing. If you can’t live with the first page then pitch out the remaining thousand pages.” …

Menton, an anatomy professor for 20 years at Washington University School of Medicine, is a researcher in residence at Answers in Genesis and has made a new career out of picking apart evolutionary discoveries.

The scientists who have spent the past decade pouring over Ardi’s fragmented skeleton believe she walked upright and that her teeth resemble modern human teeth more closely than they do those of a chimpanzee.

Though they do not believe Ardi is a direct ancestor of humans or the long-sought “missing link,” paleontologists say she helps show that both human beings and apes evolved from a common ancestor about 6 million years ago, that did not look much like either. …

Ardi, paleontologists say, was capable of grasping, something chimps need in order to climb in trees, but likely did not swing from branches the way modern chimps do.

For Menton, all the fragments indicate is that Ardi is an ape, plain and simple — and not anywhere nearly as old as scientists would have you believe.

Menton believes scientists sat on the Ardi discovery for over a decade just to roll it out during the Darwin anniversary. He questions the ability to accurately date any fossils more than a few thousand years old, let alone millions, and he said the condition of the skeleton was so incomplete and fragile that serious research was almost impossible.

//

Menton said Ardi’s skull and feet are exactly the kind of skull and feet you would expect an ape to have and have none of the features of modern humans.

“Evolutionists want to call Ardi ‘ape-like.’ This creature is ape-like, because she is an ape. Just call it an ape,” he said.

The biggest problem Menton has with Ardi is her estimated age. The Earth, he says, is no more around 5,000 years old, a number creationists have estimated by counting the generations of man named in the Bible from Adam to Jesus.

“Evolution is supposedly based on science, but the science does not prove what they want it to. Creationism is not based on scientific observation but on God’s word. God created everything in six days, and that’s it.”

via Creationists Say Science and Bible Disprove Ardi Fossil Is Evidence of Evolution – ABC News.

In order to disbelieve evolution, you have to deny a staggering amount  physical evidence collected and examined by thousands of people over the last 150+ years: transitional fossils, anatomical homologies, DNA and RNA code, endogenous retroviral insertions, pseudogenes, embryology, chromosome fusion, and convergence.

Joyce Arthur, in 1995 wrote this about Menton:

The need for a loving father figure and an ultimate purpose in life, then, is what drives the creationist engine. Emotional needs and wishful thinking take precedence over the facts of evolutionary science. Within the creationist mind, perfectly at home, is the paranoid, irrational idea that the theory of evolution poisons society and turns people into selfish animals. Resurrecting long-dead ideas from 19th century social Darwinism, Dr. Menton closed by protesting that the poor and the weak are not just steps on the evolutionary ladder of progress. Our real reason for being on this earth, he revealed, is to receive God’s love. – “God Loves Me, So Evolution Can’t Be True“

Menton’s arguments are shown to be flawed here as well:

… The probability of a specific protein arising all at once is indeed astronomically small. But proteins, and living things, do not arise all at once. Menton used as an analogy the pulling of Scrabble tiles to form the phrase “THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION”. Of course, the probability of this happening is very, very small, if all the letters are pulled one time. But evolution is not as purely random as Menton claims. Natural selection guides it. Say that we apply selection to Menton’s Scrabble model. Imagine that we pull out twenty tiles, and discard the ones that don’t fit. Now imagine we replace the discarded tiles with new ones, compare those to the target phrase, discard and replace the incorrect ones, etc., until the phrase is produced error-free. Using this process, the eventual production of the phrase “THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION” is effectively inevitable, because of cumulative selection. No evolutionist claims that complex structures arise at once; rather, they arise by a series of gradual steps, and only those which are successful survive. …

With regard to flawed arguments, see my early work on defense against faulty logic.

Physical evidence alone from over around forty different  radiometric dating techniques researched by many different scientists around the world for more than fifty years and also from helioseismic dating show that the Earth is over 4.5 billion years old.  If you want to spend the time, you can read the debate on the validity of radiometric dating.

Keep in mind that scientists get famous by showing other scientists are wrong.

Best free tools for learning to read music

I’ve played music professionally for years without actually being able to read music.  Many times, however, I’ve wished I was able to throw up a page of sheet music and play it on the guitar, piano, and trumpet. I’d also like to be able to sight sing with absolute pitch recall (not having to check a reference tone). If I could download new brain abilities, I’d grab these.

I’m looking for the best free on line tools for learning any of the above. Leave a comment if you know of a site or program that helped you.

Having fun with this one right now:

Here are a few more:

Zebra Keys: Everything You Need on One Site

Zebra Keys is probably one of the best sites for piano lessons. Each of the lessons are professionally written and cleanly laid out so that they’re very easy to follow. Best of all, an interactive piano keyboard is built right into the lesson articles so that you can practice what you’re learning directly on the lesson page.

Each key is clearly laid out, and the letter of each note shows up just underneath the key – making it much easier to learn which note goes with each piano key.  Once you’ve progressed through a few lessons and you want to try your hand at playing a song – Zebra Keys offers Z-Board V1.0, a virtual keyboard with all notes and chords displayed on it. …

PianoNanny: Better Than the Real Thing

One of the best sites for learning piano online is PianoNanny. This is one of those rare sites that offers the most detailed, expert piano lessons for absolutely free.  Just reading through the lessons, you get the sense that you’re sitting beside an actual piano teacher who really knows their stuff.   Each session includes text, keyboard images to help you visualize what the teacher is talking about, and even mini-apps like a “student note pad” to take notes.

Featuring 13 starter, 11 intermediate and 10 advanced lessons, PianoNanny is the most thorough of all the piano lesson websites listed in this article. …

Plern Online Piano Teacher and Composer

The Plern Piano is easily one of the most addictive and, believe it or not, fun online tools that you can use to learn how to play piano. The Plern Piano tool has dual uses; music composers can create a song from scratch, or piano students can import music from a MIDI file to learn how to play a song. Plern Piano plays through the song and as it scrolls across the music sheet, it provides you with a graphical representation of which key you need to press as well as the duration of the note. Think Tetris in musical form.

BerkleeShares – Free Piano Lessons From the Berklee College of Music

Starting in 2003, the Berklee College of Music started offering free music lessons online.  The lessons include guitar, brass, bass and even DJ & turntable training. When you click on the “keyboards” section, you’ll find a list of 12 lessons in either YouTube video format or as a PDF document. The videos are about one to two minutes, and the PDF documents are an average of about 2 pages with embedded music clips.

Ricci Adams’ MusicTheory Teaches You… Music Theory

MusicTheory is another very useful (and free) website that can teach you to play the piano. This website has 37 lessons, 10 “trainer” applications and 3 music utilities. The trainer applications on this website are exactly identical to those available at the Zebra Keys website but there are many more of them offered here. Best of all, the lessons are very thorough and offer a small keyboard app so that you can test some of the techniques you learn in each lesson.

The lessons are reminiscent of a Powerpoint presentation and you step through them in much the same way – by clicking an arrow on the screen. The lessons are clearly written by an expert and after going through these 37 piano lessons you’re sure to advance in your piano playing with a very thorough awareness of music theory. – makeuseof

‘Whole face of the mountain’ fell into valley, resident says

The sights and sounds of rocks rolling down mountainsides are common but still captivating phenomena for the residents of the Nile Valley in central Washington state.

“Every morning I hear big rocks coming down,” said longtime valley resident Frank Koch.

But a landslide over the weekend was more than Koch and the other 1,500 people in the Nile Valley bargained for.

“We just had the whole face of the mountain just pretty much come off,” said Valerie Royster, manager of the Woodshed Restaurant, which sits just across the road from the edge of the landslide.

The slide covered a quarter-mile to half-mile of State Route 410, which connects Yakima with Mount Rainier National Park, with rock up to 30 feet deep, said Washington state Department of Transportation spokesman Mike Westbay.

Westbay said 25 homes had been affected by flooding and five by the landslide itself, including a mobile home that was demolished …

Damage was estimated at $20 million, but that would likely increase, said Jim Hall, director of emergency management for Yakima County. Watch aerial shots of landslide area »

“My bet is it’s probably going to be a lot more than that,’ Hall said. Roads would needed to be rebuilt or rerouted, he said, and tons and tons of rock and debris moved.

via ‘Whole face of the mountain’ fell into valley, resident says – CNN.com.