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Secret files on UFO sightings have been made available for the first time by the Ministry of Defence.

The documents, which can be downloaded from the National Archives website, cover the period from 1978 to 1987.

They include accounts of strange lights in the sky and unexplained objects being spotted by the public, armed forces and police officers.

One man explained in great detail his “physical and psychic contact” with green aliens since he was a child.

The writer said that one of them, called Algar, was killed in 1981 by another race of beings as he was about to make contact with the UK government.

The letter’s author said he visited their bases in the Wirral and Cheshire, while his wife reported seeing a UFO shot down over Wallasey on Merseyside.

The eight released files are part of almost 200 files set to be made available over the next four years.

These documents will be available to download for free for the first month.

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The Pope’s chief astronomer says that life on Mars cannot be ruled out.

Writing in the Vatican newspaper, the astronomer, Father Gabriel Funes, said intelligent beings created by God could exist in outer space.

Father Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory near Rome, is a respected scientist who collaborates with universities around the world.

The search for forms of extraterrestrial life, he says, does not contradict belief in God.

The official Vatican newspaper headlines his article ‘Aliens Are My Brother’.

Woooo… this way to more fun…

The news has carried this story quite a bit over the last few days so there’s not a lot I can add here to the basic facts.

Hofmann’s discovery had a big effect on me during my college years and opened my thinking up in many ways. LSD is definitely not for everyone. But I am not in agreement with the policies of most governments on this substance. I think in controlled circumstances it has a place in our pharmacology, in our psychological therapies and it our quests for personal enlightenment.

One of the best comments I saw on Hofmann’s passing this week was over on the Unknowngenius blog where the author said,

Albert Hofman, discoverer of the lysergic acid diethylamide compound (better known under its initials) and advocate of a mature, non-repressive approach to psychedelic drug experimentation, died this week at the age of 102.

Yet another tragic example of a young life cut short by the evils of drugs.

Some links on Albert (R.I.P.):

- to the Albert Hofmann Foundation

- Albert Hofmann on Wikipedia

- Albert Hofmann via Erowid - a number of remembrances of the man in different newspapers may be found here.

India, a nation of 1.1 billion, has a chronic labor shortage, in the area where it needs workers most.

As it grows rapidly — tilting from a stagnant, rural economy to a developing, urban one — India is building thousands of new homes, offices, malls, airports, roads, ports, power plants and industrial parks.

So many projects are now under way in India that the pool of workers with even the most basic skills is running dangerously dry. The shortage of bricklayers, rod benders, welders, wall painters and other skilled and semiskilled laborers is threatening to slow the construction of projects that are key to the nation’s economic growth.

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The Greens in New Zealand have shared a new discovery with the rest of us:

Scientists searching for a way to solve global warming have stumbled on the perfect solution for removing CO² from the air and locking it away in a non gaseous state. Crucially - given the scale of the problem – the device is self-replicating, self-powered and has the added benefit of preventing floods and erosion. They call it ‘the tree’.

- I wish Ray well on this idea but after reading a number of articles and books that were written in the past that tried to envision the future, I haven’t much faith in our ability to predict the future out very far. Just think about the movie 2001.

- These links explore the Singularity concept which some of you may not be familiar with:

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Ray Kurzweil, the famous inventor, is trim, balding, and not very tall. With his perfect posture and narrow black glasses, he would look at home in an old documentary about Cape Canaveral, but his mission is bolder than any mere voyage into space. He is attempting to travel across a frontier in time, to pass through the border between our era and a future so different as to be unrecognizable. He calls this border the singularity. Kurzweil is 60, but he intends to be no more than 40 when the singularity arrives.

Kurzweil’s notion of a singularity is taken from cosmology, in which it signifies a border in spacetime beyond which normal rules of measurement do not apply (the edge of a black hole, for example). The word was first used to describe a crucial moment in the evolution of humanity by the great mathematician John von Neumann. One day in the 1950s, while talking with his colleague Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann began discussing the ever-accelerating pace of technological change, which, he said, “gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue.”

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HOUSTON—According to an official NASA report released Saturday, nearly 32 percent of all prayers exiting Earth are deflected off satellites orbiting the planet—ultimately preventing the discharged requests for divine intervention from ever making it to the Gates of Heaven. “After impact with the satellite, these diverted prayers typically plummet back into the atmosphere, where they either burn up or eventually land, unanswered, in a body of water,” the report read in part. “Of the remaining prayers, research confirms 64 percent fail to make it past the stratosphere because they aren’t prayed hard enough, 94 percent of those with enough momentum are swallowed by a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and 43 percent are eaten by birds.” The report concluded that, of the 170 billion prayers issued last month, one made it to God, whose reply was intercepted by a hurricane and incorrectly delivered to a Nigerian man who reportedly did not know what to do with his brand-new Bowflex machine.

Thanks to The Onion…

Thanks to ScienceBlogs & Greg Laden, I can offer you this gem:

Click me for the YouTube video.

KALISPELL, Mont.

The blushless bride wears a hooded sweatshirt of red, offset by a bored expression that says she’s done this dozens of times before. The distracted groom wears a sweatshirt-and-cap ensemble of matching olive, offset by his — not their — infant daughter, now fidgeting toward sleep just outside the cramped room where holy vows are about to be exchanged.

The judge, wearing a white outdoor vest, takes her usual seat and exchanges nice-to-see-you-again pleasantries with the young couple, whom she hasn’t seen since the last time she married them, a week ago.

The three principals get down to the business of solemnizing this marriage. And when they are done, they will have another to solemnize, and another, and another, and another, because this is Montana, the only state to permit that strange and sacred ceremony, the double-proxy wedding, wherein the presence of neither the bride nor the groom is required.

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- This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, a friend of mine suggests the website bugmenot.com as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.

If sheep had Olympic Games, this one would be a gold medalist. A runaway sheep chased by police in northern Germany reached speeds of 45 kilometers an hour before jumping over the police car.

Police in the northern German village of Güster had their hands full on Monday when they were called out to catch an escaped sheep. “They gave chase in their vehicle but the pursuit didn’t prove easy because the animal at times ran at speeds of up to 45 kilometers (28 miles) per hour,” police said in a statement.

They finally caught up with it when it briefly got its leg stuck in a fence. “An officer carefully lifted the uninjured animal from the fence and placed in the field. But the sheep evidently didn’t like its new home because it made a daring leap straight over the hood of the police car.”

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