Reading this newspaper article from the Amarillo Daily News of 11 April 1951, I get the distinct impression that the reporter might is perhaps being just a little sarcastic:
A new book speculates that pilots of flying saucers are super-bees from Mars, two inches long and quite beautiful.
[…]
One report was that flying saucers travel 18,000 miles an hour, with sudden stops and turns. Heard says no pilot shaped like a human being could withstand the force and pressure of such movement. But insects might—and so maybe the Martians are bees.
‘A creature with eyes like brilliant cut diamonds, with a head of sapphire, a thorax of emerald, and abdomen of ruby, wings like opal, legs like topaz—such a body would be worthy of this super-mind.’
[…]
The super-bees have been real gentlemen so far, taking care not to crash into man’s airplanes. In fact, ‘they have behaved with a deportment which shows not merely savoir-faire, but real considerateness.’
The full article is here. According to the Wikipedia article on the author of Is Another World Watching?, Gerald Heard, he started taking LSD in the 1950s. This is possibly not unrelated.
National Geographic has a supercomputer simulation of the Tunguska event of 1908, where an air-bursting meteoroid or comet flattened a 30-mile area of Siberian forest. Boom!
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I’d buy one of these t-shirts, but I already own a similar XKCD one and might start to gain a reputation for being something of a science geek if I got both. And goodness knows I wouldn’t want that.
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My new favourite conspiracy theory:
NASA (in association with secret organizations, such as the Illuminati or the Freemasons) wants to use this plutonium for a "higher purpose", dropping Cassini deep into Saturn at the end of its mission where atmospheric pressures will be so large that it will compress the probe, detonating like a nuclear bomb. What’s more, this will trigger a chain reaction, kick-starting nuclear fusion, turning Saturn into a fireball. This is what has become known as The Lucifer Project.
There’s lots more about this madness here.
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Jupiter has been in the news recently because of a new red spot which developed on the planet. Being a storm only the size of the Earth or so, it was fairly puny in Jovian terms, and so promptly got swallowed up by the Great Red Spot only a couple of months after first being spotted.
Because of this, The Big Picture has today posted lots of pretty photographs of Jupiter and its moons. The image above is of Io (which is about the size of our moon) orbiting the planet. Jupiter, it’s fair to say, is really quite big.
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