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News and observation reports, March 2006:

NOCTURNAL LIGHTS IN INDIANA, USA:

Kokomo -- On Tuesday night, March 21, 2006, about 9:00 PM, I saw some bright amber-orange lights as I left the house walking my dog. I wrote it off thinking it was a Grissom AFB Stratotanker, with its landing lights on. Thirty minutes later, I noticed brighter and more intense orange lights of which 3-4 seemed to appear and then disappear. They seemed to arc slightly and were only visible for 4-6 seconds. I thought perhaps I had witnessed an engine coming off a jet or something falling out of the sky like a military flare release.

I came home and told my wife and turned on the TV, but nothing showed up on the news. I called the Grissom AFB and talked to the Public Affairs Officer and he stated, they do not use flares during refueling operations since if would be dangerous with all that fuel, I asked him if any A-10 aircraft were in the area releasing flares. And he stated that no, they only do that over proving grounds. He said another person had called describing exactly the same thing I saw.

I went out the following evening at 9:00 p.m., and spotted four separate bright orange lights randomly dispersed through the sky unlike the first night.

Thanks to Brian Vike, Director HBCC UFO Research http://www.hbccufo.org

BLURRY DISC IN MASSACHUSSETS, USA:

Dennis. -- The witness says: "On March 20, 2006, at 7:25 PM, on the my front steps facing Cape Cod Bay, I looked up and saw an extremely bright light in the sky, just above the line of the trees in the shape of a blurry disc. It was quite large and had only appeared for a second, and was moving so fast that I blinked and it was gone. I would never have thought twice about it but my eyes still hurt from the brightness. The size of the object would be about that of a U.S. Quarter at arm's length. It was bright yellowish-white in the shape of a disc, almost oblong, but it was blurry in sight. It was the height of a low flying aircraft. It was in the path of the plane route moving extremely fast. I blinked and it was gone."

Thanks to UFOINFO.

UNEXPECTED COMET COMPOSITION:

On January 2, 2004, the dedicated NASA space sprobe Stardust flew in only 236 kilometers distance of the Wild 2 comet. Its mission was to gather gasses and dust from the comet's tail, non-descrutively captured in a special highly porous aero gel and to bring it home so that comet composition can be studied. The mission was a success: more than one million particles larger than a micrometer were captured and brought back to earth at the beginning of last year. 45 of them are large enough to be seen with the naked eye.

The data are expected to be so numerous that the general public may be invited to put their PC to contribute in a stardust@home project - see http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu

A first analysis of the largest samples proved more surprizing than expected: Researchers discovered minerals such as fosterit, an olivine-type mineral that is a crystalline mineral from iron, and also minerals from calcium, aluminum and titanium and other elements which develop only at high temperature, indicating the hot environment of stars, whereas it was rather consensual until then that comets formed in the outside and cold regions of the solar system.

And indeed the Wild 2 comet developed 4.5 billion year ago far beyond the course of the planet Neptun and penetrated the internal solar system for the first time only in 1974.

Donald Brownlee, the scientific directing the Stardust mission, said: "I am certain of that: these minerals formed in no case inside this icy celestial body."

Brownlee offered the idea that these minerals had to come from the inner parts of the young solar system, or maybe from the hot environment of another star. Another theory is that the sun magnetic fields may have cast away material from the inner solar system to its cold distant periphery.

I wonder about the chances, possibly not so low, that such minerals are not initial parts of the comet itself but were captured by the comet, if it had earlier chances to wander nearer to our star. If it formed so early in the then debris filled solar system, one should maybe not wonder so much about its composition.

It is now expected that the analysis of the crystal structure and the isotope composition of the minerals could supply hints to the origin of the materials. If it revealed that the material came from another star, that would be a quite interesting discovery.

SATURN'S MOON ENCELADUS MAY HAVE LIQUID WATER:

Observations from the Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn and its moons indicate that Enceladus may have pockets of liquid water just below its surface. It feeds an active plume spewing water and other material spaceward. A hot spot of thermal activity was also observed at its south pole.

Exobiologists are enthusiastic as it opens the possibility of a habitable environment on Enceladus, which adds to Mars and Europe, and possibly Io and Triton.

The discovery will be published in this week's issue of the journal Science.

FLYING TRIANGLE OR AIRPLANE, NEW YORK, USA:

Poughkeepsie -- On March 8, 2006, at 8 PM, a flying triangle was sighted with full lighting flanking on each side. One side was all red and the other side was green. It was hovering in place for most of the time, then abruptly moved to another area in the sky for a few moments and then disappeared. The lights blinked on and off for about fifteen minutes.

Thanks to Peter Davenport, NUFORC.

GEIPAN OPENS THEIR WEBSITE:

The new official French study group of UFO phenomena, GEIPAN, refounded amidst CNES, the National Center for Space Studies, has just opened their website at:

http://www.cnes.fr/html/_112_4461_.php

No interesting information is published there for the moment, the website merely indicating the GEIPAN mission statement and and recalls that there are UFO reports that have commonplace explanations.

CASSINI ON THE LOOK FOR SUBSURFACE OCEAN AND METHANE ICE ON TITAN:

The Cassini space probe in orbit around Saturn made the first of four planned Titan flybys in a search for possible subsurface oceans and methane-rich ice, as astronomers hope to understand how Titan replenishes the methane in its atmosphere.

Gabriel Tobie, a researcher with the University of Nantes in France, said that "methane is only around for a short time geologically, the timescale is somewhere between 10 and 100 million years." He suspects that Titan's methane is probably locked in ice covering an ocean of water and ammonia. Methane makes up about two percent of Titan's predominantly nitrogen-rich atmosphere, thicker than the atmosphere on Earth, and is apparently replenished over time through outgassing since it is destroyed by sunlight.

It was previously believed that Titan's methane rested in a liquid methane ocean on the surface but the Huygens probe that landed on Titan last year found no signs of an ocean, although it did suggest that liquid methane once carved gullies across Titan.

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