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32 25 Space Conspiracies That Just Won’t Die

That Just Won't Die

Continued from Page 28

We've launched balloons into space!

With the advent of high-resolution, miniature
cameras, several people have decided to strap
these cameras on to high-altitude balloons and
take pictures from up high. They've caught
glimpses of blackness and, at times, taken
interesting tiny passengers along (such as these
Lego pieces and a Canadian flag in 2012). So
they must be in space, right?
There's no way a balloon can get into
space, and simple physics explains why. When a
balloon rises into the sky, the air inside will
expand in response to the dropping atmospheric
pressure and eventually pop. Even Felix
Baumgartner's stunning high-altitude balloon
There's life on Venus. cataloged.) Of the space rocks discovered so far,
jump in 2012 was not actually from space, but
NASA has not found a single asteroid that has a
from the stratosphere, which extends to roughly
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union high probability of hitting Earth in the
31 miles (50 kilometers) above the Earth's
sent several uncrewed missions to study Venus. foreseeable future.
surface. At that altitude the air is thin enough to
Ten of these Venera probes landed on the
see the blackness of space, but thick enough to
surface of Venus and were able to transmit data Aliens landed in Roswell, New Mexico
support special high-altitude balloons. The
and images for a few minutes before
boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer
succumbing to the planet's extreme atmosphere. On a ranch in Roswell, New Mexico, so the
space is about twice as high as the upper limits
of the stratosphere. In 2012, the Russian news service RIA Novosti story goes, an alien spacecraft crashed in 1947.
reported that Leonid Ksanfomaliti, a scientist While the accounts of exactly what happen vary,
who worked on the Venera missions, suggested the legend claims that a disc or some sort of
There are canals on Mars.
that the photographs showed living objects spacecraft was found on a ranch, and that the
moving around on the planet's surface. (RIA government quickly covered up the evidence.
Author Percival Lowell became one of space's
Novosti ceased operations in 2013.) While rumors of aliens circulated, some
first popularizers when he wrote many books
These alleged life-forms on Venus are people speculated that the crash was just a plain
for the general public back in the late 1800s and
just an example of "letting your mind see old weather balloon that might not have been
early 1900s. In these books and other writings,
patterns in low-resolution data that simply aren't recognized by the local community. The U.S.
he said there were canals on Mars built by an
real," Jonathon Hill, a research technician who military has since acknowledged the
intelligent civilization, perhaps to move water
processes images taken during NASA's Mars "spacecraft" was actually a weather balloon sent
into desert-stricken areas. He claimed to have
missions, explained to Space.com's sister site, aloft as part of Project Mogul, which involved
seen the canals in his own telescope, and
LiveScience, in 2012. According to NASA, the flying microphones on high-altitude balloons to
produced several sketches that are still available
objects that appeared to be moving were listen for sound waves generated by possible
on the internet today.
actually camera-lens covers that automatically Soviet Union nuclear tests.
There are no artificial canals on Mars.
Several spacecraft have flown by the planet or popped off of the cameras after landing
LiveScience reports. These half-circle objects Climate change isn't real.
orbited it, and not one has caught signs of aliens
were seen in images from Venera-13 and
from orbit. What they have seen, however, are
Venera-14, two identical spacecraft that landed Earth is on an abnormal warming trend. Arctic
smaller channels that were created by nature –
about 590 miles (950 km) apart. Both had two ice is melting, the sea level is rising and
likely from water, ice or other processes that
identical cameras — one in the front and one in
cause erosion. temperatures are going to extremes in many
the back — so it makes sense that the covers locations around the world. Why is this
would appear in different places. Another
A star is flinging comets at Earth. happening? Anti-climate-change conspirators
photograph that Ksanfomaliti said was a have many explanations: solar activity,
scorpion is actually a blur in the image. radiation, the Earth's (and sun's) movements
A long-standing theory known as Nemesis
around the Milky Way, among other theories.
supposes that there is some sort of "death star"
An asteroid is about to crash into
on the outer edge of the solar system, whose
Earth. While there are many components of climate
orbital motions perturb comets in an icy region
change, the fact that humans have contributed to
of objects known as the Oort Cloud. According
to the myth, the star's gravity throws these This recurring rumor claims that a threatening it is indisputable. Temperature graphs show that
comets toward the inner solar system, and these "doomsday" asteroid is about to slam into our the climate has not warmed this much, this
planet. An example from 2015 had an asteroid quickly in all of Earth's history (as seen in
comets collide with Earth and cause mass
purported to hit Earth in late September, when it geological records), and that the increase
extinctions once every 27 million years.
would supposedly wreak devastation from its correlates with increased industrialization. []
However, 2011 study concluded that this
impact point near Puerto Rico. NASA quickly
idea is unlikely, because the comet strikes in
dismissed the reports — which turned out, as
recorded history haven't happened with any
usual, to be false. But that's not to say that
regularity. The pattern that was recorded in the
asteroids will never hit our planet.
hoax is actually a statistical artifact, or the result
of researchers trying to find patterns in nature NASA and a network of monitoring
where they do not exist, the study's authors telescopes across the world are cataloging all
known asteroids wider than 459 feet (140
found.
meters) across in line with a 2005 congressional
www.XZBN.net - “Searching for Answers,
mandate. (Smaller asteroids, if found, are also
Demanding the Truth.”