Free Republic

A division within the FBI is asking defense contractors to report incursions by “unmanned systems” — including unidentified anomalous phenomena — that could pose a threat to U.S. national security. NewsNation special investigative correspondent Ross Coulthart has obtained a flyer produced by the FBI’s Office of the Private Sector announcing a new initiative to report unmanned systems such as drones and underwater vehicles that could pose a threat to defense facilities and “critical infrastructure” sites. The document notes an increase in “incursions over recent months” and says the unmanned systems “may be intended to disrupt operations or gauge U.S. response...

wrong. “‘We just had an asset go down. We had an asset go down,'” Arnu recalled. “This is not Creech security. This is Area 51 security, and they had an asset go down. Then the next thing you hear, UAV, unmanned aircraft, unmanned aircraft with ordnance.” He picked up details that strict security measures were implemented almost immediately. Not only was Area 51 itself locked down, but within a very short time, so too was a large swath of the Tiikaboo Valley.

The YFQ-44 Fury, Andurll's prototype for the Air Force's collaborative combat aircraft program, made its first flight somewhere in California. Anduril ================================================================== The neoprime contractor lagged behind General Atomics for the inaugural CCA flight test. Anduril’s robot wingman has notched its first flight Friday, more than a month after the neoprime defense contractor blamed software woes and a push to make the inaugural takeoff semi-autonomous for the delay. The takeoff happened at a testing location in California, the Air Force said in an emailed news release. Anduril’s prototype for the service’s combat collaborative combat aircraft competition has now joined one...

JUICE might be bound to Jupiter, but it is fortuitously in place to peek at this object from beyond the stars. Comet 3I/ATLAS looking stunning! Image credit: International Gemini Observatory /NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/Shadow the Scientist, Image Processing: J. Miller & M. Rodriguez (International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab) (CC BY 4.0) ================================================================ Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is about to be studied from not one but two locations in deep space. The comet has just gone through perihelion, the closest approach to the Sun, but unfortunately, it is on the opposite side of our star....

Vice President JD Vance weighed in on the mystery of UFOs this week, suggesting that some unexplained phenomena could reflect "spiritual forces" influencing the physical world. Speaking with New York Post columnist Miranda Devine on her podcast "Pod Force One," Vance said he hasn’t had time to fully investigate but intends to dig in. "I can’t allow myself to become so busy that I don’t get to the bottom of this. I will get to the bottom of this," Vance said. The vice president said the topic often came up in conversations with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, noting that...

Space news

© Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizon ================================================================= A blue dune captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has raised new questions about wind, sediment, and geological diversity on the Red Planet. Though the coloring is artificially enhanced, the unique features of this formation, located in two distinct craters, are anything but ordinary. NASA scientists recently released two detailed images taken by the MRO’s HiRISE camera, showing separate dune fields inside Lyot Crater and Gamboa Crater. These images don’t just offer stunning visuals; they open a rare window into the complex interactions between Martian winds and surface materials. The unusually shaped and...

Shield AI's X-BAT designed to counter China's strategy of destroying American aircraft before they leave the ground Analysts say China has developed a chilling strategy for fighting a war with the United States: destroy America’s fighter jets before they ever leave the ground. In nearly every modern conflict, disabling enemy aircraft on the ground has been the first move. When Israel struck Iranian nuclear sites earlier this year, it began by destroying Iranian runways — grounding Tehran’s air force before it could take off. Russia and Ukraine have done the same throughout their ongoing war, targeting airfields to cripple enemy...

Late in World War 2, in the European theater, the Germans hit the Allied air forces with something new: Jet fighters. Chief among them was the Messerschmitt Me-262, a big, brutal twin-engine beast packing four 30-mm cannons. It was considerably faster than the American P-51 Mustang, generally considered the best piston-engine fighter in the air at the time. It was near-impossible to defeat in the air, but it was slow and cumbersome on taxi, vulnerable during takeoff and landing, and required a long runway. So we went after them when they were on the ground, destroying aircraft and bases alike....

Jinlin Crater A team of scientists has uncovered evidence that a massive asteroid strike created a prominent crater in southern China’s Guangdong province roughly 10,000 years ago, during a period of rapid human development. The Jinlin crater, situated near Zhaoqing city, marks only the fifth confirmed impact site in China and the very first identified in the country’s southern region. Measuring approximately 2,950 feet across, the tilted, bowl-shaped formation suggests it was formed by an extraterrestrial object roughly 100 feet in diameter, unleashing an explosion comparable to dozens of atomic bombs. Researchers believe the impact would have had a profound...

General Atomics is exploring laser armament options for drones across its portfolio, including its new Gambit family of autonomous combat aircraft. General Atomics via Carter Johnston =============================================================== General Atomics recently showed what it says is a rendering of an MQ-20 Avenger drone armed with a laser directed energy weapon. The laser beam is depicted projecting through a fully rotating nose cone turret fitted in place of its normal nose section. The company says this is a purely conceptual design, but it reflects a broader exploration of potential laser armament for uncrewed aircraft across its portfolio, including members of the highly...

We often imagine our galaxy as a serene, spinning disk of stars, a celestial carousel of light against the black velvet of space. This comforting image, however, is an illusion. From our tiny vantage point, embedded within one of its spiral arms, we are only now learning that the Milky Way is a place of profound and dynamic movement, a living entity that breathes and shudders on a scale almost impossible to comprehend. The latest revelation, born from the unparalleled data of the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope, is not just a wobble or a tilt, but a colossal,...

Chinese researchers claim they have developed a heat-resistant coating for fighter jets to absorb radar waves, and to help the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) catch up with the United States in stealth technology. According to a paper published October 14 in Advanced Materials, Peking University and Harbin Engineering University scientists have created a lightweight, ultra-thin “metasurface” that combines flexibility, strength, and electromagnetic absorption. The coating, only 0.1 millimeter thick, can reportedly endure temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit) and maintain performance under high-speed airflow, conditions typical of supersonic flight, according to the South China Morning Post....

Comet 3I/ATLAS is heading toward a rare encounter with NASA’s Europa Clipper, offering a unique opportunity to uncover secrets of the cosmos. © Image credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/Shadow the Scientist NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, currently on its way to Jupiter, may soon encounter a unique scientific opportunity. The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is about to cross the path of the spacecraft’s trajectory, potentially showering it with charged particles from its ion tail. This rare alignment could provide the closest look yet at material from beyond our solar system, offering a glimpse into the distant star systems where such comets originated. A...

A United Airlines airplane traveling from Denver to Los Angeles that made an emergency landing after its windshield cracked may have struck a weather balloon while at a cruising altitude of 36,000 feet over Utah. The flight safely made an emergency landing in Salt Lake City. A pilot reportedly sustained injuries from the incident. A Silicon Valley company called Windborne Systems, which operates long-duration weather balloons, said one of its devices may have struck the aircraft. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating the incident. "The NTSB is investigating a cracked windscreen on a...

Everybody knows (or is) the one person in the friend group who could generously be described as an unreliable narrator. You know the type; tall tales, stories that never quite match up, and a weird fixation on arbitrary details are all telltale signs of such a friend. For one Texas woman, she’s going to have to work overtime to convince her friends that she does not fit that archetype after she tells them about what landed in her yard a couple of weeks ago. According to KHOU-TV, Ann Vincent Walter was at her Hale County farm north of Lubbock when...

Skynet-1A was launched in 1969. Image Credit: NASA, Image ID: KSC-69P-0941 via Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain, Modified by IFLScience A military spacecraft launched 56 years ago was moved from its orbit – and nobody is quite sure who did it, or why. In 1969 the UK launched Skynet-1A, a military communications satellite placed in orbit above the east coast of Africa in order to relay information to British armed forces. It stopped working due to hardware issues around 18 months after it started operating, and the spacecraft was left to the laws of physics to orbit the Earth – it...

UCSD and UMD researchers found that many satellites are transmitting sensitive data, without encryption, to anyone with an antenna. Anew study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and the University of Maryland (UMD) has revealed that a vast portion of global satellite communications, including personal, corporate, and even military data, is being broadcast unencrypted and can be intercepted using less than $800 in off-the-shelf equipment. The team’s three-year investigation found that roughly half of all geostationary satellite signals are left vulnerable to eavesdropping. Using a small satellite receiver system set up on the roof of a...

VIDEO AT LINK.............. An unusual double-ring structure spotted in space with the help of citizen scientists has turned out to be a cosmic rarity. The celestial anomaly, captured by a radio telescope, is an odd radio circle, one of the scarcest and most mysterious objects in the universe, said Dr. Ananda Hota, lead author of a study published on October 2 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Odd radio circles, also known as ORCs, likely consist of magnetized plasma — charged gas that is strongly influenced by magnetic fields — and are so massive that entire galaxies...

A photograph of a black graphite disk floating above a stack of three, round magnets. (Credit: Adrian Skov (OIST)) Study shows how perfect magnetic symmetry can cancel energy loss. In A Nutshell Researchers at OIST built a 10-millimeter graphite disk that levitates and spins above a magnetic array inside a vacuum chamber. By arranging magnets in perfect circular symmetry, the setup cancels the eddy currents that normally slow conductors moving through magnetic fields. Even at one-billionth of Earth’s air pressure, the disk kept spinning with almost no slowdown; only tiny tilts or material imperfections created measurable friction. This ultra-stable, contact-free...