While everyone is waiting for the countdown on New Year's Eve, Y2K glitches have already started to appear. Instead of the year 2000, the number 1900 has been showing up on various documents around the country. And on December 15th in Vancouver, British Columbia, a new computerized smoke alarm installed in the city's SkyTrain went off and stopped the whole system. Thousands of commuters and holiday shoppers were stranded. Ironically, the new computerized alarm was supposed to prevent Y2K shutdown problems.
Photograph of Three Mile Island nuclear power plant located in Middletown, Pennsylvania, a few miles south of Harrisburg, the state capital. On March 28, 1979, the worst commercial nuclear disaster in U. S. history occurred when a pump failed in the reactor cooling system. Nearly a million gallons of radioactive water escaped through an open valve onto the reactor building basement floor. Radioactivity was also released into the air. Photograph courtesy U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
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"Although life at the Martian surface would have been possible only 3.5 or 4 billion years ago, life could have existed on Mars any time from 4 billion years ago all the way up to the present. And if it does exist, it would be below the surface. "
- Bruce Jakowsky, Ph.D., Geologist and Planetary Scientist, University of Colorado, Boulder
December 2, 1999 Houston, Texas - On Friday, December 3rd, NASA's Polar Lander will set down on the South Polar Cap of Mars. Two probes designed to punch into the soil will be released. If all goes well, soil samples will be warmed up and analyzed for water. If there's ice, there might be liquid water underground. And if there's water, then life could still possibly exist on Mars - even if only bacteria and other microbes below the surface.
The Allan Hills, Antarctica ALH84001 meteorite discovered in 1984 that made worldwide headlines because scientists found rice-shaped carbon globules in tiny cracks on the rock which resembled earth bacteria. The carbon in this meteorite dates back about three billion years when Mars probably had water on its surface, was warmer and had a global magnetic field. Photograph provided by the NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas.
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"There are an estimated 10 billion large gaseous planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone and at least one trillion galaxies in this universe. Even if only one out of a trillion of those galaxies had life, you'd still be talking about 10 billion places where life exists."
- Steve Vogt, Ph.D., Astronomer,
Univ. of California at Santa Cruz -
November 21, 1999 Marion New York - The latest formation on record, at least in soybeans, formed around October 21st when it was discovered in Marion, New York about 30 miles east of Rochester near Lake Ontario. The farmer was havesting at night with spotlights and was shocked to discover the curves, circles and corridors of this new pictogram in exactly the same place he found another formation in mid-August 1997. This new one was lined up north to south with a 24-foot-diameter ring at the top connected by a long corridor to a large comma-shape. Fifty feet straight east of the comma was a small 6 foot circle, known as a "grape shot." The entire formation was apparently crowned by a thin arc which the farmer had nearly obliterated in his night time harvesting before he realized the pictogram was there. All the circle, ring and arc plants were laid down counter-clockwise, except for one small circle at the end of the comma which was clockwise.
November 19, 1999, Spedden, Alberta, Canada - Fernand Belzil, known to his friends as Fern, is 69 years old and has been raising purebred cattle on a ranch near St. Paul, Alberta for the last forty years. He became interested in the mutilation mystery in 1994 and has personally investigated about forty unusual cattle deaths. The most recent was a 1700 pound herd bull found in Spedden, a few miles west of St. Paul, on October 29th.
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Orca Whales Contaminated by Ocean Chemical Pollution
Orca "killer whales" throughout the world are now contaminated by a poison that the United States and Canada banned twenty years ago, but other countries such as Russia still use. That poison is PCBs, poly chlorinated biphenyls, once used everywhere for cooling and insulating electrical transformers and coloring newspaper comics. PCBs were even sprayed on country roads to keep dust down. Dr. Rob Macdonald, an oceanographer for the Canadian Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, British Columbia, says "the PCB paintbrush has covered the globe." Marine scientists are concerned that the oceans are so polluted with the dangerous chemicals.
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"I think it's very unlikely that it was an engineered virus. It looks much more like there are sequences very similar in another part of the world, but that doesn't tell us anything about how it might have been introduced. And that is obviously cause for some concern."
- W. Ian Lipkin, M.D., Univ. of California at Irvine -
November 15, 1999 University of California-Irvine By the time the first frost touched Philadelphia this fall, dead crows and other birds in a couple of suburbs had been sent to laboratories to see if the Kunjin West Nile Fever Virus had spread from New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. The Pennsylvania test results are due soon and public health officials are concerned about the implications for next spring and summer. For the first time in history, this virus strain normally found only in Africa, Australia, the Middle East and Eurasia showed up in the United States. Fifty-six people in New York City were infected with the foreign virus and seven died, along with dozens of crows that are especially sensitive to the West Nile Virus. Transmission of the disease is through ticks, mites or mosquitoes that bite birds. Bird blood fills up with the virus rapidly over several days. During that time, insects can bite infected birds and then bite a human who can also become ill.
Photograph of Culex pipiens female mosquito, courtesy Entomology Image Gallery.
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November 13, 1999 Las Vegas, Nevada This past week I talked with Colm Kelleher, Ph.D. Biochemistry and Deputy Administrator at the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) in Las Vegas, Nevada. NIDS paid for a necropsy on the deformed calf fetus born October 22, 1999 at a ranch owned by Joe Martinez in Los Brazos, New Mexico. (See: Earthfiles November 7, 1999 report.) Dr. Kelleher told me that after my radio and Earthfiles.com reports, he requested that the one eyeball from the deformed fetus that had been stored at minus 85 degrees F. be thawed for further examination. I asked Dr. Kelleher if any specific study of the eyeball had been made before by veterinarian Leroy Martinez or NIDS scientists prior to freezing. He said none had been, so now the eye would be studied further. After thawing and further examination, NIDS provided a photograph of the deformed fetus's comma-shaped cornea and elongated pupil shown below.
