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Robertson Panel
The Robertson Panel was a scientific committee which met in January 1953 headed by Howard P. Robertson. The Panel arose from a recommendation to the Intelligence Advisory Committee (IAC) in December 1952 from a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) review of the U.S. Air Force investigation into unidentified flying objects, Project Blue Book.Minutes of the Intelligence Advisory Committee, 4th December 1952, IAC-M-90 The CIA review itself was in response to widespread reports of unidentified flying objects, especially in the Washington, D.C. area during the summer of 1952. The panel was briefed on U.S. military activities and intelligence; hence the report was originally classified Secret. Later declassified, the Robertson Panel's report concluded that UFOs were not a direct threat to national security, but could pose an indirect threat by overwhelming standard military communications due to public interest in the subject. Most UFO reports, they concluded, could be explained as misiden ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Luis Walter Alvarez 1961
Luis is a given name. It is the Spanish form of the originally Germanic name or . Other Iberian Romance languages have comparable forms: (with an accent mark on the i) in Portuguese and Galician, in Aragonese and Catalan, while is archaic in Portugal, but common in Brazil. Origins The Germanic name (and its variants) is usually said to be composed of the words for "fame" () and "warrior" () and hence may be translated to ''famous warrior'' or "famous in battle". According to Dutch onomatologists however, it is more likely that the first stem was , meaning fame, which would give the meaning 'warrior for the gods' (or: 'warrior who captured stability') for the full name.J. van der Schaar, ''Woordenboek van voornamen'' (Prisma Voornamenboek), 4e druk 1990; see also thLodewijs in the Dutch given names database Modern forms of the name are the German name Ludwig and the Dutch form Lodewijk. and the other Iberian forms more closely resemble the French name Louis, a der ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Reber
James Q. Reber (July 16, 1911 – January 16, 2003) was the second deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office. Reber earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in International Relations at the University of Chicago in 1939. In 1943, he began his government career with State Department, as a foreign affairs and economic specialist. He later joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1950, and did various planning and coordination activities until 1957. In 1955, Reber became the Chairman of the Ad Hoc Requirements Committee, thereby assuming a major leadership role in the national reconnaissance community. The committee developed prioritized lists of intelligence requirements and U-2 targets during overflights of the Soviet Union. When the committee was taken over by the United States Intelligence Board in 1960 and renamed the Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance, he continued as chairman. The committee's activities eventually morphed into prioritizing targets for early im ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel Abraham Goudsmit
Samuel Abraham Goudsmit (July 11, 1902 – December 4, 1978) was a Dutch-American physicist famous for jointly proposing the concept of electron spin with George Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925. Life and career Goudsmit was born in The Hague, Netherlands, of Dutch Jewish descent. He was the son of Isaac Goudsmit, a manufacturer of water-closets, and Marianne Goudsmit-Gompers, who ran a millinery shop. In 1943, his parents were deported to a concentration camp by the German occupiers of the Netherlands and were murdered there. Goudsmit studied physics at the University of Leiden under Paul Ehrenfest, where he obtained his PhD in 1927. After receiving his PhD, Goudsmit served as a Professor at the University of Michigan between 1927 and 1946. In 1930 he co-authored a text with Linus Pauling titled ''The Structure of Line Spectra.'' During World War II he worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As scientific head of the Alsos Mission, he successfully reached a Germ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes ( ; sv, Nobelpriset ; no, Nobelprisen ) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist most famously known for the invention of dynamite. He died in 1896. In his will, he bequeathed all of his "remaining realisable assets" to be used to establish five prizes which became known as "Nobel Prizes." Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901. Nobel Prizes are awarded in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace (Nobel characterized the Peace Prize as "to the person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses"). In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden's central bank) funded the establishment of the Prize in Econom ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Luis Walter Alvarez
Luis Walter Alvarez (June 13, 1911 – September 1, 1988) was an American experimental physicist, inventor, and professor who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968 for his discovery of resonance states in particle physics using the hydrogen bubble chamber. In 2007 the ''American Journal of Physics'' commented, "Luis Alvarez was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century." After receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1936, Alvarez went to work for Ernest Lawrence at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Alvarez devised a set of experiments to observe K-electron capture in radioactive nuclei, predicted by the beta decay theory but never before observed. He produced tritium using the cyclotron and measured its lifetime. In collaboration with Felix Bloch, he measured the magnetic moment of the neutron. In 1940, Alvarez joined the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where he contributed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Project Grudge
Project Grudge was a short-lived project by the U.S. Air Force (USAF) to investigate unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Grudge succeeded Project Sign in February, 1949, and was then followed by Project Blue Book. The project formally ended in December 1949, but continued in a minimal capacity until late 1951. History Project Grudge was intended to alleviate public anxiety over UFOs and persuade the public that UFOs constituted nothing unusual or extraordinary. UFO sightings were explained as balloons, conventional aircraft, planets, meteors, optical illusions, solar reflections, or even "large hailstones." Project officials recommended that the project be reduced in scope because the very existence of Air Force official interest encouraged people to believe in UFOs and contributed to a "war hysteria" atmosphere. On 27 December 1949, the Air Force announced the project's termination. Conclusions Project Grudge issued its only formal report in August 1949. The report's conclu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Project Sign
Project Sign (Project Saucer) was an official U.S. government study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) undertaken by the United States Air Force (USAF) and active for most of 1948. It was the precursor to Project Grudge. History The project was established in 1948 by Air Force General Nathan Farragut Twining, head of the Air Technical Service Command, and was initially named Project SAUCER. The goal of the project was to collect, evaluate, and distribute within the government all information relating to UFO sightings, on the premise that they might represent a national security concern. On April 27, 1949, the U.S. Air Force publicly released a paper prepared by the Intelligence Division of the Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Field, Ohio.Associated Press, Flying Discs Held No Joke, The Oakland Tribune (Oakland, California), April 27, 1949, p. D13. The paper stated that while some UFOs appeared to represent actual aircraft, there was not enough data to determine their ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime military R&D was carried out, including important developments in radar and the initiation and early administration of the Manhattan Project. He emphasized the importance of scientific research to national security and economic well-being, and was chiefly responsible for the movement that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation. Bush joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1919, and founded the company that became the Raytheon Company in 1922. Bush became vice president of MIT and dean of the MIT School of Engineering in 1932, and president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1938. During his career, Bush patented a string of his own inventions. He is kno ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Identification Studies Of UFOs
Identifying unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is a difficult task due to the normally poor quality of the evidence provided by those who report sighting the unknown object. Observations and subsequent reporting are often made by those untrained in astronomy, atmospheric phenomena, aeronautics, physics, and perception. Nevertheless, most officially investigated UFO sightings, such as from the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book, have been identified as being due to honest misidentifications of natural phenomena, aircraft, or other prosaic explanations. In early U.S. Air Force attempts to explain UFO sightings, unexplained sightings routinely numbered over one in five reports. However, in early 1953, right after the CIA's Robertson Panel, percentages of unexplained sightings dropped precipitously, usually being only a few percent in any given year. When Project Blue Book closed down in 1970, only 6% of all cases were classified as being truly unidentified. UFOs that can be explained ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Battelle Memorial Institute
Battelle Memorial Institute (more widely known as simply Battelle) is a private nonprofit applied science and technology development company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. Battelle is a charitable trust organized as a nonprofit corporation under the laws of the State of Ohio and is exempt from taxation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code because it is organized for charitable, scientific and education purposes. The institute opened in 1929 but traces its origins to the 1923 will of Ohio industrialist Gordon Battelle which provided for its creation and his mother Annie Maude Norton Battelle who left the bulk of the family fortune to the institute after her death in 1925. Originally focusing on contract research and development work in the areas of metals and material science, Battelle is now an international science and technology enterprise that explores emerging areas of science, develops and commercializes technology, and manages laboratories for customers. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Background Radiation
Background radiation is a measure of the level of ionizing radiation present in the environment at a particular location which is not due to deliberate introduction of radiation sources. Background radiation originates from a variety of sources, both natural and artificial. These include both cosmic radiation and environmental radioactivity from naturally occurring radioactive materials (such as radon and radium), as well as man-made medical X-rays, fallout from nuclear weapons testing and nuclear accidents. Definition Background radiation is defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency as "Dose or dose rate (or an observed measure related to the dose or dose rate) attributable to all sources other than the one(s) specified. So a distinction is made between dose which is already in a location, which is defined here as being "background", and the dose due to a deliberately introduced and specified source. This is important where radiation measurements are taken of a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a U.S. multiprogram science and technology national laboratory sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and administered, managed, and operated by UT–Battelle as a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) under a contract with the DOE, located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Established in 1943, ORNL is the largest science and energy national laboratory in the Department of Energy system (by size) and third largest by annual budget. It is located in the Roane County section of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Its scientific programs focus on materials, nuclear science, neutron science, energy, high-performance computing, systems biology and national security, sometimes in partnership with the state of Tennessee, universities and other industries. ORNL has several of the world's top supercomputers, including Frontier, ranked by the TOP500 as the world's most powerful. The lab is a leading neutron and nuclear power rese ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
