The extraterrestrials in Chevy's Volt commercial. (Credit: Chevrolet)

This American football championship game has historically been the most-watched program on American television. In fact, the 2011 Super Bowl had the largest audience ever for a U.S. television broadcast at 111 million viewers. This year’s big game could repeat last year’s record-breaking viewership. But something else from the 2011 Super Bowl that will certainly be repeated this year is the appearance of extraterrestrial-themed advertisements.

The ET theme was dominant in commercials that aired during the 2011 Super Bowl. Several extraterrestrial-themed movies were advertised during the broadcast, and multiple car companies featured extraterrestrial characters in their ads. Last year, Chevrolet used a character from Transformers: Dark of the Moon in one of their commercials. The company is going with an even stronger extraterrestrial theme this year. Motor Authority reports that “Chevy has enlisted the little-green-men-brigade to sell Volt sedans and Silverado pickups during this year’s big game.” The commercial for the Volt is filled with little extraterrestrial characters and UFOs.

I have a feeling that the extraterrestrial theme will be popping up in several other commercials too.

The Super Bowl takes place Sunday, February 5 at 6:30 PM ET on NBC.

Watch Chevrolet’s Volt commercial below:

Artist's conception of the alien planet GJ 667Cc (Credit: Carnegie Institution for Science)

This giant planet, called GJ 667Cc, is at least 4.5 times as massive as Earth. According to Space.com, a team of scientists, which included Guillem Anglada-Escudé of the Carnegie Institution for Science, determined this planet’s location to be within the habitable zone of its host star — “a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface.” Anglada-Escudé stated, “This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it.”

Space.com explains that the researchers suspect “potentially habitable alien worlds could exist in a greater variety of environments than was previously thought possible,” based on the new findings.

The team’s research will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Municipal Public Safety Officers describing their UFO pursuit. (Credit: La Voz de la frontera)

According to La Voz de la frontera, police received hundreds of calls about a strange device in the air. The UFO was seen in the area of the Mexicali airport, and was described by witnesses as a round object emitting white light. Witnesses also reported seeing blue and yellow flashing lights on the object.

One of the police officers who pursued the object explained that the UFO moved at very fast speeds, moving up, down, and sideways, and would suddenly change its course.

The website i09 suggests that a UFO recorded on video over Tijuana, Mexico on January 27 could be the same UFO that “taunted police” in Mexicali last week, but that is simply speculation.

Here is that video:

Lou Farish (right) with the mayor of Eureka Springs, at the opening of either the 1st or 2nd Ozark UFO Conference in 1989 or 1990. (Credit: Antonio Huneeus)

Friends of Lou,

I’m sorry to have to tell you that Lou died of cancer this afternoon at 4:55 PM CST in Morrilton, Arkansas at the River Chase Rehabilitation and Care Center where he had been under hospice care since early September. He died peacefully, was not in pain, and was surrounded by a small group of friends. A memorial service is tentatively planned for 2:00 PM on Saturday, February 4, at the Harris Funeral Home in Morrilton, AR. Confirmation of the date and time will be in an obituary to be posted in a day or two on the Harris Funeral Home website at www.harrisfuneralhomes.net. If I can provide additional information, please let me know.

If you cannot attend Lou’s memorial service, but would like to send me a short statement to be read at the service about how you knew and/or will remember Lou, I will be glad to do that for you. We may also include these statements in a program to remember Lou this April at the Ozark UFO Conference in Eureka Springs. Also, if you have any favorite photos of Lou that we can use in the service, I would appreciate it if you would scan or photograph them and send them to me, and especially any early photos from the 70s and 80s.

Since Lou did not have a wife, children or siblings, he left his estate, including 80 acres of land, to a trust to be used to encourage UFO research and education through awards, fellowships and mini-grants over the next several years.

Lou was one of the most interesting people I ever met, and like many of you, I thought of him as one of my best friends. He was one of a kind, and will be greatly missed, both as a person and for his many contributions to ufology. His circle of friends goes far beyond the e-mail list I’m sending this message to. If you have email addresses for others who knew and cared about Lou, please forward this message on to them.

Jerry Blackburn

Lou Farish (right) with Prof. James Deardorff at the podium in one of the early Ozark UFO Conferences in the early 1990s. (Credit: Antonio Huneeus)

A great and humble ufologist

Everyone would agree that Lucius Farish was one of the great American ufologists and yet he never published a book, stopped writing articles years ago, never lectured and almost never appeared on TV. So, how did people know about him and his work? Lou was a humble researcher that never promoted himself or his ideas. He lived for years in Plummerville, Arkansas, working for the U.S. Post Office and cultivating ufology on the side. He joined APRO, MUFON and other UFO and Fortean organizations in his youth, publishing articles for various magazines and newsletters in the sixties and seventies. Lou developed an interest in historical UFO research and wrote some articles about this topic with Jerry Clarke. Then sometime around the mid-seventies, Lou began compiling his monthly UFO Newsclipping Service, a 20-page digest on legal size with reproductions of local newspaper articles throughout the USA on sightings, events, etc. It had an international section (mostly UK and other English speaking press) and a “Forteana News” section on the last four pages for the latest about Bigfoot, Loch Ness, Atlantis, monuments in Mars, remote viewing, etc.

Front page of the December 2005 UFO Newsclipping Service.

It’s hard to fathom the importance for something like the UFO Newsclipping Service back in the old days when people didn’t have the web and all the new social media. Nowadays any UFO story anywhere in the world can be found instantly, but not back then when it took the dedication of someone like Lou to put together the pieces of what the print media was saying about UFOs. Then in the late eighties Lou found his second highly successful niche in American ufology. In the Spring of 1988, an Arkansas researcher called Bill Pitts organized a conference in Eureka Springs, a picturesque spot in the Ozarks, to launch what was supposed to be a New Project Blue Book. It was a historical event in that some of the people involved in the old air force project did attend and talk. (See my interview with Major Dewey Fournet on this site.)

Pitts’ New Blue Book didn’t prosper but Lou Farish, who was helping the conference with local MUFON people, saw the advantages of both the picturesque location of Eureka Springs and the need for a UFO Conference that could service the Midwestern and some southern states. Thus was born in 1989 the Ozark UFO Conference, held annually in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, in April, which in a short time became one of the largest and most important American UFO events. In the early days it was also supported by MUFON, and counted with the appearance of many seasoned researchers like Linda Moulton Howe, Timothy Good, Dr. John Mack, George Knapp, Wendelle Stevens, and many others, including myself who attended many times in the 90s and will speak again later this year. I had the privilege of assisting Lou in a couple of things, including helping to bring a speaker (Sergei Bultantsev) from what was still the old Soviet Union, and presenting the year later the Russian documentary Planet of Aliens by Vladimir Avinsky.

A 1978 newspaper article and drawing from the March 1978 UFONS.

The Ozarks Conference continued to expand and Lou kept running it until the last couple of years when due to his health he turned over to the people who had worked with him. I have no doubt that Lou’s open and honest personality had much to do with the success of the Ozark’s Conference. Everyone liked Lou. It was obvious that you were dealing with someone who was both rational and passionate about the subject, who never engaged in self-promotion, fanatical ideas, personal attacks, and some of the other features that unfortunately accompany some of American ufology. He was unique, a great American ufologist who never published a book, gave lectures or appeared on TV, but whose contributions to the field via the Newsclipping Service and the Ozark Conference will be remembered for a long time. All those who knew Lou will miss him greatly.

You can check the 2012 program of the Ozark UFO Conference here.

A blue jelly sphere that rained down in the UK. (credit: BBC)

According to Popular Science, British authorities say the “tiny, one-inch gelatinous spheres are odorless, are not sticky, and are not meteorological.”

Former aircraft engineer Steve Hornsby discovered approximately twelve of these spheres in his yard on the afternoon of Thursday, January 26. The BBC explains that Hornsby kept the objects in his freezer to prevent them from melting, but later determined that is was not necessary, as the objects do not melt at room temperature.

There is speculation that these mysterious spheres could simply be “marine invertebrate eggs” that “stuck to a bird’s feet and were carried into the air.” But for now, as Popular Science explains, “no one has any real clue what they are.”

What is your opinion about these strange blue tiny UFOs? Share your thoughts on the Open Minds Facebook page.

Recently, Ralph Paradiso, a witness to one of the October 13, 2010 New York UFO events, submitted his eyewitness account, along with photos of what he saw that day.

UFO photographed over Chelsea, NYC. (credit: Ralph Paradiso)

Here is the sighting report provided by the witness:

This object was taken at 3:00 pm in Chelsea, NYC on 10-13-10 at the corner of 23rd street and 8th (north east towards the Empire State Building).

The sighting lasted from 9:30 am (when the objects were first spotted in Chelsea) until 11 pm. There were no helicopters or airplanes flying over the area during the time of the sighting (due to a gas leak at the same time as the sighting, they had to close all the airports in the tri-state area). Channel 2 news NY and NY1 news were there and they would not focus their cameras or zoom in on the orb/discs that were flying low in the area. They focused on the big object in the sky that was to high up to focus on. That object stayed in the same place for hours. I was there for a least 3 hours. There were around 50 – 60 people standing around watching. The object that was being shown on the news stations was the biggest one. It was there the 3 hours I was watching. It stayed in the same place and would fade in and out. The smaller objects were flying around at a high rate of speed. I saw around 5, but a lot of people said they saw more. The objects looked like they were high polished aluminum.

If you would like to share your UFO sighting with Open Minds, use our convenient Contact form.

Orbital positions of the planets in systems with multiple transiting planets discovered by NASA's Kepler mission. (credit: NASA Ames/Dan Fabrycky, University of California, Santa Cruz)

Astrobiology Magazine describes the findings:

The planets orbit close to their host stars and range in size from 1.5 times the radius of Earth to larger than Jupiter. Fifteen are between Earth and Neptune in size. Further observations will be required to determine which are rocky like Earth and which have thick gaseous atmospheres like Neptune. The planets orbit their host star once every six to 143 days. All are closer to their host star than Venus is to our Sun.

2011 was an exciting year with the release of Kepler data. And much more data will continue to be released in 2012. As MSNBC explains, the mission has successfully confirmed 61 planets, and has identified another 2,326 planetary candidates that have yet to be confirmed.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Fran Drescher (credit: Manfred Werner - Tsui/Wikimedia Commons)

The actress, best known for her role as the title character on the 90s sitcom The Nanny, recently told the Huffington Post that both she and her ex-husband were abducted by extraterrestrials before they met each other. And she claims the situations in which they were each abducted are similar. She explained that her abduction occurred when she in junior high, driving down the road with her father. Her ex-husband, also in junior high at the time, was abducted while driving down the road with his father.

Drescher stated, “A few years later, we met, and we realized that we had the same experience. I think that somehow we were programmed to meet.” She even theorizes that an alien implant could be how the extraterrestrials programmed her actions. And she claims her ex-husband has one too. She explained, “We both have this scar. It’s the exact same scar on the exact same spot . . . that’s where the chip is.”

Newt Gingrich (credit: NBC)

The space topic was brought up at the recent 2012 Republican Candidates Debate in Florida. When asked about the space race, Newt Gingrich stated that he would like to see the U.S. go back to the Moon permanently, implying the colonization of the Moon, and he thinks a priority should be “getting to Mars as soon as possible.” He also shared his opinion that “building a series of space stations and developing commercial space” is something the U.S. should do.

Mitt Romney also stated that space travel should be a priority for the country.

Watch the video below to see both Romney and Gingrich talking about the United States in space.

If the movie is not displaying, you can watch it on the Huffington Post.

Possible life on Venus? (credit: L. Ksanfomaliti/Solar System Research)

Leonid Ksanfomaliti, professor at the Moscow-based Space Research Institute and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, recently published findings in the Solar System Research journal claiming that photos from Russia’s 1982 Venera 13 landing probe show life on Venus. According to the Telegraph, Ksanfomaliti claims that multiple objects (specifically a disc-shaped object and an object with a “scorpion shaped body”) appear in the photos, and they appear to “emerge, fluctuate and disappear.” He explains in his paper, “What if we forget about the current theories about the non-existence of life on Venus, let’s boldly suggest that the objects’ morphological features would allow us to say that they are living.”

But according to MSNBC, “outside analysis suggests he is breathing life into an assortment of camera lens covers and image blurs.” One person who doubts Ksanfomaliti’s conclusions is Jonathon Hill, a research technician and mission planner at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University. Hill processes many of the images taken during NASA’s Mars missions, so he is familiar with examining photos from landing probes. It is his opinion that the disc-shaped, or “crablike,” object is simply a mechanical component. He supports his theory by explaining that the same object is visible in a photo taken by an identical Venus landing probe that landed nearby.

Hill postulates:

If those objects were already on the surface of Venus, what are the chances that Venera 13 and 14, which landed nearly 1,000 kilometers apart, would both land inches away from the only ones in sight and they would be in the same positions relative to the spacecraft? It makes much more sense that it’s a piece of the lander designed to break off during the deployment of one of the scientific instruments.

According to MSNBC, it is NASA’s opinion that the “crablike” objects in the photos are “camera lens covers that popped off the Venera probes after they landed,” and the “scorpion-shaped body” is simply digital noise in the photos.

What are your thoughts about these photos? Is Leonid Ksanfomaliti, a respected Russian scientist, breathing life into inanimate objects? Or is NASA dismissing the idea of life on Venus to quickly? Share your thoughts on the Open Minds Facebook page.