Military & Secret Tech

This week in news from The Debrief, a new theoretical study argues that a “universal consciousness” may have predated the Big Bang and continues to influence the structure of reality itself. Meanwhile, astronauts conducting experiments outside the International Space Station found that an ancient, extremophile Earth organism survived nine months in the harsh vacuum of space, raising fresh questions about the resilience of life. And at the University at Albany, physicists have launched “UAlbany Project X,” a long-term, data-driven investigation into unidentified anomalous phenomena, signaling a growing willingness in academia to rigorously explore aerial mysteries once left at the fringes of science.
Here’s a look at all the recent stories we’re covering right now at The Debrief…

How a 500-Year-Old Bible Map Accidentally Helped Shape the Modern Idea of Territorial Borders
A backwards 1525 Bible map helped shape modern borders, influencing how we imagine territory, nations, and political space today.

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Hears the Crack of Martian Lightning, Providing the First Glimpse into the Red Planet’s Atmospheric Electricity
New evidence of electrical phenomena in the Martian atmosphere could expand our understanding of the Red Planet’s chemistry, climate, and habitability.

Newly Discovered Fossil Evidence Proves These Giants Roamed the Earth Over 12 Million Years Ago
Analysis of ancient fossils has shown that giant anacondas became extremely large over 12 million years ago and remain giants today.

“Bronze Age People Didn’t Do That”: English Team Unearths “Unprecedented” Evidence of 4500-Year-Old Ancient Monument
British archaeologists have made a discovery they believe points to an unusual ancient monument that once stood in Northwest England 4,500 years ago.

Scholars Investigated 13th-Century Texts for Clues to India’s Environmental Past—What They Found Was Unexpected
India’s tales from long ago are helping scholars piece together the flora and foliage that once covered the country’s present-day savannas.

This 3.4-Million-Year-Old Foot Reveals Another Mysterious Early Human Species Once Walked in the Same Area as Our Ancestors
3.4 million years ago in the Afar region of Ethiopia, at least two different kinds of early human relatives walked the same landscape.

The Hidden Oceans of Saturn and Jupiter’s Icy Moons May Have Shaped Their Surface Features, Study Reveals
New research now shows how icy moons’ hidden subsurface oceans may have driven their geological development.

“No One Has Really Gone Back and Looked at What the Bones Themselves Say”: New Research is Shedding Light on an Ancient Sea Monster
Ohio’s ancient sea monster, the Dunkleosteus terrelli, stands revealed in new clarity after a recent study.

Hundreds of Easter Island Moai Statues Can Now Be Explored in Unprecedented Detail, Thanks to This Interactive 3D Model
Binghamton University archaeologists have released a new interactive, 3D model of the Moai statue quarry on Rapa Nui (Easter Island).

Psychologists Report that Just Seeing Batman is Enough to Drive Prosocial Behaviors
Seeing Batman inspires us, say psychologists whose new research suggests it increases people’s propensity for prosocial behavior.

The Next Frontier of Anti-Violence Tech? Scientists Discover Human Tears Carry a Chemical Signal That Lowers Aggression
Research reveals that a hidden evolutionary signal in human tears that may be hardwired to calm aggression.

Astronomers Uncover the Dramatic Past of a Red Giant Star Orbiting a Hidden Black Hole
Astronomers are revealing the dramatic past of a distant red giant star by analyzing the faint rhythmic pulses hidden in its light.

A new analysis of samples returned from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu has revealed a rich collection of organic molecules, including several chemical building blocks used by life on Earth, as well as the potentially historic detection of the complex amino acid tryptophan.
Discovered in 1999, Bennu is a near-Earth asteroid that passes by our planet every six years. It was the target of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which aimed to collect samples from the asteroid and deliver them to Earth in September 2023.
Now that samples are safely in labs for examination, this new study, led by Angel Mojarro of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined tiny fragments of Bennu’s rocky surface. Because these samples were taken directly from the asteroid and sealed before re-entry, they preserve a pristine record of early Solar System chemistry, free from contamination by Earth’s atmosphere and biosphere.​
The sample site was imaged by OSIRIS-REx at touchdown on the rocky surface of the asteroid Bennu. The circular head in the image center is 30 centimeters in diameter. (Image credit: NASA)
“Our findings expand the evidence that prebiotic organic molecules can form within primitive accreting planetary bodies and could have been delivered via impacts to early Earth and other solar system bodies, potentially contributing to the origins of life,” the researchers wrote in their study. 
The team focused on two main types of organic material within the Bennu samples. One is a tough, tar-like “insoluble” organic sample made of large, interconnected carbon-rich structures, similar in some ways to very old coals or kerogen on Earth. The other is a “soluble” sample made up of smaller, more mobile molecules that can be extracted with liquids, such as amino acids and nucleobases, the molecules life uses to build proteins and to store genetic information in DNA and RNA. 
To study both, the team used a combination of heating samples to release volatile compounds and a wet-chemistry method that chemically tags small molecules for detection with high-sensitivity mass spectrometry.
A sample collected from the asteroid Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. (Credit: NASA)
Mojarro and his co-authors identified 15 of the 20 standard amino acids used by terrestrial life to assemble proteins, along with all five nucleobases that form the “letters” of DNA and RNA: adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine, and uracil. Earlier work on other Bennu fragments had already shown that the asteroid carries 14 protein-forming amino acids and the full set of nucleobases, but the new study adds one more amino acid to the list.
In a historical first, a tentative detection of the amino acid tryptophan in the aggregate Bennu sample indicates that a relatively complex amino acid exists in extraterrestrial objects. Tryptophan is one of the 20 amino acids used by life, and on Earth, it plays roles in both protein structure and cellular signaling. In the Bennu samples, it appears at trace levels across multiple subsamples and is absent from blank laboratory controls, so the team argues that it is unlikely to be a contamination artifact, while still stressing that further measurements will be needed to confirm the detection beyond doubt. 
If confirmed, its presence would suggest that some fragile organic molecules are missing from meteorites because they do not survive the heating and shock of atmospheric entry, highlighting the importance of sample-return missions for capturing the full range of prebiotic compounds in space.

The study also shows that Bennu is not chemically uniform. OSIRIS-REx returned not only a mixed “aggregate” powder of fine particles, but also three visually distinct stones which correspond to different boulder types seen on the asteroid’s surface. When the team analyzed these stones separately, they found clear differences in both the soluble and insoluble organics for each one.
The different types of rock indicate that Bennu’s parent body experienced multiple, distinct episodes of aqueous alteration in a wet, alkaline, ammonia-rich environment, and that different lithologies record different moments in this history rather than a single, uniform alteration event. In other words, wherever Bennu originally came from, it has had a complex upbringing across multiple environments, which have impacted its chemical makeup.
“Sample return missions from a variety of planetary bodies are accordingly crucial to enabling new discoveries and elucidating products of cosmochemistry,” the authors concluded.
MJ Banias covers space, security, and technology with The Debrief. You can email him at mj@thedebrief.org or follow him on Twitter @mjbanias.

Physicists at the University of Albany, New York, have announced a new research initiative—dubbed UAlbany Project X—that marks the beginning of a long-term scientific study of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).
The new project, officially launched last month, was made possible by an endowment gift that will provide ongoing funding for the team’s scientific investigation of aerial mysteries, which are currently also being investigated in a separate effort by the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).
Kevin Knuth, Ph.D., a professor of physics at the University of Albany and one of the new project’s lead scientists, told The Debrief that UAlbany Project X (UAPx) is an outgrowth of many years of ongoing research that he and his colleagues behind the new effort have already undertaken.
“We’ve been working on studying UAP scientifically for about seven years now,” Knuth explained, adding that his entry into the study of aerial mysteries began with an examination of the many decades of information that have been collected on the topic.
“I started by just doing what a physicist ought to do, which is getting your head around the problem,” Knuth told The Debrief. This ultimately led to his collaboration with scientists from the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies to author a 2019 paper that estimated the minimum speeds and accelerations of UAP observed in several notable cases. Among these was a 2004 incident involving an object observed by U.S. Navy personnel aboard the USS Nimitz (CVN-68) during training exercises off the southern California coast.
Footage of the object, popularly known today as the “Tic Tac,” was obtained by an FA/18 Super Hornet pilot named Chad Underwood and subsequently leaked online. In 2020, the Pentagon confirmed the footage was authentic in an official release accompanied by two other historic videos purportedly depicting UAP, while noting that the object in the 2004 video remained “unidentified.”
A still frame from the 2004 footage obtained by U.S. Navy pilot Chad Underwood, depicting a purported UAP encountered by personnel with the U.S. Navy’s Carrier Strike Group 11 (CSG-11) (Image Credit: U.S. Department of Defense).
That incident, Knuth says, had been part of what led him and fellow University of Albany physicist and associate professor Matthew Szydagis, along with several colleagues, to conduct a field expedition in 2021 off the coast of Santa Catalina Island with a non-profit scientific research organization called UAPx.
“We worked to have an updated collection mission over the Catalina Channel where the Nimitz Encounter occurred,” Knuth told The Debrief, during which the University of Albany researchers collected observable-light and infrared imagery, and other data that helped them develop a framework for the scientific documentation of UAP.
That work culminated in a paper by Szydagis and co-authored by Knuth and their colleague, University of Albany associate professor Cecilia Levy—the core of the new UAlbany Project X initiative—published in Progress in Aerospace Sciences earlier this year.
“This was a really seminal paper,” Szydagis told The Debrief, describing it as “a summary of UAPx’s first results from the Catalina-Laguna mission.”
“I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of scientists who have gotten their work on the UAP topic published in such a high-caliber journal,” Szydagis said. A second co-authored paper on the history of the UAP subject, with Knuth as the lead author, had appeared in the same edition of the journal, along with a separate study by Luc Dini, Geoffrey Mestchersky, and Jacques Vallée that provided estimates of energy values associated with a historic UAP incident.
“It’s a highly reputable journal that is cited by a lot of other scientists,” Szydagis said. “And yet, nobody talked about either that paper or Kevin’s history paper.”
“In the UAPx paper, we did something that we thought would be considered very important,” Szydagis said. “We concluded the paper with suggestions on how to quantify the meaning of extraordinary evidence, and very few people seem to be paying attention to that.”
Today, while UAP—or UFOs, as they are traditionally known—often succeed in dominating prime time television news segments, podcasts, and occasionally even mainstream publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other peer-reviewed journals like Nature: Scientific Reports, the majority of the attention the subject receives goes toward the question of government secrecy, and how much more the U.S. intelligence community may know about UAP than it has disclosed to the public.
Such questions had been the focus of a recent documentary, The Age of Disclosure, by filmmaker Dan Farah, in which a trove of current and past U.S. government officials that included Marco Rubio, currently serving as U.S. Secretary of State, and James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, spoke on the record about the issue of transparency regarding information collected about UAP.
Yet, while the question over government secrecy involving UAP commands much of the attention in the media cycle, that isn’t to say that the work of scientists—particularly those with the University of Albany team—had been overlooked by everyone.
Enter Tony Gorman, a well-known Albany-area businessman with many years of experience who was previously a co-owner of The Gorman Group, a family-owned highway construction company that has operated in the area for many decades.
Gorman had seen a short local news story about the UAP research Knuth, Szydagis, and Levy were conducting at the University of Albany, which prompted him to reach out to the team to help ensure an ongoing source of funding for their work.
“I have always been curious about UAPs and what could possibly be out there,” Gorman said in a statement. “When I saw the UAP research the UAlbany team is doing, I wanted to learn more.”
Gorman reached out and, after a series of discussions with the UAlbany researchers, decided to put his money behind their scientific efforts.
“I gained so much respect for their work,” Gorman said. “Right there, I knew I wanted to get involved.”
From left to right: Professor Matthew Szydagis stands alongside Albany businessman Tony Gorman, and Professors Cecilia Levy and Kevin Knuth (Photo by Zach Durocher/University of Albany. Used with permission).
“We received this donation from Tony Gorman,” Knuth told The Debrief. “A generous donation, which basically funds us for five years, and in addition to that, sets up an endowment that funds us in perpetuity.”
“So we’re here to stay.”
“We have money to help sustain us for the long term,” Szydagis told The Debrief. “With Tony’s very generous gift, we have the potential ability to be working on UAP for the rest of our lives.”
As for what the team specifically plans to work on, Szydagis explained that part of its plan is to leverage knowledge from past research while carefully plotting a course forward through strategic investigations that will help the physicists expand the data they are collecting on UAP.
“We’re planning a long-term, cautious, sustainable plan to keep working on UAPs for decades to come,” Szydagis said, though noting that the team is also working to ensure that it does not add to “the clutter of more projects and more silos.”
“So the old UAPx is closing down, and it’s being reborn,” Szydagis told The Debrief. “We are preserving UAPx’s original mission.”
“Through an incredibly generous gift from Tony Gorman, Professors Knuth, Matthey Szydagis, and Cecilia Levy have secured a major endowment to launch UAlbany Project X (UAPx)—the direct academic continuation of everything we’ve built from scratch,” wrote Gary Voorhis, a U.S. Navy veteran and former CEO and co-founder of the original nonprofit UAPx.

“They did it. They took our little rag-tag expedition team and turned it into a funded, university-backed research program with the potential to run for decades,” Voorhis wrote.
Knuth says the new UAlbany Project X will seek not only to collect more data on UAP but also to clarify the subject, how science can be applied to it, and to help dispel misconceptions about UAP.
In addition to the core University of Albany team, the researchers have announced they will receive input from experts, including physicist Eric W. Davis, who Szydagis said will work with the team on a volunteer basis as an adjunct researcher in an advisory position for the project.
“We are deeply honored to have him,” Dr. Szydagis told The Debrief.
“There has been a lot of excellent work done,” Knuth added, although noting that he hopes UAlbany Project X will be able to take scientific approaches to UAP research into new and exciting areas.
“I think the best thing to do is to learn from the mistakes of others, and to build on their successes,” Knuth said. “We’ve gotten diffraction gratings for high-quality cameras, and we plan to collect spectra. And magnetic and electric fields are often omitted from study, and so we plan to accommodate that as well, along with an excellent network of multiple cameras.”
“We have plans to build arrays of cameras to watch the sky and have this portable,” Knuth told The Debrief. “Basically, take your equipment and plant it somewhere for a couple of weeks, and collect data. That’s the way to do it.”
Thanks to Gorman’s endowment, the team also plans to ramp up publication of scientific papers on UAP.
“You should expect more papers from us, not just field expeditions,” Szydagis told The Debrief. “We’ve got all kinds of ideas on papers we want to publish on this topic broadly. And now we can start working on more of these things.”
“We no longer have to just work on this for free in our volunteer time,” Szydagis added, “which is not sustainable long-term.”
Fundamentally, Szydagis says that he, Levy, and Knuth will continue the mission that began during the original UAPx field expedition in 2021 and advance those efforts by collecting new data in the years ahead.
“UAPx is a phoenix being reborn,” Szydagis said. “It’s not dying, it’s not disappearing.”
“The mission will continue as a university effort.”
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

The Martian atmosphere is electrically active, according to scientists, citing new French research that reveals evidence of electrical phenomena with significant implications for our understanding of the Red Planet’s atmospheric chemistry, climate, and habitability.
NASA‘s Perseverance rover has been scouting the Jezero crater for signs of life for the past four years. Unexpectedly, its instruments recently picked up something completely unexpected—“mini lighting”—as revealed in a new paper published in Nature.
SuperCam
“These discharges represent a major discovery, with direct implications for Martian atmospheric chemistry, climate, habitability and the future of robotic and human exploration,” lead author Dr Baptiste Chide told Reuters.
Just one day after landing on Mars, SuperCam’s microphone recorded audio from the Red Planet for the first time. The SuperCam instruments, responsible for some of Perseverance’s most interesting finds, inadvertently picked up the audio and electromagnetic signatures suggesting the presence of mini lightning on Mars.
Unfortunately, while the early data is promising, SuperCam was designed to look for life, not lightning. Despite the audio evidence, there is debate about the presence of Martian lightning due to the lack of visual evidence. Although SuperCam collected some evidence of unexpected atmospheric electricity on Mars, researchers say that more specialized instruments and sensitive cameras would help confirm the initial findings.
Discovering Lightning on Mars
The work is a collaboration between the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the Université de Toulouse, and the Observatoire de Paris (PSL), working alongside other international researchers.
The French researchers behind the discovery combed through 28 hours of microphone recordings Perseverance made over 1,374 Earth days. Their results indicated that the electromagnetic and acoustic signatures were similar to minor static electrical events on Earth. Researchers have previously theorized that the Martian atmosphere may host such electrical activity, but this is the first direct evidence.
Martian Dust Devils
Violent surface activity, particularly dust devils and dust storm fronts, was strongly correlated with electrical activity. Dust devils are whirlwinds of swirling dust, produced as hot air rises off the Martian surface. The swirling internal movements of these dirt twisters produce electrical discharges as friction develops between tiny dust particles charged with electrons. Electrical arcs several centimeters long, along with an audible shockwave, result from these interactions.
On Earth, dry regions, such as deserts, are most prone to producing static electricity. Mars features even more optimal conditions for producing static electricity than even Earth’s driest regions, as the thin carbon dioxide atmosphere allows sparks to form through much weaker charges than on our planet.
Understanding Mars
The team’s findings may have a substantial impact on our understanding of Martian habitability. Specifically, discovering this extent of atmospheric electrical activity alters our understanding of the Red Planet’s chemistry.

The atmospheric charge is strong enough to speed up the formation of highly oxidizing compounds, which can destroy organic compounds and strongly alter the atmosphere’s photochemical balance. One immediate implication is that this may finally explain the long-debated rapid loss of methane from the Martian atmosphere.
Mars’ climate dynamics are poorly understood at present. The team suggests that static electricity may be affecting dust movement, which would significantly affect Martian weather. Electricity could also pose a threat to electronic equipment on which current robotic and future crewed missions rely. Further supplemental research, aided by specialized instrumentation, will be required to deepen our understanding of Martian climate dynamics and support safe and reliable crewed landings in the future.
 The paper, “Detection of Triboelectric Discharges During Dust Events on Mars,” appeared in Nature on November 26, 2025.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.