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Drones, satellites uncover ancient encampments, fortresses, civilizations

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

Back in 2016, a hunter perched in an elevated hide outside the German town of Bad Ems, an hour’s drive northwest of Frankfurt, noticed some unusual discoloration in a field of grain.

Archeologists were summoned and a drone dispatched, revealing a dual track arcing from one side of the pasture to the other. One might have concluded it was a very large tractor trail in these pastoral parts near the River Lahn. But it wasn’t.

It turned out to be the remnants of a defensive double ditch on the perimeter of a 2,000-year-old Roman army encampment.

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Canada’s Chinese diaspora: How the Tiananmen Square protests changed Vancouver

STORY BY PAIGE JASMINE GILMAR

“It was the end of innocence and idealism in a way,” political science professor Yves Tiberghien wrote to UBC News, the University of British Columbia’s communications’ hub. “The sense of hope and infinite possibility, the fresh idealism of the mid-1980s is gone.”

That idealism, however, was not just gone after the Tiananmen Square protests, it was trampled, shot and wiped clean by martial law in the public space in China’s capital. It was an effective end to any hope for greater freedoms in the country and, to some, a better future. And as Asian communities throughout Canada commemorate the 34th anniversary this month of the infamous protests and massacre, they also stopped to remember the day that also impacted Canada’s cultural makeup.

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Runaway Bart Simpson balloons and rogue microwave ovens: NASA debunks most UFO reports

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

The world’s top space agency says American authorities have investigated about 800 reports of what it calls unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) in recent decades, but only a small number cannot be explained.

A NASA research panel has been looking into reported sightings of airborne phenomena “that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective.” It is expected to release a report in July.

Addressing the group’s first public meeting, which included a live broadcast online, panelist Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the U.S. Defense Department’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, said authorities receive 50-100 UFO reports a month. Only two to five per cent are “possibly really anomalous.”

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The Trojan Horse of the 1700s

STORY BY PAIGE JASMINE GILMAR

George Etherington was a man who took his military service seriously, spending the mid- to late-1700s climbing the ranks of the British army. But Etherington had one weakness—and that was for sports.

Born in Delaware in 1733, Etherington rose to the rank of captain in 1756 while serving in the Seven Years’ War. So, when he took command of Fort Michilimackinac, at the confluence of lakes Huron and Michigan, in 1762, he carried the confidence of British military superiority with him—but that wouldn’t last for long.

Etherington and his garrison were responsible for salvaging the tenuous relationship between the Brits, French and the Ojibwe and Sauk tribes, but even for Etherington, that was a big feat.

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