Shipwreck looters who plundered historical artefacts from Royal Navy warship at bottom of the sea jailed

The pair failed to declare more than 100 items

Shipwreck divers who plundered historical artefacts from the wreck of a Royal Navy warship have been jailed.

Nigel Ingram, 57, and John Blight, 58, were found guilty of failing to disclose more than 100 items of unreported wreck from the HMS Hermes in the English Channel - including a torpedo hatch, launch panels and chinaware.

The two men were found at the location of the HMS Hermes by French maritime officers on Tuesday September 30 2014.

The items looted from the ship were worth hundreds of thousands of pounds

Ingram was still in the water at the time, having dived from Blight’s boat called De Bounty.

Although no offences were identified at the time officers were suspicious of the lifting equipment on the boat, resulting in an underwater exploration of the Hermes three days later.

HMS Hermes was a protected cruiser built in the late 19th century and converted into an aircraft ferry and depot ship ready for the start of the First World War.

They looted the items from HMS Hermes, which is at the bottom of the English Channel

It was sunk by a German submarine in the Dover Strait in October 1914, causing the loss of 44 British lives.

After the exploration a criminal investigation was launched by the French authorities and later referred to Kent Police, resulting in the arrests of Ingram and Blight on Monday October 19, 2015.

More than 100 items of unreported wreck were recovered at Ingram’s home along with approximately £16,000 cash.

They were found guilty of fraud relating to their failure to disclose recovered items in order to make a financial gain

A number of photographs were also located on his computer, one of which showed the condenser of the Hermes on the back of De Bounty approximately four hours after it had been boarded by the French surveillance officers.

Police established through subsequent enquiries that Ingram had cashed a cheque from a scrap merchant for £5,029 the day after, on Wednesday, October 1 2014.

John Blight, 58, of Winchelsea, East Sussex

Also seized from Ingram’s home was a notebook entitled ‘De Bounty, Diver Recovery’ that contained details of what dives were undertaken and the items recovered, including the condenser.

The total value of the wreck collected was estimated at being more than £150,000.

Nigel Ingram, 57, of Winchelsea, East Sussex

None of the items listed were reported to the Receiver of Wreck as they should have been.

Ian Hope, prosecuting, said the pair hauled "huge" pieces of wrecks from the seabed using winching equipment on Mr Blight's boat.

They "deliberately and dishonestly" failed to declare them to the authorities, as they were legally obligated to do,

On Friday June 22 2018 both men were found guilty of fraud relating to their failure to disclose recovered items in order to make a financial gain, following a two-week trial at Canterbury Crown Court.

Shipwrecks are legally protected

ngram, from Teynham, Kent was subsequently jailed for four years and Blight from Winchelsea, East Sussex for three-and-a-half years.

Investigating officer PC Anne Aylett, of Kent Police, said: "The HMS Hermes and other shipwrecks of its kind are legally protected for a reason, and that is because they form an important part of the history of this country.

The duo showed

"Nigel Ingram and John Blight have demonstrated a complete disregard for the law by helping themselves to artefacts that should have remained beneath the sea instead of being brought to the surface and sold for scrap metal.

"We are proud of our close working relationship with our partner agencies, which in this case included the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, the Marine Management Organisation, the Receiver of Wreck, Sussex Police, Historic England, Crown Prosecution Service and the French authorities, and take a robust approach to ensuring important historical items do not end up in the hands of people who are not entitled to them.

Advertisement

"We will continue to investigate anyone suspected of stealing items from sunken wrecks and seek to prosecute them when appropriate."

Mark Harrison, head of heritage crime and policing advice for Historic England, said: "All archaeological sites underwater comprise a finite, irreplaceable and fragile resource, vulnerable to damage and destruction through human activity.

"Like nighthawking on land, the illicit removal of objects from underwater archaeological contexts does much more damage beyond just the loss of an item.

"All archaeological sites can give us clues and evidence about past events and it is this history that is disturbed and lost when items are removed.

"This removal means that part of our national story is lost and can never be replaced, particularly where historic artefacts have been sold for scrap, as in this case.

"We know that the majority of the diving community complies with the laws and regulations regarding the discovery and recovery of wreck from the sea.

"We will continue to work with the police and other organisations to identify the small criminal minority who are intent on causing loss and damage to our shared cultural heritage."

True 'intense' face of Belgium's Mystic Lamb revealed after 600 years

The intense and soulful true face of Belgium’s Mystic Lamb, the central figure of a world-famous 15th century Flemish altarpiece, has finally been revealed after almost six centuries.

The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, one of the world’s most stolen artworks and oldest oil paintings, was created in 1432 by Jan Van Eyck and his brother Hubert, leading artists of the influential Flemish Primitives. The giant altarpiece, which features hinged panels depicting Bible scenes and daily life, is on display in St Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent.

It was revealed this week after a painstaking restoration that tourists visiting the cathedral over the last 600 years have been gazing at a completely different lamb’s face to the original, which was overpainted in the 16th century to become an “impassive rather neutral figure”.

"The head is very different from what we've known since the 16th century. It depicts a lamb which is much more intense and expressive, which connects far more directly with the people, with big eyes," restoration project leader Helene Dubois said.

Koenraad Jonckheere, professor of Baroque art at Ghent University told Flanders Today that the overpainting, “subtly adapted the shapes to the taste of the time and to some extent neutralised the Van Eycks’ intense and humanised identification of the Lamb into an expressionless animal, seemingly unaffected by what was about to come.”

The original, by contrast, has more personality and sports “an intense gaze and is characterised by a graphically defined snout and large, frontal eyes, drawing onlookers into the ultimate sacrifice scene”.

It was not the only time that the 20 panel altarpiece, of which 40 percent was overpainted, has suffered an indignity.  A partial restoration in 1951 revealed the lamb’s original ears but techniques were not advanced enough to complete the work, leaving the lamb sporting four ears for nearly 70 years.

Over the years the 15 foot by 10 feet masterwork has been split into pieces, seized by Napoleon and the Nazis and stolen by thieves. In a mystery that has baffled detectives for decades, one of its 12 panels is still missing after a daring heist in 1934.

A week ago, Ghent’s public prosecutor urged people not to dig up the city’s beautiful cobbled squares after the author of a new book suggested the panel may be buried underneath one of them.

The Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone is a granite slab dating from 196 BC, bearing an inscription that was the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics (a form of ancient script that uses images as its alphabet). It was discovered by a French soldier in 1799 near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in Egypt. The British acquired the artefact when they defeated the French in 1801, and transferred it to the British Museum in London a year later. The Egyptian government has demanded the stone back in the past, but the request has not been met so far.

The full restoration of both sides of its hinged panels is due to be complete by the end of 2019, in time for the start of a year of celebrations of Jan Van Eyck.

First soldier to receive VC from Queen dies

Private William Speakman-Pitt, known as Bill Speakman, wearing the Victoria Cross which he won for his bravery in the Korean War, 29th January 1952

The first soldier to receive a Victoria Cross from the newly crowned Queen in 1952, has died at the age of 90.

Bill Speakman was awarded the VC - Britain's highest military honour - for his bravery in leading a military action during the Korea War.

Rounding up six of his comrades in November 1951, he gathered a pile of grenades and led a series of charges against North Korean and Chinese soldiers.

Despite suffering injuries to his leg and shoulder, he battled on to repel the enemy.

The Prince of Wales and Bill Speakman

Having run out of grenades he resorted to throwing beer bottles in a heroic bid to protect his comrades and allow them to withdraw safely.

"You just do what you're trained to do as a soldier," he said. "We did what we had to."

The Victoria Cross is awarded for gallantry "in the presence of the enemy". 

King George Vl awarded him the honour but died before an investiture could take place.

"When I got it the king was alive but he was very ill," Mr Speakman said. "So the Queen - I was her first VC. It was a wonderful moment. I think she was nervous and I was very nervous," he told the Royal British Legion.

Prior to his death, Mr Speakman was one of only 10 living people who had been awarded the VC, which was first presented by Queen Victoria in 1857.

On Remembrance Sunday last year, he was accompanied by another holder of the award, Johnson Beharry, who won his VC for bravery in Iraq in 2004.

Mr Speakman, a father of seven born in Altrincham, Cheshire, also served in Italy, Greece, Malaya and Borneo. Between 1945 and 1970 he was in the Black Watch, the Argyll and Southern Highlanders and The King's Own Scottish Borderers.

He later became a Chelsea pensioner.

The Victoria Cross Trust said it was "extremely sad" to hear of Mr Speakman's death. "Our thoughts and prayers go to his family and friends at this sad time," it added.

Supermassive black hole seen eating star for the first ever time

This artist rendering provided by NASA shows a star being swallowed by a black hole, and emitting an X-ray flare, shown in red, in the process. A new study published Monday, Feb. 6, 2017, in the journal Nature Astronomy details a black hole that's taken a record-breaking decade to devour a star 1.8 billion light-years from Earth. 

Scientists have seen the vast blast thrown out by a black hole eating a star for the first ever time.

Researchers have finally watched the formation and expansion of the fast-moving jet of material that is thrown out when a supermassive black hole's gravity grabs a star and tears it apart.

Scientists watched the dramatic event using highly specialised telescopes, which are trained on a pair of colliding galaxies called Arp 299, nearly 150 million light-years from Earth. At the centre of one of those galaxies, a star twice the size of the Sun came too close to a black hole that is more than 20 million times big as our Sun – and was shredded apart, throwing a blast across the universe.

It was that blast that scientists were able to see happen for the first time ever. Theorists have long thought the events were common – speculating that material torn from the star makes a rotating disk around the black hole, emitting intense X-rays and visible light, and also pushes jets of material outward from the poles of the disk at nearly the speed of light – but have been yet to see it actually happen.

"Never before have we been able to directly observe the formation and evolution of a jet from one of these events," said Miguel Perez-Torres, of the Astrophysical Institute of Andalusia in Granada, Spain.

Most galaxies have supermassive black holes, which can pull matter into them and form a huge disc around their outsides as they do. But for the most part, those black holes stay quiet, not devouring anything.

That means that the violent events that scientists have finally seen can be a unparalleled insight into what actually happens around a black hole.

"Much of the time, however, supermassive black holes are not actively devouring anything, so they are in a quiet state," Perez-Torres said. "Tidal disruption events can provide us with a unique opportunity to advance our understanding of the formation and evolution of jets in the vicinities of these powerful objects," he added.

"Because of the dust that absorbed any visible light, this particular tidal disruption event may be just the tip of the iceberg of what until now has been a hidden population," Mattila said. "By looking for these events with infrared and radio telescopes, we may be able to discover many more, and learn from them," he said.

Advertisement

Researchers had initially turned their sights towards the doomed star as part of a search for supernova explosions in such colliding pairs of galaxies. They had initially thought that they were seeing was one such a supernova explosion – but it kept expanding, confirming that it was in fact a jet being spewed out as the star was torn apart.

High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC)

Venus is an important destination for future space exploration endeavors. However, it presents a unique set of challenges. Though its internal geology is similar to Earth’s, its surface is hot enough to melt lead and is covered with craters, volcanoes, mountains, and lava plains.

The atmosphere of Venus is primarily carbon dioxide with thick clouds of sulfuric acid that completely cover the entire planet. The atmosphere traps the small amount of energy from the sun that reaches the surface along with the heat the planet itself releases. This greenhouse effect has made the surface and lower atmosphere of Venus one of the hottest places in the solar system.

The upper atmosphere of Venus, with similar pressure, density, gravity, and radiation protection to that of the surface of the earth, is relatively benign at 50 km. A lighter-than-air vehicle could carry either a host of instruments and probes, or a habitat and ascent vehicle for a crew of two astronauts to explore Venus for up to a month. Such a mission would require less time to complete than a crewed Mars mission.

A recent internal NASA study of a High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC) led to the development of an evolutionary program for the exploration of Venus, with focus on the mission architecture and vehicle concept for a 30 day crewed mission into Venus’s atmosphere.

Key technical challenges for the mission include performing the aerocapture maneuvers at Venus and Earth, inserting and inflating the airship at Venus, and protecting the solar panels and structure from the sulfuric acid in the atmosphere. With advances in technology and further refinement of the concept, missions to the Venusian atmosphere can expand humanity’s future in space.

The Fermi Paradox Is Not Fermi's, and It Is Not a Paradox

The Allen Telescope Array

Two big ideas often come up in discussions about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. One is the Drake Equation, which estimates the number of civilizations in our Galaxy whose signals we might be able to detect—potentially thousands, according to plausible estimates. The other is the so-called Fermi paradox, which claims that we should see intelligent aliens here if they exist anywhere, because they would inevitably colonize the Galaxy by star travel—and since we don’t see any obvious signs of aliens here, searching for their signals is pointless.

The Drake Equation is perfectly genuine: it was created by astronomer and SETI pioneer Frank Drake. The Fermi paradox, however, is a myth. It is named for the physicist Enrico Fermi—but Fermi never made such a claim.

I’d like to explain why the so-called Fermi paradox is mistaken, based on my deep-dive research on the topic, because this mistake has inhibited the search for E.T., which I think is worthwhile. It was cited by Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI) as a reason for killing NASA’s SETI program in 1981; the program was restarted at the urging of Carl Sagan, but was killed dead in 1993 by Senator Richard Bryan (D-NV). Since then, no searches in the U.S. have received government funds, even though thousands of new planets have been discovered orbiting stars other than our sun.

Did Scientists Just Find a Missing Piece of the Universe?

The cosmic web model of the universe.

It would be silly to think we completely understand our universe, given how small the Earth is compared to the vastness of the cosmos. But from here on our tiny planet, it appears that much of the universe is missing. And I’m not just talking about dark matter. Regular stuff seems to be missing, too.

Astronomy fans probably know that as far as humans can tell, the universe is composed mostly of some mysterious, unexplained energy called dark energy that pushes it apart. The remaining piece, about a quarter, is dark matter, another unexplained thing that seems to build the universe’s skeleton. Just 4 percent is the regular matter that we can see: stars, planets, and interstellar and intergalactic gas. But the observed amount of this regular matter still falls perhaps a third short of the amount of stuff that physicists think should exist based on their models of the universe.

Specifically, scientists are looking for baryons, particles made from quarks that make up the nuclei inside of atoms. Scientists claimed to have found this missing stuff before. Notably, two papers published last year reported the discovery of a filament of hot gas connecting galaxies. An 2014 paper found extra stuff in the halos surrounding galaxies like the Milky Way, which may account for the missing matter in these types of objects.

Another group of scientists now says it has found the true source of the missing stuff, following an intense search using a space-based telescope.

“We were granted a lot of time,” astrophysicist Fabrizio Nicastro from the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics told Gizmodo. “And we got this detection.”

Nicastro’s team says that “the missing baryons have been found,” in a paper published today in Nature. What they really did was observe the light coming from one very bright source several billion light-years away. As this light approaches Earth, it stretches due to the expanding universe, so longer wavelengths indicate older light. At two distances, they observed what looked like a filter that absorbed some positively charged oxygen atoms.

This filter would be made by the “WHIM,” or warm-hot intergalactic medium—hot gas in between galaxies. That, says Nicastro, would be the source of the missing matter; this gas would be the missing baryons.

The observation took a lot of time—it was the longest observation performed by the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space telescope, over 20 days in two sessions.

Assistant professor Jessica Rosenberg from George Mason University thought the paper was certainly interesting. “It’s a tantalizing result,” she said. But extrapolating a single source of light with two absorptions to account for all of the missing matter “is a bit of a leap, in my opinion,” she said.

Others were harsher. “This is one detection, and so deriving a cosmic mean density of hot gas is a bold thing to do—and not necessarily in a good way,” said Jason Tumlinson, astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute. “Usually you would need a larger sample to be confident in the derived mass budget.”

Rosenberg thought the study was worthwhile, given the significant investment of time. But she said that the journal Nature has a tendency to oversell astronomy results, something also suggested by a few astronomers on Twitter. She surmised that readers might not be excited about the results unless scientists claim to have solved one of the universe’s problems. Those kinds of paradigm-shifting papers come infrequently.

This might call to mind another recent controversy, in which a Nature paper claimed to have found a galaxy that was “lacking dark matter.” But others thought there wasn’t enough data to make such a claim—similar to what is occurring with this paper.

Hunting for the WHIM will continue regardless. Nicastro told Gizmodo that existing and future missions with better instrumentation will continue to make observations, and that seven other sources of light have been selected to look for the gas.

As usual, science is a process. And if you make bold claims, people will inevitably push back.