Swann | Jupiter probe
(April 27, 1973)
Experiment 46
No big sharp noises for the next 1/2 hour please.
6:03:25 (3 seconds fast) There's a planet with stripes.
6:04:13 I hope it's Jupiter. I think that it must have an extremely large hydrogen mantle. If a space probe made contact with that, it would be maybe 80,000 - 120,000 miles out from the planet surface.
6:06 So I'm approaching it on the tangent where I can see it's a half moon, in other words half lit half dark. If I move around to the lit side it's distinctly yellow toward the right. (Hal - Which direction you had to move?)
6:06:20 Very high in the atmosphere there are crystals, they glitter, maybe the stripes are like bands of crystals, maybe like rings of Saturn, though not far out like that, very close within the atmosphere. ["Note": see sketch of ring in the raw data drawing ahead.] (Unintelligible sentence.) I bet you they'll reflect radio probes. Is that possible if you had a cloud of crystals that were assaulted by different radio waves? (Hal - That's right.)
6:08:00 Now I'll go down through. It feels really good there (laugh). I said that before, didn't I? Inside those cloud layers, those crystal layers, they look beautiful from the outside, from the inside they look like rolling gas clouds - eerie yellow light, rainbows.
6:10:20 I get the impression, thought I don't see, that it's liquid. 6:10:55 Then I came through the cloud cover, the surface it looks like sand dunes. They're made of very large grade crystals so they slide. Tremendous winds sort of like maybe the prevailing winds of earth, but very close to the surface of Jupiter. From that view the horizon looks orangish or rose-colored but overhead it's kind of greenish-yellow.
6:12:35 If I look to the right there is an enormous mountain range.
6:13:18 If I'm giving a description of where I've gone and am, it would be approximately where Alaska is if the sun were directly overhead which it is. The sun looks like it has a green corona, seems smaller to me. (Hal - What color is the sun?) White.
6:14:45 I feel that there's liquid somewhere. Those mountains are very huge but they still don't poke up through the crystal cloud cover. You know I had a dream once something like this where the cloud cover was a great arc, sweeps over the entire heaven. Those grains which make that sand orange are quite large. They have a polished surface and they look something like amber or like obsidian but they're yellowish and not as heavy. The wind blows them, they slide along.
6:16:37 If I turn, the whole thing seems enormously flat. I mean if I get the feeling that if a man stood on those sands I think he would sink into them (laugh); maybe that's where that liquid feeling comes from.
6:18:10 I see something that looks like a tornado. Is there a thermal inversion here? I bet there is. I bet you that the surface of Jupiter will give a very high infrared count (?), reading (?) (Hal - reading) (inaudible sentence). The heat is held down.
6:19:55 I seem to be stuck, not moving. I'll move more towards the equator. I get the impression that that must be a band of crystals similar to the outer ones, kind of bluish. They seem to be sort of in orbit, permanent orbit down through another layer farther down which are like our clouds but moving fast. There's another area: liquid like water. Looks like it's got icebergs in it but they're not icebergs.
6:22:20 Tremendous wind. It's colder here, maybe it's because there's not a thermal inversion there.
6:23:25 I'm back. OK.
The atmosphere of Jupiter is very thick. I mean ... (Ingo draws) ... Explanation of drawing: This is what appears to be a hydrogen mantle about 100,000 miles off the surface. Those here are bands of crystals, kind of elements. They're pretty close to the surface. And beneath those are layers of clouds or what seem to be prevailing winds. Beneath that is the surface which I saw was, well, it looked like shifting sands made out of some sort of slippery granulated stuff. And off in the distance, I guess, to the East was a very high mountain chain 30,000 feet or so, quite large mountains. I feel these crystals will probably bounce radio waves. They're that type.
Generally, that's all.
