My previous article was titled “..the ‘others’ are far more advanced than we are.” It was focused on the work of a National Security Agency employee named Lambros Callimahos. He was a man who had a deep interest in the matter of extraterrestrial life and its implications for us – good, bad or somewhere in between. The article began as follows: “Of the many and various UFO / extraterrestrial-themed documents and papers that have surfaced under the terms of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, one of the more interesting ones is Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It was written back in the 1960s (specifically in 1965) by a man named Lambros D. Callimahos. He was a cryptologist with the National Security Agency. On September 23, 1965, Callimahos took part in a panel-style debate on the subject of his paper at a conference on military electronics in Washington, D.C.”

It’s worth noting that three years later, Callimahos wrote another paper on extraterrestrial life and UFOs. His 1968 paper was titled UFO Hypothesis and Survival Questions. He stated: “It is the purpose of this monograph to consider briefly some of the human survival implications suggested by the various principal hypotheses concerning the nature of the phenomena loosely categorized as ‘UFO.’ UFO Hypothesis and Survival Questions focuses its attention for the most part on five central issues: (a) All UFOs are hoaxes; (b) All UFOs are hallucinations; (c) All UFOs are natural phenomena; (d) Some UFOs are secret earth projects; and (e) Some UFOs are related to extra-terrestrial intelligence.”

In relation to point “a,” Callimahos said: “…the fact that UFO phenomenon have been witnessed all over the world from ancient times, and by considerable numbers of reputable scientists in recent times, indicates rather strongly that UFOs are not all hoaxes…” When it came to hallucinations, Callimahos had a few key thoughts: “People, of course, do hallucinate. Although groups of people hallucinating is rare, it has been known to happen. Machines have their own form of hallucination; the radar, in particular, ‘sees’ temperature inversions. But a considerable number of instances exist in which there are groups of people and a radar or radars seeing the same thing at the same time; sometimes a person and a gun camera confirm each other’s testimony. On occasion, physical evidence of a circumstantial nature was reported to have been found to support witnessed sightings. A continuing high percentage of reports of unusual aerial phenomena are being reported by people in responsible positions in science, government and industry. The sum of such evidence seems to argue strongly against all UFOs being hallucinations.” He added: “Many UFOs have been reported by trained observers to behave like high speed, high performance, high altitude rockets or aircraft.”

As for the matter of at least some UFOs really being secret weapons, rather than extraterrestrial craft, Callimahos told his readers: “…[the] U.S. Air Force re-entry vehicle and an often publicized Canadian ‘saucer’ project leave little doubt as to the validity of this hypothesis. Undoubtedly, all UFOs should be carefully scrutinized to ferret out such enemy (or ‘friendly’) projects. Otherwise a nation faces the very strong possibility of being intimidated by a new secret ‘doomsday’ weapon.”

Callimahos also had fairly dire warnings for those who might think that an encounter with aliens would be overwhelmingly positive in nature. It’s important to note that he wasn’t talking about aliens attacking us and taking over the planet and trying to wipe us out – in The War of the Worlds or Independence Daystyle. Rather, Callimahos was talking about something else; something that was no less potentially hazardous, though. He spelled it out in eye-opening  and concise fashion:

“If ‘they’ discover you, it is an old but hardly invalid rule of thumb, ‘they’ are your technological superiors. Human history has shown us time and again the tragic results of a confrontation between a technologically superior civilization and a technologically inferior people. The ‘inferior’ is usually subject to physical conquest. Often in the past, a technologically superior people are also processors of a more virile or aggressive culture. In a confrontation between two peoples of significantly different cultural levels, those having the inferior or less virile culture, most often suffer a tragic loss of identity and are usually absorbed by the other people.”

Could a worldwide encounter with aliens lead to our downfall, possibly in the way that Lambros Callimahos warned of fifty years ago? Maybe it really could…

A British man has filmed what he says is evidence of a UFO flying over the city of Leeds. James Goldman, 30, who lives in Leeds, describes the object as a glowing ball of white light that moved silently and “with absolute purpose.” The video, which was taken with a smartphone camera as the strange object passed over the city, shows an object similar to the “orbs” that appear in purported pictures of ghosts and spirits. Apparently basing their comparison  exclusively on the basic shape of the object, the Daily Mirror compares this UFO to the Death Star from the Star Wars series.

Speaking to Daily Mirror,  where you can see his footage of the UFO, Goldman says the object “a round bright white lit ball slightly metallic in nature” he estimates the object to have been flying at an altitude of 300 meters and at speed of 200 kph, or 124 mph. Whether he is any good at estimating speed and height is uncertain, so those numbers should taken with a grain of salt.  Goldman does say he “couldn’t believe such an object would fly so low.”

“It definitely wasn’t a plane and it was too low to be a satellite. I know what drones look like and it just wasn’t a drone either. I doubt it was a military craft because they wouldn’t be flying something like that over a populated area.”

The UFO was filmed over Leeds, UK.

From the footage, the UFO has the same sort of look as the orbs claimed to be evidence of ghosts.  Orbs generally show up only in the pictures themselves. There aren’t many cases of people seeing paranormal orbs with the naked eye. That this UFO appears like one may be due to the camera’s zoom, which tends to make everything a bit less identifiable, but there is a eerie non-physical quality to the way it looks. Goldman says it was better in person:

“It was much clearer with the eye than what the camera has captured. After I stopped recording it continued to move at a 45-degree angle upwards and disappeared into the distance. It didn’t blink out suddenly or anything like that, it just petered out into the distance.”

Unfortunately, with the shaky camera and no real frame of reference, it’s hard to see the object moving with the same sort of “absolute purpose” that Goldman attributes to it.

This isn’t the first time someone has claimed to see a white orb shaped UFO. The phenomenon has been reported in a handful of places including Moscow and Antarctica.  Last year, there was discussion of whether some orb shaped UFO sightings could be explained by Google Loon balloons.

Artist’s rendition of orb UFOs

While the object in the video is nowhere near the world destroying monstrosity of the Death Star,  it wouldn’t be the first time that Star Wars was responsible for a false UFO report.  Early this year a a misidentified Stormtrooper-shaped helium balloon was responsible for a viral video of an alleged humanoid UFO sighting. I’d much prefer a Death Star shaped balloon to the real thing, personally.

Summer vacation season has arrived in Scotland, which means it’s time for tourists to point their cellphones at Loch Ness and claim that every log, fish, boat wake and bubble is proof of the Loch Ness monster. However, the latest video accepted by the Official Register of Sightings at Loch Ness was not taken by a tourist standing on the bank of the loch but by an Irishman sitting at home watching the live feed from the official Loch Ness CCTV livecam. Not only did he see something that looked monsterish, he took a video of the video which showed the anomaly for a long (by Nessie sightings standards) ten minutes. Is this the real deal or just another seal?

“I just click in now and then for 20 minutes–it’s better than watching Coronation Street.”

Sometimes you don’t see anything, but it’s still better than “Coronation Street.”

Eoin O’Faodhagain, who should win the title for Best Name for a Nessie Spotter, also has the best method for spotting Nessie – he sits at home in Drumdoit Castlefin, County Donegal, watching the live 24/7 feed from a video camera pointed at Urquhart Bay – a well-known location for Loch Ness monster sightings. Eoin was tuned in on April 30th when he saw something that prompted him to reach for his recording device and watch what might happen next. He was pleasantly surprised at what he saw. (Watch for yourself here.)

“It was very unusual, it was certainly something big–it dived down and up again and dived and disappeared. It was not a boat and not a log.”

Well … “unusual” is definitely an appropriate word for a video of a video feed that “shocked” O’Faodhagain and got Gary Campbell, the Keeper of the Official Register of Sightings at Loch Ness excited.

“As far as Nessie footage goes this is a feature film. Normally you only get videos of one of two seconds.”

The fact that the video-of-a-video-feed is blurry, probably due to Eoin magnifying what he captured on his phone, doesn’t seem to bother Campbell. He points out the one obvious truth – that the object is moving and appears to be bobbing in and out of the water – and speculates that it’s no more than 20 feet long. Despite the fact that a 20-foot log could do the same thing, he says:

“It is unexplained.”

Would searching by kayak be better?

Campbell wields his “unexplained” like many use “unidentified” – that word alone doesn’t make it a ‘creature’, let alone a living creature or Nessie. Hopefully, the Loch Ness DNA testing expedition will dip their ladles into the waters where this video was shot and come up with a better explanation. In the meantime, it is entered in the annual “Best Loch Ness Monster sighting of 2018” sponsored annually by the Inverness Courier.

Yes … there’s still another big unanswered question. Did anyone think to look back at the actual feed from April 30th? Are they not saving it? Wouldn’t it be more clear than the video-of-a-video?

Start monitoring the Loch Ness CCTV feed and keep your cellphone handy. Eoin O’Faodhagain is right – it beats watching “Coronation Street.”

There can be no doubt that any alleged encounter with creatures from another world is already by definition profoundly bizarre. Such reports really cover the full spectrum of the odd and of high strangeness, with these accounts reliably stirring debate, wonder, and awe. Yet there are some cases that go even beyond this, to fully catapult themselves into the furthest reaches of the extreme fringe of the bizarre, hovering out beyond all attempts to comprehend or explain them. Here are some of the stranger.

Certainly one of the more downright bizarre cases comes to us from the U.S. state of West Virginia, where in July of 1968 a local man by the name of Jennings Frederick was out bowhunting in the rural backwoods just outside outside of Fairmont, West Virginia. At some point he allegedly heard a high pitched, unearthly sound that he would describe as sounding like “a recording running at exaggerated speed.” Curious, Jennings searched about for the origin of this surreal noise, and this was when he would come across a very strange sight indeed.

There in the brush stood a 7-foot tall, semi-humanoid entity, with an exceedingly thin, almost skeletal frame, long ears, and stalk-like arms that were almost like tendrils and which ended in slender, 7-inch long fingers tipped with some sort of needles or thorns, as well as suction cups. The whole of the anomalous creature was described as green and very plant-like in nature, as if it were part animal and part plant. The whole time Frederick watched it that incessant chattering sound reverberated around him, and he suddenly realized that he could make out words within the alien noise, like glimpses of meaning from white noise, which he took to say:

You need not fear me. I wish to communicate. I come as a friend. We know of you all. I come in peace. I wish medical assistance. I need your help.

As Frederick stood there wide-mouthed in bewilderment, the mysterious being purportedly suddenly lashed out with one of its stalk-like arms with blinding speed to wrap him in an iron grip. The needles or thorns on its fingers then apparently pierced the startled man’s skin and began to draw blood, but rather than the pain he found himself drawn to the thing’s eyes, which seemed to rapidly switch back and forth from red to yellow in a hypnotizing, oscillating cycle that held him in thrall and dulled his senses. After about two minutes of this, the otherworldly plant-monster reportedly let him go and took off in a sprint up a nearby embankment in great 25-foot long bounds, followed shortly after by a deep thrumming noise that Frederick would later speculate to have been the sound of the creature’s space ship.

For years Frederick took this undoubtedly absurd-sounding story to himself out of fear of ridicule, but in 1976 he would relate it to the paranormal researcher Gray Barker, who would then include it in his newsletter. The story would be brought to even greater attention when it was mentioned in the late Brad Steiger’s 1978 book Alien Meetings. Was this an alien, some sort of cryptid, or what? Whatever it was, the “Vegetable Man” of West Virginia is certainly one of the more bizarre encounters on record.

Vegetable men are weird enough, but there are other encounters with unidentified, often humanoid creatures that are every bit as bizarre. On the evening of November 17, 1974, something beyond normal was witnessed by several motorists along a lonely stretch of road on Bald Mountain, in the U.S. state of Washington. The first of the witnesses was a man named Ernest Smith, would say of the the entity he caught in his headlights thus:

It was horse-sized, covered with scales and standing on four rubbery legs with suckers like octopus tentacles. Its head was football-shaped with an antenna sticking up…The thing gave off this green, iridescent light.

Another couple driving by at the time by the name of Mr and Mrs Roger Ramsbaugh also claimed to have seen the creature and its ethereal glow. Interestingly, just three days previous there had been a report of a UFO crashing to earth in the region, perhaps suggesting a connection. The researcher and author Jim Brandon also mentioned in his book Weird America that at the time Lewis County Sheriff William Wister had led an investigation into the reports, but that he had been shut down by the Air Force and NASA, after which teams of men had been brought in to search the area, which Brandon would describe as “a special NASA team, including a heavily armed military unit wearing uniforms with no insignia.” What could this creature have been? Was it just a newspaper hoax on a slow news day? Who knows?

If none of this has been weird enough for you, then how about floating, disembodied alien brains? In August 17, 1971, there was a perhaps even stranger alien encounter from Palos Verdes, California. Witnesses John Hodges and Pete Rodriguez were allegedly headed to their car at 2 AM when they saw off through the trees a faint, mysterious glow emanating from beyond. They got into their car, switched on the headlights, and their suspended in the beams of light from their vehicle were what were described as two large, blueish entities that looked just like disembodied human brains, hovering right in the middle of the road and surrounded by clouds of vapor that seemed to cling to them. The larger one of the “brains” was described as having a prominent red spot like an eye set within it, and this is the one that began to move towards the vehicle for purposes unknown.

The two terrified men understandably got out of there as fast as they possibly could, and it was later noticed that they had 2 hours of missing time. In 1976, Hodges would undergo hypnotic regression after years of being plagued by nightmares and wondering what had happened to them out on that lonely road. Under hypnosis, Hodges revealed that he had dropped Rodriquez off at home and arrived at his own house to find the larger brain waiting for him there, which had then telepathically spoken to him. He claimed that he had then been taken into the brains’ ship to some sort of “control room,” where it was revealed that they were merely telepathic tools being used by other aliens, this time more akin to the “grey” aliens typically described in more mainstream reports, although in this case they stood over 7-feet tall.

These master aliens then apparently claimed they were from a place called “Zeta Reticulii,” and showed Hodges various images of nuclear war and destruction as they explained that the human race had grown too powerful for its own good. He was also shown another planet that had been completely destroyed by another race that had met the same fate, and was admonished that humankind would be the “instruments of their own fate,” telling him, “Take the time to understand yourselves. The time draws near when you shall need to!” Hodges then says that he felt a potent buzzing sensation in the back of his head and found himself back in his own car.

In the years after, he became convinced that these aliens had implanted him with what he called a “translator cell,” and that he received frequent telepathic communications from them through this device, in which they made dire predictions such as an apocalyptic war in the Middle East and the future widespread use of nuclear weapons. Many of the prophecies given by the aliens have turned out to have not come to pass, which sort of raises an eyebrow even further than it already is. Whether you think this story and its “space brains” has any truth to it at all or not, you have to admit it is a damn strange tale all the same.

The United States certainly does not hold the monopoly on such mind-bending weird cases, and almost as absurd as floating brains is a case involving basically floating, sentient bags of jelly, which were apparently witnessed on December 20, 1958 in Sweden. On this day, 25 year-old Hans Gustafsson and 30 year-old Stig Rydberg, were on their way along Route 45 from Höganäs to Heisenberg in the early morning hours along a foggy road that had such poor visibility that the two friends decided to pull over. As they walked about outside the vehicle they soon noticed through the haze that there was some sort of glow emanating from the surrounding forest nearby.

The two decided to hike off into the darkened, glow frosted trees to try and see where the light was coming from, and after penetrating around 150 feet into the woods they allegedly came across the source of the glow, which proved to be far more bizarre than they had anticipated. There before them was a disc-like object resting on two legs around two feet long, the whole of which cast a scintillating glow of ever-changing colors. Even odder than the sight of this apparent flying saucer was what could be seen cavorting about the vicinity, which were 3-foot long amorphous blobs that Rydberg would describe thus:

They were like protozoa, just a bit darker than most, sort of a bluish color, hopping and jumping around the saucer like globs of animated jelly.

Nowhere on the bodies were any visible limbs or sensory organs, nor any other discernible features, and it was as if they were just pulsating gobs of gelatinous goo that could somehow levitate over the ground. Things got rather tense very quickly when these unusual entities suddenly surrounded the two puzzled men and purportedly began to engulf their limbs within their throbbing masses, described as feeling like “magnetic dough,” while at the same time exuding a terrible stench like “ether and burnt sausage.” It seemed as if the blob-like creatures were trying to drag the increasingly terrified witnesses towards the glimmering disc, and no matter how hard the two witnesses fought back and struggled it did little good.

By chance, Rydberg finally managed to tear himself free and run back towards their car with the alien blobs in hot pursuit. When he reached the vehicle he leaned heavily on the car’s horn, piercing the night with a wall of noise in an effort to draw anyone’s attention to their plight, but which also seemed to have the effect of startling the creatures enough to let go of Gustafsson. The blobs then huddled under their craft, filed inside it, and shot off away into the night sky, leaving behind a screeching whistling blare, that nauseating stink, and two very shaken men who found that they were covered in strange bruises and cuts.

Gustafsson and Rydberg perhaps understandably kept the story to themselves for some time, but when it finally came out it became a minor sensation in Sweden. The to witnesses were also interviewed by police, and although the story was without a doubt off-the-wall, they could find no sign of any hoaxing going on, and even when the two were secretly monitored when they thought they were alone, they did not let on that there was any lying or trickery going on. Gustafsson and Rydberg were also found to be in find physical and psychological health, and in the end, police concluded that the men really seemed to have been traumatized by what they at least truly believed they had seen, whatever that was.

This particular case of what are commonly referred to as the “Domsten Blobs” was also covered by Steiger in his book Strangers from the Skies, with the author himself referring to the outlandish monsters as “terrible flying jelly bags.” It is difficult to ascertain just what it was that these two men saw, or at least thought they saw, and with no other accounts anywhere near it we will probably never know.

Moving over to England we have the weird case that appeared in Fortean Times in the summer of 1988. The incident occurred near Birmingham in the West Midlands, where on January 4, 1979, a Jean Hingley was out working in her garden. At some point she looked up to see a glowing orange sphere appear to hover over her home, which gradually changed to white and inexplicably caused her dog to collapse to the ground, seemingly paralyzed. Things got even stranger still when some tiny, “fairy-like” entities suddenly came buzzing from down out of the sky to enter the house. The article would describe these beings thus:

They were about 3.5 ft tall, and dressed in a silvery tunic with six silver buttons down the front. They had large eyes like ‘black diamonds’ with a glittering lustre, set into wide white faces with no nose to speak of and a simple line for the mouth. Their heads were covered by transparent helmets like ‘goldfish bowls’, surmounted by small lights. Their limbs were silvery-green, ending in simple tapering points with no apparent hands or feet. They had large oval ‘wings’ which looked as if they were made of thin, transparent paper covered with dozens of glittering multi-coloured dots, like ‘braille dots’. Each ‘being’ was surrounded by a halo, and numerous very thin streamers hung down from their shoulders. They hovered and flew about the room with their ‘arms’ clasped in front of their chests, while their ‘legs’ hung down stiffly. Their wings didn’t flap like those of birds, but seemed to be for display and merely fluttered gently or occasionally folded inwards like a concertina. Their expression – “like a dead person’s face” – never changed during the encounter, which lasted for about an hour.

These creatures apparently spoke in unison in a low, gruff voice, and would occasionally emit a laser-like beam of light from their helmets, which had the effect of dazzling the witness and creating a burning sensation. The creatures were also quite mischievous and troublesome, knocking objects over, shaking the Christmas tree, jumping on the sofa, banging on walls, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. They would continue this cavorting, occasionally stunning Hingley with their enigmatic laser weapons, until they were called to attention by a sudden beeping noise coming from the garden. The creatures then flitted back outside, oddly carrying with them pieces of mince pie they had pilfered from the kitchen, and entered the large orange craft that had been hovering over the house earlier, which was now sitting upon the ground and sported portholes and two long antenna-like structures that glowed blue.

When the craft was gone, Hingley claimed that she had been incapacitated by an inexplicable pain, and when she snapped out of it she realized that there was a tiny burn mark in her forehead. An inspection of the area turned up what appeared to be 8-foot long tracks like the tracks of a tank’s treads, and additionally it was found that various electrical appliances in the home had been mysteriously fried by some unknown force. What were these fairy-like beings and what did they want? It is unknown.

Another account first came to public attention in an 1968 issue of Flying Saucer Review, and comes from nearby France, where in 1962 a business man was driving along a rural road in Var on a dark and rainy night. As he drove along the desolate stretch of road peering through the torrent of rain, the witness allegedly noticed a group of figures huddled in the middle of the road as he rounded a bend. He at first took these to be people, perhaps in need of help, but would soon find out that these were no human beings. The witness would explain:

My window was down and I leaned my head out slightly to see what was the matter; it was then that I saw beasts, some kind of bizarre animals, with the heads of birds, and covered with some sort of plumage, which were hurling themselves from two sides towards my car. Terrified, I wound up my window, accelerated like a mad man, and the stopped 150-meters [approximately 500-feet] further on. I turned round and saw these things, these beasts, these nightmarish sort of beings, which were heading, with a sort of flapping of wings, towards a luminous dark-blue object, which hung in the air over a field on the other side of the road. On reaching it [the UFO], these ‘birds’ were literally sucked into the underpart of the machine as if by a whirlwind. Then I heard a dull sound (clac!) and the object flew off at a prodigious speed and finally disappeared.

What were these bizarre bird-like beings? Since no one has seen anything like it it is anyone’s guess. Finally, we leave Europe to come to the South American country of Venezuela, and a very harrowing and strange report from November of 1954. On November 28, 1954, two witnesses by the names of Gustavo Gonzales and José Ponce were driving a truck from Caracas to Petare, Venezuela, when in the early morning hours they came across an enormous glowing orb floating about 6 feet above the ground in front of them. Perhaps unwisely, the men stopped the truck and got out to investigate, upon which they noticed several small, 3-foot high humanoids covered in bristly hair that seemed to be gathering rocks to bring aboard their craft.

Gonzales and ponce approached and decided to try and grab one of the creatures, which turned out to be a bad idea. The small, vaguely ape-like being was apparently vastly strong, effortlessly flinging them off and then proceeding to viciously claw at them. When Gonzales fought back by stabbing it with a knife, his weapon was found to have no effect on it at all. The struggle continued until one of the other creatures put an end to it all by firing off a stunning beam of bright light that knocked the two men to their knees, whereupon the odd beings entered their ship and shot off into the night. Medical examination would show that Gonzales did indeed have a nasty looking scratch mark on his body, and the two men were found to be completely sober. Making the whole case even more bizarre was a report from another witness who also claimed to have seen the creatures and to have even seen the struggle between them and the two witnesses.

These are some of the most outrageous, perplexing, and even downright absurd reports of alien encounters there are, and we are left to wonder just what in the world is going on here. These are singularly peculiar cases that have no other parallel in the sightings records, and which lurk on the very fringes of the weird. What could these creatures be and where did they come from? Why haven’t they been seen more often? Are these hallucinations, illusions, hoaxes, or lies? No one really knows, and these extremely odd encounters continue to serve to stir the imagination.

The ongoing saga of the mystery booms being heard across the United States continues, and possibly taken a turn for the spooky. Over the past year, unexplained explosions and booming noises have been shaking homes and terrifying residents in many rural parts of the continental U.S. While the vast majority of these anomalous booms are left unexplained, the FBI has taken a particular interest in mysterious explosion noises recently heard across rural Pennsylvania just north of Philadelphia. Does this mean some sort of sleeper cell terrorist group might be practicing with improvised explosives?

Let’s hope not.

Given the craters found alongside rural roads, though, who knows? To add more mystery and a healthy dose of conspiracy to these recent booms in Pennsylvania, though, news reports suggest the ever-elusive and ominous Men in Black might now be on the case, doing what they do best: creeping out bewildered eyewitnesses. Is there more to this case than meets the eye?

Speaking to The Intelligencer, a newspaper covering the Upper Bucks County area of Pennsylvania where these mystery booms took place, residents described the “kinda spooky” experience they had following one of the recent unexplained booms. One resident who asked that her name not be used claims two eerily-familiar-sounding and unidentified agents of some kind showed up at her door unannounced, questioning her in a somewhat threatening manner:

Two men in dark suits and dark car were banging on our front door and back door at the time until I answered. I could see they had badges under their coats, but they didn’t identify themselves. It was unnerving. Then they left.

What should be made of the appearance of the MIB? Is there more to this case than some backwoods paramilitary group or “lone wolf” testing explosives on the side of empty highways? Were these Men in Black merely men who happened to be wearing black working on behalf of an undisclosed organization like the NSA or CIA, or is something spookier afoot in rural Pennsylvania? As with all things MIB, we’ll likely never know.

In the search for great names for bands, the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detectors has been available since the 1990s without any takers. That may change this week with the news that this odd device was used to discover a particle that should not exist – the sterile neutrino … a particle that can allegedly pass through matter and not interact with it (and another great band name if your bass drum isn’t big enough for the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detectors logo). Unfortunately, the experiment could not be replicated until recently which scientists using a new device appear to have proven its existence. Is it possible? Here’s the real question … is it band-name-worthy?

“That would be huge; that’s beyond the standard model; that would require new particles … and an all-new analytical framework.”

That’s Kate Scholberg, particle physicist at Duke University, commenting in LiveScience on the announcement, published in arXiv.org, of the possible discovery of the sterile neutrino by scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. It took the invention of another device — the MiniBooNE (Mini Booster Neutrino Experiment) instrument which was built solely to find the allegedly massless neutrinos – to discover the sterile neutrino (the other three are the electron, muon, and tau neutrinos) and then potentially blow the Standard Model of physics to smithereens by proving that neutrinos are not massless but, well, smithereens that can still pass through matter without interacting with it. This sounds like something dark matter might do. Are the sterile neutrinos dark matter?

As described in Quanta Magazine, the MiniBooNE sounds like something invented at a summer picnic by guys tired of firing their shotguns at empty beer cans. MiniBooNE shoots a beam of muon neutrinos at a giant tank filled with oil. Before hitting the oil, some of the muons change (by oscillation) into electron neutrinos which flash when they collide with oil molecules. While this happens rarely, it can be predicted reliably … which caused oscillation among physicists when the total number of hits was slightly higher than predicted.

One possible explanation is that heavier sterile neutrinos – called “sterile” because they never interact with anything but other neutrinos – exist and are also changing into electron neutrinos. The increase in mass measured on the other side of the oil barrel by the MiniBooNE indicates that the sterile neutrinos may not only exist but are not massless as previously theorized. And, if their mass is heavy enough, they could be good candidate for being dark matter.

Or not.

“It’s clear there’s something to be understood, and I certainly hope it’s a fourth neutrino. That said, this would be the first discovered particle beyond the Standard Model, so the threshold for the evidence is obviously very high.” For now, he said, “I am taking a slight wait-and-see approach.”

Skeptics like Neal Weiner, a New York University theoretical physicist interviewed by Quanta, point out that more proof is needed before tossing the Standard Model out the window, especially because other similar experiments have not been able to replicate the results of MiniBooNE.

“I’m very excited about this result, but I am not ready to say ‘Eureka!’”

Janet Conrad, a neutrino physicist at MIT and a member of the MiniBooNE team, agrees, which is why she’s moving from MiniBooNE to ISODAR — an ISOtope Decay At Rest experiment which is being designed to “definitively address these physics topics using a well-understood, high-intensity 8Li β-decay-at-rest antineutrino source coupled with a massive detector such as KamLAND that has good inverse-betadecay identification capabilities with high efficiency.”

Eureka?

It’s nice to know there’s research money being spent on particle physics and, if the sterile neutrino has really been discovered, these experiments destroying the Standard Model of Particle Physics do not blow us to smithereens in the process.

They are also a great band name generator, as The Smithereens have proven. While ISODAR may not fit a band, it sounds like a great name for a Star Wars villain.