“You will not be allowed to land on the moon unless ‘they’ decide to allow you. The Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) researchers around the world believe that the extra terrestrials have sent a message to the Indian government to ‘get rid of your nukes before you explore other worlds’.”

Well, that didn’t take long. Less than a day after the Indian Space and Research Organization (ISRO) lost contact with its Chandrayaan-2 lunar lander as it descended to the moon’s surface and was presumed to have crashed, Indian UFO researcher Sabir Hussain, the director of the Indian Society for UFO Studies (INSUFOS), issued a statement blaming the malfunction on extraterrestrials who used it to warn the Indian government against increasing its already large nuclear weapons arsenal.

“Both India and Pakistan have been openly threatening each other with nuclear attacks. But what the leadership of both these nations do not realize is that they can use their nuclear weapons only if the UFOs decide to allow them. In my opinion, this Vikram episode is just a warning to the Indian leadership from UFOs, that if you can’t take care of your own world then don’t come to ours.”

That’s good advice, Sabir Hussain, but how do you know for sure it was aliens and not a human-caused engineering malfunction? He answers by bringing in one of the most-repeated stories of possible alien interference with humans using nuclear weapons.

“More messages are likely to follow. US Air Force Missile Launch Officer, Robert Salas, who witnessed an UFO switching off 10 nuclear missiles under his command in 1967, also concurs with this.”

He’s referring to the famous incident in 1967 reported by then Air Force Captain Robert Salas where 16 nuclear missiles became non-operational at two different launch facilities immediately after guards saw UFOs hovering 30 feet (10 meters) above them, yet the Air Force personnel could not identify them. An official investigation could not find a definitive cause for this incident nor for a similar one that occurred at a base in North Dakota in 1966 and was recounted by eyewitness David Schindele, a retired Air Force captain. Both men have repeatedly stated that there’s more to these incidents that is being withheld by the US military and government. In addition, there have been many reports of UFOs seen over nuclear plants, often related to leaks and other accidents. These have also been linked by some to benevolent extraterrestrials attempting to keep humans from destroying themselves … at least with nuclear weapons or reactors.

Hussain then makes references to reported sightings by astronauts Edgar Mitchell, Gordon Cooper and Donald Slayton, and cosmonauts Yevegni Khrunov, Vladimir Kovalyonok and Pavel Popovich. He also asks if this might be the reason why the US and NASA haven’t sent humans back to the Moon before pointing out an often-overlooked connection to some recent military-UFO encounters.

“UFOs are very concerned about humans playing with nuclear weapons. In 2014-15, they were toying with American nuclear aircraft carriers, Theodore Roosevelt and Nimitz as recounted by some American Naval officers to the New York Times in May 2019.”

Case closed. Done deal. ETs knocked the Chandrayaan-2 lunar lander out of commission as a warning to nuke-loving Indian leaders. Do you agree with Hussain’s logic and connections of some wide-apart dots?

Wait!  This just in …

“ISRO is continuing its efforts to restore a link with Chandrayaan 2’s lander ‘Vikram’ … with “right orientation” it can still generate power and recharge batteries with solar panels.”

Indian media reports that ISRO has located the lander and holds hopes that it’s just mis-oriented, not disoriented, and might still have at least a portion of its solar panels leaning in the direction of the sun – enough to eventually charge the batteries and send a signal. If that happens, what will they find out from Chandrayaan 2 about the last moments of its descent? Will it confirm what Sabir Hussain claimed? Will it explain why the ETs didn’t finish it off? Did they give it a final message for humanity? A solution to our chaos? Or will Chandrayaan 2 relay a movie-worthy warning to humans worried about what to do when the nuclear holocaust finally hits – a warning that will make the perfect dystopian ending for a story that should already be on its way to a Hollywood screenwriter?

We’re gonna need a bigger spaceship.

It used to be that writing angry letters accusing the Navy of covering-up UFO encounters precluded you from getting any job, let alone one in the government. Now there’s a sitting US congressman doing just that. Not only is Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.) a congressman, but he’s a member of the House Homeland Security Committee and the ranking member of the Intelligence and Counterterrorism Subcommittee. My how times change.

Back in July, North Carolina Republican congressman Mark Walker wrote a letter to Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer asking if the Navy is investigating Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (the military’s preferred terminology), and if they had any knowledge of foreign or private technological advances that could explain the UFO—sorry, UAP—sightings. In the letter (which you can read here), Walker specifically asked about “UAPs” and, despite the Navy’s assertion that most sightings can be explained by drones, pointed out that many pilots’ stories involved witnessing behavior that would “require extreme advancements in quantum mechanics, nuclear science, electromagnetics, and thermodynamics.”

The so-called “tic-tac” UFO encountered by the USS Nimitz in 2004

Navy Under Secretary Thomas Modly responded to Walker’s inquiries, stating that “the Department of the Navy takes these reports very seriously and continues to log sightings and fully investigate the accounts.” While Walker says he appreciates that the Navy is investigating these events, he says he still has concerns. Walker spoke to Politico in an article published Friday:

“While I am encouraged the Under Secretary of the Navy confirmed that UAP encounters are fully investigated, there is frustration with the lack of answers to specific questions about the threat that superior aircraft flying in United States airspace may pose.”

In particular, Walker wants to know about the shadowy Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the Pentagon program founded under the direction of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, which investigated UFO sightings as well as poured millions of dollars into research on topics like “Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions.” AATIP was formally ended in 2012, but there is evidence to suggest it never actually shut down and operates invisibly to this day. Walker says:

“Has it ended? If it has ended are we documenting anything? Where are the resources coming from? That’s a fair question that constituents and the American people would like to know.”

Mark Walker says his main concern is that these “UAP” are tech belonging to Russia or China and represent a national security threat. He says that if they do represent such a security threat, than the American people have the right to know about it.

But it seems he hasn’t ruled out the possibility that whatever people are seeing up there come from somewhere else. Walker says:

“The way I look at this: What if [U.S. government agencies] already do know about it but the rest of us don’t? I certainly have an open mind to see where this leads us. We are going to stay on the issue and follow through like we said we wanted to do.”

We live in weird times, folks, and it’s probably only getting weirder.

When you place an environmental observatory weighing 770 pounds on the floor of the Baltic Sea  you don’t expect your employees to bring you this kind of news:

“On August 21st at 8:15 pm it stopped the data transmission. At first we thought of a transmission error. {But} the devices were gone, the divers could not find them anymore.”

According to the BBC, the Boknis Eck Observatory was installed in December 2016 by the GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel and the Helmholtz Center Geesthacht in the outlet of Eckernförde Bay, which is located north of Kiel, Germany and south of Denmark. It was 1.8 kilometers (1.1 miles) offshore at a depth of 22 meters (72 feet) in waters prohibited to all boats. The $331,902 (£270,000) device consisted of two desk-sized components – sensors and a power supply connected by cable to the coast.

“When the divers reached the bottom of the sea last week at the observatory’s location, they found only the torn off land cable. It was completely shredded”

Shredded! Boknis Eck coordinator Prof. Dr. Hermann Bange had to give his bosses at GEOMAR the bad news that they could no longer measure environmental data such as temperature, salinity, nutrients, oxygen, chlorophyll, flow velocities, methane concentrations and other critical information from the floor of the Baltic Sea because something absconded with their observatory. But what?

“Since the racks each weigh around 520 and 220 kilograms and the cable connections are extremely massive, storms, currents or marine animals are the culprits.”

If the 770-pound observatory was knocked off of its moorings by a storm, wouldn’t there be a trench leading up to where it was eventually deposited? And if it was an animal, what kind of creature living in the Baltic Sea is large enough to detach and carry away something weighing that much? While there are some whales, none are large enough to carry out this task. What else could it be?

“I am one hundred percent convinced and confident that we have found something that is very, very, very unique. Then if it is a meteorite or an asteroid, or a volcano, or a base from, say, a U-boat from the Cold War which has manufactured and placed there – or if it is a UFO… Well honestly it has to be something.”

“It” is the so-called Baltic Sea anomaly – an object discovered on the floor of the Baltic Sea in 2012 which has defied identification and spawned countless theories – geological, conspiracy, paranormal, scientific and otherwise. Dennis Åsberg, part of the diving team that found it and reported that it messed with their compasses and equipment, had no idea what it could be. While the prevailing opinion is that it’s a disc-shaped rock distorted by murky waters, another alleged compass-interfering anomaly was discovered nearby earlier this year. Could something otherworldly have removed the observatory? A secret military operation?

That’s the Baltic Sea but a different anomaly

Or was it just regular humans looking for scrap metal? If that was the case, GEOMAR is hoping someone notices and notifies them. In fact, if anyone knows anything about the mysterious disappearance of their observatory, GEOMAR would like them to report it.

“Or maybe someone will find parts of the apparatus somewhere on the beach.”

If there’s a huge mysterious creature with the apparatus in its jaws, get help first.

We’ve been seeing some weird stuff happening in deep space recently. First, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way lit up for some unknown reason, and now NASA says they’ve detected mysterious green and blue blobs of light that appeared near the center of the “Fireworks galaxy” and disappeared just as quickly. If aliens are having space-raves and I wasn’t invited, I’m going to be upset.

According to a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal, NASA’s NuSTAR X-ray Observatory was observing a supernova in the Fireworks galaxy when the green blob showed up. The mysterious blob is known as a ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX) and wasn’t there the first time astronomers looked at the galaxy, but showed up on their second observation 10 days later. Another NASA telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, then tried to catch a glimpse of the object—now referred to as ULX-4—but found that it had already disappeared. Which is weird.

Yep, those are some weird blobs alright.

Credit: NASA

Hannah Earnshaw, a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and lead author on the study, explains:

“Ten days is a really short amount of time for such a bright object to appear. Usually with NuSTAR, we observe more gradual changes over time, and we don’t often observe a source multiple times in quick succession. In this instance, we were fortunate to catch a source changing extremely quickly, which is very exciting.”

There are a few possible explanations for ULX-4, but no one knows for sure. It’s possible that astronomers witnessed the very quick annihilation of a star by a black hole. That’s also one of the explanations for why our own galactic center lit up recently. As objects are devoured by black holes, their matter gets churned up and spun into the surrounding accretion disks. As the objects are chewed up they get super-heated and radiate X-rays, which then show up to us as undignified green and blue blobs. Usually, though, they last a lot longer.

Another explanation is the always weird neutron star. Neutron stars, perhaps the least understood celestial object, are created when a star isn’t quite big enough to make a black hole. Instead it compresses into a very strange ball of neutrons roughly the size of a large city with incredible gravity and a strong magnetic field. The magnetic field of neutron stars form two columns at either pole of the star which blast streams of X-rays out into space. It’s possible that what NuSTAR saw was one of the poles of a neutron star briefly pointing at Earth.

Artist’s rendition of a neutron star.

Credit: Kevin Gill (CC BY-2.0)

It seems like whatever caused these strange space lights is probably one of the weirdest objects we know of. It’s pretty cool that a chance observation resulted in some (hopefully) useful data on these strange beasts. Hannah Earnshaw says:

“This result is a step towards understanding some of the rarer and more extreme cases in which matter accretes onto black holes or neutron stars.”

It could also be space-raves, which are themselves rare and extreme events.

Overlooking the Konya Plain of Turkey, which sprawls out over hundreds of square miles of remote, desolate wilderness, and just about 30 miles from the regional capital of Konya near a river that dried up millennia ago is a mysterious ancient settlement called Çatalhöyük. Long vanished from the face of known history, it was unearthed in 1958 when archeologist James Mellaart and his team began investigating two foothills that seemed to show promise of archeological finds, but when they began digging it would turn out to be far older and more bizarre than they had ever imagined, their excavation slowly bringing into the light one of the most ancient, unusual, and indeed mysterious cities on the face of the earth, challenging our ideas on prehistoric people in the process.

The first intriguing aspect of this forgotten city is its incredible age, which dates back to at an estimated roughly 7500 B.C., making it around 9,500 years old and making the other Roman ruins of the region seem positively modern by comparison. It is so old, in fact, that Çatalhöyük is believed to be one of the oldest known organized settlements in the world, earning it the nickname “The World’s Oldest City,” in an era when humanity was still largely nomadic wanderers. Outside of the city limits was found evidence of agriculture, which would have been a revolutionary concept for these hunter-gatherers and very experimental in nature, as well as millions of bones from sheep, cattle, goats, horses, dogs, boar, fox, deer, hare, and many other species that suggest they were practicing herding and keeping livestock rather than hunting.

All of this is not even the most unique thing about this mysterious city. Mellaart and other archeologists over the years have found that it follows a very unusual lay out, in that it had no roads, with the mud brick and plaster windowless houses arranged in tight clusters right up against each other with no footpaths between them and holes in the roofs of the dwellings instead of doors. It is thought that there was once a network of ladders that spanned the honeycomb-like structure of the place and that the residents would navigate this web to access buildings and enter through the roof, although no one is really quite sure why this should be. It is all a very unique organization and construction style that hasn’t been seen before or since, and it is not understood why it should have been built this way.

Çatalhöyük

There are other oddities as well. The houses are adorned with various paintings and the skulls of bulls prominently displayed, the significance of these skulls still a mystery, as well as littered with various objects fashioned of obsidian and numerous figurines of advanced craftsmanship. There have been some rather anomalous objects found here as well, such as a mural which is believed to show an overhead view of the village and the Hasan Daği volcano 80 miles away, making it what is believed to be the world’s oldest map, as well as a head fashioned out of plaster and adorned with inscrutable obsidian eyes that had been set up near a storehouse almost as if it were watching over it.

Most of the homes were equipped with a sort of crude hearth used for warmth, ventilation, and cooking, and the dead were buried not in a communal cemetery, but beneath the hard-packed earth of the homes themselves. Again, why the dead should be buried like this is, like much of the rest of this fascinating place, unknown. In some cases, the bodies were found to have had skulls that had been removed and then reburied for reasons unknown, possibly for ritualistic purposes, skulls that had been hit with rocks but not fatally, and most of the bodies held evidence that they had been kept out in the open air for a time before burial. Why? Who knows? There is also the oddity that in many cases the remains buried within a single house are not biologically related, making it even more bizarre. Despite this odd burial method, the houses and indeed the city itself all demonstrate an unusual level of cleanliness, with waste burned and buried and the buildings constantly re-plastered to a smooth finish to maintain a new look, and it is believed that the residents were remarkably healthy for the era due to this cleanliness, making it all the more impressive for that period of history.

At its peak, the ancient city of Çatalhöyük is estimated to have had around 10,000 residents, making it not only one of the oldest cities, but also the largest for the era. For the time this would have been a bustling urban metropolis, and just as amazing is that it had extreme longevity, with the city believed to have been inhabited over a span of 2,000 years and covering 18 layers of dwellings as it evolved and was built up over the millennia. Also rather impressive is the structure of the society itself. Although there are no written records here, study of the remains shows very little difference in quality of life or workloads between men and women, and the homes are all nearly identical, with no obvious societal gaps, all of this suggesting that this was a remarkably egalitarian society. There doesn’t even seem to be a base for any type of leading government. Everyone seems to have had the same quality of life, the same access to goods, and the same level of health, and it would have been almost a utopia. However, there might have been some drawbacks to this, as current chief archeologist Ian Hodder has said:

We believe people in Çatalhöyük were quite equal, but it might not have been the nicest society to live in. Residents had to submit to a lot of social control — if you didn’t fit in, you presumably left. What Çatalhöyük may show is that such a society only works with strong homogeneity. For many generations, it was very unacceptable for individual households to accumulate [wealth]. Once they started to do so, there is evidence that more problems started to arise.

It is perhaps this emerging inequality that led to this civilization’s doom. It has long been a mystery as to what happened to the city of Çatalhöyük, as it was continuously inhabited for 2,000 years and then seemingly overnight it was just abandoned. Theories have ranged from some pestilence to an invasion, to a volcanic eruption, but there is no real evidence for any of this. More likely is that the growing social divide and rise of different classes in their previously egalitarian society caused rifts between the people and unrest, causing it all to deteriorate and crumble. There is a chance that we will eventually learn more about this once great city that was well ahead of its time. Only a small fraction of it has been unearthed to date, so it is quite possible we will uncover answers lying there under the earth. However at the moment no one really knows, and the fall of Çatalhöyük, and almost everything else about it, remains just as shrouded in mystery as ever.