“You can’t keep a good three-fingered mummy down.”

If that’s not a saying in Peru, it should be. Despite efforts by government officials, mummy organizations and skeptics around the world, the scientists and investigators trying to study the mysterious 3-Finger Nazca-Palpa Mummies continue to fight for the right of the world to see what these preserved beings are. On November 6, 2019, four of them gave presentations at the VI Congreso Internacional de Investigación (VI International Research Congress) hosted by the Universidad Nacional San Luis Gonzaga – the university which is now in possession of the 3-fingered mummies. Fortunately for those not invited (that’s us), Giorgio Piacenza of ExoNews (The Exopolitics Institute News Service) attended the conference and was able to interview some of the presenters, attendees and university officials.

Biologist José de la Cruz Ríos López, who has participated in both historical and DNA tests on the mummies, confirmed to Piacenza that the research is following objective scientific principles and he’s not involved for any monetary gain. He reiterated that it would be impossible to create these three-fingered mummies from human and/or animal parts. (Watch his bi-lingual interview here.)

In his interview with Piacenza, University Vice-Rector of Research, Dr. Martin Alarcón Quispe talks about protecting the 3-finger mummies from skeptics, including Peru’s Ministry of Culture, while still providing access to both serious scientific researchers and members of the public. The Vice-Rector said that the mummies have a reptile-like skin which could have helped them survive in the desert, and their DNA does not match any known species. However, he wants the process to be scientific, regardless of what the final results and determinations are. (Watch his bi-lingual interview here.)

Next up was Dr. Galeckii Dimitri from Russia, who also confirmed that his research found that the mummies could not have been assembled and in his mind were not fakes. Although they have some human traits, he doesn’t believe they’re human. The skin on the mummies is continuous, not pieced together. He found no evidence of alterations, either physical or chemical, to the mummies, and confirmed that not only were egg-like things seen by X-ray inside the bodies, they were surrounded by a membrane. (Watch his tri-lingual interview here.)

Piacenza talked to Dr. Robert E. Farrell, an engineering professor and researcher with an interest in ufology as well as the 3-fingered mummies. To him, the CAT scans prove these are non-human beings, possibly from another planet. He also explains how carbon-dating can determine the age of Maria, the largest of the mummies, even if she had come from another planet. (Watch his English interview here.)

Finally, Piacenza includes an interview with someone who has been involved with the 3-fingered mummies since their discover was announced – investigative reporter Jaime Maussan. He summarizes many of the unusual findings about the mummies and the resistance to this research that could change human history. (Watch his English interview here.)

If you’re looking for definitive proof that these 3-fingered mummies were once aliens, the interviews won’t provide them. However, the data keeps piling up that they’re something other than human and not fakes.

You definitely can’t keep a good three-fingered mummy down.

If you’re someone who believes in synchronicity, then this research is for you. In a big way. Make that a BIG way. To illustrate what a big deal this is in the scientific community, the researchers take the rarely-seen stance of using the word “mysterious” in the title of their paper. Hey, that’s OUR word!

“For this mysterious coherence in large scales, we cautiously suggest a scenario in which it results from a possible relationship between the long-term motion of a large-scale structure and the rotations of galaxies in it.”

There’s that word again, this time in the abstract of “Mysterious Coherence in Several-megaparsec Scales between Galaxy Rotation and Neighbor Motion,” published recently in the Astrophysical Journal. The research was led by astronomer Hyeop Lee at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, South Korea’s national research institute in astronomy and space science. However, the key phrase in the abstract is “large-scale structure.”

“The observed coherence must have some relationship with large-scale structures, because it is impossible that the galaxies separated by six megaparsecs [roughly 20 million light years] directly interact with each other.”

Does it look like this?

In an interview with Vice.com, Lee explains the team’s research – a study of 445 galaxies within 400 million light years of Earth – and their “mysterious” observed synchronicity where many of the ones rotating in a direction toward Earth had neighbors that were moving toward Earth, and vice-versa. There’s no known way galaxies 20 million light years apart can exert that kind of gravitational force upon each other, so the team attempted to model a dark energy or dark matter force that could link them. The answer? Large-scale structures. Here’s a definition from the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics:

“Up until the latter part of the 20th Century astronomers thought, in the words of the eminent astronomer Edwin Hubble, that the universe was “sensibly uniform.” As a result of redshift surveys of large samples of galaxies we now know that the galaxies around us are distributed in an incredible tapestry of filamentary and sheet-like structures called the cosmic web. Massive clusters of galaxies lie at major “intersections” in this web. Galaxies like our own Milky Way are usually found in groups which often lie on the outskirts of clusters or superclusters. The first really large structure, the Great Wall, was discovered by CfA astronomers in the late 1980’s and is approximately 300 million light-years across.”

A cosmic web of galaxies connected by “an incredible tapestry of filamentary and sheet-like structures.” (Let’s pause here for a moment to ponder: Which came first: the planetarium or psychedelics? Asking for a friend.) Lee told Vice.com that the “mysterious coherence” the team observed was very slowly rotating in a counter-clockwise direction. Vice.com points out that this is the latest of similar studies reaching similar conclusions about large-scale structures. In a 2014 study led by Damien Hutsemékers, an astronomer at the University of Liège in Belgium, and published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile was used to study nearly 100 quasars and the results revealed that the rotation axes of 19 quasars in this group were parallel, despite being several billion (that’s billion with a B) light years apart.

Or this?

“Galaxy spin axes are known to align with large-scale structures such as cosmic filaments but this occurs on smaller scales. However, there is currently no explanation why the axes of quasars are aligned with the axis of the large group in which they are embedded.”

The evidence points to the existence of large-scale structures keeping the galaxies of the universe connected and spinning in synchronicity. The explanation obviously needs more study before it’s accepted, but it’s worth pondering – with or without the aid of psychedelics.

One more thing to ponder … Axes of Quasars would make a great name for a Pink Floyd tribute band.

A very strange corner of the odd that I have come across is that of bizarre entities that seem to have the ability to cloak themselves to some extent in order to become practically invisible, often specifically described as being something like the creature from the science fiction The Predator films.  It is a phenomenon that seems to not be really remarked upon in the common literature, and which is on the surface completely absurd, but there are many cases of this, such as I have covered here before. Yet there are plenty more odd accounts out there as well, and it seems that these weird accounts are etching out their own niche in the realms of the paranormal. Here we will look at some more completely outlandish accounts of beings from beyond our understanding that seem to have the Predator-like ability to cloak themselves from being seen as they go about their unknowable agendas.

Eminent researcher, author, and collector of humanoid accounts Albert Rosales has personally provided me with a selection of very curious encounters with such enigmatic entities. One of these reports comes from 2009, with a witness in a rural wooded area near Thornville, Ohio, who had stayed up late on her computer in a detached room that served as her office. At one point she looked out over the lawn that spanned between the office and her house, faintly illuminated by a porch light and that was then something very strange caught her attention. There walking along the lawn at a rapid clip was an “invisible, human-like creature,” which was transparent but had a slight shimmer around the edges, and which she specifically likened to the creature from The Predator films. It apparently made its way across the lawn and into the woods, and the frightened woman rushed to her husband.

Another eerie report comes from MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), with a witness in Brighton, England. She claims that one evening in July of 1988 she awoke to a very strange sensation like a spasm in her body, and she soon found that she was completely and utterly paralyzed, unable to barely move even a finger. As the frightened woman lay there unable to move a muscle, she says that it felt as if something crawled on top of her to sit there heavily on her chest, as well as the sensation of hands around her throat. There was then what seemed to be something breathing in her ear and a noise like low growling and she desperately moved her eyes to the side trying to discern what this thing was. The bizarre report explains what happened next:

She could just make out a large long head next to her own face, and as the spasm like feeling started to wear off, a tiny bit at a time, she could see that this figure that was on top of her was like a lizard/newt-like creature. It was like blending in with all that was around it, or maybe invisible, the witness was not sure, but she could see it more clearly as the seconds passed. It was reptilian, the witness thinks she growled at it, and bared her teeth at it and she could feel that it could read her mind, and she began swearing at it and shouting all sorts of vengeance at it. She felt violated and used. The next thing, which was very quick, it was off her and was standing to one side of the bottom of her bunk bed, which she had at the time, a light came through the thin gap which was made by the curtains. The light was of different shades of a golden light which also had very small particles inside it, like dust or very small starts which moved around like little bright lights. 

The reptilian creature stood there, it was about 6 ft high, and the witness could feel that it was either proud or happy, maybe both. She tried to sit up as best she could and she spat at it, but the spit just went down her chin, and through her mind she swore again. The creature walked forward and stepped into the light beam, as it did, the feet, then the legs vanished into the light; the more the creature moved forward towards the window, the more or it vanished. When it was gone, the witness felt relaxed, but she could still feel where she was held around her throat. She felt she was raped by the horrendous reptilian creature.

What was going on here? In another bizarre case provided by Rosales from MUFON, the 10-year-old witness and his friends were out playing with what are described as “air soft guns” along a river in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in the summer of 2001. It was sort of like a paintball game, a battle, with both of the boys trying to track each other down and shoot each other, and so the witness found himself hunkered down in some brush waiting to ambush the friend. Listening intently to his surroundings he then heard the crackling of twigs and leaves, and assumed this to be his quarry, yet when he looked he only noticed some branches waving about as if something was going through them. It was odd, since the day had been calm and windless, so the boy could not figure out how the grass and branches could be moving about like that when no one really seemed to be there.

The curious witness then moved closer to the strange anomaly and was surprised to see that branches were snapping and bending as if brushing up against a solid object, but still he could see nothing there to explain it. He blinked his eyes and intently peered at that spot, and suddenly he could see the vague outline of something, described as standing 8 feet tall and with an oval head, the whole of it completely translucent and only visible through a certain angle of light, almost as if it were a faint hologram. The terrified boy then allegedly shouted out in surprise and the entity crouched down into an “attack stance” and stared at him for a few moments, issuing some otherworldly sounds before making a dash for the wooded tree line, crushing brush and bushes as it went. The witness would claim that he would hear those bizarre guttural noises in the surrounding forest near his house on occasion after that, and that a few years later he witnessed a black triangle-shaped UFO with three orange/red lights fly over his house and then shoot into the sky at breathtaking speed.

It is unclear what connection this UFO sighting had to the witness’s strange invisible entity sighting, but a few of the reports Rosales sent along do involve UFOs. One of these is the report from two boys by the names of Denilson and Rafael, who in 2008 were out playing in the Sebastian’s Chapel Square of Jardinopolis, Sao Paolo, Brazil, when they spotted some bright, rotating red and blue lights move over the square towards a nearby field, where they seemed to descend. Gathering some others, the boys warily approached the field, where the anomalous lights could be seen hovering in the air, but even stranger than this were what appeared to be several transparent entities crouched in the field beneath. The report, which comes from Milton Dino Frank Junior, Presidente do Centro de Ufologia Brasileiro, explains of these unearthly creatures:

The creatures were crouching in a horseshoe or U-formation and appear to be “communicating” with each other. The boys were extremely frightened, since they had never seen anything like that before. The boys were convinced that the creatures were not animals, since their behavior was totally different from that of typical farm animals that abounded in the area. The boys explained that the creatures were well-defined but when they changed their viewing angle they were able to see four and up to five creatures, giving some the creatures the appearance of being “invisible” and only becoming visible when the struck by the light rain that was falling at the time. When Cristiano shone his scooter headlight directly on the creatures they disappeared. They could only see the creatures when it was dark. In the darkness they still see the contours of their bodies. The boys estimated the creatures to have been about 1.20 meters in height, with large black oval-shaped eyes, lacking noses or ears, they had a round mouth and their color was dark gray. They hands with fingers but were unable to count how many fingers on each hand. All four youths gave identical description of the creatures.

The boys would claim to have watched these bizarre invisible entities for a full 40 minutes, after which a “red laser point” appeared on one of the boy’s shirt and they could see it was a red beam of light coming from a cylindrical object out on the field, which also happened to have smoke wafting off of it. The terrified boys then perhaps wisely hastily got out of the area, only to come back a few days later to find that all of the bushes and brush in the vicinity of the sighting had turned brown. Many thanks to Albert Rosales for these particular reports.

Moving on to other sources, Lon Strickler’s always excellent site Phantoms and Monsters has quite a few reports along these lines. One was related to Srickler by paranormal author Rosemary Ellen Guiley, and is an account by a witness calling himself simply “Ben,” who had quite the odd tale to tell indeed. Ben claims that he had been living in a house in rural Western Washington State when his odd experiences began in 2016. It all started when he had been out on his property armed with a rifle with the intention of warding off trespassers, possibly drug dealers, who had been prowling around the area at the time. At one point he says he dozed off, and when he woke up he did so to see a humanoid figure 15 feet up in the air in some trees. Guiley would write of Ben’s experience thusly:

It was not solid, but looked like rippled air, similar to the cloak of invisibility portrayed by the alien entity in the Predator films. Its head, neck, and shoulders were outlined, but the rest of it fell away into nothingness. As he stared at this shape, an overwhelming dread seized him, penetrating to the core of his being. He was deathly afraid to move in the slightest way. At last he took off his glasses, wiped them on his shirt, and put them back on. The shape was still there. Ben counted down in his mind from five to zero, and at zero grabbed his belongings and dashed for home. Nothing pursued him, or showed up at the house.

Ben would then go back to the site of this encounter some time later, to find that the whole area was infused with a dark feeling of dread. It was at this time that he would find an L-shaped hole in the ground, as well as some anomalous gashes in the earth, although what connection this had to what he had seen was not clear. Ben would patrol the area on several other occasions and always find that pervading sense of dread, as well as that the temperature always seemed to be significantly lower than the surrounding terrain, but he has yet to see that glimmering entity again. Also from Phantoms and Monsters is a spooky report from a witness in Mission, Texas, who says this happened when he was just 7 years old. He had been living at a mobile home park surrounded by orange groves, lending it a very rural, isolated ambiance. He says that one morning he woke to a strange noise outside his bedroom window, and thinking it was coyotes he glanced outside, yet he did not see anything out of the ordinary. Then a wave of bizarreness would hit all at once, of which the witness says:

I then noticed motion to my left and turned to see a figure standing next to my mothers car. It was an “outline” of a large being, it had to be huge as it was several feet taller than the car. I would guess maybe 6.5 to 7.5 feet. The figure was big and bulky, the shoulders very wide and the legs very thick, but all clearly humanoid shaped. The inside of the outline was very dark shimmering-like light couldn’t escape (the best way I can describe it) but the outline was clearly visible. It turned towards me, and we just stood there looking at each other for several seconds. I don’t know how I knew it could see me, but I did. At this point I did not feel any fear, I was just stunned, trying to understand what I was seeing. It then slowly turned and walked off into the darkness.

At this point I jumped from my bed and ran to my parents room, I woke up my mother and tried to tell her what I had seen, but she insisted it was a “bad dream”. I knew it wasn’t. She got up and continued to get ready for work. She tried to laugh it off but I kept insisting and did not want her to go outside because the big, invisible man would get her I feared. At that point she didn’t want to hear anymore about it. I think I was somewhat in shock and traumatized by the experience. So I said nothing else about it. However, several days later, there was a small article in our local paper “The Monitor” about a local woman who had seen the same EXACT thing I saw, only she reported it to the police. As I recall the article made the woman out to be a “crazy lunatic”. My mother read this article to me, and we both just sat there stunned. She then questioned me about it again and told me not to tell anyone. I suppose she didn’t want to expose me to ridicule. To this day she refuses to talk about the ordeal.

The podcast Expanded Perspectives also has some very strange accounts that seem to fit the theme of some sort of invisibility cloaked humanoid entities. One such account comes from a witness living out near Grand Paris, Louisiana, in a small, backwater town where everyone knows each other. He says that he is an avid bow hunter, and at the time of his brush with the unexplained he had been out on a bow hunting trip with a cousin in the Kisatchie National Forest. At the time they were camping deep in the woods in August far from any trails, scouting for their quarry in a designated hunting area. It was as they sat around the fire one night that odd things would begin to happen, starting with the witness and his friends hearing things out in the brush and seeing a strange glimmering of light that seemed to be circling the camp. They wrote it off to tiredness, and headed out the next morning to continue their hunt, but things would get real strange real fast. The witness explains:

About lunchtime, we stopped and started having some freeze-dried backpacker food, where you just have to add the water. I was using my jet-boil to get the water boiling. It is pretty loud for a pocket stove, so you have some left-over roaring noise in your ears when you turn it off. I shut it off, and poured it in our packets, and then we sat there about to dig in. That is when my life changed forever. My cousin jumped straight up, and freezes, standing there. I looked up from what I was eating, kind of startled, and asked him: “What the hell are you doing?” He didn’t, or rather, couldn’t reply. He just stared at that little clearing about sixty yards from us. I was starting to get that weird feeling that something wasn’t right.

After that night, and all the noises I heard, I could feel all the warning bells going off in my body. Like when you see a snake that you didn’t know was there. Except this feeling was just lingering. So I asked him a second time. He tells me in a shaky, whispering voice: “I see the predator.” Now, at this point I should have laughed or something, but it never crossed my mind. I jumped up and looked with him. No joke man, there it was. Not like in the movie, where you can see the alien thing, but like this man-shaped shimmer. It was about ten or twelve foot up in a tree and it was crouched down. You could clearly tell it was a guy’s shape. I wheeled around and started throwing my lunch stuff in my pack while my cousin kept staring at it. I am really glad he did, because when looking back, if was had been alone, I would have just run and left everything. The packing took me less than sixty seconds.

I had my backpack on and was holding his backpack. I walked back over to where he was, and this thing was still crouched on a limb. So I started thinking “Maybe it is nothing, and we are freaking ourselves out.” Because it hadn’t moved an inch. At that moment, it was like it was reading my thoughts. This thing stands up and drops down off the limb unto the ground. My f…ing heart stops. It was about five feet tall at max, and it was man made exact. When it hit the ground, you could hear it making a sound, like if any of us would jump out of a tree. It then steps back and against the tree it came out off for about five seconds, and then here it came. It moved towards us with a fluid movement of an animal and it covered about ten yards in no time, and slipped behind some small brush and stopped. We grabbed each other and took off.

He says that as they made their retreat, the entity persistently followed them through the wilderness, always remaining at a distance of around 50 feet away, and never making any noise except for its disruption of the vegetation. The man continued their mad dash towards their truck, finally reaching it and speeding out of there. -

He tells what he saw looks like stacks of Reynolds wraps, that clear, clean plastic stuff, except that it was in the shape of a man. It was moving along the shoreline, opposite the river they were hunting on. What he saw was man shaped between five and six feet tall, clear or see-through, except it had distortion along the edges, and the center was noticeable more clear. This phantom thing was moving like it had a purpose. The moment my dad and his friend started watching it, it somehow recognized that, that it was being observed, and it froze in place. It squatted down and watched them back for a bit. Their dogs were acting really strange, super nervous. They were whimpering and wining, and were getting antsy.

My dad and his buddy stood up, holding their guns, and started to go back to the truck. This phantom thing then slid off into the water, and went under. They didn’t know what to say or what to do really. They bee-landed back to the truck, loaded the dogs, and their gear. They were about the head out, when my dad saw the thing in a tree about twenty yards from the truck, just watching them. He hadn’t heard anything, and the dogs had chilled out when they back to the truck. So they had not reason to worry. However, at that moment he got scared, and they hauled ass out of there. He and his buddy didn’t talk about it afterwards.

Another case from Expanded Perspectives comes from a witness named Daniel Velazquez, a construction worker from Seattle, Washington. In August of 2018, he says he was riding in a truck with his boss and another worker on the way to work on the I-5 freeway, and at first it was just a regular commute. That is, until something very surreal caught his attention. He says:

As we were exiting the freeway, I was just sitting back in my seat and as I looked to the right I seen this “Predator” figure moving to its right. I jumped up in my seat and said to my boss “Oh my God do you see that? Look”! I was absolutely stunned! There was a little outcropping of trees and beyond that there were three to four homeless people just going about their business. They seemed to be clueless about the “figure” that was walking about twenty yards in front of them. I was absolutely shocked and did not know what to say or do. I only saw the figure for about four or five seconds, and when I turned to my boss to ask if he is seeing this, and then turned back to where I saw the figure, it was gone or I lost sight of it. It was exactly like the “predator” figure in the movie, not the alien form but the cloaked version. In my 40 years I have never seen anything like that!

What was this thing, if anything? From the forum Hernando’s Hideaway comes a incredible account from commenter claiming to see what he describes as a “cloaked Bigfoot.” The witness says that he has always been an outdoorsman, and would often go hiking in the woods around rural area where he lived, often going to relax at a secluded log out in the forest. The witness describes having gone out to that log numerous times and never having felt anything but peace and quiet, but on this day something would be different. The witness says of the outlandish experience he would have:

This particular day, as I sat on the log, I heard some rustling in the bushes. I felt an uneasiness come over me… as if I was being watched. I could sense the direction it was coming from too. So I stood up and walked slowly to get a better view when I noticed a very large creature that I could see through standing between two trees. I would say it was at least 8 foot tall, maybe more. The body of this creature had a wavy pattern flowing through it, like heat waves that come up from a hot road surface. I could see the forest behind it… through it! The wavy pattern is how I was able to make out it’s form. (There wasn’t anything causing a heat wave anywhere else.)

It just stood there looking at me. I froze for a moment in pure fear that encompassed my entire being! But out of pure fight or flight adrenaline, I finally made my legs move, and I walked a safe distance… then I ran!! I was afraid if I started out running, it would chase me, like they say animals will do. I made it safely back home, and I don’t remember EVER going back into those woods alone after that! I missed going to “my spot”. It was my place to find peace and talk with nature. That “thing” stole it from me!! Since that encounter, I’ve often wondered if this is how Big Foot is so good at avoiding being captured?

Lastly we have a report from Reddit, from a user called “QueenOTheSea,” which seems to have happened not out in some rugged wilderness, but right out in the middle of a busy street. She says that she was 15 years old at the time and being driven to school up a fairly busy road, when she saw what looked like the silhouette of a man just walking along. She says of what happened next:

It looked like the silhouette of a man, but as if he was invisible, as if I could only see him because he was reflecting light and color around him. It’s so strange to describe, it was as if he was made of glass or mirrors, but barely distinguishable from his surroundings, as if he was invisible, but not quite. I remember pushing my mom to force her into turning the car because I was afraid of hitting him. She had gotten back control really quickly and we only swerved a little bit. She had lectured me about it on the way to school. I don’t know why I’m thinking about it today. I looked it up online, trying to describe what I saw best I could, but couldn’t find anything relevant (just a bunch of English reflections on the book The Invisible Man, lol). Perhaps I was young and never actually saw anything, although I remember it very vividly.

It certainly seems that these sorts of reports deserve almost their own category in the world of the weird. What are these cloaked, invisible beings and what are they up to? Are these ghosts, aliens, interdimensional entities, or what? There seems to be no real solid explanation for what these things could be, but the reports are out there, leaving us to wonder what could be behind it all. Are there cloaked humanoids watching us from the shadows with inscrutable purpose, or is this all just tall tales and exaggeration? The answer remains unclear, but it certainly seems to be an area of the paranormal that deserves more attention. Next time you are out in the wild, keep an eye out for any slight shimmer, because you never know what might be watching you.

The more we study Mars the weirder it becomes. Which should come as a surprise to no one. It’s an entire planet that’s not Earth. It would be really strange and disappointing if we already figured out Mars’ secrets before we even got over there. Probably the biggest question regarding Mars is whether the red planet ever supported life and if it did in the past, could it still be harboring alien life today? Those in the camp of “duh, of course there are Martians” may have another boost to their argument as a recent NASA press release reveals that the levels of oxygen (which you might know as one of the main things we need to not die) on Mars are behaving rather strangely.

NASA already found that methane levels on Mars act differently than scientists thought they should. Methane is, like oxygen, a “biosignature” gas because it is a byproduct of carbon-based life (put simply, it’s farts). Last year, the Curiosity rover discovered that levels of methane in Mars’ atmosphere fluctuate based on the season, rising dramatically during Mars’ summer and spiking periodically at seemingly random times, for unknown reasons. Coupled with the organic matter that was found on Mars at nearly the same time and some eyebrows were certainly raised.

Breathe deep little buddy.

Now scientists have found that levels of oxygen behave the same bizarre way as the levels of methane, cycling periodically with the greatest concentration during the summer months. NASA’s Curiosity rover analyzed the atmosphere in Mars’ Gale Crater over the course of three years and found that while other atmospheric gasses increased and decreased in line with scientists’ models, oxygen levels rose in the spring and summer months by up to 30% before falling “back to levels predicted by known chemistry.” According to a paper recently published, this suggests that something was producing oxygen and then taking it away. Cue the music.

NASA is far from convinced that the likely source is biological, however. Melissa Trainer, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who led the research says:

“We’re struggling to explain this. The fact that the oxygen behavior isn’t perfectly repeatable every season makes us think that it’s not an issue that has to do with atmospheric dynamics. It has to be some chemical source and sink that we can’t yet account for.”

Oxygen and methane are biosignatures, yes, but they are also present in high concentrations in the Martian soil. Scientists working on the problem say that it is much more likely the cause is geological rather than biological, but so far all of the geological explanations have come up short. Timothy McConnochie, who co-wrote the paper says:

“We have not been able to come up with one process yet that produces the amount of oxygen we need, but we think it has to be something in the surface soil that changes seasonally because there aren’t enough available oxygen atoms in the atmosphere to create the behavior we see.”

So scientists are, at the moment, completely at a loss. Melissa Trainer invites anyone who can help to do so:

“This is the first time where we’re seeing this interesting behavior over multiple years. We don’t totally understand it. For me, this is an open call to all the smart people out there who are interested in this: See what you can come up with.”

Before you go spouting off about how it’s definitely aliens consider this: there would need to be a population of something that springs to life so quickly that it raises oxygen levels by 30% in the course of half a year. That, too, is ridiculous. But who am I to say? It’s Mars. Mars is weird.

If you name your baby “Hitler,” you can’t escape the fact that you’ve doomed him (or her, if you’re really strange) to a life of derision at best, hate or violence at worst. However, if you name it Wernher, you may be hoping they associate him with the Wernher von Braun who pioneered rocket technology for NASA, not the same Wernher von Braun who developed the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany. That may have been the idea behind NASA choosing to name a faraway, snowman-shaped, Kuiper Belt asteroid discovered by the New Horizons spacecraft Ultima Thule.

This composite image of the primordial contact binary Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 (officially named Arrokoth) was compiled from data obtained by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it flew by the object on Jan. 1, 2019. The image combines enhanced color data (close to what the human eye would see) with detailed high-resolution panchromatic pictures. (Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute//Roman Tkachenko)

Pronounced ‘ultima thoo-lee’, the announcement press release explained that: “Thule was a mythical, far-northern island in medieval literature and cartography. Ultima Thule means “beyond Thule”– beyond the borders of the known world.” However, it didn’t take long for the media and neo-Nazis to point out that Thule is believed by some to be the ancient birthplace of the “Aryan race” – a concept first revealed in the Oera Linda Book, which was allegedly discovered in the 1800s and inspired the occultist and racist Thule Society and Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, the main architect of the Holocaust. Is it any wonder that modern Neo-Nazis adopted this Ultima Thule asteroid as their own?

“Most people don’t hear the word Ultima Thule and think Nazis, Aryan myths, and strange ghostly white people living at the pole.”

Benjamin Teitelbaum, an ethnomusicologist who researched a Scandinavian band called Ultima Thule that taps into this racially charged definition, defended the nickname to Newsweek after it was announced in early 2018. However, he points out (as you may have already discovered for yourself), a quick Google search says otherwise. 20th century philosopher Julius Evola, whom Steve Bannon and other alt-right leaders like to cite, used the term frequently. At the time, Mark Showalter, a planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute and investigator on the New Horizons mission who led the naming process, said the new name for 2014 MU69 was accepted because:

“We’re very, very tired of talking about 2014 MU69. Any name is better than 2014 MU69.”

Well, almost any name. On November 12th, NASA decided enough was enough and gave 214 MU69 a new moniker.

“In a fitting tribute to the farthest flyby ever conducted by spacecraft, the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 has been officially named Arrokoth, a Native American term meaning “sky” in the Powhatan/Algonquian language.

With consent from Powhatan Tribal elders and representatives, NASA’s New Horizons team – whose spacecraft performed the record-breaking reconnaissance of Arrokoth four billion miles from Earth – proposed the name to the International Astronomical Union and Minor Planet Center, the international authority for naming Kuiper Belt objects.”

To link Arrokoth to the asteroid, the announcement points out that the Hubble Space Telescope (at the Space Telescope Science Institute) and the New Horizons mission (at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory) are operated out of the Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, region to the Powhatan people.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by the distant Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule (2014 MU69) on Jan. 1, 2019. The object, the most distant ever visited by a spacecraft, is now called Arrokoth.
(Image: © NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/National Optical Astronomy Observatory)

The team used this connection to associate the culture of the native peoples who lived in the region where the object was discovered; in this case, both the Hubble Space Telescope (at the Space Telescope Science Institute) and the New Horizons mission (at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory) are operated out of Maryland — a tie to the significance of the Chesapeake Bay region where descendants of the indigenous Powhatan people still reside.

Naming an asteroid Arrokoth shouldn’t be controversial to many people, other than those who preferred the Nazi-connected name. Naming your child Arrokoth shouldn’t doom them to a life of therapy either. Naming your band Arrokoth sounds pretty cool. This looks like a good choice all around.

Between 1896 an and 1897, a famous swarm of airship sightings occurred in the United States.  The initial reports began occurring in November, 1896 over Sacramento, and involved many townsfolk (including some city officials and members of the Sacramento mayor’s staff) claiming to have seen a dark body with a bright illumination resembling an arc light fitted at the front of the craft as it passed overhead in the stormy winter skies.

Several more sightings would occur in the Sacramento area before the airship flap took off toward the east, with sightings continuing throughout the Midwest and southern United States into the middle of 1897. Then, as quickly as the mysterious aerial visitor had appeared, it was gone again.

Scholars on subjects ranging from the history of aviation to UFO sightings debate what these “mystery airships” might have been. Were they actual airships, invented by some clever engineer just years in advance of the earliest successful attempts at manned flight? Were they hoaxes perpetrated by pranksters with fire balloons, and/or bored newspapermen conjuring tall tales, or could there have been something more to the reports?

While the airships of the 1890s remain a mystery, less often mentioned in the literature is the fact that a second, shorter wave of sightings along the pacific coast occurred a little more than a decade later, which bore many characteristics of the 1896-1897 flap.

Tacoma, Washington, as it appeared in a postcard from around the time of the “airship” flap of 1908 (public domain).

The earliest report dates to February 1st, 1908, beginning with sightings of a bright light moving through the sky over the Pacific coast. Tacoma area newspapers gave the following description:

“…(a) mysterious flying object described as three times as bright as the planet Jupiter, displaying colors of dark red, pale green, yellow and brilliant white… cruising the evening skies over the region around Tacoma between the hours of 7 and 9 o’clock… Rumors in such towns as Kent, Crays Harbor, and Tacoma had the phenomenon explained as a Japanese airship spying out the Pacific coast. On one occasion something like a rocket was seen discharged from the apparently unknown object.”

Two nights later on the date of February 3rd, the aerial phantom reappeared over Kent, Washington. The object was described as a bright light seen at apparently low altitude in the western sky, and brighter than the planet Jupiter. Weekend observers near Kent watched the light appear between 7 and 9 PM local time on both Saturday and Sunday nights, just as it had appeared over Tacoma two nights earlier.

Many telephone calls to local newspapers were made reporting the appearance of the strange western light. “At times the strange light did not appear to be more than 10 to 12 miles distant,” one newspaper account read. “All sorts of conjectures are ventured as to the mysterious illumination.”

Admittedly, these descriptions don’t seem to preclude the planet Jupiter rising over the western horizon after sundown as a possible explanation. The same was offered of some of the 1896-97 airships, which had similarly first appeared as a bright aerial apparition out over the Pacific; however, the strange light was seen again the following night on February 4th, this time by a group of passengers on the Northern Pacific train at the Fifteenth Street Bridge in Tacoma.

The engineer had been the first to observe the object, looking up to behold “a strange multi-colored light in the evening sky,” which appeared to be traveling from north to south. “So prominent was the light, the trains conductor and some of the passengers left the coaches and ran down the track to get a better look. One person had field glasses and said he discerned a cigar-shaped mass.”

The cigar shaped mass would indeed seem to be something apart from Jupiter’s nightly appearances off over to the west. Little more was said of the Washington airship after this, apart from a peculiarly-worded editorial which discussed capturing the airship “by the usual method of salt on its tail,” having a bit of fun with the reports of the previous several nights.

Venus appearing brightly in the western sky over the Pacific

(Wikimedia Commons).

As to the possibility that some residents had been observing a planet, sky mapping software made available at www.in-the-sky.org indicates that Jupiter would have been positioned relatively high in the sky in the early days of February 1908. However, the planet Venus would have been visible between 7 and 8 PM, disappearing below the western horizon shortly after 8:10 PM local time. The less brilliant planets of Mars and Saturn would have remained visible for several hours before passing below the horizon.

It is possible that some observers shortly after 7 PM might have been observing Venus on its westerly course over the Pacific. Further, the fact that some of the newspaper reports mention that the light appeared “two to three times as bright as Jupiter” would seem to indicate that the object had been observed in some region of the sky apart from Jupiter (which would have appeared overhead as the sky darkened at around this time), and that observers were aware of Jupiter’s location at the time. Venus setting over the western horizon might indeed have appeared brighter than Jupiter; however, it would have had the appearance of moving gradually toward the North, whereas newspaper accounts describe the object “moving slowly from north to south.”

Had the residents of Washington merely seen a bright planet as it passed through the night sky in early February of 1908? Had they still been afflicted with a touch of “airship fever” in the aftermath of events from one decade earlier? Or had there actually been more to the sightings of what at least one observer called “a cigar-shaped mass” to which the unearthly light had been attached?

During the Second World War, many pilots—both Allied and Axis fighters, and above Europe and the Pacific—reported observations of unusual aerial phenomena. Generally appearing as one or more lights, and often reddish in color, these aerial specters would often pace aircraft, flying off to the side, directly in front of, or in pursuit of the observing pilot and crews.

Known today as “Foo Fighters,” there have been a variety of interpretations as to what their ultimate source and nature might have been. Theories range from Nazi experimental weapons (a seemingly unlikely notion, if indeed Axis pilots had observed them as well), to unique varieties of natural luminous phenomenon akin to ball lightning.

Beginning in 2012, the Washington Post featured a number of articles on such phenomenon as “red sprites,” “blue jets,” “elves,” and other odd electrical phenomena of the upper atmosphere, which very likely could explain some of the Foo Fighter reports from the Second World War.

However, there are always the occasional outliers, and as far as Foo Fighters go, while many can most likely be explained as electrical phenomena that would have been virtually unknown at the time of the war, a few reports do seem to point to something more tangible.

One very atypical Foo Fighter report from close to the end of the Second World War was logged by the Eastern Air Command, South East Asia, in its Weekly Intelligence Summary for June 1, 1945. The incident occurred over Truk (known since the end of World War II as the Chuuk State, one of four such states in the Federated States of Micronesia).

“A B-24 of the 11th Bomb Group on a snooper mission over Truk during the early morning hours of 3 May 1945, encountered what may prove to be as baffling a phenomena (sic) as the balls of Ught seen by the B-29s while over the Japanese mainland,” the report states, referencing previous sightings of Foo Fighter-like illuminations observed previously by pilots over the Pacific.

The report then gives the following account of the incident:

“The B-24 first observed two red circles of light approaching the plane from below while still over the Truk atoll. One light was on the right and the other was seen on the left of the B-24. The light on the left side turned back after one and one half hours. The one on the right remained with the bomber until the B-24 was only 10 miles from Guam. From the time that the B-24 left the atoll, the light never left its position on the right side. It was reported by the crew members as sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, and sometimes longside the B-24 and always about 1200 to 1500 yds distant.

The light followed the B-24 in dives from 11,000 to 3,000 feet, through sharp course changes and even brief cloud cover always keeping its same relative position and distance. At one time, the pilot turned into the light and he definitely reports no closure occurring. During the night, high cirrus clouds masked the moonlight and no part of the object was observed except the light.”

This statement is curious, in that the report seems to indicate that while only the light produced by the object could be seen at night, in daylight there seemed to be more of it that became visible. Had the report left us with no more than this, it would indeed have proven to be a tantalizing—and frustrating—case where limited details leave far too much to the interpretation of the reader.

However, in the final line from the report, we do glean this much more about the strange aircraft that had been escorting the B-24: “At daybreak, the light changed to a steady white glow and a possible wing shape with a silver glow was noted by some members of the crew.”

Indeed, this description of a “wing shape” possessing a “silver glow” (metallic reflection?) would seem to be quite different from the essentially nebulous reports of ball lightning-like manifestations that comprise most Foo Fighter observations. Here, we appear to have a description of what sounds like an object that was being observed producing the illumination.

If the details given in this report do represent a physical object or aircraft that had been producing the light, it raises a number of questions. What had the “aircraft” been, and could other Foo Fighter reports (which occurred mostly at night) have possessed similar attributes, particularly if the observers had managed to see the object in daylight, as the crew here had done?