The landscape of UFOlogy is littered with an array of stories of the strange and outlandish. This area is by nature a wellspring of high strangeness, the bizarre, and reports that often seem to defy all attempts to categorize them. Among these the most unusual seem to be those cases in which an unidentified object has come hurtling down from the heavens to crash, and there is a surprisingly high number of such otherwordly tales. One of the more well-known and oft-discussed of these is a mysterious event that unfolded in the remote wilds of Nova Scotia, Canada, and which has attracted much attention from UFOogists and remains unsolved to this day.

It was the evening of October 4, 1967, and the day had come to an end at the tiny, rustic fishing village of Shag Harbour, tucked away in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia and surrounded by scenic vistas. The sun went down, and the evening was just like any other, until at 11:20 PM something very strange happened at this isolated place. Up in the sky there was a sudden bright flash, and four brilliant lights that travelled over the area for nearly an hour, until a bright object suddenly dipped down to go crashing into the water with great force. Some people would claim that the anomalous object had made an otherworldly whistling noise as it descended, to punctuate its landing with a loud, reverberating boom, while others reported that the object seemed to flash a sequence of lights before its fall. One witness named Laurie Wickens would later say of it:

We see four lights in the sky and over the land here. We thought it was a plane and never paid no attention – more or less just watching lights go on and off. It went across the road in front of us, behind the hill – we couldn’t see it. We made it to the top of the hill. There was a light in the water. We went to the phone booth, called the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and reported a plane crash.

Shag Harbour

Wickens would add that the mysterious craft had floated about in the water around a half mile off shore while trailing a strange yellowish substance, bobbing along for nearly an hour before sinking down into the depths, and there were several RCMP officers who saw the floating object as well. In all, at least eleven people would flood the RCMP with reports of having seen essentially the same thing, a bright light whizzing across the sky to crash into the sea, and it was at first assumed to be an airplane crash. In response, both local fishermen and the RCMP immediately launched a search and rescue operation, quickly arriving at the scene where the object had supposedly gone down, joined by the Coast Guard, but there was no wreckage or sign of the aircraft other than an unusual yellow foam found swirling about in the waves.

Interestingly, it would be found that there were no aircraft reported missing, and that indeed all commercial, private and military aircraft were totally accounted for all along the eastern seaboard stretching down through New England. Simply put, if this had been a plane, then no one knew who it was or where it came from. The mention of the lights and behavior of the craft before impact, as well as the lack of any missing aircraft and the fact that it did not sink right away, led RCC Halifax to pass along the strange incident to the “Air Desk” at Royal Canadian Air Force headquarters in Ottawa, where it was labelled as a UFO report. It was at around this time that the military moved in, with a Navy ship and divers from the Royal Canadian Navy and the Fleet Diving Unit Atlantic arriving on the scene to search the depths for a full three days, scouring the entire area, although their official report would claim that they had found nothing at all, no bodies, no wreckage, nothing. Of course, there were some witnesses who would step forward to claim that the Navy had indeed found something, and that it had been whisked away, but there is nothing to verify this.

In the meantime, the story was hitting the news in a major way, and there was much talk about the possibility that this had not been a plane at all, but rather a crashed UFO. Feeding into this idea were several other UFO sightings that had been reported in the same general area in the days leading up to what had been dubbed “The Shag Harbour Incident” and could be related. In one report, on the same evening at 7:15 PM Air Canada flight 305 reported that they had spotted a brilliantly lit, rectangular object with smaller lights behind it pacing their plane about a mile off, before they witnessed a large explosion, followed by another apparent explosion, although these produced no noticeable sound. could this have been the craft that went down? In another, Capt. Leo Howard Mersey, of the fishing vessel MV Nickerson, had picked up four anomalous objects on radar, after which the entire crew had seen a formation of four bright lights in the sky.

It would turn out that there had been several other reports of strange lights in the skies of the area in the hours leading up to the crash, which only served to fuel the fires of discussion that this had been no airplane. This would help the incident launch itself firmly into the UFO discourse, and it would become a classic case of a possible UFO crash, surrounded by mysteries and conspiracy theories. The case would go on to be investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canadian Coast Guard, the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Canadian government, and the U.S. Condon Committee, making it one of the most well-documented cases of what officially remains a UFO out there.

The incident has gone on to become a part of local and Canadian UFO lore, to the point that there is an annual two-day Shag Harbour UFO festival, as well as a limited edition series of glow-in-the-dark coins depicting the incident that were released by The Royal Canadian Mint that sold out nearly immediately. The case has become a classic, iconic addition to theUFO lore, very well documented, and still no one really has any idea of what exactly transpired on that fateful evening. Was it aliens, meteors, an earthquake, or what? Did the government cover it all up to relegate it into the dark recesses of history? No one really knows, and the Shag Harbour Incident remains a much talked about case within the annals of the strange.

One of the UFO-related issues that isn’t touched on as much as it could be is that of what I call “UFO warnings.” I’m talking specifically about those in the UFO field who have made statements designed to deter other researchers from digging too deep into the subject – for the sake of their physical health and sanity. In many cases, they are former researchers; people who had stumbled across something that led them not just to quit Ufology, but to encourage others in the field to quit, too. Frederick “Ted” Holiday – the author of The Goblin Universe, The Dragon and the Disc, and The Great Orm of Loch Ness – claimed to have seen a Man in Black-type character near the shores of Loch Ness, Scotland, in 1973. Roland Watson, an authority on the Nessie phenomenon, says: “Events took an even stranger turn when [Holiday’s] co-author, Randall Jones Pugh, did a radical thing when in 1980 he destroyed his UFO work and walked away from the subject. This happened after a series of personal experiences which he said ‘were too frightening to talk about‘. Why did he do that? What were these experiences that put fear into him and did the death of his fellow investigator, Ted Holiday, months before add to some intimidation he felt he was under? There is now no way to tell since Randall died in 2003.” Pugh warned people to stay away from the UFO subject, such was the fear he developed of the phenomenon.

In an interview I did with Ray Boeche – both a priest and a long-time UFO investigator – he told me: “I have always thought that one of the most important things that John Keel ever said was that if you have kids or teenagers, this is not something to encourage them to get involved with. Keel was a pretty dyed-in-the-wool atheist. But he understood that, at some level, there’s something, in some sense transcendent over us, that can, if nothing else, ‘mess’ with us. And it can cause a lot of damage. Sometimes, I think I’m singing a one-note song with this, from a Christian perspective. I would not consider myself theologically liberal or a theological fundamentalist. My beliefs are solidly orthodox, and rooted in my view of the Bible as God’s inerrant Word. But there are things that we just aren’t equipped to deal with from a mechanistic, naturalistic worldview. There are malevolent forces out there that will be happy to take advantage of just about any opening we give them. And, so, we need to be very cautious. I tend to think that may be what happened to Albert Bender, but he might not have been so cautious.”

And talking of Albert Bender…he was the poor soul who, in almost single-handed fashion, unleashed the Men in Black phenomenon on Ufology, in the early 1950s. He was also a direct witness to the chilling things in black. Not only that, Bender largely quit Ufology after writing his 1962 book, Flying Saucers and the Three Men. Eventually, he quit the subject completely. Even today, the full story of Bender’s exit from Ufology remains shrouded in mystery. Notably, Bender himself – back in the fifties – warned his colleagues of the dangers of looking into the UFO phenomenon.

Now, let’s take a look at the work of John Keel, most noted for his books The Mothman Prophecies and Operation Trojan Horse. In a 2017 review of the latter book, Andrew Griffin wrote: “Keel says that ‘black magic’ is often linked to the phenomenon, and some people have such frightening experiences dabbling in the topic, that they abandon it for good. In fact, Keel tells his adult readers who are parents to warn their children away from Ufology altogether.‘I have in my files hundreds of cases, some of which have now been investigated by qualified psychiatrists, in which young men and women obsessed with the UFO phenomenon have suffered frightening visits from these apparitions, been followed by mysterious black Cadillacs which appeared and disappeared suddenly, and have been terrified into giving up their pursuit of UFOs. Many contactees report similar experiences‘ [italics Griffin’s].”

Gareth Medway addressed the experiences of a a UFO researcher named Brian Leathley-Andrews, of Coventry, England. Medway said that Leathley-Andrews had a series of strange experiences in the 1960s, and one particularly weird affair in October 1968.  On the day in question, Medway wrote, he “returned home to notice a man standing by the next-door garage.”

Leathley-Andrews said of the man: “His face was glowing orange and as I watched, the face changed to that of an old man before my eyes.”

Medway stated that: “After this [Leathley-Andrews] started experiencing problems with his telephone, and getting threatening calls. He soon abandoned UFO investigation.”

In 2018, Leathley-Andrews finally came out of the shadows, years after he quit Ufology, and said: ““I want to publicly warn all teenage hobbyists that this is nothing to dabble in lightly.”

Every high school physics student knows that the universe is governed by four forces of nature – gravity, the weak force, electromagnetism and the strong force – and anything found to be different would change everything we know about everything … or at least about physics. Get ready because that moment may have arrived. Researchers in Hungary claim to have discovered a new particle which exhibits a fifth force – and it may explain dark matter … provided we survive the end of physics as we know it.

In “Observation of Anomalous Internal Pair Creation in 8Be: A Possible Indication of a Light, Neutral Boson,” a paper submitted recently for peer review, researchers from the Institute of Nuclear Research in Hungary describe new evidence they discovered supporting the existence of X17, a strange-behaving particle apparently emitted during the breakdown of radioactive beryllium. First theorized in 2016, they estimated the mysterious particle has a mass of nearly 17 megaelectronvolts and named it X17

In their latest experiments, the researchers observed X17 again, this time in the decaying of helium atoms. But the bigger discovery is that the particle is a boson—which means it’s not ordinary matter. If it’s not ordinary matter, then it could be … dark matter! That would make X17 proof of a fifth fundamental force and all that goes with it actually existing. If only there were a way to prove that X17 is the chosen one.

Enter CERN – you knew the home of the Higgs boson particle would eventually be involved with this. The European Organization for Nuclear Research has been using the Large Hadron Collider to search for the X17 particle and hasn’t found one yet. The new research operated at a much lower energy level than the LHC, so it could offer new data to help in that quest – if the evidence is first verified by peer review. Needless to say, not everyone (well, not every particle physicist) is willing to accept the idea of a fifth particle and the subsequent changes it would make in the Standard Model of particle physics (the theory describing the electromagnetic, weak, and strong force interactions). However, any explanation of dark matter – which is believed to make up 85% of the universe – would move us to another level of understanding the universe.

“(It would be) a window into some aspect of the universe that we are completely unaware of. Not only would it be obviously Nobel Prize–winning because it would be a new [fundamental] particle, but this particular particle doesn’t fit into the existing table of particles.”

Matt Strassler, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University not involved in the study, told Scientific American he thinks it’s a big deal. So does Daniele Alves, a particle physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory not involved in the study.

“It’s possible that this particle is part of a larger ‘dark sector,’ meaning it could also interact with dark matter particles. It could be a portal to this sector.”

“A portal to this sector.” That doesn’t sound like a “This changes everything!” exclamation, but that’s how scientists are. Most are awaiting further reviews and research on X17. Alves is heading to the Los Alamos lab where she will be “looking at the production of particles in neutron-capture reactions, when a neutron is captured by another nucleus, and in the process, it might emit things. The most common thing it might emit is a photon, but it could also possibly emit this new X17 particle.”

Meanwhile, The Fifth Force would be a great name for a prog rock band, with an album called “A Portal to This Sector.”

Ask most people what an asteroid is and they’ll probably say it’s a small space rock which is only dangerous if it hits Earth. Ask a businessperson the same question and they might say it’s a dead space rock full of rare minerals that belong to no one so they’re just waiting to be mined and brought back. Tell that to a NASA scientist working on the OSIRIS-REx mission which is currently orbiting the asteroid Bennu and they might say “Not so fast – this one is mysteriously exploding and firing rocks at us!” Is there some Little Prince on Bennu protecting his stuff? (Who? Google it.)

“No one has ever seen an active asteroid up close like this. It wasn’t that long ago that the conventional wisdom was that asteroids are these dead bodies that didn’t change very much.”

Well, Carl Hergenrother, an astronomer at the University of Arizona and the scientist who proposed Bennu as the target for OSIRIS-REx, doesn’t believe THAT anymore. In a new paper published in the journal Science and reviewed in Wired, Hergenrother tells us that Bennu has been observed regularly exploding tiny pieces of rocks off of its surface – some high enough that they enter temporary orbits around it. This was seen as soon as OSIRIS-REx itself entered orbit around Bennu in December 2018. Since a few other asteroids have been observed doing the same thing, astronomers assumed Bennu was either flinging rocks into space with its centrifugal force or steaming them there as ice particles quickly turned to gas. While that’s the case for other asteroids, neither fit Bennu.

“Our observations classify Bennu as an active asteroid. Active asteroids are commonly identified by major mass loss events observable with telescopes, on scales much greater than we observed at Bennu.”

“Active asteroids” are dead rocks that are still acting alive – space zombies. However, OSIRIS-REx’s close proximity has found that Bennu is not made up like other active asteroids. So, without ice or centrifugal force, why is it exploding rocks off of its surface?

“Plausible mechanisms for the large ejection events include thermal fracturing, volatile release through dehydration of phyllosilicates, and meteoroid impacts.”

Hergenrother and the other astronomers in the study noticed that the explosions generally occurred in what would be considered the late afternoon of a Bennu day. That’s when the surface, which has been baking in a non-atmosphere-blocking sunlight all day reaches the temperature when its rocks fracture. Phyllosilicates are parallel sheets of silicate minerals that are also affected by the extreme heat and facilitate the rocks breaking via shrinkage. Rocks flinging off the surface during other times are probably caused by tiny micrometeoroids hitting the surface of Bennu hard enough to knock other tiny rocks into space, only to have them fall back down and possibly knock more loose, creating a cycle of ever-decreasing spitting events.

Artist’s concept of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft preparing to take a sample from asteroid Bennu.

Image Credit: NASA/Goddard

Whatever is causing Bennu’s rock explosion, it’s not enough to abort the mission whose main purpose is for OSIRIS-REx itself to bang into its surface and extract rock and soil samples, then return then to Earth in 2023. Any further studies of the zombie asteroid effect will have to wait for another future expedition.

One thing is for certain – there’s no Little Prince on Bennu tending to its volcanoes, because there are no volcanoes on Bennu. If OSIRIS-REx spots a little man appears who laughs, who has golden hair and who refuses to answer questions, it’s someone else. (What? Google it.)

Whenever there are strange lights over a part of Arizona, it seems to be mandatory to immediately link them to the Phoenix lights – the famous illuminated UFOs seen be thousands over Phoenix, other cities in Arizona, Nevada, and Sonora, Mexico, on two separate occasions in 1997. Because there were so many witnesses, potential explanations, denials, investigations and media follow-ups, the Phoenix lights live on – often taking some of the luster off of other UFO sightings in the area. That may not happen with the latest one. On December 8, multiple witnesses reported and recorded a lighted orb over Mesa that appeared to be dropping smaller orbs. Officials from government, law enforcement and the military claimed to be just as puzzled as the witnesses. What did they see? Have the Phoenix lights returned?

“It was a cloudy night and had drizzled off and on. Regular planes had been flying by since we can see the flight path for the airport. All of a sudden I saw this bright glowing orange light. I thought it was a planet or a star at first and then I realized ‘oh that’s close and it’s moving towards us. Then ‘boom’ it started dropping what looked like orange fireballs or something that traveled for a few seconds before they faded out and disappeared.”

Phoenix

According to The Daily Star, ABC News, The Deseret News and other media sites, Mesa residents Kerri Burnett and Doug Maier were watching planes coming in and out of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (about 14 miles away) at around 9 pm when they saw the first orange orb coming in from the southeast — not the direction of the airport, which is slightly northwest of Mesa. They both recorded the UFO on their cell phones, noting that their neighbors were also outside watching the UFO, which then became UFOs. Maier immediately posted the video on Facebook, and was soon contacted by a reporter from the local ABC affiliate.

“The interviewer informed us of his research, speaking to Luke AFB who confirmed it was nothing from them. He also stopped at a place where he saw an FAA member and showed him the video, and that too was inconclusive.”

The reporter told Burnett that some officials believed they had seen parachute flares. However, Luke Air Force Base – about 40 miles northwest and the most likely source of such flares – denied that speculation. Other news organizations contacting the various authorities – the FAA, the military, etc. – received similar explanations and no further comments. Maier is so convinced the real identity of the objects is something else, he put together a comprehensive video of all of the cell phone recordings, the media reports and further details on the sighting. (Watch the video here.)

Flares

“We put together a compilation of the footage we had from each of our phones, my Facebook Live Footage, and the News Interview. After I go into detail and recap of what was strange in the sky, how it behaved, and the news interview. I am still in shock because I believe whatever that thing was, it wasn’t man-made. Yes, I swore like a sailor but hey I was in shock. My way of dealing with whatever the heck that thing was.

THOSE WERE NO FLARES! The thing was SILENT and it made no sound whatsoever. It had a Lava-Flow like color that I can’t explain. It maneuvered in ways we could only dream of. The way that thing moved and maneuvered around in the sky was IMPOSSIBLE for us. Finally, the object was not as far away as it appeared to be on video. It had the altitude of a Cessna and was below the clouds. It was amazing, confusing, frightening, and unreal all at once.

I don’t care what the aviation experts say or who they work for. I know what I saw, and it wasn’t from this world.”

“I know what I saw, and it wasn’t from this world.” That’s the opening line for the first “Mesa Lights” documentary sure to be produced as this mysterious sighting gains momentum. Being one orb dropping smaller ones — as opposed to a V-shaped group or a series, as the Phoenix lights were – suggests these were something different. But what?

Will Kerri Burnett and Doug Maier ever find out? Will we? We’ll keep tabs on this breaking story.

In a hurry to get somewhere on the other side of the world? In an hour? Then you need to join the Space Force. What … what? That seems to be the advice of a retired United States Air Force general who claims the Space Force already has the technology to build a craft capable of being anywhere on Earth in an hour. If you’re not interested in fast travel, he has some Space Force technology for homebodies too – the newest branch of the armed forces also has the capability to deliver wi-fi and energy from space. Holy Nikola Tesla!

“The technology is on the engineering benches today. But most Americans and most members of Congress have not had time to really look deeply at what is going on here. But I’ve had the benefit of 33 years of studying and making friends with these scientists. This technology can be built today with technology that is not developmental.”

The next generation of one-hour pizza delivery?

Late last month, Lieutenant General Steven L. Kwast, commander of the Air Education and Training Command at the San Antonio-Randolph Base in Texas, revealed this and more in a speech entitled “The Urgent Need for a U.S. Space Force” delivered to an audience at Hillsdale College in Washington D.C. Kwast (he retired earlier this year) believes it’s not just advanced technology that will determine who will lead the world in space but also who has the values to protect human rights from exploitation by the market forces, industries, militaries and governments that guard the technology. That responsibility, in Kwast’s mind, belongs to the Space Force.

“The power of space will change world power forever. As a historian, reflecting on the fact that throughout the history of mankind… technology has always changed world power. But the story of rejecting new and holding and clinging to the paradigms of the past is why no civilization has ever lasted forever, and values are trumped by other values when another civilization figures out a way of finding a competitive advantage. The nature of power, you either have it and your values rule or you do not have it and you must submit. We see that play out again and again in history and it’s playing out now.”

But wait a minute, you say. The Space Force is still a proposal, not an actual branch of the military … right? That’s true … although this week the Democrats in Congress and White House negotiators agreed to authorize the creation of the Space Force in exchange for a policy establishing 12 weeks of paid parental leave for federal workers. Neither has anything to do with the other, but that’s how government works these days. Kwast should be happy to hear the news because he warns that China (it’s always China) is already building its space force. But wait a minute again, you say. Didn’t Kwast say we have advanced technology for ultra-hypersonic travel and Tesla’s dream of wireless energy from space already “on the bench”?

Unfortunately, that’s where he falls back on that old diatribe about China beating us to 5G technology. Why is he worried about 5G when it’s such low tech to flying anywhere in an hour and getting energy from space? It would have been nice if he had given more insights on those and perhaps explained how today’s manufacturers – hungry for new business – and today’s workers – ready for more jobs – can capitalize on this. All we really have are mysterious triangular aircraft sightings and rumors.

While it’s great that people like retired Lieutenant General Steven L. Kwast are hinting about this advanced technology, seeing is believing. After all, we’re still waiting for flying cars.

Quantum physicist Deep Prasad previously hinted that he had an encounter with extraterrestrials which is why he became so interested in UFOs and aliens. And just recently he came forward with his story. On Thanksgiving, Prasad posted his experience to Twitter and it is one interesting story to say the least.

It’s a pretty lengthy story (the full transcript can be read here as well as on Prasad’s Twitter account), so I’ll just summarize the most important and highly interesting parts.

He began the post by stating that on February 1^st of this year, around 9:40 a.m., he became paralyzed and witnessed three strange beings that were communicating in a mysterious and incomprehensible language. The words/sentences that he saw were written in a sort of hieroglyphic texts/symbols and the only word Prasad understood was “DNA” – which he read at least three different times.

He noticed that he was no longer in his room and was somewhere he didn’t recognize. One of the beings jumped on top of him and walked towards Prasad’s head. At that point, he felt “the most blissful, euphoric feeling” that he ever had. After experiencing that “oneness” feeling for a few minutes, he was knocked out and lost consciousness, but immediately woke back up.

He experienced “impossible electrical anomalies” wherever he went for approximately two weeks after the encounter. He then went to the SCU conference where he met Lue Elizondo along with other people who shared his interest in UFOs and aliens.

As for his emotional well-being, Prasad claimed to have still felt the feeling of “oneness” for about two weeks after the encounter and had lost any feelings of depression, stress, anxiety and trauma. He said that he was unable to feel fear and had nothing but love for everyone. He also became spiritual after his encounter. He wasn’t accustomed to feeling that way and even considered getting an MRI in order to find out which parts of his brain were “rewired”.

He did, however, begin to have dreams where he was looking at the inside of a UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) and the beings in his dreams communicated with him telepathically. He even saw an unidentified craft only weeks after his experience with the aliens. As a matter of fact, he had a total of four UFO encounters since his experience – two of them he was able to record.

He finished off his story by stating that he was “grateful for the experience” and that he’s thankful for everyone that he has met since his encounter. But wait, there’s more! Prasad drew a picture of what the alien beings looked like (the sketch can be seen here). So, was he really transported to an alien craft where he witnessed extraterrestrials? Like I said, it’s one interesting story to say the least.