Some of the most spectacular UFO accounts come from pilots and aircraft. These are the witnesses that seem to know what they are talking about, who are familiar with the skies and the various phenomena associated with them, and reports of strange unidentified objects from such witnesses always capture attention. One of the most well-documented such accounts on record comes from a crew aboard a Japanese airliner flying over Alaska, and it has gone on to become a much discussed entry into the realm of airborne UFO sightings.

It was November 17, 1986, and Japan Air Lines flight 1628, a Japanese Boeing 747-200F cargo aircraft, was on its way from Paris to Narita International Airport, in Japan, with a cargo of Beaujolais wine. The flight was overseen by Japan Airlines Captain Kenju Terauchi, an ex-fighter pilot and senior airline pilot with more than 10,000 hours flight experience, and everything was smooth at the start. The plane took off on schedule and made its way towards its destination, a route which would take it over a portion stretching from Reykjavík to Anchorage, Alaska. It was here in these skies that the routine flight would take a turn for the decidedly unusual.

The distance from the lights was far enough from us and we felt no immediate danger. I thought perhaps it is a UFO. The lights were still moving strangely. Most unexpectedly two spaceships appeared [directly in front of the plane], shooting off lights. The inside cockpit shined brightly and I felt [the warmth of the UFO’s thrusters’] on my face. Then, three to seven seconds later, the fire — like from jet engines — stopped and became a small circle of lights as they began to fly in level flight at the same speed as we were. The middle of the body of the ship sparked an occasional stream of lights, like a charcoal fire. Its shape was a square, flying 500 feet to 1,000 feet in front of us, very slightly higher in altitude than us. Its size was about the same size as the body of a DC-8 [similar in size to a Boeing 707].

It is impossible for any manmade machine to make a sudden appearance in front of a jumbo jet that is flying 910 kilometers per hour and to move along in a formation paralleling our aircraft. But we did not feel threatened or in danger. Honestly, we were simply astounded. I have no idea why they came so close to us. There was a pale white flat light in the direction where the ships flew away, [pacing us]. The Anchorage Center replied that they saw nothing on their radar. I set our digital weather radar distance to 20 miles, radar angle to horizon. There it was, on the screen: a large, green, round object had appeared seven or eight miles away, in the direction of the object. We arrived at the sky above the Eielson Air Force Base and Fairbanks. It was a clear night. We were just above the bright city lights and we checked the pale white light behind us. There was a silhouette of a gigantic spaceship! We must get away quickly!

The larger craft was described by Terauchi as “a mothership,” and reported as being twice the size of an aircraft carrier, looming out there on the horizon and pacing the airplane. Throughout the whole ordeal, the original lights were displaying feats of maneuverability that were well beyond any known aircraft, seeming to defy gravity, and Terauchi would say of this:

The thing was flying as if there was no such thing as gravity. It sped up, then stopped, then flew at our speed, in our direction, so that to us it [appeared to be] standing still. The next instant it changed course. In other words, the flying object had overcome gravity.

In the meantime, Air Traffic Control was unable to register anything on their radar to confirm any of this, although Elmendorf’s NORAD Regional Operations Control Center (ROCC) did manage to pick up a “surge primary return” in the area. Terauchi carried out evasive maneuvers, changing altitudes and moving about in circles, but the strange craft easily managed to match them and continue to follow, and when offers were made to scramble military jets the Captain refused, not sensing that there was any imminent threat. The objects would continue their inscrutable activities until a United Airlines passenger jet entered the airspace around 150 miles from Anchorage and purportedly sent the UFOs scattering off into the unknown. Flight 1628 would land safely, and Terauchi and his crew, co-pilot Takanori Tamefuji and flight engineer Yoshio Tsukuba, would file a report with the Federal Aviation Administration on what they had witnessed.

The bizarre account would get out into the press, and interestingly Captain Terauchi would be grounded in response, relegated to a desk job, which only stoked the fires of conspiracy talk. John Callahan, the FAA Division Chief of the Accidents and Investigations branch, launched an investigation and would turn up some interesting findings, such as evidence that showed that the objects at some points had been clocked at moving thousands of miles per hour. Callahan would apparently have a meeting attended by representatives of the FBI, CIA and President Reagan’s Scientific Study Team, during which the data was met with excitement according to him. He would say:

When they asked me what I thought, I told them that it looked like we had a UFO that was up there. As far as I was concerned, Reagan’s science team were the ones that verified my own thoughts about it. They were very, very excited about the data. They had said at that time that this was the was the only time — and they had used the words ‘a UFO’ — was ever recorded on radar for any length of time.

Regardless of this, it was allegedly decided to basically bury the data on the incident and all present were told to act as if the meeting had never taken place at all. Not only this, Callahan would claim that the officials had confiscated all of the data and whisked it away, although he managed to squirrel away the initial pilot’s report. The FAA would conduct a 3-month investigation into the incident, and after it wrapped up there would be a fair amount of backtracking, such as claiming that the military radar signatures had been caused by technical difficulties and a “split radar image,” and that there was no evidence at all that anything had been there.

The case has ever since been picked up and hotly discussed in UFO circles, where various hypotheses have been thrown about. The skeptical argument is that the crew had been disoriented and had misidentified Venus or Mars, both of which had been unusually bright at the time in question, or that they had been reflections on cloud cover or the result of optical illusions caused by ice crystals. However, we must remember that these were experienced pilots and that there was mention of actual heat from the UFOs permeating the air around them. Another skeptical argument is that Captain Terauchi had already established himself as being a UFO believer, having logged several other sightings during his tenure with the airline, and so it is suggested that perhaps he was not a totally unbiased observer, but here the phenomenon was witnessed by other crew as well, who corroborated the story, although it is only Terauchi who apparently saw “the mothership.” The exact details of the meeting allegedly attended by Callahan have never been officially released or corroborated either, further muddying the waters.

What did Japan Airlines Flight 1628 see, if anything? The theories have orbited the case of course, including that this was some sort of top secret stealth technology or experimental aircraft being tested, that it was actual aliens, or that it was nothing more than Venus or ice crystals. The intriguing thing here is the meeting that supposedly took place afterwards and the unceremonious grounding of the pilot who logged it all. Is this evidence of a cover up, or something else? Regardless of what is really going on here, the case has become one of the most oft-discussed and pervasive in UFO literature, and stands tall among the numerous accounts of pilots having brushes with the unknown.

In my previous article, I detailed how Kenneth Arnold – the man who ushered in the era of Flying Saucers in June 1947 – eventually changed his views on the nature of the UFO phenomenon. In Arnold’s own words in the early 1960s: “After some 14 years of extensive research, it is my conclusion that the so-called unidentified flying objects that have been seen in our atmosphere are not space ships at all, but are groups and masses of living organisms that are as much a part of our atmosphere and space as the life we find in the depths of our oceans. The only major difference in the space and atmosphere organisms are that they have the natural ability to change their densities at will.” That’s quite a change of opinion, to say the very least! Still on this issue of changing opinions, I’ll share with you today what I think is the most spectacular (and controversial and mysterious) change of opinion in the entire history of Ufology. It all revolves around the Roswell affair of July 1947 and the U.S. Air Force.

In 1994, the USAF published a detailed report (followed by an even bigger one in 1995) stating that while the Pentagon did not believe aliens crashed at Roswell, its staff no longer believed that the cause of the event was a weather balloon. The Air Force said that what really came down was a Mogul balloon: a huge balloon array designed to monitor for early Soviet atomic test-explosions in the atmosphere. But, that’s not the most amazing change of opinion I want to share with you. Yes, it relates to Roswell (directly, no less) but it is focused on a very different aspect of the mystery – that involving claims that bodies had been found at the crash site. In its 1994 report, the Air Force firmly stated that they had not addressed the matter of bodies for one specific, simple reason: Mogul balloons didn’t have crews. They were completely, 100 percent unmanned. In light of the USAF’s 1994 words on the bodies (or the lack of them), it was a very big surprise when, in 1997, the Air Force announced they were releasing a new report that would show bodies were found after all. They were, in reality, the Pentagon said, crash-test dummies. In other words, witness to the affair were really seeing military dummies on the ranch floor when they thought they were seeing small unusual bodies.

The 1997 report is a strange one. We have to wonder why the USAF even decided to publish the “dummies report.” Three years earlier it had made a clear and concise statement that no bodies of any kind – human, animal or alien – were found. When the USAF changed its opinion  – and having published a new report in 1997 that, in many ways, only served to create suspicions that this was all part of an ongoing cover-up – it wasn’t just UFO researchers who sat up and took notice: it was the mainstream media, too; many of who displayed doubts about the new theory. Or the new opinion. Let’s see what the Air Force had to say about this massive turnaround.

The 1997 report was titled The Roswell Report: Case Closed. In the foreword to the extensive report, Sheila Widnall, who at the time was the Secretary of the Air Force, stated this: “‘The ‘Roswell Incident’ has assumed a central place in American folklore since the events of the 1940s in a remote area of New Mexico. Because the Air Force was a major player in those events, we have played a key role in executing the General Accounting Office’s tasking to uncover all records regarding that incident. Our objective throughout this inquiry has been simple and consistent: to find all the facts and bring them to light. If documents were classified, declassify them; where they were dispersed, bring them into a single source for public review. In July 1994, we completed the first step in that effort and later published The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert. This volume represents the necessary follow-on to that first publication and contains additional material and analysis. I think that with this publication we have reached our goal of a complete and open explanation of the events that occurred in the Southwest many years ago. Beyond that achievement, this inquiry has shed fascinating light into the Air Force of that era and revitalized our appreciation for the dedication and accomplishments of the men and women of that time. As we celebrate the Air Force’s 50th Anniversary, it is appropriate to once again reflect on the sacrifices made by so many to make ours the finest air and space force in history.”

So, why did the USAF alter its opinion? The 1997 report includes the following: “The July 1994 Air Force report concluded that the predecessor to the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army Air Forces, did indeed recover material near Roswell in July 1947. This 1,000-page report methodically explains that what was recovered by the Army Air Forces was not the remnants of an extraterrestrial spacecraft and its alien crew, but debris from an Army Air Forces balloon-borne research project code named Mogul. Although Mogul components clearly accounted for the claims of ‘flying saucer’ debris recovered in 1947, lingering questions remained concerning anecdotal accounts that included descriptions of ‘alien’ bodies. The issue of ‘bodies’ was not discussed extensively in the 1994 report because there were not any bodies connected with events that occurred in 1947. The extensive Secretary of the Air Force-directed search of Army Air Forces and U.S. Air Force records from 1947 did not yield information that even suggested the 1947 ‘Roswell’ events were anything other than the retrieval of the Mogul equipment.”

The USAF continued: “Subsequent to the 1994 report, Air Force researchers discovered information that provided a rational explanation for the alleged observations of alien bodies associated with the ‘Roswell Incident.’ Pursuant to the discovery, research efforts compared documented Air Force activities to the incredible claims of ‘flying saucers,’ ‘aliens’ and seemingly unusual Air Force involvement. This in-depth examination revealed that these accounts, in most instances, were of actual Air Force activities but were seriously flawed in several major areas, most notably: the Air Force operations that inspired reports of  ‘bodies’ (in addition to being earthly in origin) did not occur in 1947. It appears that UFO proponents have failed to establish the accurate dates for these ‘alien’ observations (in some instances by more than a decade) and then erroneously linked them to the actual Project Mogul debris recovery. This report discusses the results of this further research and identifies the likely sources of the claims of ‘alien’ bodies. Contrary to allegations that the Air Force has engaged in a cover-up and possesses dark secrets involving the Roswell claims, some of the accounts appear to be descriptions of unclassified and widely publicized Air Force scientific achievements.”

The military’s conclusions read as follows, in summarized form:  “Air Force activities which occurred over a period of many years have been consolidated and are now represented to have occurred in two or three days in July 1947. ‘Aliens’ observed in the New Mexico desert were probably anthropomorphic test dummies that were carried aloft by U.S. Air Force high altitude balloons for scientific research. The ‘unusual’ military activities in the New Mexico desert were high altitude research balloon launch and recovery operations. The reports of military units that always seemed to arrive shortly after the crash of a flying saucer to retrieve the saucer and ‘crew’ were actually accurate descriptions of Air Force personnel engaged in anthropomorphic dummy recovery operations. Claims of bodies at the Roswell Army Air Field hospital were most likely a combination of two separate incidents: 1) a 1956 KC-97 aircraft accident in which 11 Air Force members lost their lives; and, 2) a 1959 manned balloon mishap in which two Air Force pilots were injured.”

The biggest change of opinion in UFO history? In my view, yes.

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.