When you think of how an alien abduction might play out, what do you imagine? Many of us might immediately conjure up thoughts of a person out in the middle of nowhere, far from home in some remote setting, where the weirdness begins. This might seem to make sense, as why would UFOs do it any other way? Yet, there are many supposed encounters that have happened in decidedly more mundane circumstances, with people being whisked away in familiar environments and even from their own homes, and here is a selection of some such very odd cases of abductions from the last places you might suspect.

Some of the stranger UFO abductions do come from the outdoors, but not necessarily under the kind of circumstances one would expect for such spectacular encounters. One of these supposedly happened one summer evening in 1995, when a group of friends was out having a casual BBQ party right in the suburban yard of a home in Derbyshire, in the East Midlands of England. They had all been talking and having a blast until 10:30 PM rolled around and things took a turn for the decidedly bizarre. The witnesses would later claim that a very large, disc shaped craft had descended from the sky to hover over their party, after which they all suddenly fell violently ill, displaying nausea and uncontrollable vomiting. The strange UFO would then float off into the distance, but something was obviously not right.

It seemed as if there was some missing time involved, as one of the witnesses noticed that the BBQ itself had gone from glowing coals to dead ash, and the food that had sat upon it was burned to a charred crisp. When they realized all of this and looked at their watches, it would turn out that a full 90 minutes had passed, which none of them could recall. In the following days they would all be plagued by strange nightmares and feelings of inexplicable, crippling anxiety, and they then agreed to be hypnotized to try and dredge up any memories of what had happened during that lost 90 minutes. In separate sessions, they would all recall under hypnosis that they had been brought aboard that weird craft and examined in some sort of room that looked reminiscent of an operating theater but with walls that were “round, but divided into squares.” A few of them would even recall having been to other planets, and it leaves one to wonder just what happened during this otherwise normal BBQ.

More well known than this is the 1969 case of a José Antonio da Silva, in Bebedouro, Minas Gerais, Brazil. He was just out for a leisurely day of fishing not far from his home on one calm day when he realized that there was someone moving about behind him and whispering. This was odd enough as it was, but then he says he was suddenly struck by a sudden paralysis, which sent him sprawling to the ground unable to move. He was then approached by several figures speaking an unfamiliar language and dressed in helmets and suits that seemed to be fashioned of aluminum foil, who roughly grabbed him and dragged him aboard a nearby cylindrical metallic craft of some sort. Once aboard, one of the beings slapped a helmet on him and things would quickly graduate from the weird to the utterly bizarre.

The UFO sped away as he was brought to some sort of large, sterile looking room. There before him was allegedly a humanoid being covered with hair and with reddish hair on its head that flowed down to its waist, and it was surrounded by several other, smaller dwarfish beings. They had in their possession all of his fishing equipment and tackle, which they seemed to be intently examining with great interest. As the frightened and startled Da Silva looked around this bizarre room, he claimed that he had seen other people in there, kept upon a shelf of some sort and awake but seemingly paralyzed much as he was. One of the smaller, hairy dwarf-like creatures approached him and made him drink some sort of dark green concoction, after which they spoke with him about human civilization and during this time one of the creatures snatched away his crucifix. After that, Da Silva was apparently taken back to Earth, where he would awaken outside of the town of Vitoria, a full 200 miles from where he had started. When he later got back to the nearby town, he would realize that he had been gone for nearly 5 days. Whatever happened to this man, it wasn’t your typical leisurely day out fishing.

Even weirder than these accounts are those abductions that have supposedly occurred within rather residential or even urban areas. In march of 1988 there was one such account from a witness by the name of Helen Thomas, who was out along with her mother Carol near Birmingham, England when they took a trip down a residential alleyway on their way to work at a nearby mill. As they went through one alleyway as they always did, they became aware of a strange humming sound that reverberated around them, followed by a blinding light from above. Both of the women reportedly felt extremely dizzy and nauseous at this time, and just as they felt they could not bear it anymore the light was simply gone as suddenly as it had appeared.

They soon realized that several hours had passed which they could not account for, and Helen’s jacket was oddly very wet, despite the fact that it had not been raining and everything around them was dry. Over the coming days both of them would experience their skin breaking out in blisters and welts for no apparent reason, and they also had frequent nosebleeds and a strange discharge from their navels. They would eventually tell of what had happened to UFO researcher Tony Todd, who was convinced that they had been abducted and arranged to have them hypnotized. Under hypnosis it would all get stranger still, as they described what had happened to them in that alleyway during their missing time.

They claimed that after the light had enveloped them they had found themselves in a bright, white room, lying atop tables next to each other and with “wet netted cloths” over them. Around them were several odd beings with large heads, very thin, long arms, and “wet, wrinkled skin.” In the corner was another, different being, who looked almost human and had blonde hair, blue eyes, and was dressed in some sort of silver uniform with an insignia upon it. These creatures then pushed glass tubes into their belly buttons, and they both had the instinctive feeling that the beings were “taking eggs” from them. One of the creatures examined Helen’s leather jacket, rubbing it upon its body and seemingly fascinated with the texture of the leather. When the examination was complete the two women were shown a display covered with strange symbols and images of violence and war. They had then been dropped off back into the alleyway from which they had been taken.

It is another weird case among many, and our next one comes from a woman who was allegedly just innocently out hanging out her wash. The woman known only as a “Mrs. G” was purportedly out on her balcony hanging out clothes when a bright light suddenly swept down from the sky to hover right above her. She says the UFO shot down a beam of light that brought her up into a craft of some sort, upon which were strange beings dressed in “tight, shiny metallic suits.” She then felt some sort of strike from behind and woke up again in her own yard, where it became apparent that several hours had passed. She apparently then went about finishing the chore she started with, and it is unclear how this story really ends.

Perhaps even spookier than these accounts we have looked at so far are those in which people have been abducted by otherworldly forces from right out of the comfort of their own homes. A stunning example of this is the apparent abduction of a woman by the name of Betty Andreasson, in the city of South Ashburnham, Massachusetts, in the United States. On the evening of January 25, 1967, Betty was in the kitchen of her home while her seven children, mother, and father were right nearby in the living room. It would have seemed to be just a normal evening if it wasn’t for the weirdness that was about to unfold.

At around 6:30 PM, the lights flickered, followed by a thin beam of reddish light projecting down through the kitchen window, and that was when Betty’s father looked outside to see five strange humanoid creatures approaching the home. These creatures apparently “hopped” towards the home and phased right through the door, after which the entire family was supposedly frozen in time. The creatures were described as being about 5 feet tall, with pear-shaped heads, wide eyes, and small ears and noses, their mouths mere slits. They were dressed in blue one-piece suits of some sort, and each hand had only three fingers. All of them travelled about by levitating, and they seemed to be particularly interested in Betty, who they led outside to a large, metallic craft outside. Betty would later relate how she had been brought aboard this ship and subjected to examinations, as one of the creatures apparently stayed behind to look after her paralyzed family. After they were done, they were all released with lost time. Hypnosis would uncover some of this, and it would be actively investigated by UFO researcher Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who found the family to be perfectly sane and reliable witnesses. Just what happened here? Who knows?

Lastly, we have a case from a witness in the Houston suburb of Pearland, Texas, who says this happened right as he was taking a nap on the sofa in his own home. He says he woke to what he though at first to be vivid hallucinations, as if he had been drugged, but it would soon prove to be far stranger. He says of his harrowing experience:

I looked to my right and saw something in my bathroom. It was small, I thought maybe a squirrel or raccoon had gotten in the house. I closed the door to trap it, but upon a closer inspection, nothing was there. I heard what I thought were voices and strange noises coming from my neighbors’ yard. From my window, it looked like my neighbors were building a very large tall bench swing, there was a red color coming from this area. I thought that the neighbors were maybe playing with lights of some sort and that this may have been the reason for the strange colors in my bedroom. This all happened around midnight. I wanted to find out what was possibly happening next door so I went downstairs.

As I was reaching the stairs I noticed an unrecognizable symbol on the wall that seemed to be made of blue light. When I touched it, it felt warm. This light also cast a blue reflection on the white enamel paint of the bannister. I realized that this could not have been a reflection from next door because of the lack of windows in my staircase. When I got outside, it was quiet. I asked “hello” and didn’t get an immediate response. The air felt staticy and it felt as though if I touched anything that I’d receive a shock. When I peered through the fence I saw ten black spheres; Four on top, three below, then two and one, like an inverted triangle. It rose slightly, then the top left sphere broke away from the others and came towards me. At first I panicked and could not move. As I looked into this sphere, it had an iridescence to it that made me feel calm when I looked at it. I do not remember going back to my room, I just remember being there. I noticed the clock said 1:45am. I also noticed some dried crusty blood around my right nostril. The room still had those two strange colors moving all around the surfaces of the walls and ceiling.

Not understanding what was happening, I jumped into bed and buried my face in the pillows. I woke the next morning with the distinct feeling that this was real and not a dream. There were still bits of dried blood in my nostril and for a few days after, the area just to the side of my nostril still hurt. Deep under the skin like when a pimple is coming up. Then it went away. I know this happened to me, everything inside me says it was real. I have no way of explaining it and I have no real way of filing it away in my mind like you would with a normal experience.

Looking at such cases as we have here, it would seem that UFO abductions are a phenomenon far from just those people wandering about on the fringes of civilization. It seems that this is something that can happen to anyone at any time, which makes it all even creepier and more unsettling than it already is. What are we to make of such reports? Are these truly visitations from creatures from beyond our world and understanding, or is there something more to it all? Whatever one may think, these certainly remain up there with some of the stranger UFO abduction cases there are, and are certainly worthy of further discussion.

In modern accounts of UFO sightings, one variety of unidentified flying objects remains particularly prevalent: the so-called “black triangles,” which denote large, dark-colored and slow-moving three-sided aircraft. Reports of the objects have maintained a remarkable degree of consistency over time, and involve massive objects that fly at low altitude, and are generally observed moving at night.

Reports of sightings of these objects began to become prevalent in the 1980s and even saw some coverage in American periodicals like Popular Mechanics, where sightings of vast “flying wings” were likened to being the next generation of American stealth aircraft.

Despite their appearance over places like California’s Antelope Valley—a locale that has been long associated with sightings of experimental aircraft produced by the Lockheed Corporation—many of the reports were difficult to bite off and chew. Greg Pope’s reporting on sightings of what he dubbed “the big wing” in Popular Mechanics in late 1991 noted that some of the descriptions of these aircraft by California residents “simply strains credulity.”

Sightings continued throughout the 1990s, and not just in America, but elsewhere around the world. A “wave” of such reports occurred over Belgium in the early 90s and similar sightings that have continued over the UK and Canada seemingly rule out the possibility that experimental aircraft of U.S. origin can account for such reports.

Sightings in the U.S. aren’t relegated solely to the southwest, either. A report I received from one individual (who preferred not to be named) occurred when he was a youth growing up in northern Kentucky. The period would have been between 1994 and 1995, and one Saturday evening during an outdoor gathering at his parent’s home, he and around ten others observed, “a completely silent, black triangle fly south to north directly over our heads.”

The witness estimated that the aircraft was flying at an altitude of approximately 100 to 150 feet “and moved silently.” The object appeared to have three lights on the bottom, and subsequent phone calls made by the mother of the witness to the control tower at the nearby Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport indicated that no unusual objects were observed, nor detected on radar.

Sightings of a similar object occurred over southern Illinois in January 2000, when police began receiving phone calls in the early morning hours about a massive object observed flying at low altitude over St. Clair County. The aircraft was followed by several officers, and dispatch recordings gave real-time descriptions a massive, triangle-shaped object.

“I couldn’t find a single significant difference between the St. Clair object and an advertising blimp in transmit, which is exactly what the FAA told the Riverfront Times,” noted Brian Dunning of the Skeptoid podcast in 2014. It is fair to ask, in light of this explanation, why an advertising blimp would have been operating at approximately 4 AM over southern Illinois, and why no flight logs were ever disclosed to account for the craft in question being a conventional blimp.

Reports of similar objects have continued in recent times, too. In 2020, KLAS reporter George Knapp wrote of a sighting by journalist Cateland White, who described seeing a large, slow-moving triangular object as it passed over her home in 2019.

White gave the following description of the object:

“It was triangular shaped, and there were rectangular reflectors,” White said. “There was no interior light coming out of it at all. And by the time it got out of sight, I bet it was five to eight minutes. It was really slow. And I couldn’t figure out how it was staying in the air.”

Such accounts beg the question of not only whether experimental aircraft may be operating in the skies over America, but also whether they have been deployed for service here and in other countries around the world. Then there is the other possibility, of course, that they are not part of the current inventory of the United States, or that of any other nation.

Whatever their source, the so-called “black triangles” have reached near-mythical status among aviation buffs, and represent some of the most perplexing modern cases involving large unidentified aircraft in our skies.

In the world of the paranormal there are a variety of different types of encounters with seemingly humanoid entities. Some of these are of course of ghosts, while others can be of lesser defined phenomena, and some of these truly leave us scratching our heads. Among such reports are scattered accounts of encounters with what seem to be pitch black entities of some sort, which seem to appear anywhere and which have origins and machinations that are inscrutable to us. Here is a selection of such strange encounters with black humanoid entities from beyond our understanding.

Some of these strange encounters happen out in the wilds where things are already dark and scary enough as it is without having to worry about pitch black, possibly demonic entities. One such story comes to us from Reddit user “Justinf10000,” who says he had his spooky experience in the woods of Camp Tommy, in Fishkill, New York. He says he had been working as a camp counselor at the time of the incident, and that on this evening he was sneaking out to go meet up with his girlfriend in one of the other cabins. He wasn’t supposed to be out, as the cabins were supposed to be locked down after 10PM, but he had done this often and there was no reason to think anything strange would happen this time, but it did anyway. He explains of what happened as he cut through the forest:

Suddenly I heard rustling in the woods, and stopped to investigate it. There are bears/other animals so I was expecting something like that. This 3 foot humanoid type thing suddenly jumps out of the bushes spooked and looks at me. It’s too dark for me to make out any of its features, other than it was standing on 2 feet, had 2 arms, and basically looked just like a miniature person without any features (just looked solid black, if it had clothes on, I would have been able to notice that).

I was really curious what it was so I started walking towards it, and it must have got more spooked because it bolted back into the woods. I’ll never forget how mechanical it looked as it took off running too. It’s whole body basically shifted 90 degrees (like if someone was doing the robot dance) and it just took off. I have never seen anything on 2 legs run that quickly so I was pretty confused about what it was. I’m a pretty fast runner and fit person in general, but this thing was on another level of fast. As much as I try to make sense of it, I still to this day have no idea wtf it was. It was very human, but too short to be a human (3 feet tall is about accurate) and i really don’t know how a human could run that fast anyways. I have no freakin idea but it’s always bugged me! Maybe one day I will go back to try and find this creature again!

Strange, indeed. Another such account comes to us from the wilds of the state of Alabama, where Reddit user “AMpwrs” says she had a rather bizarre experience just after an evening riding around in his 4×4 truck through a wooded area. On their way back they apparently ran out of gas and were forced to push the truck to a secluded parking area, where they decided to sit and take a rest before deciding what to do next. It was as they sat there that the witness looked up and saw something strange in the solitary security light of the parking lot. He says of what happened next:

Standing there no more than 10 ft in front us and directly in clear view under the security light was a horrible creature. I froze up and just remained as silent as I could, then my buddy screams out loudly. That’s when this thing noticed us and jumped, turning in our direction. It immediately ran off in an awkward lanky fashion and ducked behind a tree. It then peeked around the tree back toward us then sprinted off towards the woods where it disappeared. That’s when I said, “did you see that”?

 My friend immediately described exactly what it was that I had just witnessed down to detail. A solid black bipedal creature with shiny tight skin. It had an elongated head and no face. It did have facial bone structure but no orifices. No mouth, no nostrils and no eyes. You could see every bone in its body and it was slightly hunched. It had long dangling pointy fingers.

The creature apparently then ran off into the night and was not seen again. What was this thing? Who knows? Not all of these encounters happen out in the middle of nowhere. Another tale comes to us from a soldier in the U.S. Army, who at the time was at the sprawling, 94,000-acre Fort Sill, in Lawton, Oklahoma, for training exercises. He says that on this evening he was on firewatch duty, which was basically a pretty boring detail according to him. However, on this evening it would prove to be anything but boring. The witness says:

One Saturday I had firewatch. Not a big deal i decided I’d chill in my room for most of it and make myself been seen every now and then. We had a gym below the main floor. We would spend a lot of time in that gym. Firewatch was sometimes tasked with cleaning it up. There was a small walled off section though. It used to contain an electric chair. I’m still unsure on the history of the building we we’re at but it was next to a large cemetery. We would hear the occasional creepy story about the building and the electric chair.

Anyway, I digress. That night I was asked to clean the gym and then to mop 3rd deck. At the time no one lived on 3rd deck. My buddy and I cleaned the gym then walked up the stairs to mop. He mopped from the end to the middle and I proceeded to mop the rest of the way to the stairs. We finished mopping my friend went to go skate in his room while I told duty we we’re done. I walked back up the stairs to grab the mop bucket. I got up there and I realized someone had walked all over the floor that we just mopped. So I looked down the hallway.

When I did I saw a human like figure. Except it was black. The blackest black I have ever seen. I felt this wave of uncertainty and fear wash over me. Something I have never felt before. I sprinted down the stairs ran to my room waking my roommate up. He thought I was messing with him when I told him what happened. After that I never saw the figure again while I was there. It was honestly one of the most disturbing experiences of my life.

What in the world was going on here? Was this a ghost, his imagination, or something else altogether? On occasion, such entities are seen around more residential areas or even more creepily within homes. One account from Your Ghost Stories supposedly happened in 2008 in the U.S. state of Connecticut, with the witness saying that the strangeness began when he woke up one evening to find a strange presence in his room. He explains of what happened next:

A few seconds after awaking I felt the sensation of something gripping my heart and squeezing it to the point where it was painful. For me to admit pain, actual pain, with what I’ve gone through in terms of getting hurt playing sports, means that it was really something bad. Also, I don’t wake up at those hours of the morning anymore without a reason I’m aware of, a dream, having to go to the bathroom, or something along those lines. When I woke up for this, there was no immediate cause that I can remember that forced me to wake up… All I remember is waking up.

In the corner of my bed room, there was a black shadow, darker than my room that appeared to be humanoid, but somehow didn’t really have a shape. I never looked directly at it, but only looked at it out of the corner of my eye, which is unusual because I ALWAYS look at unusual objects/things. I do remember it seeming to reach out toward me at one point. All I did was curl up into a ball and started praying. A minute or 2 after I started praying, I felt the pressure in my chest release, and with it came a profound calmness I’ve never had before, and I’ve managed to maintain a piece of that calmness ever since. My house is not haunted, nobody has ever died in it, and there’s no ancient Indian Graveyard underneath it. I have no explanation for what happened.

This sounds like it could almost be a case of the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, wherein the witnesses will find themselves in a sort of limbo state between sleep and wakefulness and experience extremely vivid dream-like hallucinations, but it is hard to say. Another witness, Reddit user “Hhandholmes,” says that he and several acquaintances were plagued by a string of sightings of these types of black entities in the vicinity of where he lived, at an undisclosed location within the United States. He says that within a month he and several others spotted petite black humanoids standing only around 4 feet tall lurking about the area, and he explains:

In most of the cases we all witnessed the same style of humanoid, around 3 1/2 to 4 feet tall and pitch black, meaning that no features were even seen on the things. They would walk/run extremely fast and were only seem at night time, sometimes even passing through street lights yet their bodies got no lighter than what they were in the dark, they were always a pitch black.

They were spotted all in the same two blocks of each other, mostly standing in the alleys, once sitting in a tree, on someones front porch and even in a bedroom. The most seen together was only two, meaning that they mostly traveled alone? Most of them seemed to simply be watching, there was one incident where the being was slightly different. it was probably a foot and half taller but hunched over and could drop on all fours and sprint away faster than any animal or person I have ever seen.

There are cases along these lines reported from countries other than the United states as well. One comes to us from a Reddit User “is_no_good,” who says he had this experience while living in a small rural village in Germany in 2003. At the time he was on his way back from a church service when he saw something very outlandish standing in a side alley. He says of his encounter:

In a sidestreet under a lighted street lamp stood this thing, it was completely black had no face and no clothes, was very tall, like about 2m and the creature’s arms reached below its knees. It just stood there in silence and as I saw it and realized that it can’t be a human, I was frozen to fear and couldn’t stop looking at it, till it made a step in my direction. In this moment I ran like hell to the house of my parents without turning around. It didn’t get me or something but I was in extreme fear. I never talked to anyone about this because I feared that people would laugh about me. But I saw it and it still haunts my thoughts now and then. Fortunately, I never saw it again. In Summary: The thing was completely black it had no details. There was no face, no colors, no nose shape, no eyes. It had normal proportions except the knee long arms. It was very thin and approximately 2m tall. It made no sound. And I have the feeling that it was a ‘he.’

Another account is from a witness on Your Ghost Stories who lives in the Philippines. She explains that this happened when she was in college living with 4 housemates at an apartment near the university. It was here where they would all be menaced by a very strange entity indeed. The witness says:

One afternoon at around 4 or 5, one of our housemates (which was also my classmate and batchmate) was eating her dinner while I was sitting in the middle of the living room facing the mirror and my sister was in the living room watching TV. So as the area is an open space and is just divided by some sort of study table or chairs (I can’t remember the divider we used), all 3 of us are basically within the same room and can clearly see each other. After a while, I saw a tall dark figure sort of peeping at us from the kitchen sink area. There is a thick supporting foundation just before the sink (L-shaped area) and there was this tall dark thing hiding by it. I can see its face, hair, one arm and left leg and foot but the other parts are not visible as it seems to be hiding (like when a kid is shy but is still curious to see something kind of pose). So it took me a few seconds before I was able to talk because my mind can’t comprehend what I was seeing so my immediate question was, “is there anyone at the sink”? Which I know is quite odd and impossible as I know there are only 3 of us.

My housemate, being a scaredy cat suddenly stood up looking at me in disbelief asking me to stop teasing her but I told her that there is something by the column going to the sink looking at us. My sister then said there are only 3 of us in the house right now and it can be a burglar as we are just on the 2nd floor of the entire apartment building. But I told them that is not possible as the exit staircase is no longer there due to weather and rusting. I also told them that it is not person based from what I see.

They then asked me what I see and I told them that aside from the white of the eyeballs, everything was just black. I told them it was black as a charcoal and the hair is like that of an afro and the it is almost as tall as the ceiling. It stayed there for a good 2 to 3 minutes as if it was observing someone or something from the house (my guess is that it was looking at the TV as it was the direction of its gaze) before it disappeared. I think all the hairs on my body were standing up during the entire time I was seeing this thing and then everything went back to normal as soon as it disappeared. The funny thing is I think my sister and our housemate were even more afraid of the thing than I was even though I was the only one that can see it. I didn’t feel any scary aura coming from it. I guess my goosebumps were just due to the fact that I don’t know what I was seeing and I can’t believe what I was seeing. And more than ten years from that event, I still don’t know what that tall dark thing was.

With such an eclectic mix of truly bizarre reports we are left to wonder what it is we might be dealing with in such encounters. Are these examples of ghosts, demons, or even aliens or interdimensional interlopers of some sort bleeding over into our reality? Are they just fanciful fictionalized accounts or the product of the imagination? There is no way to really know for sure, and such cases as these serve to really fuel speculation and wonder as to what might be going on.

Everybody loves a murder mystery – including the space scientists at NASA. Spoiler alert: they already figured out the murderer in this whodunit and they’re calling it officially a “cosmic homicide.” If you know anything about space and astronomy, you won’t be surprised to learn that the culprit is a black hole. However, this one is a type that has been theorized to exist but has eluded detection and proof … until now. Is this really a murder mystery or more of a Stephen King horror thriller?

“Astronomers have found the best evidence for the perpetrator of a cosmic homicide: a black hole of an elusive class known as “intermediate-mass,” which betrayed its existence by tearing apart a wayward star that passed too close.”

NASA’s press release on the discovery of the first known intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) opens like a murder case, but quickly switches to sounding like an archeological study.

“These so-called intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) are a long-sought “missing link” in black hole evolution.”

And then it becomes a horror monster thriller.

“It took the combined power of two X-ray observatories and the keen vision of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to nail down the cosmic beast.”

This is getting interesting.

While the movie doesn’t have a title yet, the plot opens with the Hubble telescope, that workhorse responsible for so many stellar discoveries. According to the NASA press release for the study published in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomer Dacheng Lin of the University of New Hampshire pointed the Hubble telescope at a strange X-ray flare detected but not identified previously by other space telescopes. The first clue this was something completely different was the startling discovery that it wasn’t coming from our galaxy nor from the center of another galaxy – which meant it wasn’t a supermassive black hole. Being on the edge of a galaxy made 3XMM J215022.4−055108 and its strange galactic home something new yet familiar.

“The star cluster that is home to 3XMM J215022.4−055108 may be the stripped-down core of a lower-mass dwarf galaxy that has been gravitationally and tidally disrupted by its close interactions with its current larger galaxy host.”

The cause of the X-ray flare was the cosmic homicide of a star by this strange black hole in a strange location in a strange galaxy. Using the glow, the astronomers estimated the size of the black hole at 50,000 solar masses – the perfect size to be an intermediate-mass black hole. That proves it’s both the murderer in the cosmic homicide tale and the missing link between small and supermassive black holes.

The black hole, named 3XMM J215022.4−055108, is indicated by the white circle. © NASA, ESA and D. Lin

(University of New Hampshire)

Like good homicide detectives, the astronomers will use this new knowledge to look for other cosmic killer IMBHs. They’ll also keep their eye on 3XMM J215022.4−055108 – there’s no way to bring it in and lock it up for life, so it’s still lurking in a dark corner of a mysterious galaxy … waiting for an unsuspecting star to sashay by. Yes, it’s a true “cosmic beast.”

Killer Cosmic Beast. Homicide: Life on the Galactic Edge. Law & Order: Intermediate Black Hole Unit. The movie and TV series possibilities are intriguing. Maybe it’s time for a channel that caters to astronomers. Andromeda Prime? Netflux? Starz Encore Murders?

Film-making has got to be among the most difficult careers in the world. More so if the topic of your film is something as mercurial and controversial as the UFO phenomenon. If you’re going to make a movie about tigers then you know that if you travel to the jungles of Southeast Asia (or Oklahoma) chances are you’ll be able to film some tigers. If your movie is about mount Everest you can book your plane ticket to Nepal with full confidence that the mountain isn’t going anywhere. But with UFOs, you will always be two steps behind them, so filmmakers need to follow a ‘cold case’ approach: visit the ‘crime scene’, interview the witnesses and the experts, perhaps even analyze trace evidence, if any; but the chances of capturing with your camera a bonafide flying saucer –or at the very least a fuzzy orange orb– are close to nil.

Yet that does not exclude the possibility of really weird things happening during the production of a UFO film. Nietzche’s famous quote, “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you” is often invoked in paranormal circles, to illustrate how showing an active interest in these mysteries can often carry some unforeseen circumstances…

Take for instance the documentary Witness of Another World (Testigo de Otro Mundo) released originally in 2018 (last year with English subtitles) by Argentinian filmmaker Alan Stivelman. The film focuses on the story of Juan Pérez, who in 1978 was a very young ‘gaucho’ (a South American cowboy) who had an incredible close encounter of the third kind; a case so remarkable it merited the personal investigation by none other than Dr. Jacques Vallee. WoAW shows, among other things, how Juan’s experience forced him to isolate himself from society and even from his own family; living as a recluse in a small cabin with no electricity or even running water, with no other company than his animals with whom he claims to be able to communicate. For you see, like many other UFO experiencers, Juan developed what can only be described as psychic abilities, including the gift –or is that a curse?– of prophetic dreams.

[Minor Spoilers Ahead] In the film there’s a scene in which Dr. Néstor Berlanda –a professional psychiatrist who’s been treating Juan for many years– is shown conducting a sort of hypnotic regression therapy on him, in order to reveal more information of what happened on that fateful morning of September 6th, 1978, when the (then) 12-year-old boy who was sent by his father to fetch their herd of horses, found himself instead face to face with a shiny object which his juvenile mind first mistook for a ‘tractor’ or a ‘barn’, and inside the ‘barn’ he encountered two non-human entities (a very tall humanoid, and a smaller being which looked like a robot). On a podcast interview that my friend Greg Bishop and I recorded with Alan, among our many questions for him we asked about that scene in particular, because we’re both keenly aware of the backlash generated by the use of hypnosis in abduction research due to the potential risk of implanting false memories in the witness.

Berlanda and Juan

Alan explained to us the procedure Dr. Berlanda had applied on Juan carried no such risk, because was different from the typical hypnosis performed by therapists, and that it was more a method of ‘relaxation’ than an actual trance-like state –of course, critics could argue that relaxation is the whole point of hypnosis, so I guess Dr. Berlanda could be the only one able to explain the difference in detail. Another aspect of the therapy scene Greg had found very interesting was how, at one point in the session, Berlanda suggests Juan to ‘ask’ questions to the tall humanoid –like “why are they here?” or “why did you choose me?”– to which he apparently received some surprising answers. 

Illustration depicting the tall being encountered by Juan

“What would be the point of asking such questions,” Greg asked Alan, “if they hadn’t really taken place during the original event of 1978?” Was Berlanda trying to help Juan attain some sort of closure by way of filling the gaps of his encounter using his own imagination?

“No,” Alan said to us. In what would seem as a total departure from causality and logic, Berlanda had discovered that by taking Juan in the proper state of mind, he was apparently not only able to remember what had taken place to him in the past, but also he was able to communicate with ‘them’ as if they were there during the session in the present time!

As incredible as this may sound, there is at least another example in the UFO literature in which similar interactions with alleged alien intelligences while in the presence of independent researchers have been documented: I’m talking here of course of the hypnotic sessions with Betty Andreasson Luca, as described by author Raymond E. Fowler in his classic book The Andreasson Affair. 

Betty Andreasson and her husband, Bob Luca

According to Fowler, during the 12th regression session which was conducted on July 16, 1977, the MUFON investigators were attempting to extract more details about the event that happened to Betty and her family on January of 1967 –when she was taken from her home and led by a group of ‘gray aliens’ to a circular craft, and from there to another realm in which she received visions of a mystical nature– when suddenly Betty’s mind spontaneously ‘shifted’ from her past memories to the present, and she found herself unable to move her arms and legs. She also felt as if someone or something was controlling her words, and suddenly, to the amazement of everyone present, she began to talk with a mechanical tone in an unknown language –this “star language” was later determined to be very similar to ancient Gaelic. 

At one point it seemed as the hypnosis with Andreasson had turned into a mediumship session, and the investigators were trying to ask direct questions to the intelligence or intelligences controlling Betty, who was answering them in plain English –although the meaning of the replies still remained too cryptic. At other times, the flow of the communication and the messages in the “star language” were interrupted by meaningless bursts like “Base 32 — Base 32 — Signal Base 32,” and it was later suggested messages from a truck driver using a CB radio was messing with the ‘alien transmission’ hijacking Betty’s mind. 

Could it be that electromagnetic signals generated by human technology could actually interfere with the ‘superior technology’ of UFOs? Although no one is able to answer that question, basically every UFOlogist accepts that the opposite is true –based for example on the many cases in which automobile engines have been shut down by the close proximity of a UFO, which is attributed to the tremendous magnetic field surrounding these objects affecting the car’s alternator. 

Which brings us back to Witness of Another World, and two other fascinating incidents occurring during the filming of that intriguing hypnotic session between Dr. Berlanda and Juan, which Alan shared with Greg and I during our interview (despite the fact that they were not mentioned in his documentary): During the shooting of that scene –which took place inside’s Juan humble house in the middle of the Argentinian pampa– all the lights in the camera crew’s equipment began to flicker all at once; an inexplicable phenomenon, given how they were being powered with independent batteries.

Alan Stivelman

Even more fantastic still, is that every single member of Alan’s team –with the exception of himself and Dr. Berlanda– fell asleep at the exact moment when Berlanda told Juan to ask the questions to the tall humanoid, and they didn’t wake up until the session ended.

Both Greg and I were totally dumbfounded when Alan told us these things via Skype, in October of 2019. It goes without saying that to this day he doesn’t have an explanation to why these things happened while he was making his movie, and neither have I. Perhaps part of the answer lies in what Betty Andreasson told to the MUFON investigators while she was in hypnotic trance in 1977: That, to these beings –whatever they are wherever they come from– “the future and the past are the same as today.”