It was a meteorite that crashed in Siberia in 1908! No, it was a comet! No, it was a bomb! No, it was a UFO crash! No, it was a methane explosion! No, it was a visit by an angry Evanki god called Ogdy! No, it was …

Something packing the force of what has been described as 185 Hiroshima bombs hit a fortunately deserted area of Siberia near the Tunguska River in 1908 – destroying an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 sq km (830 sq miles) – but the space rock or bomb or whatever caused it has never been identified, especially since there’s no impact crater or reliable eyewitnesses. An air burst from a meteor disintegrating in the atmosphere generally gets the most votes, but it’s far from unanimous. Now, new research suggests a similar yet different cause for the Tunguska Event … and that cause may still be around. Should we be worried? Is this the winner? Don’t place your bets … yet.

Trees leveled by the Tunguska explosion.

“We have studied the conditions of through passage of asteroids with diameters 200, 100, and 50 metres, consisting of three types of materials – iron, stone, and water ice, across the Earth’s atmosphere with a minimum trajectory altitude in the range 10 to 15 kilometres.”

In the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dr. Sergei Karpov and fellow researchers at the Kirensky Physics Institute in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, focused their attention on a select group of asteroids or various sizes, composed of what they believe the Tunguska rock might have been and traveling at a trajectory estimated to be the same as the event-causer. The model generated what each size and composition would have on 1908 Tunguska.

The icy space rock was eliminated early because it would have melted before achieving maximum destruction. The stone space rock would have come closer, but it still would have disintegrated and left a trail of debris and a possible crater. That left the brick house built by the third little pig … sorry, the iron space rock. After manipulating the sizes, the researchers delivered their verdict and Science Alert reported it:

“According to the team’s calculations, the most likely culprit is an iron meteorite between 100 and 200 metres (320 to 650 feet) across that flew 3,000 kilometres (1,800 miles) through the atmosphere.”

More trees leveled after the Tunguska event

But wait … there’s more! The Siberian Times explains:

“The meteor passed over 3,000 kilometres (1,865 miles) of the planet’s surface at the lowest altitude of 10 to 15 kilometres (6.2 to 9.3 miles), they believe. It travelled at a phenomenal 20 kilometres per second speed (12.4 miles per second) before exiting into the outer space shredding about half of its over 30 million tonnes weight on the way.”

That’s right – the model concludes that the Tunguska Event was caused by the shock wave of a 200-meter-wide iron asteroid that ripped through the atmosphere, losing half of its mass along the way … but not all of it. The 100-meter-wide asteroid blasted back into space, explaining why it left no impact crater in Siberia. What about all of the iron chunks and shavings it lost in its flight through the atmosphere? That is explained by its incredible speed and altitude, says Science Alert:

“It would never have dropped below 11.2 kilometres per second (7 mps), or below an altitude of 11 kilometres.”

“The lack of iron debris is also explained by this high velocity, since the object would be moving too fast, and would be too hot, to drop much. Any mass lost would be through the sublimation of individual iron atoms, which would look exactly like normal terrestrial oxides.”

Those oxides would have remained behind in the higher atmosphere and explain the bright glow witnessed that same night across Europe.

If this sounds similar to the Chelyabinsk Event of 2013, you’re right. However, that one exploded before it could escape and, while destructive, caused far less damage than found in Tunguska.

Is it time for bookies to pay those with “Iron asteroid which went back into space” bets? The researchers are still hesitate to credit their model with an indisputable answer. Are we in any danger of this killer iron asteroid coming back? You’re probably more likely to be done in by an iron deficiency or tripping over an anvil.

That is a question that has surfaced in  the last few days, as a result of the controversy surrounding my new book, The Rendlesham Forest UFO Conspiracy. On the issue of how Ufology discovered the story, there’s no doubt at all that it was the team of Brenda Butler, Dot Street and Jenny Randles that got the ball rolling. They were the authors of the very first book on the mystery, Sky Crash, which was published in 1984. There is also no doubt that without their combined investigations, our knowledge of the incidents would be nowhere compared to where we are today. Possibly, even, without those three persistent investigators the truth behind those incidents would have remained hidden and locked away. Forever? I would not bet against it. That gives you some idea of the depth and determination of Dot, Jenny and Brenda to get the answers.

A bit of background for you on how the story began to surface: Brenda lived not at all far from the forest and had more than a few contacts in the region. Notably, that included friends who were employees of the U.S. military. It wasn’t one hundred percent inevitable that Brenda would hear tales of something strange having taken place just outside the confines of RAF Woodbridge. It was, however, highly likely that such a thing would eventually occur. And as the history books have shown, such a thing did occur. Dot and Brenda were friends and decided to take a deep and careful look at the story. Jenny Randles joined their team soon after, in early 1981. The three were soon hot on the trail of the story – and barely a month after Lieutenant Colonel Halt had put his memo on the incidents together for the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense. And, the three women never looked back. It was a story that suggested, just maybe, a spacecraft from a faraway world had come down in the woods. In the world of Ufology, this was a development that could not have been envisaged just a short period earlier. One of the key sources for the story who the three women relied on – and whose unforgettable words galvanized the trio to look ever deeper into the story – was the pseudonymous “Steve Roberts.” Such was the sensitivity surrounding the man and his story of a UFO event in the woods, he was careful to mask his real name.

It was, to a large degree, the words of their source that caught the attention of Street, Butler and Randles. They did a very good, solid job of pursuing the story. It was soon published. Sky Crash makes for fascinating reading. Shadowy characters, Ministry of Defense chicanery, sinister goings-on in the woods, tales of extraterrestrial visitation, and military figures hiding their real names for fear of what might happen to them, were just the start of things. In the weeks and months that followed, the Ministry of Defense proved to be highly close-mouthed when it came to discussing the December incidents with members of the public and the media. No surprise. They were even more cautious about chatting with an energized team of UFO sleuths who weren’t going to give up. That’s Jenny, Dot and Brenda, of course.

In some ways, the MoD was unable to do very much about it, as wild rumors of the startling events were already seeping out. Eventually matters would develop into a chaotic torrent. To demonstrate how incredibly careful and determined the MoD was to try and keep matters under wraps, it was not until April 13, 1983 that an official admission was made to Jenny Randles that a handful of “lights” had been seen in the vicinity of Rendlesham Forest and that remained “unexplained.” That’s right: two years passed before the rumors of something very strange and non-human having been seen in Rendlesham Forest began to unravel in the world of intelligence and the military. Those who were hiding the truth were now in the dangerous position of losing control of the situation.

Almost two months later to the day, a copy of Lieutenant Colonel Halt’s memo was declassified in accordance with the laws of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. It was provided to a now-deceased American UFO investigator, Robert Todd. In a June 14, 1983 letter to Todd, Colonel Peter Bent – who, at the time, was the Commander of the 513^th Combat Support Group (CSG) – made an amazement statement. He said: “It might interest you to know that the U.S. Air Force had no longer retained a copy of the 13 January 1981 letter written by Lt. Col. Charles I. Halt. The Air Force file copy had been properly disposed of in accordance with Air Force regulations. Fortunately, through diligent inquiry and the gracious consent of Her Majesty’s government, the British Ministry of Defense and the Royal Air Force, the U.S. Air Force was provided with a copy for you.”

It wasn’t long at all before Brenda, Dot and Jenny found themselves in a runaround. Curiously, during the course of an interview with MoD spokeswoman Pam Titchmarsh on August 18, 1983, Randles was told that – contrary to the statement made by Colonel Bent – the Ministry of Defense had not supplied the Americans with a copy of Halt’s memorandum. Notably, Titchmarsh was very wary about discussing the case with Randles, who had made a trip down to London with Street and Butler. “I wouldn’t know,” was Titchmarsh’s uneasy and succinct reply when Randles asked her if the MoD’s “operational staff” had built up their own files on the case. Nevertheless, since a copy of the Halt memo had been released to Robert Todd by U.S. authorities, Titchmarsh was – at the very least – obliged to admit that her department in the MoD (Defense Secretariat 8) did have a copy of Halt’s report on file. Despite that, the Ministry of Defense denied that the events of December 1980 were of any kind of defense significance. That denial of anything strange having occurred continues.

For as many people out there who believe in UFOs and that they are something beyond our current ability to understand, there are probably just as many skeptics who seek to debunk it all and explain it away. This might be because they really believe there are mundane answers, or in some cases it may be because they are trying to hide something and keep it from public scrutiny, but whatever the reasons, what happens when one of these skeptics sees something themselves that changes their mind? What if that person was an official with the government charged with being a skeptic and debunker as his profession? Here we have a wild story of an alleged former military official, whose job it was to create cover-ups and sweep away the truth, only to admit years later that the truth was not that clear or easy to dismiss.

Back in the 1950s the main driving force behind the U.S. government’s efforts to investigate the UFO phenomenon and one of the most well-known of a series of such projects was a little something called Project Blue Book. Started in 1952, it was conducted by the United States Air Force with the aim of scientifically analyzing UFO data and determining if UFOs posed any sort of threat to national security. Up until its closure in 1969, the project would investigate thousands of reports of unidentified flying objects, and while they were ostensibly set up to try and figure out what was going on, mostly it seemed that their job was to find whatever mundane explanation they could find to stuff any given report into. At times they seem to have been almost damage control with the public, to sweep it all away in order to avoid panic, and they would officially claim to have never found any evidence at all of these objects representing a national threat or of consisting of any sort of extraterrestrial vehicles or proof of some anomalous advanced technology. They spent a lot of time debunking, in other words, and one of their chief debunkers was supposedly a man by the name of Lieutenant Colonel Richard French.

Lieutenant Colonel Richard French

French’s main job with Project Blue Book was to allegedly explain away any and all UFO reports in digestible ways that the public could handle. He not only shot down fakes, but also managed to sweep away any reports that were not convenient or were annoyingly difficult to explain, and you can bet that Venus, Jupiter, and swamp gas were in his bag of tricks. What makes French’s story so interesting is that while his job was to downplay or outright dismiss these reports, he at one point had his own astounding experience that was not so easy to explain away, and wouldn’t be uncovered until long after he had retired.

In 2013, French was part of a Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in Washington D.C. where he testified on his experiences in Project Blue Book, along with a panel of six former members of Congress, and he had some interesting things to say. His own experience apparently happened in the early 1950s, when he was a young man out off the coast of St. John’s, in Newfoundland. At the time he had been called to investigate what was being called a “UFO crash,” and made his way to the location to find a crowd of people bunched up together on a wharf looking out over the grey water. French would explain of the situation:

They said, ‘We have a UFO report and we want you to investigate it,’ and that was standard for what I was doing. They told me there were two of them involved and that they were deep under the water, after entering the water doing roughly 100 miles an hour. There were a lot of people assembled on the wharf, at least 100 standing around just looking in amazement at the water, including several local policemen.

Considering he had spent his career up to that point debunking such reports and had been very good at it, French didn’t really expect to see much. Yet, when he looked out across the relatively clear waters, he said he could notice that there was definitely something weird going on. There under the surface about 20 feet from shore he says he could see two disc-shaped craft about 18 feet in diameter and approximately 3 feet thick, both of which seemed to just be hovering there as the gawking bystanders watched on in bafflement. In addition to the two objects, he also says that he then noticed that there were two diminutive humanoid beings also there in that frigid water, who seemed to be in the process of trying to repair the downed craft. French would say of these creatures and the scene playing out before him:

They were about 2 or 3 feet tall, light grey in color, very thin, long arms with either two or three fingers. The top of their heads was much wider than their jaw line, their eyes were very slanted and you couldn’t see pupils in them. They looked the way [aliens] have been depicted in motion pictures. The first thing I saw was the UFOs, and it was apparent to me that they were doing something to the craft, and I couldn’t really tell what because they were on the bottom side of it and not visible to me except when they would occasionally get over to the side where I could see them. The water was fairly clear and I could see without any trouble. They weren’t down at the bottom of the [seabed] — they were about half way down.

When it hit the [surface], it was going about 100 miles an hour. It then accelerated to somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 to 3,000 miles an hour and disappeared. It returned about 20 minutes later, slowed down to nearly a stop before it entered the water, then went down, and the two [beings] worked together. It took them about 20 minutes and then the two ships departed together, again slow when they exited the water, and immediately they sped up to a very high speed. I believe they were repairing [the ship] and tested that the repairs had been adequate, and then away they went.

He says that despite what he saw he would keep it to himself and even tried to downplay the whole even that he himself had witnessed. According to him, he used evasive terminology and sort of brushed it off, even though he knows what he saw, and he says of what he was told to tell the public:

If someone had a UFO sighting, I and another agent would try to come up with some logical explanation for this strange aerial appearance. We gave our analysis and tried to debunk [sightings] by saying it was swamp fog or that the thing they saw was actually hanging on wires. Needless to say, it was a fictitious report, as all of them were. I didn’t really say that they were UFOs — I said that there was something we didn’t know — some type of foreign or unrecognizable vehicle there. In other words, I weasel-worded it. But Oh, I think without a doubt it (the Newfoundland object) was a UFO and I think there were aliens aboard it. There’s no question in my mind that was exactly what it was, and my duty was to debunk the story, so I did my best to do so.

Venus

Is any of this for real? It must be noted that French has a bit of a history of making bold UFO claims. He is also on the record as claiming that the famed 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, was actually way weirder than even most people think. According to him, there was not one alien spacecraft crash, but two, with one apparently shot down by a U.S. plane using experimental technology a few days after the first crash. French has said of this to the Huffington Post:

There were actually two crashes at Roswell, which most people don’t know The first one was shot down by an experimental US airplane that was flying out of White Sands… and it shot what was effectively an electronic pulse-type weapon that disabled and took away all the controls of the UFO, and that’s why it crashed. When they hit it with that electromagnetic pulse– bingo!– there goes all their electronics and, consequently, the UFO was uncontrollable. It was within a few miles of where the original crash was. We think that the reason they were in there… was to try and recover parts and any survivors of the first crash. I’m [referring to] the people from outer space– the guys whose UFO it was. It had inscriptions on it that looked like it was in an Arabic language– it was like a part number on each one of them.

Of course, the Roswell crash is famous for having been explained away as a downed weather balloon after the military backtracked from initially stating that it was a crashed disc, but it has been debated and picked apart ad nauseum ever since. How does French’s own testimony on all of this fit in, if at all? Is he telling the truth or is this just another delusional supposed witness coming forward with tall tales and fictitious ramblings? It certainly seems that his credentials are impressive so what are we to think of all of this? Why would someone go from a professional skeptic and debunker to a believer unless there was a very good reason? Is he the real deal or a loon? Whatever side of the fence you fall on and whatever one may think, it certainly is at the very least a very strange and wild ride.

The U.S. military establishment has finally publicly admitted that the infamous Tic-Tac UFO videos are real and the objects in them are unidentified. Do you believe them? Do you think the Pentagon has much more information about these flying objects that hasn’t been released? Of course it does … and most likely so does the Japanese military, which nonetheless has formally requested more data on them from the Pentagon. Will the Pentagon release all of it to Japan? Any of it? Should it?

“No SDF [Self-Defence Force] pilot has encountered a UFO. The videos have come from the US Defence Department so I would like to hear their analysis. I don’t really believe in UFOs. We would like to establish procedures in the event an encounter takes place with a UFO.”

South China Morning Post reports that Japan’s Defence Minister Taro Kono has appealed to the U.S. Defense Department for more info on UFOs which he himself doesn’t believe in. He also claims that no Japanese military pilot has ever encountered a UFO (more on the claim later) but, being a good Defense minister, he wants to develop a protocol so that they are prepared if that day ever happens. Or has it already happened, and this feigned disbelief is merely a cover-up?

“One of the people I have interviewed is Mamoru Sato, who was a wing commander in the Air Self-Defence Force, and who collected testimony from a number of military pilots who had interacted with UFOs. Those reports were met with ridicule and the authorities refused to take him seriously.”

Greg Sullivan, director of the Japan Centre for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, told the South China Morning Post of sightings by Japanese military pilots of a “flying saucer” at close range, a series of highly reflective craft moving at speeds beyond a conventional aircraft and others. Japan’s government has publicly denied the existence of UFOs before. Of course, ridicule and censorship of military pilots reporting UFOs is nothing new – U.S. pilots attest to this and have expressed relief and admiration for the pilots who admitted in public their sightings in the Tic-Tac incidents. However, the denial and cover-ups in Japan seem to extend beyond the military.

In 1994, the flying-saucer-shaped Cosmo Isle Hakui Space and UFO Museum was set to open in Japan with over 10,000 official documents relating to UFO phenomena gathered from multiple countries that would be available to researchers and to the general public. After an FBI investigation, the museum mysteriously switched to just offering memorabilia from space missions. And Japans’ former Prime Minister of Yukio Hatoyama (2009-2010) has intimate knowledge of one particular UFO encounter – that of his wife, Miyuki Hatoyama. In her book, Very Strange Things I’ve Encountered, she described her own UFO encounter in 1970.

“While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus… It was a very beautiful place, and it was very green.”

It’s a safe bet that both Japan and the U.S. know more about UFOs than either will admit to the public. Will they admit it to each other? In these days of fast-shifting alliances and increased military and space competition, that seems unlikely. Should they anyway? Knowledge is power, and the U.S. at the moment is struggling to maintain its place on top of the world power structure. If these are secret aircraft of a human enemy, keeping knowledge of them from further leaking could be considered crucial. Sharing secrets is a sign of trust – do the U.S. and Japan trust each other anymore?

On the other hand, if the Tic-Tacs are hostile alien crafts, wouldn’t an alliance against them be better than going it alone? If they’re not hostile, the U.S. would probably want to be the first to announce them just for the publicity, and giving the knowledge even to an ally runs the risk of leaking.

Bottom line? Japan probably knows about them already and this is just a front by both powers to keep the public at bay. Given the choice — and the fact that the world is getting stir-crazy from the coronavirus lockdowns – most people would probably opt for joining Miyuki Hatoyama on a triangular-shaped UFO to Venus.

Did she say ‘triangle-shaped’? Hmmm.

No, our smaller satellite is not laughing at its big brother – then again, would you blame it if it did? Nor is it dead – in fact, it’s alive enough that cracks and ridges are forming and new rocks are showing up on its surface. There’s not a whole lotta shaking going on but it’s enough that scientists now believe that moonquakes are not just caused by long-term cooling and shrinkage but by tectonic plates still moving because of a massive event billions of years ago. Apparently, the Moon never forgets what is done to it. Anything you want to confess, Buzz Aldrin?

“New observations of wrinkle ridges on the nearside maria of the Moon display signs of ongoing ridge modification.”

In a press release announcing their new paper published in the journal Geology, co-authors Peter Schultz, a professor in Brown University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, and Adomas Valantinas, a graduate student at the University of Bern and a visiting scholar at Brown, reveal what made them think the Moon is not dead – ridges covered with “freshly exposed boulders.” Schulz was using data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to study strange bare spots in the large dark patches on the Moon’s nearside – strange because just about all of the lunar surface is covered with ground-u-p rock (regolith) created by a constant bombardment of micro-meteorites due to its lack of an atmosphere.

“Exposed blocks on the surface have a relatively short lifetime because the regolith buildup is happening constantly. So when we see them, there needs to be some explanation for how and why they were exposed in certain locations.”

Not only were they exposed now, Valantinas and Schultz used data from NASA’s 2014 GRAIL mission and found the same cracks – meaning something was continuously forcing them open. (Photos of the cracks here.) To Schulz, the only explanation was “an ongoing process driven by things happening in the Moon’s interior” – but what were the ‘things’? They called this an Active Nearside Tectonic System and went looking for a cause.

The full moon as seen from the Earth, with the Ocean of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum) border structures superimposed in red. Scientists now think this huge feature on the moon was formed by lunar lava early in the moon's formation, and not a cataclysmic impact. New research shows that there could could be active tectonic systems on the moon today.

(Image: © Kopernik Observatory/NASA/Colorado School of Mines/MIT/JPL/Goddard Space Flight Center)

Infrared (upper left) and other images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show spots on the moon with ridges and no regolith. These observations could be evidence that there is active tectonic activity on the moon today.  (Image credit: NASA)

“We propose that this active nearside tectonic system (ANTS) reflects ongoing reactivation of an ancient system related to offset antipodal effects from the South Pole–Aitken basin.”

They found it on the Moon’s far side – a crater called the South Pole–Aitken basin. Schultz thinks this 1500-mile was formed 4.3 billion years ago by a massive impact – a space-rock smash which shattered that side of the Moon all the way to the interior on the other side … to the spot where the ridges are still moving 4.3 billion years later. That’s some long memory.

OK, this is interesting … but is it a big deal? Schulz thinks it is because it points out that the Moon still holds secrets we haven’t discovered. Are they enough to increase interest – and funding – in more lunar missions? That’s probably won’t happen until there’s a whole lot more shaking going on. Or the Man in the Moon cracks up.

That’s not funny

One of the things I highlight in my new book, The Rendlesham Forest UFO Conspiracy, is the fact that the events of December 1980 in those woods were not alone. Several such experiments were undertaken in the U.K.  The following incident – one of at least five – which is very similar to the collective Rendlesham Forest events, occurred in the early 1990s at yet another military base in Suffolk, England. On this occasion it was RAF Lakenheath. As Militarybases.com state of the base: “Royal Air Force Lakenheath is a RAF military base that is run and operated by the U.S. Air Force. It exclusively hosts American troops. It is located in Suffolk, in the eastern part of the United Kingdom…The installation is a co-base run by the Americans under the British regulations and laws…It was activated on site in 1952 and represents one of the longest lasting units in the Air Force, serving in the area for almost 60 years. The wing counts almost 8000 individuals. About 2000 of them are British civilians and family members, while almost 6000 are active military troops.”

Jets at RAF Lakenheath

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The original source of the story was a UFO researcher named Roy Wilkinson. He shared it, in the late-1990s, with Matthew Williams. The latter is someone who, for a number of years, was a Criminal Investigator with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. Today, it is called HM Revenue and Customs. Williams told me that it was late one night, during the course of military operations in Suffolk woods, when something very strange happened. Over to Williams: “A report came through that on one particular night those on maneuvers should expect to see something being tested in the area; and when the testing was taking place, they were to ignore it: pretend it’s not there and carry as normal.” Quite understandably, as Williams says: “They found this a bit hard to do, because when this thing came along, it was actually a ball of light and was too small to be manned – so it had to be a remote drone of some kind, they thought. But, it was pure light, no mechanics, no rockets, no noise, which makes me think it wasn’t a drone. And this thing moved silently above the area where they were on maneuvers – off the base and in the woods.”

Back to Williams: “Then, the light increased in intensity and illuminated the whole area like a flare would. Everyone stopped what they were doing, and just broke their orders. They watched this thing for a minute or so, and then it diminished in size and went off at a high speed into the distance. Everyone was talking about this and, really, it unnerved them to a certain degree. The whole evening’s events were then called off, because everything was in such a state of disarray. If the military experimented with things which could be perceived to be UFOs, i.e., balls of light, then – because of their knowledge that the event was going to happen – they would have to have those UFOs stored somewhere near.”

Both tellingly and suspiciously, the very next day several of the personnel involved were extensively questioned by senior officers. Those senior officers wanted to know what the witnesses thought of the incident: did they believe the statement that something had been “tested” in the skies over Suffolk? Or did they distrust their senior officers, and think it was really a UFO that was encountered? Could it have been an alien spacecraft? Did anyone have strange dreams after returning to their base and falling asleep after dawn? What was it that caused them to go against their orders? Was the whole thing too fantastic and panic-inducing to prevent the men from operating in the ways expected of the military? These were fascinating – almost bizarre – questions. They were also questions that suggested the senior officers in charge of the operation were very keen to see what the effects were on the men who were exposed to the phenomenon. With a fair degree of hindsight, we can say that the Lakenheath incident was a perfectly orchestrated operation designed to see just how far and wide the human mind could be tampered with – and using unwitting military personnel as the targeted individuals. Just like the Rendlesham Forest affair.