Astronomers have discovered the first ever evidence that a river once flowed for over 100,000 years on Mars. Researchers from the University of Utrecht were analyzing high-resolution images taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter when they found proof of a major river.

They found evidence that the river was quite deep and fast-flowing by analyzing the marks on exposed cliff faces that are over 650 feet in height. Additionally, the river would have flowed continuously throughout year. This new evidence proves that approximately 3.7 billion years ago, the Red Planet would have had an atmosphere stable enough to support large quantities of liquid water and even capable of supporting life.

“Such perennially flowing rivers would require an environment capable of maintaining large volumes of water for extensive time-periods, and almost certainly necessitated a precipitation-driven hydrological cycle,” explained lead researcher Dr. Francesco Salese, adding, “More in line with slower climatic change, and less in line with catastrophic hydrologic events.” “This kind of evidence, of a long-lived watery landscape, is crucial in our search for ancient life on the planet.”

They think that the river was continuously shifting therefore making sandbanks that are close to the ones found in the Rhine as well as additional rivers that are located in the northern part of Italy.

The huge cliff face is situated in the northwestern rim of the Hellas Basin in the southern hemisphere of the planet in a place that’s called Izola Mensa. Researchers were able to study tons of detail located on the soft sedimentary rocks and noticed that the marks were the same as those found here on our planet when water flows along rocks for an extended period of time. Pictures can be seen here.

Hellas Basin on Mars

ESA has named the ancient valley system ‘Nirgal Vallis’, and predicts that it’s between 3.5 and 4 billion years old 

(Image: ESA)

Unfortunately, they weren’t able to determine the length of the river. Salese explained this further by stating, “The extremely high resolution imagery allowed us to “read” the rocks as if you are standing very close to the cliff,” adding, “Unfortunately we don’t have the ability to climb, to look at the finer-scale details, but the striking similarities to sedimentary rocks on Earth leaves very little to the imagination.” Their study was published in the journal Nature Communications and can be read in full here.

Hopefully this new technology can aid scientists in examining even more planets. “Now we have the technology to extend this methodology to another terrestrial planet, Mars, which hosts an ancient sedimentary rock record which extends even further back in time than our own,” noted William McMahon who is a geologist at Utrecht University.

Salese added that NASA’s Perseverance rover is scheduled to fly by the Red Planet in July or August of this year and it will explore other similar rock deposits located in different parts of the planet.

In his excellent catalogue, “MIB Encounters,” Gareth Medway includes a story that suggests the Men in Black might be nothing less than biological robots. Before we get to the matter of the MIB being something far removed from the human race, let’s take a look at biological robots in today’s world of science. On January 13 of this year, the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper ran an article titled “Scientists use stem cells from frogs to build first living robots.” In part, the article stated: “Researchers in the US have created the first living machines by assembling cells from African clawed frogs into tiny robots that move around under their own steam. One of the most successful creations has two stumpy legs that propel it along on its ‘chest’. Another has a hole in the middle that researchers turned into a pouch so it could shimmy around with miniature payloads. ‘These are entirely new lifeforms. They have never before existed on Earth,’ said Michael Levin, the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. ‘They are living, programmable organisms.'”

Do the Men in Black fall into the category of those “programmable organisms”? Let’s have a look at what we know about the MIB. We’ll begin with that aforementioned story that Gareth Medway highlights. It reads as follows: “The Christiansen family of Wildwood, New Jersey, who had seen a UFO on 22 November 1966, were interviewed by ‘the strangest looking man I’ve ever seen,’ wearing a thin black coat, who introduced himself as ‘Tiny’ from the ‘Missing Heirs Bureau.’ He spoke in a high, ‘tinny’ voice, in clipped words and phrases like a computer, ‘as if he were reciting everything from memory.’ His black trousers were too short, and ‘they could see a long thick green wire attached to the inside of his leg, it came up out of his socks and disappeared under his trousers.’ John Keel commented that he had not heard of this feature in other MIB cases: ‘Was Tiny wearing electric socks? Or was he a wired android operated by remote control?’ He departed in a black 1963 Cadillac.”

Now, to the theme of this article. First and foremost, the MIB are nothing like Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. The MIB-themed movies were good fun. They still are. But, by presenting the Men in Black as the employees of a secret organization that wipes out dangerous aliens, the assumption is they are human. They are not. There are so many weird issues surrounding the real MIB phenomena. Those same issues strongly suggest the Men in Black are something else entirely. Over the years I have addressed more than a few different theories for what the MIB might be. The list includes time-travelers, Tulpas/thought-forms, demons, extraterrestrials, inter-dimensional creatures, and more. But, let’s stay focused on that biological robot angle.

The fact is that the MIB do seem to act in a strange and robotic fashion. There is the matter of their skin. More than a few people who have been confronted by the Men in Black close-up have noticed something very strange. Eerie, in fact. In many cases, their faces appear to be plastic-like. Not unlike a nightmarish, hideous mannequin. Or a creepy old doll come to life.  Moving on, Gareth Medway notes that the MIB talk in a very odd way. He mentioned they seem to recite “everything from memory.” I have several such cases in my files. In one case, the witness said the MIB appeared to have no actual understanding of what he/it was saying. The wording, the witness suspected, was programmed. On top of that, there’s the matter of the somewhat clumsy, jerky fashion of walking that the MIB have. Certainly, this is not described in every case, but there are more than a few such reports. Finally, there is the angle of food. Or, rather, from the perspective of the Men in Black, a distinct lack of food. That’s right: the MIB have a distinct aversion to food. They don’t even seem to know what food is. Perhaps, if the MIB are biological robots, they get their sustenance in a distinctly different way to us. None of this proves that the MIB are biological robots. But, specifically as an extremely controversial theory, it’s not a bad one.

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.