Football, or soccer to most North Americans, is perhaps to the surprise of many in the United States one of the most beloved and popular sports in the world. It is a game that has attracted much fanfare, heated rivalries, and is rabidly followed by millions of people from all corners of the globe. It is a very big sport, but is it possible that it is loved just as much by forces from beyond our understanding? Here we will look at the time a group of UFOs showed up at a game and caused quite a stir.

It was October 27, 1954, and an excited crowd of approximately 10,000 people was gathered at the famed Stadio Artemio Franchi stadium in Florence, Italy. Since opening in 1931, the stadium had been host to many momentous events throughout its history, including such historic football games as the World Cup quarter-final in 1934, the Spaghetti Bowl during World War II, and the football preliminaries for the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, and on this day it was the venue for an important match between the Fiorentina club and its neighborhood rivals, the Pistoiese club. It was a characteristically heated match, and the fans were going nuts, roaring in support of their respective teams, but then something very strange happened, indeed.

Stadio Artemio Franchi

Just after halftime, with the home team ahead 6-2, the teams began playing again, but all at once the crowd went eerily quiet, the cheers and shouts dying down as the players paused and the ball rolled to a stop. All eyes were on the sky above, where a large, cigar shaped shaped object was flying about before stopping to hover there above the stadium, where by some accounts it was joined by several others. The objects moved fast and then just stopped there overhead with inscrutable purpose as the normally noisy stadium was enveloped in complete silence, the puzzled audience and players staring upward in awe. One of the witnesses would later say of the spectacle:

I remember clearly seeing this incredible sight. We were astonished we had never seen anything like it before. We were absolutely shocked. They were moving very fast and then they just stopped. It all lasted a couple of minutes. I would like to describe them as being like Cuban cigars. They just reminded me of Cuban cigars, in the way they looked. I think they were extra-terrestrial. That’s what I believe, and there’s no other explanation I can give myself.

The UFOs allegedly eerily hovered there for around 10 minutes, before suddenly ejecting some sort of silky, glittery substance into the air and then speeding off at high speeds. This gossamer substance then slowly drifted down over the stadium and covered the area. Oddly, whatever the material was, it then reportedly proceeded to sort of just evaporate and totally disintegrate upon contact, leaving behind no trace. Roberto Pinotti, the president of Italy’s National UFO Centre, would explain that this was what is often called “Angel Hair” in UFO circles, and is a type of cobweb-like substance that is sometimes reported in conjunction with UFO sightings. He explains of this:

At the time the newspapers spoke of aliens from Mars. Of course, now we know that is not so – but we may conclude that it was an intelligent phenomenon, a technological phenomenon and a phenomenon that cannot be linked with anything we know on Earth. It is a fact that at the same time the UFOs were seen over Florence there was a strange, sticky substance falling from above. In English we call this ‘angel hair’. The only problem is after a short period of time it disintegrates. No-one knows what this strange substance has to do with UFOs.

One journalist by the name of Giorgio Batini, with the Florentine newspaper La Nazione, was determined to get a sample of whatever this strange material was, and he was apparently successful when he found some trees near the stadium covered with the stuff. He was carefully able to collect some specimens and had them sent to the Institute of Chemical Analysis at the University of Florence. It was found that the substance contained boron, silicon, calcium and magnesium, but this was about all that could be discerned as the substance ended up just sort of evaporating away in short order. Some skeptics have pointed out that perhaps this is not a spider-web like material, but actual literal spider webs, spun by large gatherings of spiders. One astronomer James McGaha has said of this:

When I looked at this case originally, I thought perhaps it was a fireball, a very bright meteor breaking up in the atmosphere. They can be cigar-shaped with pieces breaking off. But it became fairly apparent that this was actually caused by young spiders spinning webs, very, very thin webs. The spiders use these webs as sails and they link together and you get a big glob of this stuff in the sky and the spiders ride on this to move between locations. They just fly on the wind and these things have been recorded at 14,000 feet above the ground. So, when the sunlight glistens off this, you get all kinds of visual effects. As some of this stuff breaks off and falls to the ground, this all seems magical of course. But I’m fairly confident that’s what happened that day.

Of course, the spider theory has its problems. For instance, how does that explain the giant, cigar shaped UFOs that thousands of people witnessed over the stadium and also in the surrounding countryside? Then there is the chemical composition that was found in the samples that were brought in, which contained elements not found in spider silk, such as boron and silicon. Many of the witnesses also insist that it could not have been spiders and that the fluffy material was disgorged by those fast flying craft. Some things with the spider idea just don’t seem to fit, and the UFOlogist, Pinotti, does not mince words when he says, “Of course I know about the migrating spiders hypothesis – it’s pure nonsense. It’s an old story and also a stupid story.” Whatever was going on here, the people who were there insist that this was UFOs, and it makes one wonder why they were there and what that material could have possibly been. Were they here to watch humanity and study a large group setting? Were they attracted by the noise? Or do they, like many around the world, just like a good old football match?

VIDEOS, selected by peter2011

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union launched the Phobos program to study and explore the two moons of the planet Mars, Phobos and Deimos. The unmanned probe called the Phobos 2 was one of two such probes, which were equipped with loads of some of the most state of the art instruments and equipment available, as well as two small landers that were to be deployed to the surface of Phobos. The two moons were already considered two of the most enigmatic objects in the solar system, with the famed author and scientist Dr. Carl Sagan once musing that the acceleration of Phobos didn’t make sense and that it must actually be hollow, and this mission was to be the first good look Earthlings had ever gotten. Unfortunately, some very weird events would make sure that all did not go according to plan, and so would begin the tale of a probe possibly destroyed by aliens.

The mission actually started off very smoothly and with much promise. Phobos 1 was launched on July 7, 1988 and Phobos 2 on July 12, 1988. Although a malfunction took Phobos 1 out of the picture in September of 1988 while still in transit, the Phobos 2 operated perfectly for the entire trip all the way to Mars, collecting data along the way, and inserted itself into orbit around the planet on January 29, 1989. It was here where it began to experience problems, with two of its three onboard computer systems experiencing malfunctions, yet after taking numerous photos of the Martian surface it nevertheless soldiered on towards its final destination, which was the moon Phobos. It did manage to approach the moon and carried out three successful preliminary encounters with Phobos, taking 37 high quality images of the moon’s surface before things got strange. On March 28, 1989, the Phobos 2, which had been performing admirably despite its computer issues, just abruptly and without explanation stopped working, right as it was synching into a permanent orbit around the moon.

This might have been chalked up to a mere system malfunction, but it gets a bit weirder when looking at some of the evidence surrounding it. First of all were some of the photographs set back by the probe in the time leading up to its demise, which were seen as very curious, indeed. In one of these images, indeed the probe’s last image just before contact was lost, during a time in which it was aligning itself to the orbit of Phobos, there can be seen what appears to be a long, spindle shaped or cylindrical object estimated as measuring around 20 kilometers long and 1.5 kilometers wide, and which appears to be somewhere in the atmosphere between the probe and the surface of Mars. Although it might be easy to write it off as an optical illusion or shadow, the structure was photographed on two different color cameras from slightly differing angles, and it also turns up in the infrared footage. At the time, even the chairman of the Soviet equivalent of NASA, said of the photo, “One image appears to include an odd-shaped object between the spacecraft and Mars.”

Adding to the mystery were other photos taken earlier by the probe, which seemed to show strange rectangular forms on the surface of Mars, and making it even more mysterious still would be that it was later stated by the Kaliningrad control center and reported in the October 19, 1989 issue of Nature Magazine that an investigation into the death of the Phobos 2 had concluded that the probe had been spinning wildly after its final transmission, almost as if it had been impacted by something. You can perhaps see where this is going. The idea among some in the UFO community is that this probe had stumbled across something it was not supposed to see, and that it was either struck by the object in the picture, which has been called a “mothership,” or shot down by it. It certainly doesn’t help that the Soviets were loathe to release the images in the first place, long refusing to show these frames to the public, with most of this being leaked to the West by a Russian astronaut and pilot by the name of Colonel Dr. Marina Popovich, causing whispers of a cover-up.

The mysterious image of the “mothership”

The images and their close proximity to the loss of the Phobos 2 probe have managed to generate discussion ever since. It has been suggested that the cylindrical object is nothing more than a shadow of Phobos the moon and that the end of transmissions from the probe is merely a coincidence, but others have pointed out that the outline appears to be too distinct and the shape not consistent to the shadow of the moon, which has actually been photographed before. The more fringe idea is that there is something out there that does not appreciate our snooping around, and indeed there have been an oddly high number of such Mars probes and missions that have experienced difficulties or been lost. One more recent high-profile case was NASA’s 1992 Mars Observer mission, which was meant to undertake a 2-year mapping of the planet’s surface, but which was suddenly lost in August of 1993 to disappear without a trace. There has been so much trouble in studying Mars that of course there are some who speculate that perhaps there is something out there that does not want us there.

It is hard to know just what is going on here. Is this all just misidentification mixed with coincidence? What really happened to the Phobos 2 probe? Was this just a technical glitch, as they’d like everyone to believe, or something far stranger? What do those photos really show? Mars has definitely become ground zero for a wide variety of mysterious images from both its surface and above, and this certainly adds to the pile of strangeness associated with the Red Planet.

“There are hints of a novel object (“Planet 9″) with a mass 5−10 M in the outer Solar System, at a distance of order 500 [astronomical units].”

Thus begins a new paper by a renowned theoretical physicist who believes the “hints” of Planet 9 can be found and identified using spacecraft currently under development. He himself hints that this “Planet 9” may not be a planet at all, but something even more theoretical and “exotic.” More exotic? Like a planet of prehistoric women?

“Searches for this object are in progress. On the other hand, it has been suggested that Planet 9 might really be a primordial black hole (PBH) or other exotic compact object.”

In a new paper published in arxiv.org but not yet peer-reviewed, Ed Witten, a theoretical physicist at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, proposes that where there’s hints of smoke, there’s likely hints of fire, but not necessarily of the planetary kind. Witten certainly has the creds to present this kind of theory – he’s worked on the mathematics of quantum field theory and developed string theory’s unifying “M-theory” which proposes 11 dimensions (9 space dimensions, 1 time dimension, 1 energy dimension) and is the closest thing so far to a “Theory of Everything,” even though no experimental support for it exist.

Witten stays in theoretical mode by proposing that Planet 9 might be a primordial black hole – hypothetical black holes thought to have formed shortly after the Big Bang, meaning they aren’t collapsed stars like conventional black holes. If Planet 9 is a black hole in our solar system (a scary thought), it can’t be seen with conventional telescopes. Fortunately, Witten proposes a soon-to-be-conventional alternative.

“A possible alternative is to probe the gravitational field of this object using small, laser-launched spacecraft, like the ones envisioned in the Breakthrough Starshot project.”

Breakthrough Starshot is the project – founded by Yuri Milner, Stephen Hawking, and Mark Zuckerberg – to build a fleet of tiny light sail spacecraft that would be pushed by lasers at speeds approaching 20% of the speed of light to distant locations. A trip to the Alpha Centauri star system 4.37 light-years away would thus take 20+ years, but one to the edge of the solar system where this Planet 9 or Primordial Black Hole 1 might live would take far less time.

According to LiveScience, each craft would contain just an atomic clock and a radio transmitter. That simple pairing would tell Earth researchers when the craft was affected by the gravity of a large space object, where it is and, depending on the force, whether it’s a planet, a prmoridal black hole or something more exotic. A planet of prehistoric women?

“Think “quark nugget.””

The unimaginative LiveScience proposes a quark nugget (or strangelet), which is a theoretical object composed of approximately equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks. Whatever the “hint of a novel object” might be, Witten’s proposal is a good news/bad news idea. Tiny light sails are low cost, but their completion, deployment and arrival are still decades away – far too long for those who want their Planet 9 questions answered now.

For those people, I suggest passing the time with viewings of “Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women,” a 1968 sci-fi film directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starring the lovely Mamie Van Doren as Moana, a prehistoric woman living on Venus. Not exactly string theory or even string bikinis, but a fun romp based on a Roger Corman film.