Does the Russian space program know something (or some things) that NASA doesn’t? If recent interviews with cosmonauts are any indication, that answer is a resounding “Da!” – especially if the subject is the existence of life on other planets. First, cosmonaut Ivan Vagner, at the time a crew member on the International Space Station, records five UFOs near the ISS and reports them on Twitter as nonchalantly as he might tweet a photo of his latest freeze-dried space meal. Next, Russian astrobiologists report the discovery of phosphine in the upper atmosphere of Venus – a strong indicator of the presence of life. This is followed by cosmonaut Sergei Kud-Sverchkov, in an interview discussing his preparation to becoming an ISS crew member, revealing that cosmonauts are trained on how to communicate with any space aliens they encounter.

And now, there’s this:

“Therefore, when the human being reaches Mars, then he will probably find some life, very similar to the Terran, but already more adapted to the conditions of Mars.”

Cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev

In an interview with Sputnik News, Oleg Artemyev explained why he believes humans will encounter life forms on Mars similar to those on Terra (Earth). Artemyev is an experienced cosmonaut – he’s spent 356 days in space as a flight engineer on Expeditions 39 and 40 to the International Space Station (including three spacewalks) and was the Commander of Soyuz MS-08. While it doesn’t appear he himself has encountered aliens in space or on Earth, Artemyev is confident that his counterparts will when they get to Mars. What makes him so certain?

“I believe that in fact there is already life on Mars and that it is very likely that we have already introduced it. Since all those vehicles, rovers and stations that reached Mars – however much we have processed, cleaned or quarantined them – still so in some hidden place they brought with them the simplest microorganisms.”

Oleg Artemyev is a realist – there’s no way any spaceship, no matter how well they’re sanitized on Earth, can leave the planet without microbes in and on it. The Soviet Union/Russia has been flying by or orbiting Mars since the 1960, landing on it with probes since 1971. The United States as gone further and put rovers on the planet since the 1990s, spreading the microbes around. The ISS missions have proven that microbes and tardigrades (those cute ‘water bear’ micro-animals can survive and thrive outside of the station. All Artemyev is doing is connecting some obvious dots and drawing a conclusion … when humans set foot on Mars, they stand a good chance for finding creatures from Earth living and possibly thriving there, albeit not in the form they had when they left due to the vastly different conditions on the Red Planet.

Is Oleg Artemyev right … or at least on the right track? The best argument against his reverse-panspermia theory is that Mars’ environment  and the trip there would be just too much to allow even a microbe to survive. That’s not much of an argument, considering the concern NASA, Roscosmos and other space programs have over cleaning their spacecrafts – especially after they return to Earth.

Here’s another question – if humans find the descendants of Earth life on Mars, will it be happy to see us? Beg us to take them home? Or will the message cartoonist Walt Kelly made famous in his Pogo comic strip reign true on Mars as it still does on Earth?

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

An Albuquerque, New Mexico physicist who died in 2003, Paul Bennewitz spent a significant amount of time digging into U.S. Air Force- and National Security Agency-based top secret projects which, from the late-seventies to the early-eighties, were housed at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. Bennewitz wrongly believed those projects were connected to the activities of sinister extraterrestrials. The aliens soared across the skies above Kirtland AFB by star-filled, moonlit nights, demonstrating their extraterrestrial invulnerability and power, Bennewitz concluded. It’s hardly surprising that, for years, Bennewitz was put under deep surveillance by the U.S. military and a numbers of intelligence services. He was, as a consequence of his digging, bombarded by the murky world of officialdom with a mass of disinformation and faked UFO-driven stories in order to divert him from his research. It worked. In fact, and to Bennewitz’s eternal cost, it worked just too damned well. By the mid-eighties, he was heading for complete mental disintegration.

The intelligence community cared not a bit that Bennewitz thought their secret operations were UFO-related – precisely because the UFO connection was one of Bennewitz’s very own making. There was, however, deep concern on the part of the world of officialdom that by digging into classified activities at Kirtland in search of UFOs, Bennewitz just might inadvertently reveal – to the spies of the Soviet Union, in a worst-case scenario – information and technology that had to be kept secret at all costs, even if those costs included Bennewitz’s own sanity and health. Which, ultimately, they did. And, so, a grim and undeniably bizarre plan was put into place. U.S. agents learned the essential parts of Bennewitz’s theories from the man himself, by actually breaking into his home while he was out and checking his files and research notes.

Bennewitz’s beliefs were astounding and controversial: aliens were mutilating cattle as part of some weird genetic experiment. The E.T.s were abducting American citizens and implanting them with small devices for purposes disturbingly unknown. Those same aliens were living deep underground in a secure fortress below the Archuleta Mesa at Dulce, New Mexico. And everyone was soon going to be in deep and dire trouble as a direct result of the presence of this brewing, intergalactic threat. So, the intelligence community gave Bennewitz precisely what he was looking for: confirmation that his theories were all true, and more. It’s important to note, though, that this was all just a carefully-planned ruse to bombard Bennewitz with so much faked UFO data in the hope that it would steer him away from the classified military projects of a specifically non-UFO nature that he had uncovered. And, sure enough, it all worked very well. For the government. Far less so for Bennewitz.

When Bennewitz received conformation (albeit carefully controlled and utterly fabricated confirmation) that, yes, he had stumbled upon the horrible truth and that, yes, there really was an alien base deep below Dulce, the actions of the Intelligence community had the desired effect: Bennewitz became increasingly paranoid and unstable, and he began looking away from Kirtland (the hub of the down-to-earth secrets of the NSA and the Air Force that had to be kept) and harmlessly towards the vicinity of Dulce, where his actions, research, and theories could be carefully controlled and manipulated by the government. At this time American Intelligence brought Bill Moore into the secret scheme and asked him to keep them informed of how well – from their perspective – the disinformation operations against Bennewitz were working. They worked all too well. Bennewitz had a breakdown, required treatment, and from then on pretty much walked away from the world of UFOs, aliens, cattle mutilations and the rest of the controversy. The plot to destabilize Bennewitz achieved its goal.

UFO encounters sometimes seem to happen all of the time, to people all over the place and from all walks of life. Yet the ones that really seem to capture our attention and imaginations are the ones that happen to well-known figures and celebrities. Indeed, in this culture of celebrity these cases tend to absolutely fascinate, and show us that it is not always some nobody out in the sticks who meets up with otherworldly forces. Here we will look at a selection of some very high profile actors and musicians who have allegedly had encounters with UFOs and aliens just as bizarre as anyone else’s.

A very famous actor who has actually garnered quite the reputation for being a complete UFO nut is Canadian actor Dan Aykroyd, of Ghostbusters fame. He’s apparently pretty hardcore into it, and Ackroyd is also known for being rather an expert on the subject. Not only is he intensely interested in the UFO phenomenon, but he has become a sort of champion of pressuring for full disclosure from the government on the truth of the phenomenon, and has just so happened to have had his own sightings on more than one occasion. In a 2015 episode of The HuffPost Show with host Marc Lamont Hill, the topic turned to the strange and he talked candidly about the U.S. Air Force’s UFO alleged cover-up and some details about his own personal UFO sightings. When asked if he truly believed in UFOs, Aykroyd answered:

I do, absolutely, and I’m not alone. I have seen four, and I can’t say that they are alien craft and neither can the Air Force. The Air Force has been very interested in this. They don’t deny the existence of these hyperdynamic, super aerodynamic craft. They don’t deny. Their anguish comes in that they can’t tell you. They want to tell you anything but that they are extraterrestrial. Any excuse at all, even if they are unknown or unsolved. The Air Force cannot just come out and admit that there are extraterrestrial beings far in advanced of our culture that have built these machines. They are very interested in what is going on, but like us, they don’t know. I believe that there are probably many species coming and going and that the Air Force is very interested, but they can’t come out and say. Because then you’re going to go, ‘well wait a minute, the parish priest, the cop on the street, the President — you don’t got the power. They’ve got the power!’ You’d have complete breakdown of society.

On the show, Aykroyd went on to give some further details into his own strange UFO sightings, saying:

Two specifically were definitely aerial constructs of some kind. One of them with a light, and one of them dull gray, and they were structures – one of them going very slow, one of them hovering over me. Then there were the two that my wife and friends and I saw – a high altitude sighting many years ago in Martha’s vineyard. Two flying side by side. They were at about 100,000 feet up, and they were going fast.

Dan Aykroyd

Aykroyd has also gone on and on about UFOs on his Facebook page, often referencing research and books and talking about his conspiratorial ideas about government cover-ups. He actively plugged the 2014 book The FBI-CIA-UFO Connection: The Hidden UFO Activities of USA Intelligence Agencies on his page, which goes over the vast research done on declassified documents by a physicist named Dr. Bruce Maccabee, who spent thirty-six years at the Naval Surface Warfare Center. Aykroyd would say in a Facebook post of the book:

Ex-Naval Surface Warfare employee and physicist Dr. Bruce Maccabee has assembled the most extensively and meticulously researched body of documentary evidence ever compiled on the U.S. government’s genuine interest in the UFO phenomena. The USAF has NEVER denied the existence of these super-performance aerodynamic vehicles. The Air Force’s continued anguish over PUBLIC disclosure is not due to the military’s genuinely admitted reality of these machines’ existence but due to the government’s struggle to categorize the phenomena as being ANYTHING but extra planetary in origin.

Another big name actor who has had his own experience is Russel Crowe, who while hanging out with a friend in the suburb of Woolloomooloo, in Sydney, not only saw a UFO, but claims to have actually filmed it. Apparently he and his friend were out watching and photographing fruit bats when they saw two mysterious crimson flashes or streaks floating across the sky. Never mind the mystery of why an A-list Hollywood star was out randomly taking pictures of fruit bats, what was this unidentified object he says he saw? Crowe captured images with his camera and put together a time lapse sequence that seems to show them flying across the sky, and he would later excitedly post the images to his Twitter account with the words “UFO? Time Lapse Photos Outside RC’s Woolloomooloo Office (THESE ARE REAL!)” He would insist that the photos were not due to camera flash or any sort of artifact on the lens or lens flare. A lot of people have been quick to point out that the images are inconclusive and it could all just be a publicity stunt, but Crowe has always alleged that the photos are of actual UFOs.

Russel Crowe

Actor Kurt Russel also had a bizarre encounter while piloting a small plane towards an airport in Phoenix, Arizona. As he approached, he claimed to see a triangular formation of lights not far from his plane. At the time he was with his son Oliver, and they both saw the strange phenomenon and at the time they did not realize what they were seeing. It would not be until years later that Russel was watching a program about UFOs and realized that his sighting had happened during the famous Phoenix Lights mass UFO sighting in 1997. In fact, it is even believed that Kurt Russel was one of the first pilots to call their sighting in. Russel has explained of that night:

We were on approach. I saw six lights over the airport in absolute uniform in a V shape. Oliver said to me – I was just looking at him, I was coming in, we’re maybe a half a mile out – and Oliver said, ‘Pa, what are those lights?’ Then I kind of came out of my reverie and I said, ‘I don’t know what they are,’” Russell recalled, “‘Are we okay here?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna call in,’ and I reported it.

A more obscure actor, at least in this day and age is the great Jackie Gleason, who outdoes these other reports in that he is rumored to have actually seen alien bodies. A lot of younger readers might not recognize the name, but in his day the comedian, actor, and writer Jackie Gleason (1916- 1987) was a legendary icon. Probably best known for his character Ralph Kramden in the hit television series The Honeymooners and his role as Sheriff Buford T. Justice in the Smokey and the Bandit series of films, Gleason had a long and storied career, appearing in countless movies and TV shows in the 1950s and 60s, including his own The Jackie Gleason Show, also launching a successful music career, and he was a very famous and well-known stalwart of the entertainment industry and a household name. Behind the scenes, though, he had an array of unconventional hobbies that many people did not really know about and which he tried as much as possible to keep out of the public eye.

Jackie Gleason

You see, Jackie Gleason was a complete an unrepentant paranormal and UFO geek. He spent hours reading about all areas of parapsychology, Forteana, aliens, and the unexplained, and obsessively collected books on such things, in particular UFOs. Indeed, he is widely known as having had one of the largest private collections of books on UFOs in the country, which would be donated to the University of Miami after his death. In the biography The Life and Legend of Jackie Gleason, author William A. Henry III explains of this intense interest and fascination thusly:

Jackie Gleason had a lifelong fascination with the supernatural. He would spend small fortunes on everything from financing psychic research to buying a sealed box said to contain actual ectoplasm, the spirit of life itself. He would contact everyone from back-alley charlatans to serious researchers like J.B. Rhine of Duke University and, disdaining the elitism of the scholarly apparatus, would treat them all much the same way. Gleason was a frequent insomniac. He would stay up high the night reading (or rereading) some of the hundreds of (UFO and paranormal phenomena) volumes in his library.

It was partly this interest that led to his friendship with former president Richard Nixon, who was also interested in UFOs. Gleason had also long supported Nixon’s campaigns and was a staunch Republican, and as Nixon had a vacation compound not far away from Gleason’s Florida home the two would strike up a friendship to become frequent golfing buddies, chattering about UFOs and other weird stuff the whole time. It was after one of these golf outings on February 19, 1973 that Nixon apparently showed up alone at Gleason’s door in the middle of the night and allegedly excitedly told Gleason to get dressed because he wanted to show him something, after which the comedian was taken to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida and guided by armed guards to a top-secret, highly secured remote installation. Things would purportedly get very strange from here.

Gleason was reportedly led into an underground area through sterile corridors and past several ominous laboratories, at one point passing a weird twisted metal mass encased in glass that Nixon told Gleason was the remains of a UFO. Gleason supposedly wasn’t sure what to think of this, and at first thought the president was just joking around, but he would soon find that this was no joke as he was led into a large chamber area where there were “six or eight of what looked like glass-topped Coke freezers.” Within each of these freezers was allegedly the mangled remains of tiny humanoid bodies, according to Gleason “only about two feet tall, with bald heads and disproportionately large ears.” These, he was told, were the remains of the occupants of a UFO that had crashed “nearby,” and to say it was shocking to the great comedian would be an understatement. It is unclear how much truth any of this holds, a it is mostly known from the memoirs of his jilted, vindictive ex-wife, but it is very odd and entertaining all the same.

The list of celebrity encounters with aliens and UFOs doesn’t stop at actors, and the music world is full of such stories. One of the famous and indeed most bonkers accounts comes from the former lead singer for Van Halen and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Sammy Hagar. According to him, back in the 1970s long before he was famous he had a very vivid dream in which he was apparently visited by two extraterrestrials who plugged him into a machine and tapped into his mind, reading his thoughts and at the same time downloading information into him. He apparently then began to wake up, which prompted the aliens to unplug the machine and shout some sort of cryptic numerical equations at him, after which he woke to hear a “POW” as the room turned white for a few moments. Although this all happened in a dream, Hagar was very quick to insist that it in fact was real, and that actual aliens had infiltrated his mind to go about their business within his dream. In an interview with MTV he would describe of the incident:

I was lying in bed one night dreaming. I saw a ship and two creatures inside of this ship. I couldn’t see their faces. I just knew that there were two intelligent creatures, sitting up in a craft in the Lytle Creek forest area about twelve miles away in the foothills above Fontana. And they were connected to me, tapped into my mind through some kind of mysterious wireless connection. It friggin’ happened. It was real. They were plugged into me. It was a download situation ..Aliens were plugged into me … Either a download or an upload. At the time, I didn’t know how to fucking explain it. But they were downloading or uploading – that’s the simplest way to put it. They were tapped into my brain and the knowledge was transferred back and forth. I could see them and everything while it was happening … Like an experiment: ‘Let’s see what this guy knows’.

Oh, I could see them – two guys on this little hillside. They were playing with a numerical code but it wasn’t from our numerical system. And then, suddenly, this telepathic connection broke. And I could actually see them go back to their ship in a beam of light – zap, like lightning. For a second there was an infinity of white. I couldn’t move. And then it was over. It scared me nearly to death. It was an experience I couldn’t understand. My ego was telling me: They’re programmed you to be a rock star! So I used it as a tool to write songs about outer space and the future, songs like Crack In The World and Silver Lights, which is about the second coming of Christ – Jesus coming back in a spaceship.

Sammy Hagar

Pretty wild to say the least. Just as well-known and also with his own completely bizarre story is the legendary John Lennon, who once told his friend, magician Uri Gellar, a rather astounding tale. Lennon told him that as he was lying in his bed one day he had noticed a bright light seeping through the cracks of the door to the room, and when he got up to see what was going on it had gotten very weird very quickly. He told Gellar that the door opened and into the room stepped four “bug-like” aliens that then used some sort of telepathic power to push him back and then left behind a strange egg-like device. According to Gellar, Lennon would purportedly excitedly tell him:

About six months ago, I was asleep in my bed, with Yoko, at home, in the Dakota Building. And suddenly, I wasn’t asleep. Because there was this blazing light round the door. It was shining through the cracks and the keyhole, like someone was out there with searchlights, or the apartment was on fire. That was what I thought — intruders, or fire. I leapt out of bed, and Yoko wasn’t awake at all, she was lying there like a stone, and I pulled open the door. There were these four people out there. Well they didn’t want my f—in’ autograph. They were, like, little. Bug-like. Big bug eyes and little bug mouths and they were scuttling at me like roaches.”

I’ve told this to two other people, right? One was Yoko, and she believes me. She says she doesn’t understand it, but she knows I wouldn’t lie to her. I told one other person, and she didn’t believe me. She laughed it off, and then she said I must have been high. Well, I’ve been high, I mean right out of it, a lot of times, and I never saw anything on acid that was as weird as those f—in’ bugs, man. I was straight that night. I wasn’t dreaming and I wasn’t tripping. There were these creatures, like people but not like people, in my apartment.

They did something. But I don’t know what it was. I tried to throw them out, but, when I took a step towards them, they kind of pushed me back. I mean, they didn’t touch me. It was like they just willed me. Pushed me with willpower and telepathy. I don’t know. Something happened. Don’t ask me what. Either I’ve forgotten, blocked it out, or they won’t let me remember. But after a while they weren’t there and I was just lying on the bed, next to Yoko, only I was on the covers. And she woke up and looked at me and asked what was wrong. I couldn’t tell her at first. But I had this thing in my hands. They gave it to me. I’ve been carrying it round ever since, wanting to ask somebody the same question. You have it. Maybe you’ll know. I’ve never seen anything like it. Keep it. It’s too weird for me. If it’s my ticket to another planet, I don’t want to go there.

At this point, Lennon allegedly produced from his pocket a small, metallic egg-like object and gave it to Gellar. It was supposedly completely smooth and with no markings or any sort of seams. Gellar supposedly still has it, and he has never quite figured out just what in the world it is. Joining the ranks of famous musicians who have seen aliens or UFOs is the legend David Bowie, who between having his demon-infested swimming pool exorcized and carrying talismans around to prevent witches from stealing his semen also saw his fair share of alien spacecraft. Apparently Bowie went through a phase in which he was dating a girl who would regularly bring him to meditation and UFO watching sessions, and during this time he apparently saw UFOs on many occasions. He reportedly once said of this

We did see UFOs – absolutely. I made sightings six, seven times a night for about a year when I was in the observatory. We had regular cruises that came over . . . they would be stationary for about half an hour, and then after verifying what they’d been doing that day, they’d shoot off.

David Bowie

Not as famous in the U.S., but practically a household name in England is the singer songwriter Robbie Williams, who has allegedly had scores of weird UFO experiences. He has sighted them on many occasions, and he has said of some of the weirder of these cases:

 I was at the Beverly Hills Hotel and I was lying on my sun lounger outside at night, looking up. Then, about 300 foot above me, there was this square thing which just passed over my head silently and then shot off. The next one was the weirdest one yet. I’d just written a song called Arizona, and it’s all about alien contact and I was playing that. I stood on the balcony and there was this big ball of gold light that turned up – we thought it was Venus or Mars or something. Then the song stops playing and it disappears. But then we put Arizona on again and the ball turned back up. It happened four times. After that a massive electrical storm started and these two big massive balls of light started dancing in the sky. It was like a whole light show for about an hour. It’s absolutely bonkers. Seriously, I want to go out and investigate these things. I’m stopping being a pop star and being a full-time ufologist.

These are all certainly spectacular accounts, made even more so by the fact that they have been given by some of the most famous and beloved stars of song and film. Whether any of it is true or the result of drugs and delusion is anyone’s guess, but it is all certainly odd and alluring to hear these mega-stars coming forth with their tales. At the very least it adds another layer to the already eccentric world of fame, and such stories serve to draw in curiosity and wonder.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

Over the years I’ve written a number of books on the Men in Black mystery. They are On the Trail of the Saucer Spies, The Real Men in Black, Men in Black, Women in Black, and The Black Diary. As a result of the fact that I write a lot on this strange subject, I occasionally get asked if government agencies ever take an interest in the MIB mystery. The answer is: yes, they do. Sometimes, it’s a deep interest, no less. For example, in the late 1950s the FBI wanted to see a copy of Gray Barker’s 1956 UFO/MIB-themed book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. It just happens to have been the very first book on the MIB subject ever published. The story goes as follows: On November 22, 1958, an inquiring citizen of Oklahoma City contacted J. Edgar Hoover about certain claims Barker had made, in his book, about the FBI and the MIB. The letter-writer said: “Recently many rumors have been printed in UFO periodicals, concerning reports that Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have discouraged certain saucer investigators, particularly Mr. Albert Bender of Bridgeport, Connecticut, from further research into the secret of these elusive discs. Since you are the Director of the FBI, I would like to know whether or not these reports are factual or whether they are just rumors.” Hoover’s response to the letter-writer was swift and right to the point: “I am instructing a Special Agent of our Oklahoma City Office to contact you concerning the matter you mentioned.” A note from Hoover to the special agent in charge at Oklahoma City added: “An agent of your office should contact [the letter writer] immediately and secure copies of or information concerning the periodicals described.”

Nick Redfern’s MIB-themed books (U.S. and overseas editions)

In a memorandum to Hoover dated December 9, 1958, the Oklahoma office of the FBI reported that the periodical in question was titled the Saucerian Bulletin and was published by Gray Barker (it was previously just called the Saucerian). The FBI further noted for Hoover’s attention that the Saucerian Bulletin reported that the three men responsible for silencing Albert Bender were from “the FBI, Air Force Intelligence, and the Central Intelligence Agency.” Director Hoover was far from happy with this – and that’s putting things mild. An FBI report of December 12 reads as follows: “Bender formed the International Flying Saucer Bureau in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1952 to look into the flying saucer mystery. In 1953 Bender allegedly stated that he knew what the saucers are. Then ‘three men in black suits’ silenced Bender to the extent that even today Bender will not discuss the matter of his ‘hush-up’ with anyone.” A month later, on January 22, 1959, Hoover was still on the trail of Barker, Bender and the Men in Black and wrote in a memorandum to one of his special agents: “The Bureau desires to obtain a copy of the book written by Gray Barker entitled They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. Reportedly, the book was published by University Books, Inc., Illinois. Contact this publishing house and if possible, obtain a copy of this book.”

Three weeks later, a copy of Barker’s book was in Hoover’s very own hands, as were all available copies of Bender’s Space Review. The FBI subsequently noted that its files contained “no information pertaining to the hush-up of Bender.” On the subject of Bender’s Space Review journal the FBI noted: “This magazine contains numerous articles and squibs concerning the sighting of flying saucers throughout the world. It does not appear to have any security significance.” Collectively, this all demonstrates that whoever Bender’s (and Barker’s) mysterious black-garbed visitors were, they were definitely not FBI agents, as Barker had suggested in They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. The FBI were as puzzled as everyone else. In other words, the real Men in Black remain as mysterious and elusive as they always have been.

A new style of rock art has been discovered in Australia by archaeologists. The art depicted the harmonious relationship between humans and animals in ancient times. This style of rock art has been named Maliwawa Figures in reference to the area in which the drawings were located.

These drawings have been referred to as the missing link in Aboriginal art between the realistic drawings of animals from around 12,000 years ago and the stick figure paintings from approximately 4,000 years ago (also called X-Ray art). It is believed that these newly discovered Maliwawa Figures date back between 6,000 and 9,400 years ago.

For the past 12 years, Paul Taçon and his team discovered 570 examples of Maliwawa Figures at 87 different sites within an 80-mile location in Arnhem Land which is an area of vast wilderness in the northern part of Australia that has rugged coastlines, rivers, remote islands, and waterfalls. It is just slightly less than 100,000 square kilometers (just under 39,000 square miles) which means that this incredible wilderness is larger than Hungary, Portugal, and Austria.

Arnhem Land

In an interview with BBC, Taçon, who is the Australian Research Council laureate fellow and Griffith University chair in rock art research as well as an author of the study, described the uniqueness of their discovery, “We came across some curious paintings that are unlike anything we’d seen before.”

The most significant aspect of the art is that it depicts such a great relationship between humans and animals. In fact, of the hundreds of drawings uncovered so far, only one showed a hunting scene. According to their paper, “Animal-human relationships appear to be central to the artists’ message.” “The artists are clearly communicating aspects of their cultural beliefs, with an emphasis on important animals and interactions between humans and other humans or animals.”

Interestingly, the majority of the Maliwawa Figures measure at least two and a half feet in height with some of them being life-size. While they were drawn with red outlines, several of them had some detailed work done inside of the lines which could indicate that more than one artist helped to create the art. The paper read in part, “It is even possible only a couple of artists made most of the paintings.” “We know… that individual rock art artists can produce a remarkable number of paintings in their lifetime.”

One of the animals depicted in the rock art was a dugong.

Some of the animals depicted in the drawings include bilbies which have never been seen before in any known Indigenous rock art. What’s even more interesting is that bilbies weren’t believed to have lived in Arnhem Land. At one point they inhabited about 70% of Australia but not in that specific northern area, although since the rock art depicted the animal, it’s very possible that they did live in Arnhem Land at one point in time.

Another interesting figure was of a dugong which is the oldest-known drawing of the marine mammal. Several pictures of the rock art can be seen here.

Scene of two male Maliwawas with ball headdresses reaching down to a shorter indeterminate human figure with a snake behind the male on the right and behind the left male a female and a macropod, Namunidjbuk.

Photo by Paul Taçon.

Digital tracing of panel of three bilby-like animals, Awunbarna.

Image by Fiona Brady.

Maliwawa dugong above and to the left of a small Maliwawa macropod, Namunidjbuk.

Photo by Paul Taçon.

Large male Maliwawa human figures from an Awunbarna site.

Photo by Paul Taçon.

Large male Maliwawa human figures from an Awunbarna site.

Photo by Paul Taçon.

Maliwawa macropod, Namunidjbuk.

Photo by Paul Taçon.

• Their paper was published in the journal Australian Archaeology and can be read in full here.

A couple of days ago I wrote an article here at Mysterious Universe on the FBI’s file on the late ufologist Stanton Friedman, which the FBI has now uploaded to its website, The Vault. As I noted in that same article, the file contains almost nothing on Stan’s UFO-based writings and/or research. Indeed, there’s no evidence that the FBI took any kind of specifically significant interest in Stan. Most of the file is on other, fairly mundane issues. With that said, I thought today I would show you a few more examples of other people in Ufology who had files opened on them, but who were watched for reasons far beyond UFOs. The Freedom of Information Acts of the United States and Australia have both allowed for the declassification of significant files on people in Ufology, but where UFOs were specifically not the primary reason for the secret watching. For example, Contactee George Van Tassel had an FBI file opened on him that runs to – wait for it – no less than 319 pages! That’s almost five times larger than Stan’s file. Van Tassel was primarily watched because of his politics – the FBI file makes that abundantly clear. There was also another reason, too. It was a very odd one. In April 1965, rumors flew around the FBI that Van Tassel had perfected a futuristic device which could cause blindness. It was a device connected to an unnamed “…ultra-rightist with tendency toward violence.” The story ultimately fizzled out, however, and the FBI moved onto other things. It was also in 1965 that the FBI finally closed its “George Van Tassel File,” referring to the man as “…an eccentric, self-ordained minister of a quasi-religious organization” and “…a mental case.” You can now read the whole Van Tassel file at The Vault.

As for Van Tassel’s fellow-Contactee, George Adamski, it wasn’t Flying Saucers and aliens from Venus that bothered the FBI. It was Adamski’s rants against the U.S. government that got the FBI angry and concerned. In his early lectures Adamski would regularly champion the Russian way of life – and its military power. For example, check out these words from Adamski, which were spoken at one of his earliest presentations: “If you ask me [the aliens] probably have a Communist form of government and our American government wouldn’t release that kind of thing, naturally. That is a thing of the future – more advanced.” Adamski also said (while the FBI quietly listened and took note): “Russia will dominate the world and we will then have an era of peace for 1,000 years.” And there’s this from the FBI’s file on Adamski, too: “…the United States today is in the same state of deterioration as was the Roman Empire prior to its collapse and it will fall just as the Roman Empire did.” It’s clear from reading the whole file that the FBI thought Adamski’s claims of alien encounters were ridiculous and of no concern. What the FBI was worried about was this: Adamski, in the early to mid 1950s, had a huge following. His lectures brought in huge audiences. And all of his massive numbers of disciples were being told that Communism was a very good thing and that the U.S. was on its way out. And that is why the FBI opened a lengthy file on Adamski. Now, let’s take a trip to Australia.

An extract from the FBI’s file on “Men in Black” writer Gray Barker (FBI, 1959)

Gray Barker, the first person to write a book on the Men in Black Phenomenon (1956’s They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers), had a file opened on him in the late 1950s. The reason: someone who had read his book sent a letter to J. Edgar Hoover, demanding to know if the U.S. government really did silence people who got too close to the truth about UFOs (the person’s name is deleted in the declassified file). Hoover quickly demanded that one of his special-agents get a copy of Barker’s book as soon as possible, which – as the files show – is exactly what happened. Barker was terrified when he found that the FBI was onto him and that they even had a copy of the Barker book. The files makes it clear, though, that Hoover wasn’t specifically interested in Barker’s Men in Black. Rather, Hoover was outraged by Barker’s claims that the U.S. government threatened ufologists. I could go on and on with more and more examples of how – just like Stan Friedman – files were opened on Ufologists, but when UFOs were specifically not the primary reason for the surveillance. Keep that in mind if, one day, you decide to apply to see if you have your very own FBI file. If such a file does exist, the chances are that the file will be far more about politics than black-eyed dwarfs from Zeta Reticuli.