On the evening of January 23, 1974, something occurred on the Berwyn Mountain range in North Wales that for some within the UFO researcher community has come to be known (to some…) as the definitive British Roswell. As researcher Andy Roberts stated in his excellent book, UFO Down?: “Running south-west to north-east across central North Wales, the Berwyn Mountains separate the flatlands of Shropshire from the Snowdonia National Park. Rising almost 900 metres above sea level, they have played host and borne silent witness to human occupation for millennia.” Andy elaborated: “Prehistoric man lived and worshipped on the mountains leaving behind him a dramatic, ritual landscape dotted with stone circles, standing stones and other once-sacred megaliths – many of which have stood for over two and a half thousand years. Not surprisingly, the area is rife with stories of ghosts and eerie presences. Folklore tells us that these mountains are haunted by many types of aerial phenomena, including the spectral Hounds of Hell: those who saw them recalled how they flew through the night sky baying as though pursued by Satan himself. To the south of the Berwyn’s at, Llanrhaedr-ym-Mochnant, the locals were plagued by a ‘flying dragon’ – intriguingly, a common name for UFOs in times gone by.”

And as Andy also carefully noted: ““It is against this backdrop of history and myth that on the evening of 23 January 1974 an event took place on the Berwyn Mountains that was to perplex locals and spawned a veritable cascade of rumors, culminating in an incredible claim that, if true, would irrevocably change our view of history and make us revise our plans for the future of both our planet and our species.  The claim was that a UFO piloted by extraterrestrials crashed, or was shot down, on the mountain known as Cader Berwyn and that the alien crew, some still alive, were whisked off to a secret military installation in the south of England for study.” Since then, the issue of what did or did not occur on the Berwyn Mountains on the fateful night in question has been the subject of several books, intense controversy, heated debate and, at times, unbridled fury. That something happened at around 8.30 p.m. on the night in question is not in doubt, however.

“I saw this bright light hanging in the sky,” said Mrs. Anne Williams of Bro Diham, Llandrillo. “It had a long fiery tale which seemed to be motionless for several minutes, going dim and then very brilliant, like a dormant fire which keeps coming to life. It would have been like an electric bulb in shape, except that it seemed to have rough edges. [It] then fell somewhere behind the hills at the back of my bungalow and the earth shook.” That the events caused considerable excitement and concern was something also noted by Police Constable Gwilym Owen, who was off-duty at the time and having a pint of beer in the nearby Dudley Arms public house. He stated shortly afterwards: “There was a great roar and a bang and the glasses shook. The sky was lit up over the mountains. The color was yellowish but other people in the valley described seeing blue lights.” Five miles away, Police Sergeant Gwyn Williams was at home in Corwen: “The walls shook and the mirror swung away from the wall,” he recalled. “My first thought was that a big lorry had hit the cinema – it was that kind of a roar and bang. Everyone ran into the street.”

Berwyn Mountains

At 838 p.m., the Global Seismology Unit of the Institute of Geological Sciences at Edinburgh, Scotland, recorded an earth tremor between 3.5 and 4 on the Richter scale. In response to questions posed by eager journalists, Dr. Roy Lilwall, the Senior Scientific Officer at the Institute, said that he had been told that a meteorite had possibly come down on the mountain and, had it been responsible for the “earthquake” that had been recorded at Edinburgh, it would have to have weighed several hundred tons. Approximately ninety minutes after the events on the Berwyns, Ken Haughton of Betws-y-coed viewed a “luminous sphere,” some 400 feet across and traveling at an approximated height of 15,000 feet. It was Haughton’s opinion that as he watched the sphere, it proceeded to descend into the sea in the area of the town of Rhyl, or possibly in the Dee Estuary.

Andy Roberts added, “Following the explosion, Llandrillo district nurse Pat Evans ran out into the village street. She saw no lights but the explosion and the accounts of other villagers convinced her that something had crashed on the mountains. It took her a while to get through to the police as the ‘phone lines were jammed with 999 calls [Note from the author: the equivalent of the United States’ 911 emergency telephone number], but eventually she spoke to Colwyn Bay Police HQ. They suggested it could have been a ‘plane crash so she bundled her two young daughters into the car and set off up the mountain, intending to offer help until the emergency services arrived.

As Mrs. Evans reached the point where the B4391 mountain road levels out she was puzzled by what appeared to be a large illuminated ball of light on the hillside. Unable to identify it was she drove on for a few minutes before returning to the same spot. The light was still there so she parked and observed it for a while. A light drizzle was falling but the night was otherwise clear and Mrs. Evans was able to describe the ball as ‘large,’ and forming a ‘perfect circle.’ But it didn’t appear to be three-dimensional. In an interview she recalled, ‘There were no flames shooting or anything like that. It was very uniform, round in shape…it was a flat round…’ As she watched in puzzlement the light changed color several times from red to yellow to white. Smaller lights, ‘fairy lights’ in Mrs. Evans’ words, could be seen nearby.  It was too far away to reach on foot and so she returned home to bed.”

On the following day, 24 January, a Royal Air Force mountain rescue team from Anglesey was dispatched to the Berwyn Mountains and, along with personnel from Gwynedd Police, searched the location for any sign of the object or its impact point. In turn, they received assistance in the search from the RAF station at Valley, Anglesey, who flew two aircraft to conduct a detailed photographic survey of the area. Nothing was reportedly found. Adding to the mystery, and on that same day, Men-in-Black-style rumors were rife among the local and close-knit communities, suggesting that the area had been descended upon by shadowy government figures that were intent on interviewing anyone and everyone with knowledge of the incident. And only hours later, an unusual aerial object was seen by David Upton at nearby Gobowen. As he went out of the backdoor of his home at about 7.15 p.m., he was immediately struck by the brightness of an object in the western sky and quickly ran back into the house for a pair of field glasses. To his complete amazement, these revealed a disc-shaped object that seemed to be divided up into four distinct sections, each of which was of a different color – red, green, yellow, and purple. David Upton’s sister, Elizabeth, a twenty-year-old bank clerk, then took over the glasses, followed shortly thereafter by their mother, Mary Upton. Both verified David’s description.

“I had been watching it for about ten minutes and thought perhaps I should tell someone about it,” said Elizabeth Upton. She telephoned the local police, and they said that they would dispatch someone to the area. A minute or so after the call, the UFO disappeared behind a cloud. “We waited for the cloud to pass and when it did the disc had gone too,” she explained, adding: “When I first came out of the house the light from the object was dazzling, like a street lamp. When we looked through the field glasses we could define its overall disc-shape and the four sections.” Two people known to have been involved in the affair were Doctors Ron Maddison and Aneurin Evans of Keele University. Both expressed the theory that a meteorite had been the culprit. However, if the object was a meteorite they said, then it had to have (a) completely disintegrated upon impact; and (b) not left a crater, as Dr. Maddison noted carefully that: “…the only changes we could see were recent disturbances of surface soil in some areas, but we were hampered to some extent by light snowfall.”

Two days later, it was stated in the local press that “police and RAF rescue experts” had come to the conclusion that the strange lights seen throughout the area were due to meteorite activity seen – coincidentally – at the same time that a group of men were out on the mountain range hunting hares with powerful lamps. Any link with the “earthquake” was entirely coincidental. RAF search team leader, Sergeant H. Oldham, said that another search of the area was “unlikely” to occur unless further information surfaced that attributed the lights to another source. Perhaps not surprisingly, the “hare” explanation received short shrift with the local witnesses, as can be seen fin the following extract taken from a letter sent to the Wrexham Leader newspaper: “Regarding your front page article ‘Mystery Tremor’ in the issue of January 25, I find the explanation given absolutely ludicrous. The tremors shook houses over a 60-mile radius, and the lights were seen clearly miles away – this was reported by the national press and radio. I know nothing about ‘Hare hunting’ but unless the hunters use aircraft searchlights and kill their prey by lobbing a small atom bomb at them, then I fail to see how anyone can accept such an explanation.”

So what, exactly, did happen on that fateful night of 23 January 1974? Did the strange lights provide firm evidence that a malfunctioning UFO was hurtling towards its doom on the Berwyn Mountains? And was the so-called “earthquake” evidence that this same UFO had almost immediately thereafter slammed at high speed into the bleak and harsh mountain known as Cader Berwyn? Or, was the entire event the result of a large-scale misconception of a curiously synchronistic combination of a meteorite shower, an earth tremor, and a group of men hunting for hares on the mountain and armed with powerful lamps – all in the same location and at practically the same time? The questions are still being answered to this day.

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Having shared with you the story of how and why the FBI took an interest in the antics of Contactee George Adamski, I thought I would give you the story of how the FBI took interest in another famous Contactee, George Van Tassel. Born on 12 March 1910 in Jefferson County, Ohio, George Wellington Van Tassel maintained that he experienced face-to-face contact with very human-looking alien entities following a claimed encounter in August 1953 near his Yucca Valley home in California. The complete history of Van Tassel’s exploits with apparent extraterrestrials is highly bizarre, involving weird accounts of meetings with imaginatively named aliens, including Numa of Uni; Ah-Ming of Tarr; Rondolla of the Fourth Density; and Zolton, the Highest Authority in the Sector System of Vela. According to the now-declassified records of the FBI on Van Tassel, before moving to Yucca Valley in 1947, he was employed by the Douglas Aircraft Corporation in Santa Monica; and Hughes Aircraft, where he worked in an assistant capacity to Howard Hughes. He also worked – the FBI learned – for both Universal Airlines and Lockheed. Exactly what it was that prompted Van Tassel to uproot his family and transfer them to Yucca Valley is something now lost to history. However, along with his wife and children, Van Tassel soon settled into his new surroundings: his famous (or perhaps infamous would be a better description!) cave under Giant Rock – an area leased from the Government.

The image of a 20^th Century family living in a cave situated beneath a sixty-foot-high rock, twenty-eight miles from Joshua Tree, California, cannot fail to conjure up the scenario of a prehistoric family struggling to live in less-than-friendly conditions. Always resourceful, however, the Van Tassels soon began to earn a comfortable living from an airstrip they rented – the Giant Rock Airport – and a small restaurant. As time passed, Van Tassel began to improve the family’s living facilities and the cave became a friendly environment. Fully furnished, it was equipped with electricity, had its own supply of water, a large library, and, as the journalist Ed Ritter noted in 1954, “a comfortable living room where [Van Tassel] studies and entertains guests.”

George Van Tassel

As a result of his alleged August 1953 encounter, Van Tassel compiled the first issue of what he titled The Proceedings of the College of Universal Wisdom, a small journal that served as a mouthpiece for not only Van Tassel but for his supposed cosmic friends, too. In the first issue, Desca, like Rondolla, also of the Fourth Density, urged Van Tassel’s followers (whose number would very quickly reach four figures) to “remove the binding chains of limit on your minds, throw out the barriers of fear [and] dissipate the selfishness of individual desire to attain physical and material things.” In the edition of the Proceedings dated 1 December 1953, Van Tassel stated that, less than a month previously, a “message was received from the beings who operate the spacecraft,” with orders from Ashtar, “the Commandant of Space Station Schare” (pronounced Share-ee) to contact the office of Air Force Intelligence at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. Van Tassel went on to advise the Air Force that: “The present destructive plans formulated for offensive and defensive war are known to us in their entirety…the present trend toward destructive war will not be interfered with by us, unless the condition warrants our interference in order to secure this solar system. This is a friendly warning.”

Were Van Tassel’s contacts genuinely of unearthly origin? Were they the rants of a sadly deluded mind? Or were they possibly a part of a sophisticated Communist-inspired intelligence operation designed to disrupt the internal security of the United States? This third possibility was definitely of concern to a Yucca Valley resident who on 5 August 1954, wrote to the FBI suggesting that Van Tassel be investigated to determine if he was working as a Soviet spy. Seriously concerned that Van Tassel was either a witting or an unwitting player in an ingenious, but subversive, Communist plot, the FBI sought to ascertain the full picture. On 12 November 1954, Major S. Avner of the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations met with N. W. Philcox – who was the FBI’s point of liaison with the Air Force – to discuss the growing controversy surrounding Van Tassel. Three days later, Avner re-established contact with Philcox, and advised him that the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base “has information on Van Tassel indicating that he has corresponded with them regarding flying saucers.”

Giant Rock, California

Very probably this was a reference to the letter that Van Tassel wrote to ATIC at the request of the mysterious Ashtar, who had offered a “friendly warning” with respect to plans formulated for offensive and defensive war. As a result, and not surprisingly, the Air Force offered, “to furnish the Bureau with more detailed information.” One day after Major Avner of AFOSI spoke with Philcox, two Special Agents of the Los Angeles FBI office met with Van Tassel at his Giant Rock home. In a memorandum to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover dated 16 November 1954, the agents wrote: “Relative to spacemen and space craft, VAN TASSEL declared that a year ago last August, while sleeping out of doors with his wife in the Giant Rock area, and at about 2.00 a.m. he was awakened by a man from space. This individual spoke English and was dressed in a grey one-piece suit similar to a sweat suit in that it did not have any buttons, pockets, and noticeable seams. This person, according to VAN TASSEL, invited him to inspect a spacecraft or flying saucer, which had landed on Giant Rock airstrip. VAN TASSEL claimed the craft was bell shaped resembling a saucer. He further described the ship as approximately 35 feet in diameter and is now known as the scout type craft. Aboard this craft was located three other male individuals wearing the same type of dress and identical in every respect with earth people.”

The FBI continued: “VAN TASSEL claims that the three individuals aboard the craft were mutes in that they could not talk. He claimed they conversed through thought transfers, and also operated the flight of the craft through thought control. He stated that the spokesman for the group claimed he could talk because he was trained by his family to speak. The spokesman stated that earthmen are using too much metal in their everyday work and are fouling up radio frequencies and thought transfers because of this over use of metal. According to VAN TASSEL, these individuals came from Venus and are by no means hostile nor do they intend to harm this country or inhabitants in any manner. He declared they did not carry weapons, and the spacecraft was not armed. He mentioned that a field of force was located around the spacecraft which would prohibit anything known to earth men to penetrate. VAN TASSEL claims this craft departed from the earth after 20 minutes and has not been taken back since.”

Van Tassel added that, “through thought transfers with space men,” he had been able to ascertain that a third world war was on the horizon, which was likely to be “large” and “destructive;” that much of this correlated directly with certain biblical passages; that the war would not be “universal;” and that the “space people are peace loving and under no circumstances would enter or provoke a war.” And to illustrate their benevolence towards humankind, the aliens, Van Tassel told his FBI visitors, had bestowed upon him some remarkable data, including information relating to the way in which the human lifespan could be extended to anywhere between three hundred and fifteen hundred years. “This principle was not developed by Van Tassel,” said the FBI. Van Tassel then described his newsletter to the FBI agents, as J. Edgar Hoover was informed:

“In connection with his metaphysical religion and research, he publishes bi-monthly a publication in the form of a booklet called PROCEEDINGS OF THE COLLEGE OF UNIVERSAL WISDOM, YUCCA VALLEY, CALIFORNIA. He declared this publication is free and has grown from an original mailing list of 250 to 1,000 copies. VAN TASSEL stated that he sends his publication to various individuals, Universities, and Government Agencies throughout the world. He declared this publication is forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation at Washington, D.C. He stated that he has donated 10 acres of his ranch holdings to the college. He mentioned that many of the buildings will be made free of metal; which will be keeping within the request of the spacemen.”

Particularly eye opening was the FBI’s concern about who was funding Van Tassel’s operations, on what was certainly a large scale: “[Van Tassel] declared that for the most part he secures money for his needs of life, for the furtherance of his religion, research, and college through the generosity of certain individuals, number about 100. He failed to identify any of these people. He also mentioned that he derives income from his airstrip and a very small restaurant which is located at Giant Rock. VAN TASSEL voluntarily stated that he is not hiding anything nor is he doing anything against the laws of this country in his research at Giant Rock. He voluntarily mentioned that he is a loyal American and would be available at any time to assist the Bureau. VAN TASSEL did not volunteer the names of any individuals whom he was soliciting for funds except his statement above that he sent his publications to various individuals, universities and Government agencies and also the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, DC.”

At the conclusion of the interview, the two agents secured copies of Van Tassel’s Proceedings that were then forwarded to Washington for study and became the subject of a confidential report, that in part stated: “One of the pamphlets contains an article by Van Tassel claiming that Jesus Christ was born of space men and that the Star of Bethlehem was a space craft that stood by while Jesus was born.” As a result of his growing reputation as someone with detailed knowledge of alien intelligence, Van Tassel became increasingly in demand on the lecture circuit, where he espoused at length on his dealings with extraterrestrials, their intentions for the human race, and their overall philosophy. On 17 April 1960, Van Tassel gave a lengthy speech at the Phipps Auditorium, Denver, Colorado, having been invited by the Denver Unidentified Flying Objects Investigative Society. To ensure that the lecture was a success, the society took out advertising time on local radio, that caught the attention of the Denver FBI, who subsequently directed a special agent to attend and report back the details of Van Tassel’s talk, which he did and in great detail:  “The program consisted of a 45 minute movie which included several shots of things purported to be flying saucers, and then a number of interviews with people from all walks of life regarding sightings they had made of such unidentified flying objects. After the movie GEORGE W. VAN TASSEL gave a lecture which was more of a religious-economics lecture than one of unidentified flying objects.”

From then on, Van Tassel was only watched on a few occasions – and in relation to matters of no particular interest. He died in 1978.

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Alien abduction cases have become so numerous that it is hard to even keep track of them anymore. Many of them follow the same beats as well, which can cause the effect of melding them all together until one doesn’t know which one is which. Yet, there are some that stand tall above the crowd in their sheer, absurd bizarreness, and that is what we are here to look at. There are not many alien abduction cases that come away with hard evidence, but here we have one that not only produced evidence, but allegedly also a sample of alien DNA. Down the rabbit hole we go.

The man known as Peter Khoury came from Lebanon to Australia with his family in 1973, and he at the time already had experience with strange UFO phenomena. In 1971, he had had his first encounter back in his home country at the age of 7, on a seemingly normal day when he was out playing with some other children. According to him, at some point he had noticed that the other kids had become somewhat frozen in time, like insects in amber or statues, and above them there had been hovering a mysterious egg-shaped craft. These kids would later wake from their frozen status with no memory of what had happened, leaving Khoury as the only witness to the whole outlandish thing. The incident would hang in the back of his mind for years, and it would seem that this would not be the last of his strange UFO experiences.

By 1981, Khoury had fully adjusted to his new life in Australia and had met his future wife, Vivian. The two dated for years, eventually marrying in 1990, but it was in 1988 that they would have a very bizarre shared experience of seeing a UFO, but it would get weirder. He claims that on the evening of July 12 of that year he had been lying in bed with Vivian and woke up with the sensation that someone was grabbing his ankles, after which he was suddenly paralyzed and unable to move. He then saw four dwarf-like hooded entities enter the room, accompanied by a taller creature with golden skin and oversized black eyes, this latter one approaching him to stick a needle right into his head. As the entity did this, it assured him that it would be “just like last time” and told him not to panic. Throughout it all, Vivian remained totally asleep and oblivious to it all. Khoury then lost consciousness.

The next morning, Khoury told his wife what had happened, and examining his head she found a spot of blood and puncture mark that corroborated his wild tale. It seems as if he was very confused at the time, having no knowledge of the greater phenomena of alien abductions and so unable to come to terms with what was happening to him. This was the main thrust that pushed him into the UFO field, even inspiring to start his own contactee support group called the UFO Experience Support Association. However, for as bizarre as this all was, it was nothing compared to what was in store for him.

One evening in 1992, Khoury came home and lay down, as he was not feeling well in the wake of an injury he had sustained at work. He drifted off to sleep but was jolted awake to find two women sitting on the edge of his bed, one Nordic in appearance, one Asian, and both with oversized eyes, impossibly chiseled features, and incidentally both completely naked. The Nordic woman then apparently grabbed Khoury and pulled his face to her breast, and in his panic he bit her, taking off a piece of her nipple in the process, but this caused no bleeding or reaction of pain from the woman. She merely stopped her assault and the two women sat there watching Khoury as he experienced an intense coughing fit. He doubled over coughing, and at some point realized that the two women were now gone. Khoury then went into the bathroom coughing uncontrollably, and it was there where he would realize that he had the overwhelming desire to urinate, which was painful and as he did so noticing that there were some blonde hairs wrapped around below down there. This was incredibly odd, as there was no way they should have been there, so he saved them in a plastic bag, convinced they must have come from the blonde stranger, who he was starting to think had not been totally human. So far so weird, but it gets even weirder. All of this came to the attention of Australian ufologist Bill Chalker, who had a look at the hair himself and decided to pursue genetic testing on it with a group of scientists and forensic investigators. Chalker would say of the enigmatic hair:

I began an investigation into the hair sample, when biochemical colleagues agreed to undertake what was the world’s first PCR (polymerase Chain Reaction) DNA profiling of biological material implicated in an alien abduction experience. The analysis confirmed the hair came from someone who was biologically close to normal human genetics, but of an unusual racial type – a rare Chinese Mongoloid type – one of the rarest human lineages known, that lies further from the human mainstream than any other except for African pygmies and aboriginals. There was the strange anomaly of it being blonde to clear instead of black, as would be expected from the Asian type mitochondrial DNA. The thin blond hair, which appeared to have come from a light-skinned caucasian-type woman, could not have come from a normal human of that racial type. Instead, though human, the hair showed five distinctive DNA markers that are characteristic of a rare sub-group of the Chinese Mongoloid racial type. A detailed survey of the literature on variations in mitochondrial DNA, comprising tens of thousands of samples, showed only four other people on record with all five of the distinctive markers in the blond hair. All four were Chinese, with black hair.

We had the shaft with one set of DNA, and the root showing a different type, and we could not understand it. And eventually, we concluded that this seemed to be the result of some sort of advanced cloning technique. And also we had evidence in the nuclear DNA that this person who needed to hear I guess, you could say, had what appeared to be CCR five dilution factor, which is an interesting property, because it leads you to be perhaps impervious to things like smallpox and AIDS, that kind of thing. So that would be a very handy thing to have. But unfortunately, it’s not shared that widely around the Earth. They have this constellation of unusual DNA properties within one small hair sample. It was bizarre. To keep a very complex story somewhat uncomplicated, what seems to be suggested by the range of findings is possible evidence for advanced DNA techniques and DNA anomalies & findings, for which we are only now discovering or starting to make sense of in mainstream biotechnology.

It is all pretty wild. A look through vast databases of DNA samples showed that no person with blonde hair could be found in Australia who shared these unique genetic characteristics, leaving it a mystery and potentially solid physical evidence of something very strange going on. What was going on here? Where did this hair come from and what does it all mean? Chalker himself would say of it:

Are we dealing with ‘humans’ from elsewhere, namely those with human DNA, albeit very rare and somewhat anomalous? This case raises all sorts of issues, such as human ‘panspermia'” — the theory that human-like beings may have migrated to Earth in the fairly recent past from elsewhere in the galaxy, perhaps giving rise to the sudden appearance of modern homo sapiens sapiens, a species not directly descended from their immediate predecessors, the Neanderthals. Also, given the Asian mongoloid connection, we looked at the problem of European-like rare Asian types in the past. The controversial saga of the Taklamakan mummies in remote Western China is turning the early history of China on its head. These mummies include people who are quite tall, some 6 feet or so, and some are blond. I’m not suggesting a connection here, but you can understand this investigation has opened up all sorts of interesting possibilities about the biological nature of some of the beings implicated in abduction cases. While such cultural and mythic connections are fascinating speculations, they provide for an interesting perspective on the many stories of Nordic type beings implicated in UFO abduction and contact cases.

Khoury would go on to have other abduction experiences, such as one in 1996 in which he was woken to see small hooded figures seeming to pass through a mirror, after which they levitated him off the bed to pull him towards them before he blacked out, but nothing comes close to the story of the hair. In the meantime, the story was printed in an article in the Center for UFO Studies publication International UFO Reporter, entitled Strange Evidence, and Chalker included it in a whole book on cases like this, called Hair of the Alien: DNA and Other Forensic Evidence of Alien Abductions. Of course there is plenty of skeptical input on this all. Not only does the story not make much sense in some respects, but it does not seem that these scientists supposedly analyzing this supposed alien DNA have ever come out officially to publish the findings in any sort of peer reviewed journal and we obviously have not been hit with any news that alien DNA has officially been found. It all ends up another wild ride that leads off into the murk where we are not sure what is going on. Is there anything to this, or is it just a sensational yarn? Time will tell.

When most people hear that one side is colder than the other, they often think it’s in reference to beds and the common complaint of couples whose temperatures clash and interfere with getting a good night’s sleep. However, when scientists from the University of Oslo say it, they’re referring to the planet Earth, where one side is becoming colder much faster than the other. Do we need planet-sized quilt? Would it help to move all the hot-blooded people to that side?

“Earth’s interior is cooling because its rate of heat loss exceeds its rate of internal heat production. Heat loss happens at the Earth’s surface and is highly variable, with thick continents providing strong insulation to Earth’s interior and thin seafloor allowing more rapid heat transfer.”

According to the study published in Geophysical Research Letters, the surface of the Earth is indeed like a bed and the continents are blankets which don’t quite cover everything. In particular, the oceans are the spots where feet would get cold in this planetary bed. While the heat generated by the Earth’s core emanates evenly, it doesn’t get to us in the same way. As explained in Popular Mechanics, the researchers at the University of Oslo wanted to know why, so they built a model dividing Earth into African and Pacific hemispheres, then dividing the surface into a grid by half degrees latitude and longitude. After feeding in the continental positions during the last 400 million years – including the supercontinent Pangea – they cranked out the temperature model. The results surprised them.

“We find that heat loss was on average 25% higher in the past than it is today, which implies more rapid overall cooling than expected. We also find that the Pacific side of the world has lost heat at a much faster rate than the African side. This is partly due to positioning of continental landmasses, including the supercontinent Pangea, on the African side for most of the past 400 million years. By contrast, the oceans on the Pacific side offered “poor insulation” that led to ∼50°C more cooling of the Pacific mantle compared to its African counterpart. The extra heat lost from the Pacific side may have been trapped there by Rodinia, an older, long‐lived supercontinent that covered the Pacific mantle about one billion years ago.”

The Pacific side lost its Rodinia ‘blanket’ about 600 million years ago, while Pangea began to break apart about 175 million years ago, providing heat longer on the African side of Earth. What does all of this mean for people sleeping (and living) on the Pacific side of the Earth bed? You know how being cold causes a lot of tossing and turning in a real bed?

“Was it covered by landmass at some point in the far distant past, keeping more heat inside? There are other possible explanations, but either way, the Pacific’s high tectonic activity today points to a heat disparity. The meltier the mantle, the more the plates can slide and slam together.”

Popular Mechanics points to this lack of a warm quilt as a (if not THE) reason for the increase in volcanic and earthquake activity along the Pacific rim. Unfortunately, there’s no electric blanket or separate-side-temperature-controlled sheets for an Earth-sized bed. And moving all of the hot-blooded people there won’t help – they’d drown before their side warmed up. The best bet is to move in the opposite direction away from the tectonic activity caused by the cold feet of the Pacific Ocean.

Sweet dreams.

Born in Poland in 1891, George Adamski had the distinction of being the most supported, celebrated and ridiculed of those who claimed direct contact with human-like extraterrestrials. The controversy largely began on 20 November 1952, when, along with six other people, Adamski claimed that he witnessed the landing of a UFO in the Californian desert and then made contact with its pilot. FBI documentation, however, showed that Adamski’s interest in UFOs preceded the 1952 date by at least two years; and the author Timothy Good stated that Adamski claimed to have had other-worldly contact as a child, and to have later received instruction from them in Tibet, hence his 1936 book, Wisdom of the Masters of the Far East, published by The Royal Order of Tibet.

At the beginning of its surveillance of George Adamski, the FBI did not apparently have any awareness of his earlier claims of contact; however a document dated 28 May 1952 references his 1950 encounters, and also reveals that – as with George Van Tassel – the FBI considered Adamski to be a subversive. A study of the documentation shows that much of the FBI’s initial data on Adamski came from a source (whose name the FBI has chosen to keep classified) that revealed the facts to its San Diego office on 5 September 1950: “[Source] advised the San Diego Office that he first met Adamski about three months ago at the café which is named the Palomar Gardens Café, owned and operated by Adamski, at the road junction, five miles East of Rincon, California, at a point where the highway branches off leading to Mount Palomar Observatory.

George Adamski

“[Source] became involved in a lengthy conversation with Adamski during which Adamski told them at great length of his findings of flying saucers and so forth. He told them of a spaceship which he said he saw between the earth and the moon, which he estimated to be approximately three miles in length, which was flying so fast that he had to take about eighty photographs before he could get three of them to turn out. According to [source] Adamski stated that the Federal Communications Commission, under the direction of the ‘Military Government’ of the United States, has established communication with the people from other worlds, and has learned that they are so much more advanced than the inhabitants of this earth that they have deciphered the languages used here. Adamski stated that in this interplanetary communication, the Federal Communications Commission asked the inhabitants of the other planet concerning the type of government they had there and the reply indicated that it was very different from the democracy of the United States. Adamski stated that his answer was kept secret by the United States Government, but he added, ‘If you ask me they 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’s comments that his alien friends were communists caused – at the very least – raised eyebrows within the FBI, and led to continued monitoring of his activities: “Adamski, during this conversation, made the prediction that Russia will dominate the world and we will then have an era of peace for 1,000 years. He stated that Russia already has the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb and that the great earthquake, which was reported behind the Iron Curtain recently, was actually a hydrogen bomb explosion being tried out by the Russians. Adamski states this ‘earthquake’ broke seismograph machines and he added that no normal earthquake can do that.

“Adamski stated that within the next twelve months, San Diego will be bombed. Adamski stated that it does not make any difference if the United States has more atom bombs than Russia inasmuch as Russia needs only ten atom bombs to cripple the United States by placing these simultaneously on such spots as Chicago and other vital centers of this country. 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. The Government in this country is a corrupt form of government and capitalists are enslaving the poor.”

From thereon, Adamski was officially considered by the FBI to be a “security matter.” In January 1953, he was again the subject of FBI interest when the San Diego office began to hear rumors to the effect that: “Adamski had in his possession a machine which could draw ‘flying saucers’ and airplanes down from the sky.” Despite his the-aliens-are-Communists-style statements of 1952, Adamski was concerned that the device that supposedly operated on the principle of “cutting magnetic lines of force,” could be used against American aircraft; and it was Adamski himself initiated who initiated a meeting with both the FBI and the Air Force of Special Investigations, and that occurred on 12 January 1953.

From the beginning of the meeting, Adamski was careful to make it clear that the machine was the creation of another person, and that regardless of what the FBI thought it knew or had been told to the contrary, Adamski had not yet seen the device – he had only been told of its existence. He did, however, apparently know enough about both it and its creator to suggest that production of the device might not be in the best interests of the Government, since the person concerned “was not entirely loyal.” On this matter, at least, Adamski cooperated fully, and provided both the Bureau and the Air Force with sufficient information to allow a formal investigation of the machine’s “inventor” to begin.

In that same meeting, Adamski could not let the opportunity pass by to discuss with both the FBI and the Air Force his claimed encounter of 20 November 1952 out in the deserts of California, as the FBI carefully noted in its write-up of the interview: “At a point ten and two-tenths miles from Desert Center on the road to Parker and Needles, Arizona, [Adamski] made contact with a space craft and had talked to a space man. Adamski stated that he, [deleted] and his wife Mary had been out in the desert and that he and the persons with him had seen the craft come down to the earth. Adamski stated that a small stairway in the bottom of the craft, which appeared to be a round disc, opened and a space man came down the steps. Adamski stated he believed there were other space men in the ship because the ship appeared translucent and could see the shadows of the space men.”

Adamski also revealed that the alien was “over five feet in height, having long hair like a woman’s and garbed in a suit similar to the space suits or web suits worn by the US Air Force men.” And in a similar fashion to George Van Tassel, Adamski related to the FBI and OSI agents that he conversed with the being by means of sign language, but felt that his mid was being “read.” As evidence of this, Adamski said that as he was about to take a photograph of the aliens’ craft, the humanoid “motioned” him to stop. Adamski told the agents that he took his photograph regardless, but that this was not to the liking of the cosmic visitor, who grabbed the material evidence out of Adamski’s hands and soared off into the sky!

Adamski’s adventures with the aliens were not over, however. Once again, according to the FBI: “Adamski further advised that he had obtained plaster casts of the footprints of the space man and stated that the casts indicated the footprints had designs on them similar to the signs of the Zodiac. On January 12, 1953, Adamski advised that on December 13, 1952, the space ship returned to the Palomar Gardens and came low enough to drop the [film negative] which the space man had taken from him, Adamski, and had then gone off over the hill. Adamski stated that when he had the negatives developed at a photo shop in Escondido, California, that the negative that the space man had taken from him contained writing which he believed to be the writing of the space men. Adamski furnished the writer with copies of the space writing and photographs of the space ship.”

However, from another source, the FBI was told that: “The photographs were taken by setting the camera lens at infinity, which would sharpen the background of mountains and trees and blurs the saucer, which was probably strung on a thin wire. [Source] advised that if the camera were set at infinity the wire would not show.” Indeed, what all of this tells us is that until his death in 1965, Adamski was a controversial character – whether within the field of Ufology, or with the special-agents of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

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