In 1992, in a privately-published paper titled: Have You Checked Your File Lately? Robert Durant, a UFO researcher and pilot, discussed the theme of an all-encompassing, Government-sanctioned-and-controlled operation designed to covertly monitor the activities of the public UFO research community: “You, the reader, are among the approximately 4,000 Americans who subscribe to ufological journals or newsletters, buy UFO books through the mail, attend conferences, or spend time with others who engage in such activities. Not a large group. We are only 3% of the total number of citizens the government admits to watching with intense care. A very easy group to track. Building your file is so much easier than compiling one on a Russian spy or a Mafioso. There is a file on you at the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, the driver’s license bureau of the state in which you are licensed, the commercial credit card companies that do business with your bank and your lenders, your doctor’s office, and so forth and so on. Is it really unreasonable to suspect that a UFO file would be created?” With that said, read on:

My previous article here at Mysterious Universe was titled “In the U.K. Government, it’s not just the Ministry of Defense that is tied to UFOs.” In part, I revealed how, in the mid-1990s, English ufologist Robin Cole was visited by government agents because he dug a bit too deep into the UFO connection to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the U.K.’s equivalent of the United States’ National Security Agency. With that in mind, I thought I would share with you other examples of UFO researchers getting knocks on the front-door from “the man.” Back in the early 1950s, the FBI opened a file on “Contactee” George Van Tassel, who created the Integratron and ran an outdoor UFO event for years – an event that attracted thousands of people. Van Tassel’s file runs to 319 pages and has now been declassified. But, what about Mrs. Van Tassel? It wasn’t just George who got a visit. His wife did, too. In a face-to-face meeting at the Van Tassel home, the FBI recorded the following:

“Relative to her husband and herself, Mrs. Van Tassel claims that she and her husband practice a metaphysical religion. She declared this religion is based on an occult principle in that she and her husband sit in a room in dead silence and receive thought transfers from one another and from other individuals who are not psychically present in the room. She declared that it was through this type of practice that her husband has learned or prophesied the coming of World War III and a gigantic explosion on the East Coast. She mentioned that at the present time she and her husband have undertaken a special project. This project is the founding and organizing of the College of Universal Wisdom. The purpose of the college is to promote and carry out interplanetary communication and the dissemination of Universal Wisdom gained through the median of space beings.” The two agents thanked Mrs. Van Tassel and left, satisfied with what they heard.

As the CIA note, in a very amusing fashion, in 1955, two elderly sisters in Chicago, Mildred and Marie Maier, reported in the Journal of Space Flight their experiences with UFOs, including the recording of a radio program in which an unidentified code was allegedly heard. The sisters taped the program; and other ham radio operators also claimed to have heard the “space message.” The CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence duly became interested and asked its Scientific Contact Branch to obtain a copy of the recording. Field officers from the Contact Division, one of who was a man named Dewelt Walker, made contact with the Maier sisters at their home, who were “thrilled that the government was interested,” and set up a time to meet with them. In trying to secure the tape recording, the Agency officers reported that they had stumbled upon a scene from Arsenic and Old Lace. “The only thing lacking was the elderberry wine,” Walker told Headquarters. After reviewing the sisters’ scrapbook of clippings from their days as entertainers on the stage, the bemused and amused officers secured a copy of the recording. OSI analyzed the tape and found it was nothing more than Morse code from a US radio station.

Moving on: In 1977, the late Graham Birdsall – editor of the now-defunct British-based UFO Magazine – and his brother, Mark, investigated a major UFO sighting near to Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England, that involved a number of witnesses who had viewed strange, aerial objects in the vicinity of Menwith Hill – a vast “listening-post” controlled by the American National Security Agency. The Birdsall brothers duly approached the staff at Menwith Hill for comment and, at one point, were actually allowed on base. This led to a curious series of events. Soon after visiting the base, Graham received a telephone call from a Mr. Mills, the senior NSA security officer at the base, who had just taken up his post at Menwith Hill and was keen to cement good, local relations. Graham engaged the NSA official in conversation for approximately one hour – something that few civilians can claim. Not only that, Graham was visited by an NSA employee who asked him more than a few questions about “motivations” when to came to UFOs – as well as Graham’s beliefs in the UFO phenomenon. The man soon left.

One of my own particularly memorable experiences occurred in 2001. After writing an article on MI5 whistleblower, David Shayler, for Mark Birdsall’s Eye-Spy magazine, I received a telephone call from a highly concerned and nervous Birdsall. He informed me that he had been visited – at his home – in North Yorkshire by “two lads from the Metropolitan Police.” Mark advised me that the two officers informed him that while publication of the article was not deemed to have harmed the national security of the country, there was a pressing need on their part to obtain the tape-recording of the interview I had conducted with Shayler. For a while I mused upon this and did nothing. Not long after, however, I was contacted by a representative of Special Branch, who advised me, in no uncertain term}s that I would hand over the tape, like it or not. Based upon what I was told, I was left with little choice, and I did indeed hand over the original recording. I should stress, though, MI5 were fine with the text of the interview being included in the pages of Eye-Spy. It was a surreal situation.

In light of all the above, the day may come when you, too, get that ominous, slow knock on the door.

The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, was fought between the years of 1955 and 1975, officially between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, but as most know America was pulled into it starting from 1964. The catalyst for America’s entry into the war revolves around a mysterious and disputed incident that happened in early August 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin, also known as the USS Maddox Incident, in which a U.S. destroyer was said to have been put under attack by with North Vietnamese fast attack craft. It would help serve to force the U.S. Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and give President Lyndon B. Johnson great authority to increase American military presence in Vietnam. This would result in a horrific trial of attrition in the jungles of Vietnam that would see an estimated 58,220 U.S. service members killed in the conflict and a further 1,626 remain missing in action by the time they pulled out in 1973, but what really happened during this initial incident has long been wrapped in mystery and controversy, and one of the weirder ideas is that this might have been the doing of underwater UFOs, also called USO (Underwater Submersible Objects) or even mysterious sea beasts.

The official version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident is that on August 2, 1964, the American destroyer the USS Maddox had been out  performing a signals intelligence patrol as part of DESOTO operations when they were aggressively approached by three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats. In the ensuing melee, the USS Maddox was assailed by machine gun fire and torpedoes, and when the smoke cleared one U.S. aircraft was damaged, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats were damaged, and four North Vietnamese sailors were killed. This first attack is not in dispute, but there would then be an alleged second incident on August 4, 1964 that would really rile the Americans up, this time involving the USS Maddox and another destroyer called the USS Turner Joy, which furthered the U.S. resolve to enter the conflict, but there has long been some amount of doubt that the US forces had ever been under fire at all, or whether this had just been an excuse to escalate the efforts to enter the war.

USS Maddox

The North Vietnamese immediately denied that a second attack had ever happened, and in later years former United States Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara also admitted that there was never any second attack. Indeed, it was found that there were not even any North Vietnamese vessels in the area during the August 4 incident, but personnel aboard both the USS Turner Joy and USS Maddox begged to differ, insisting that it had happened, so what was going on here? According to some testimony from aboard the vessels involved, some pretty weird stuff.

In 1966, a Navy sonar engineer assigned to the destroyer USS Turner Joy came forward with a rather odd version of the events of that day. He claimed that on the day of that supposed second Gulf of Tonkin attack, he had picked up signatures on his radar that appeared to be enemy torpedoes, but which behaved erratically and as if under intelligent control, approaching the ship, even going under it, only to dart off. Both vessels reported detecting small, fast-moving objects on radar, both above and below the surface, which they took to be torpedoes and torpedo boats, but visibility was low due to a storm that had brought heavy clouds and fog. There would apparently by over 20 signatures of torpedoes on sonar, but they did not behave like torpedoes, seeming to move about at will rather than a straight line, and none of them actually hit. Some frightened crew members reported that the torpedoes seemed to be illuminated, while others swore they had seen the cockpit lights of the enemy vessels out in the gloom. Others saw what they took to be the wakes of torpedoes and there were even strange sounds heard that sounded a lot like the propellers of torpedoes, yet no impacts ever occurred.

Taking no chances at all, the two American destroyers allegedly performed evasive maneuvers and unloaded almost 650 cannon shells and several depth charges, blowing the area to absolute hell, yet when the smoke cleared there were found to be no enemy vessels, no wreckage or debris, nothing. This was despite the accounts of crew aboard the destroyers who were adamant that there had definitely been something out there and that they had been under attack. At the time it was convincing enough to propel America full on into the war, only in later years being found to have been perhaps a phantom attack that had no evidence of ever having happened at all. In 2005, the National Security Agency would declassify a trove of documents that revealed there was no second Gulf of Tonkin attack, and the at the time U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara himself would concede that there had been no enemy attack on that day. Even then president Johnson would say “For all I know, our navy was shooting at whales out there.”

Despite this, crew members aboard the two destroyers have continued to insist that there was something out there menacing them, leading to all sorts of theories. One of the main ideas is that a combination of weather, schools of fish near the surface, birds, or sensor problems had all conspired to make them misidentify phantom targets as actual ones. Another idea is that these ships were being circled by USOs, or underwater UFOs, and just as strange is the idea that the signatures and sightings were caused by underwater creatures. Todd Newberry, a professor emeritus of marine biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, believes that this can be blamed on bioluminescent cousins of sea squirts called giant pyrosomes, which are basically massive colonies of filter-feeding organisms that form long blunt-ended tubes that can propel themselves along and reach up to 60 feet in length. They also tend to light up when disturbed, and the idea here is that the crews of these ships were freaked by these giant, decidedly torpedo shaped colonies of organisms shooting about. Newberry has said of this:

These things are the size of torpedoes, so they produce the same sonar image. It all fit together, as far as the character of the colony and its behavior. They could certainly have shown up on sonar. I can totally see that if you didn’t know that something like them exist and you were looking at them in the water, your imagination could go pretty crazy with what you were seeing. Imagine telling your commander who thinks you’re being attacked by torpedoes, ‘No sir, those are Pyrosoma!’ You’d be put in the brig immediately. Here’s an angle that was never picked up at the time. It could be a perfectly natural phenomenon. It was a misunderstanding by people who had never heard of pyrosomes. It’s an irresistible story to bring up.

Whatever the case may be, this alleged second Gulf of Tonkin attack is undeniably one of the reasons America entered the Vietnam conflict. Was this just propaganda spun by a government eager to staunch the spread of communism? Or was it something else? What happened to those men out there? What were they picking up and even seeing zipping around out there in those dark waters? Was this all just a misunderstanding, USOs, sea creatures, or something even more mysterious still? Whatever the answers to these questions, it all had heavy weight on the history of war, and remains a curious historical oddity that has never seen any real concrete answers, leaving it to the realm of speculation.

If you’re interested in the UFO phenomenon, you’ll probably know that for decades the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense investigated the subject. The MoD, however, is not the only government body that has got involved. There are more than a few of them. I’ll begin with the U.K.’s Special Branch. As for what Special Branch was, there’s this: “The first Special Branch in the world was formed in London in 1883. It spread throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Each British police force went on to form its own Special Branch, the largest being that of the Metropolitan Police until it was merged with the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch (SO13) to form Counter Terrorism Command or SO15 in 2006. Special Branch maintained contact with the Security Service. Although they were not part of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), they were entitled to use the prefix “Detective” in front of their ranks…It was announced, in September 2005, that the Metropolitan Police Special Branch would be merging with the Anti-Terrorism Branch of the Metropolitan Police to form a new department called Counter Terrorism Command, with the new department coming into being on 2 October 2006.”

George King’s Aetherius Society, which was very much Contactee-driven from the late-1950s onward, was the subject of a secret file created by Special Branch. That file is now in the public domain, thanks to the terms of the U.K.’s Freedom of Information Act. The papers demonstrate that Special Branch was concerned by the fact that the Aetherius Society was allying itself with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which was created in 1the 1950s. Special Branch certainly viewed King as, in their words, a “crank.” Special Branch  came to quickly realize that King was highly motivated when it came to getting the word out regarding his views on nuclear weapons and the Russians. That alone was certainly a matter of deep concern to the authorities. The surveillance, hardly surprisingly, continued at a steady pace.

Now, let’s take a look at the U.K.’s Provost and Security Services. In the same way that, in the United States, claims have been made that the US Air Force’s UFO program, Project Blue Book, never got to see the really “good” UFO material (crashed UFOs, dead aliens, etc.), similar assertions were made in the U.K. A great deal has been written (some of it by me) on the way in which the Royal Air Force’s Provost and Security Services at Royal Air Force Rudloe Manor, Wiltshire, England played a role in the UFO subject for decades – a role that remains unclear to this day. Despite failed and clumsy attempts on the part of the MoD to lay the matter to rest – by calling Rudloe Manor merely a “coordination point” for the collection of UFO reports – the controversy still continues. Today, you can take a trip to the U.K.’s National Archives and see for yourself more than a few P&SS UFO files. They show that P&SS personnel were clearly doing their own UFO investigations.

How about another official U.K. body? This one is the Home Office. What makes the stories about the Home Office and UFOs so interesting and different, however, is the noted lack of attention they have received over the years. That’s not to say there isn’t an intriguing body of data available. Quite the contrary: there actually is an intriguing body of data on this matter. According to researcher and author Timothy Good, in his 1987 book, Above Top Secret: “A close friend of mine whom I have known since 1952 witnessed the landing of an unidentified flying object in Derbyshire in September 1963, and subsequently came into contact with its operators. Four years afterwards two men with Home Office identification cards turned up at my friend’s flat and politely asked a number of questions which clearly indicated that they were familiar with aspects of the incident.” Similarly, in 1982 Good interviewed an eye-opening interview with a retired police inspector, in an attempt to determine if the UFO issue was subject to the constraints of the British Government’s Official Secrets Act – a  piece of legislation utilized to muzzle government employees when deemed necessary by officialdom. According to Good’s source: “What I can say to you, is that I know the subject itself was the subject of a Home Office directive.”

Aerial view of GCHQ

Now, there’s the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the U.K. equivalent of the United States’ National Security Agency. In the mid-1990s UFO researcher Robin Cole found himself in deep water when he started asking questions about the UFO connection to GCHQ. Particularly so when he prepared a fascinating report that contained everything he had found out about GCHQ’s ties to UFOs. Cole’s research showed that GCHQ had UFO reports on file, had copies of some of the United States’ Project Blue Book files, had an extensive “UFO library,” and were actively watching Cole himself in the shadows. It was almost inevitable that Cole would get a personal visit. He did. One morning after his report was published, Cole got a knock on the door from personnel in CID (Criminal Investigation Department) who interviewed him about his research. They wanted to know why he was looking into the UFO-GCHQ angle. They also asked questions about his knowledge of the aforementioned Royal Air Force Rudloe Manor. The good news was that Cole hadn’t committed any kind of crime. The Men in Black went their ways and Cole chose to quit Ufology.

What all of this demonstrates is that when we talk about UFOs and the U.K. government, things go far beyond than just the Ministry of Defense.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

A recently discovered Neptune-like exoplanet has been described as possibly having a “substantial atmosphere”. Named TOI-1231 b, the planet is located about 90 light-years away from Earth. It is quite similar to our Solar System’s Neptune planet in regards to its size as well as being a gaseous world with possibly a rich atmosphere.

An international team of astronomers that was led by Dr. Jennifer Burt, who is an exoplanet researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, and Professor Diana Dragomir, who is an exoplanet researcher at the University of New Mexico, discovered TOI-1231 b when they were analyzing data collected from TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite). Then on June 3^rd, the team’s discovery of TOI-1231 b was entered into NASA’s Exoplanet Archive.

TOI-1231 b is over 3.5 times larger than Earth and 15.4 times our mass. While it has a surface temperature of about 134 degrees Fahrenheit (57 degrees Celsius), it is in fact one of the “coolest” exoplanets found thus far, suggesting that it could have a very substantial atmosphere.

(Not TOI-1231 b)

The planet travels around a red-dwarf star and completes a full orbit in just 24.2 days. Even though it orbits its host star at a pretty close range (a distance of 0.1288 AU), it is still considered to be a cooler planet (its star is also considered to be somewhat cool). Unfortunately, there couldn’t be any life on the planet because of its size; however, there may be a lot to learn about its atmosphere.

Scientists are hopeful that the Hubble Space Telescope and the upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to capture evidence of starlight shining through the exoplanet’s atmosphere. The molecules in the atmosphere absorb the light which then reveals dark lines that will hopefully tell scientists which gases are present on TOI-1231 b. Additionally, when the planet passes by its host star, the transiting time takes almost 3.5 hours which is great news for studying the starlight that will shine through the atmosphere.

(Not TOI-1231 b)

There is a possibility that the telescopes could see clouds in the atmosphere of TOI-1231 b. And if the clouds do contain water, hydrogen atoms may be escaping the atmosphere and leaving a trail behind the planet as it quickly moves away. While this is exciting, we’ll have to wait and see what the telescopes detect.

An artist’s impression of TOI-1231 b can be seen here.

We are all familiar with Earth’s four oceans: Atlantic, Arctic, Pacific, and Indian. And now, thanks to National Geographic, there is officially a fifth ocean – the Southern Ocean that encircles Antarctica.

Alex Tait, who is a National Geographic Society Geographer, stated, “The Southern Ocean has long been recognized by scientists, but because there was never agreement internationally, we never officially recognized it.” More specifically, geographers couldn’t agree on whether the water around Antarctica was unique enough to be classified as its own ocean.

Interestingly, the Southern Ocean is defined by its current rather than the continent around it as is the case with the other four oceans. It is believed that the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), which flows around the continent from west to east, was formed approximately 34 million years ago when Antarctica separated from South America. Furthermore, it brings in water from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans in a type of conveyor belt (or circulatory system) that distributes heat to other parts of the planet.

The Southern Ocean is home to many species such as penguins, seals, and whales, just to name a few. It’s about time that the Southern Ocean has finally been recognized as Earth’s fifth official ocean.

In other water news, an ancient “megalake” that extended 2.8 million square kilometers (a little over a million square miles) had approximately ten times the amount of water in all of today’s lakes combined. About 10 million years ago, the Paratethys Sea was located from the Alps above Italy to Kazakhstan in the central part of Asia.

A new study has revealed more information regarding the ancient megalake. There were four cataclysmic cycles caused by climate change that continued to make the lake smaller until it completely disappeared in addition to nearly killing off numerous creatures that inhabited it such as mollusks, crustaceans, small whales, and dolphins.

For their study, Wout Krijgsman, who is a geologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, as well as his colleagues, analyzed fossilized remains, sedimentary deposits, and focused on the geological area surrounding the Black Sea which is located in the middle of where the Paratethys Sea was once located and they were able to determine that there were four separate decreases in the water levels within several millions of years with the most significant one occurring between 7.65 and 7.9 million years ago when the water level dipped about 250 meters (820 feet). This event is referred to as the Great Khersonian Drying and it turned the megalake into numerous smaller mini lakes that would have been extremely harmful to the creatures living in the water. The shorelines would have eventually become grasslands which at least would have benefited land animals.

(Map generated in ArcGIS Pro https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-pro/overview, v. 2.1, see “Methods”).

The study was published in Scientific Reports.

There can be few people reading this who have not at least heard of the legendary Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, who so terrorized the town and the surrounding area between November 1966 and December 1967, and whose diabolical exploits were chronicled in the 2002 hit Hollywood movie starring Richard Gere: The Mothman Prophecies, so named after the book of the same title written by Mothman authority John Keel. A devil-like, winged monster with glowing, red eyes, Mothman’s appearance came quite literally out of nowhere and, some say, culminated in high tragedy and death. But what was the Mothman of Point Pleasant? And how did the legend begin?  To answer those questions we have to go back to the dark night of November 12, 1966, when five grave-diggers working in a cemetery in the nearby town of Clendenin were shocked to see what they described as a “brown human shape with wings” rise out of the thick, surrounding trees and soar off into the distance.

Three days later, the unearthly beast surfaced once again. It was at the highly appropriate time of the witching-hour when Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette – two young, married couples from Point Pleasant – were passing the time away by cruising around town in the Scarberrys’ car. As they drove around the old factory, the four were puzzled to see in the shadows what looked like two red lights pointing in their direction. These were no normal lights, however. Rather, all four were shocked and horrified to discover that, in reality, the “lights” were the glowing, self-illuminating red eyes of a huge animal that, as Roger Scarberry would later recall, was “…shaped like a Mothman, but bigger, maybe six and a half or seven feet tall, with big wings folded against its back.”

Nick Redfern at Point Pleasant

Not surprisingly, they fled the area at high speed. Unfortunately for the Scarberry’s and the Mallette’s, however, the beast seemingly decided to follow them: as they sped off for the safety of Point Pleasant, the winged monster took to the skies and shadowed their vehicle’s every movement until it reached the city limits. The four raced to the sheriff’s office and told their astounding story to Deputy Millard Halstead, who later stated that: “I’ve known these kids all their lives. They’d never been in any trouble and they were really scared that night. I took them seriously.” And even though a search of the area by Halstead did not result in an answer to the mystery, the Mothman would soon return. Early on the morning of November 25, yet another remarkable encounter with the mysterious beast took place, as John Keel noted:  “Thomas Ury was driving along Route 62 just north of the TNT area when he noticed a tall, grey manlike figure standing in a field by the road. ‘Suddenly it spread a pair of wings,’ Ury said, ‘and took off straight up, like a helicopter. It veered over my convertible and began going in circles three telephone poles high.'”

Keel reported that Ury quickly hit the accelerator. Nevertheless, Ury added: “It kept flying right over my car even though I was doing about seventy-five.” Over the next few days more sightings surfaced, including that of Ruth Foster of nearby Charleston – who saw the winged monster late at night in her garden, and who said: “It was tall with big red eyes that popped out of its face. My husband is six feet one and this bird looked about the same height or a little shorter, maybe.” Needless to say, the local media had a field day with the story. Tales of what were referred to as the “Bird-Monster” hit the headlines; while both the skeptics and the police ensured that their views and opinions on the matter were widely known. Dr. Robert L. Smith, Associate Professor of Wildlife Biology in the West Virginia University’s Division of Forestry, expressed his firm opinion that Mothman was nothing stranger than a large sandhill crane. This hardly satisfied the witnesses, however. In response to Dr. Smith’s assertion, Thomas Ury said: “I’ve seen big birds, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

As for the local police, they offered stern warnings to any and all would-be monster hunters contemplating seeking out the mysterious creature, as the Herald Dispatch newspaper noted: “Sheriff [George] Johnson said he would arrest anybody caught with a loaded gun in the area after dark [and] warned that the scores of persons searching the abandoned powerhouse in the TNT area after dark risked possible serious injury.” In the weeks and months that followed, further encounters with the bizarre beast were reported; however, they were overshadowed by a tragic event that occurred on December 15, 1967. It was on that day that Point Pleasant’s Silver Bridge (so named after its aluminum paint) that spanned the Ohio River and connected Point Pleasant to Gallipolis, Ohio, collapsed into the river, tragically claiming forty-six lives. Interestingly, after the disaster at the Silver Bridge, encounters with the Mothman largely came to a grinding halt.

And while a down-to-earth explanation most certainly circulated – namely, that a fatal flaw in a single eye-bar in a suspension chain was the chief culprit – many saw, and still continue to see to this very day, the cause as being directly linked with the ominous and brooding presence of the accursed Mothman. Finally, John Keel titled his book, The Mothman Prophecies, for a reason. Keel himself foresaw a terrible disaster enveloping the city and the result being terrible carnage and death.