The year 2019 seems so long ago for most of us, but it probably seems like only yesterday for the US Navy after newly released documents show that the mysterious drones which harassed numerous Navy ships off the coast of Los Angeles in 2019 were far more prevalent that first thought … and the Pentagon still does not have an ‘official’ explanation for these unidentified aerial vehicles (UAVs). Are these more Tic Tac UFOs, Tic Tac decoys, enemy drones, secret U.S. drones or something else?

Something else?

(Not one of the mysterious drones)

Before we look at the latest revelations, let’s review how the Navy got to this point. The bulk of the data comes from The War Zone/The Drive, the military news website which has been tracking, requesting and revealing internal documents on mysterious drones following multiple Navy ships on maneuvers. It first revealed in March 2021 that the USS Kidd, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, encountered a UAP near San Clemente Island on July 14, 2019, and deployed a “SNOOPIE (Ship Nautical Or Otherwise Photographic Interpretation and Exploitation)” team to investigate. The War Zone found that other ships also encountered the UAPs on July 15 and 16 — the USS Russell, USS John Finn, the USS Paul Hamilton and the USS Rafael Peralta, which activated its own SNOOPIE team and reported a “white light identified hovering over” the ship’s flight deck for around 90 minutes. Logs of the other ships also reported sightings. The War Zone requested more information on the two-day encounter … and waited. This week, it finally received additional documents and they contained shocking new revelations.

“Newly released documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that the full scope of these drone incursions was greater than it initially appeared, and they persisted well after the Navy’s investigation was launched. Deck logs indicate that drone sightings continued throughout the month of July 2019 and included events where drone countermeasure teams were called into action. One notable event involved at least three ships observing multiple drones. Uncharacteristically for unclassified deck logs, the details on this event are almost entirely redacted.”

The logs show the USS Russell had encounters with the drones on July 17th and 20th. The USS Russell crew took anti-drone countermeasures that appeared to be unsuccessful – The War Zones explains that highly-directional radiofrequency jammers are designed to disrupt communications between drones and their operators, but are not effective against autonomous drones. The document also show that the Russell fired a 5-inch naval deck gun as a UAS (unmanned aerial system) countermeasure, but notes that these guns are not designed to hit targets that are small and slow-moving like these mysterious drones. Finally, they report that “ghostbusters” — lower-end counter UAS devices that look similar to rifles – were fired. The War Zone points out that “ghostbusters” is a new term.

The logs show that at least three ships reported multiple drones following them and adjusting their speed and position whenever a ship would make an evasive maneuver. The ships also enforced enhanced “emissions control,” or EMCON, protocols designed to minimize their electronic profile.

Whose drones are they?

(Not one of the mysterious drones)

Another engagement between the USS Russell and the mysterious drones took place on July 30th, 2019. A SNOOPIE team was activated, “ghostbusters” were used and a SCAT (Small Craft Action Team) was launched – these are machine gun operators that provide 360-degree coverage of the ship and are usually used in response to a small boat attack or low, slow flyers. The logs show that the nearby USS Bunker Hill made the same maneuvers. Perhaps the most interesting revelation is that unlike previous ones, the new documents were heavily redacted.

These new documents tell us that mysterious drones are a bigger problem for the US Navy (and the rest of the US military) than first thought. They tell us that counter-responses – including weapons – have been deployed with little success. They tell us that the Pentagon is probably hiding more information about them. What they DON’T tell us is what these drones are and who – or what – they belong to.

Kudos as always to the reporters at The War Zone and The Drive for their fine work.

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Map depicts the USS Paul Hamilton's interactions with an unknown UAS

Excerpt from the log of the USS Russell

As someone who has written extensively on the mysterious issue of the Men in Black, I’m often asked something along the lines of “What are the different types of M.I.B.?” Well, that’s a very good question. Specifically because there isn’t just one sort of Man in Black. There’s not even just two. In fact, there are several, as strange as it might sound. We’ll begin with the image that most people have: stern-faced characters – very often wearing fedora hats – and looking like they stepped out of a top secret, government facility. In other words, they aren’t the kinds you would want to cross paths with, but there’s nothing strange or odd about them. We can’t say that for all of the Men in Black, though. As we’ll see soon. Another type, that also comes across totally normal are the “Military Men in Black.” By that, I mean characters who wear military uniforms – and as a means to get into peoples’ homes and question them about their UFO encounters. Such was the extent to which this type of Man in Black was prevalent in the 1960s, the U.S. military circulated an official document warning its personnel to keep a look out for these mysterious, uniformed figures. For example, here’s one of several documents that was circulated:

On March 1, 1967, Lieutenant General Hewitt T. Wheless, USAF, penned the following memo. It was widely circulated within the military: “Information, not verifiable, has reached Hq USAF that persons claiming to represent the Air Force or other Defense establishments have contacted citizens who have sighted unidentified flying objects. In one reported case, an individual in civilian clothes, who represented himself as a member of NORAD, demanded and received photos belonging to a private citizen.” The document continues: “In another, a person in an Air Force uniform approached [italics mine] local police and other citizens who had sighted a UFO, assembled them in a school room and told them that they did not see what they thought they saw and that they should not talk to anyone about the sighting. All military and civilian personnel and particularly information officers and UFO investigating officers who hear of such reports should immediately notify their local OSI [Office of Special Investigations] offices.”

John Keel said of these uniformed men, in The Mothman Prophecies: “Mysterious men dressed in Air Force uniforms or bearing impressive credentials from government agencies have been silencing UFO witnesses. We have checked a number of these cases, and these men are not connected to the Air Force in any way. We haven’t been able to find out anything about these men. By posing as Air Force officers and government agents, they are committing a Federal offense. We would sure like to catch one – unfortunately the trail is always too cold by the time we hear about these cases, but we are still trying.” Moving on, there are the “robot”-like M.I.B. No, I’m not joking. Some Men in Black act and even look like robots. Their skin looks like plastic, and they have a jerky walk.

(Nick Redfern)

Robots in Black?!

Gareth J. Medway has an excellent list of Men in Black encounters that began a long, long time ago and that continued up to the 2000s. Of these robotic M.I.B., Gareth gives us these words: “1967, 9 January: The Christiansen family of Wildwood, New Jersey, who had seen a UFO on 22 November 1966, were interviewed by ‘the strangest looking man I’ve ever seen’, wearing a thin black coat, who introduced himself as ‘Tiny’ from the ‘Missing Heirs Bureau.’ He spoke in a high, ‘tinny’ voice, in clipped words and phrases like a computer, “as if he were reciting everything from memory.” His black trousers were too short, and ‘they could see a long thick green wire attached to the inside of his leg, it came up out of his socks and disappeared under his trousers.’ John Keel commented that he had not heard of this feature in other MIB cases: ‘Was Tiny wearing electric socks? Or was he a wired android operated by remote control?’ He departed in a black 1963 Cadillac. Sanderson, Uninvited Visitors, pp.160-61; Keel, Visitors from Space, pp.85-89.”

We now come to the creepiest Men in Black of all. They look far less like government agents and far more like the M.I.B. of the 1998 movie, Dark City. In fact, I would say the Men in Black of the movie are almost identical to those in the real world. Not only that, they have the ability to hypnotize people, to make them sick, to cause poltergeist activity in the home of the targeted person, and sometimes to vanish at almost impossible speeds. The big question is: are all of these Men in Black interconnected? My view is a big “No.” That, of course, makes the M.I.B. enigma even more complicating! Now, with the various Men in Black addressed, in the next article I’ll do likewise with the Women in Black.

Data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has revealed a possible 172 new exoplanets. In addition to the 172 planetary candidates, the team of astronomers also discovered 18 possible multi-planetary systems.

Among the candidates are several very odd systems. One system in particular that’s been named EPIC 249559552 is located approximately 650 light-years away from us. There are two “sub-Neptunes” in the system (these are smaller planets than Neptune) that orbit a yellow-white sun-like star. Their orbits are rather peculiar as the planet closest to the star completes five orbits for every two done by the further world (this gravitational influence is called orbital resonance).

(Not any of the planets mentioned in this article.)

Despite being retired in 2018, experts are still recovering astonishing information from all of the data collected by the Kepler Space Telescope during its nine-year mission. By studying all of the data, scientists will get a better understanding of how planetary systems form and how they change throughout the years; how gas giants form further away from their star before traveling inwards; and if there are certain types of exoplanets that exist more around specific types of stars.

Jessie Christiansen, who is the lead scientist for the NASA Exoplanet Archive at Caltech’s IPAC astronomy center, discussed the research by stating, “There was a lot of unexplored territory in these NASA Kepler archival data, so we worked together to build a new software pipeline that could uniformly look through the final four years of observations.”

(Not any of the planets mentioned in this article.)

Thanks to Kepler, so far there have been over 2,800 planets that have been confirmed and more than 3,250 that are awaiting confirmation (these include the recently discovered 172 new worlds). The research was published in The Astronomical Journal.

This news comes not long after it was reported that 301 new planets had been confirmed that brought the total at that time to 4,569. Currently, there are a total of 4,884 exoplanets that have been confirmed; 7,958 that are awaiting confirmation; and 3,659 planetary systems.

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It’s most intriguing to note that in the United States the black helicopter phenomenon began in 1973 – the very same year in which the U.K. was also hit by a wave of helicopter-based incidents, and that prompted the British Police Force’s Special Branch to launch an investigation. In the U.S., things started in the Hawkeye State: Iowa. For the first three months of the year, outraged farmers contacted local law enforcement officers with strange and unsettling stories: they would wake up in the morning, head to their fields and find several of their cattle dead. These were no normal deaths though. The genitals were gone, as were the eyeballs. Skin appeared to have been opened with the use of some kind of device employing incredible temperatures; maybe even a laser-based device. Organs were not savagely torn out – as they might have been if coyotes were the culprits. Instead, they were carefully cut out. Under cover of darkness, an unstoppable force was causing mayhem throughout the rural parts of Iowa. It wasn’t long before those same ranchers had something else to deal with. You have probably already guessed what that was. That’s right: black and unmarked helicopters.

But, were the pilots of the craft performing the mutilations? Or, were they monitoring the activities of the mutilators, who may not even have been human? These were the questions being asked seriously – and particularly so after sunset, when farmers wondered and dreaded what they might find when a new day dawned. Even local law enforcement were open to the idea that something from another realm of existence just might have been behind the mutilation wave. When the Iowa cases were at their height, local police authorities called in the FBI. Despite the large amount of testimony, photographs, necropsy reports, and extensive police files, the FBI stayed curiously out of the controversy. They maintained that since the events didn’t amount to “interstate transportation of the maimed animals,” they were powerless to get involved. The FBI, then, didn’t deny the reality of the grisly killings, but kept their distance because of bureaucratic reasons.

(Nick Redfern)

Where there were cattle mutilations there were black helicopters

When, in the fall of 1974, Nebraska was next on the hit-list, Senator Carl T. Curtis, who served in the U.S. Senate from 1955 to 1979, wanted answers – and he wanted those answers quickly. Such was Curtis’ level of concern, he went right to the Director of the FBI, Clarence M. Kelley, who, in 1973, took on the position of Director after the death of J. Edgar Hoover. Once again, though, the FBI took the stance that this was an area outside of their jurisdiction. Rumors abounded that the FBI had been warned to keep away from the subject. But, who would have the power and influence to ensure the FBI would stay away? It was a notable question. By 1975, things had gotten to the point where the FBI could not ignore what was going on – and in not just Iowa and Nebraska. Exasperated by a wave of mutes in his state of Colorado in seventy-five, Senator Floyd K. Haskell sent the following letter to FBI Director Kelley: “For several months my office has been receiving reports of cattle mutilations throughout Colorado and other western states. At least 130 cases in Colorado alone have been reported to local officials and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI); the CBI has verified that the incidents have occurred for the last two years in nine states. The ranchers and rural residents of Colorado are concerned and frightened by these incidents. The bizarre mutilations are frightening in themselves: in virtually all the cases, the left ear, rectum and sex organ of each animal has been cut away and the blood drained from the carcass, but with no traces of blood left on the ground and no footprints.”

(Nick Redfern)

Surveillance of the strange kind (over my old home and super-low)

If one hundred and thirty-plus incidents were not nearly enough to get the FBI involved, there was the matter of the black helicopters, which had also caught the attention of Senator Haskell. He added to Director Kelley: “In Colorado’s Morgan County area there has also been reports that a helicopter was used by those who mutilated the carcasses of the cattle, and several persons have reported being chased by a similar helicopter [italics mine]. Because I am gravely concerned by this situation, I am asking that the Federal Bureau of Investigation enter the case.”  The senator signed off: “Although the CBI has been investigating the incidents, and local officials also have been involved, the lack of a central unified direction has frustrated the investigation. It seems to have progressed little, except for the recognition at long last that the incidents must be taken seriously. Now it appears that ranchers are arming themselves to protect their livestock, as well as their families and themselves, because they are frustrated by the unsuccessful investigation. Clearly something must be done before someone gets hurt.”

Since then, various others agencies and bodies- not only the FBI – have got involved. The list includes the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Atomic Energy. The mystery of the cattle mutilations still continues. The same goes for those strange helicopters, too.

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