For many, the UFO phenomenon, or UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) as it's often known today, may seem relatively modern. Indeed, it was only from the 1940s that the idea of UFOs really swept the world and the public consciousness. Yet, this is a phenomenon that goes way back through the centuries, and here we will look at various very early encounters with strange things in the sky. 

UFO reports of some kind have occurred back to Biblical times. The Book of Ezekiel is the third of the Latter Prophets in the Tanakh and is considered to be one of the major prophetic books of the Bible. It follows the words of the Judean prophet Ezekiel ben-Buzi, a priest living in exile in the city of Babylon between 593 and 571 BC, who is written to have encountered God there and received six visions structured around three themes: Judgment on Israel, Judgment on the nations, and Future blessings for Israel. One of these bizarre visions came to Ezekiel in the form of a vision of four burning wheels, which “sparkled like chrysolite, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel,” with God atop a chariot attended by angels. Called “Ezekiel’s Wheel,” interpretations have varied as to what exactly it is all supposed to mean, but one common idea is given by the site Bible Study Tools, which says of it:

“The Bible story of Ezekiel's wheel features a vision of four wheels that illustrates the spiritual, divine essence of God and His omnipresence in our reality. This story is predominantly found in the first chapter of the book of Ezekiel, as part of his inaugural vision. God approaches Ezekiel as the divine warrior, riding in his battle chariot. The chariot is drawn by four living creatures, each having four faces (those of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle) and four wings. Beside each "living creature" is a "wheel within a wheel", with "tall and awesome" rims full of eyes all around. God appoints Ezekiel as a prophet and as a "watchman" in Israel: "Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites.” Ezekiel’s vision of the four wheels dramatically illustrates the omnipresence and omniscience of God. These wheels were associated with the “four living creatures” (Ezekiel 1:4), who were later described (Ezekiel 10:5-20) as cherubim, angelic beings appointed as guardians of the holiness of God. The Spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels. As a result, the creatures were able to move any direction the wheels moved. Most biblical scholars hold to the idea that the Spirit of God gave direction to the wheels through direct knowledge of and access to the will of God. The mobility of the wheels suggests the omnipresence of God; the eyes, His omniscience; and the elevated position, His omnipotence.”

Here is a version of the story from the Bible:

"I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north–an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. In appearance their form was that of a man, but each of them had four faces and four wings. Their legs were straight; their feet were like those of a calf and gleamed like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had the hands of a man. All four of them had faces and wings and their wings touched one another. Each one went straight ahead; they did not turn as they moved. Their faces looked like this: Each of the four had the face of a man, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle. Such were their faces. 

Their wings were spread out upward; each had two wings, one touching the wing of another creature on either side, and two wings covering its body. Each one went straight ahead. Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, without turning as they went. The appearance of the living creatures was like burning coals of fire or like torches. Fire moved back and forth among the creatures; it was bright, and lightning flashed out of it. The creatures sped back and forth like flashes of lightning. As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces.

This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like chrysolite, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not turn about as the creatures went. Their rims were high and awesome, and all four rims were full of eyes all around. When the living creatures moved, the wheels beside them moved; and when the living creatures rose from the ground, the wheels also rose. Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, and the wheels would rise along with them, because the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels. When the creatures moved, they also moved; when the creatures stood still, they also stood still; and when the creatures rose from the ground, the wheels rose along with them, because the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.

Spread out above the heads of the living creatures was what looked like an expanse, sparkling like ice, and awesome. Under the expanse their wings were stretched out one toward the other, and each had two wings covering its body. When the creatures moved, I heard the sound of their wings, like the roar of rushing waters, like the voice of the Almighty, like the tumult of an army. When they stood still, they lowered their wings. Then there came a voice from above the expanse over their heads as they stood with lowered wings. Above the expanse over their heads was what looked like a throne of sapphire, and high above on the throne was a figure like that of a man. I saw that from what appeared to be his waist up he looked like glowing metal, as if full of fire, and that from there down he looked like fire; and brilliant light surrounded him. Like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the radiance around him. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. When I saw it, I fell facedown, and I heard the voice of one speaking."

Now, traditionally, this would have been interpreted as a visitation from God and an entourage of angels, but there has been speculation over the years that this is actually an early account of extraterrestrial UFOs that has merely been seen through the lens of religious fervor and within a context understandable to the people back then, therefore being mistaken for some sort of heavenly phenomenon. Whatever the case may be, it certainly is a strange story. 

Moving along to 213 BC, we have an odd account that supposedly happened during the Second Punic War, which was the second of three wars fought between Carthage and Rome, the two main powers of the western Mediterranean in the 3rd century BC. According to this account by the Roman historian Livy, a “spectacle of ships gleamed in the sky.” Interestingly, Livy reports another appearance of ships in the sky in 173 BC, when a “great fleet” allegedly appeared in the air, and that “round shields were seen in the sky” over central Italy.

Also from the same general era is the bizarre experience reported by Alexander the Great. There are few figures from history as well-known as Alexander III of Macedon, commonly known as Alexander the Great, who became the king of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon in 336 BC at the age of 20. Throughout the course of his rule, he would forge one of the largest empires in history, stretching from Greece to northwestern India, in addition to carving out a reputation as an undefeated military might and one of history's greatest and most successful military commanders, as well as gaining the status of being one of the most influential figures on Western civilization. There have been many tales of Alexander the Great’s numerous exploits and conquests, to the point that he has become an almost legendary, larger than life figure, and one of the strangest of these is the time his army was supposedly harrassed by UFOs. 

A very early report of a bizarre battlefield encounter with something very unusual in the sky supposedly happened in 329 BC, during one of Alexander the Great’s many military campaigns. At the time, the army was advancing on an enemy city, and there was an enormous procession of elephants, horses, and men ready for war. According to the account, as they attempted a nighttime river crossing at the Jaxartes River in Central Asia, now known as the Syr Darya, the army was dive-bombed and menaced by “two great silver shields, spitting fire around the rims,” that so frightened them and panicked the animals that they postponed the crossing until the next day. The account originally came from Macedonian historian Aleksander Donski, who passed it along to the famed UFO researcher and author Frank Edwards, who wrote of it in his book Stranger than Science, but there has been some skepticism as to its veracity because there is no other known source for the story. Edwards would write of the account:

“Alexander the Great tells of two strange craft that dived repeatedly at his army until the war elephants, the men, and the horses all panicked and refused to cross the river where the incident occurred. What did things look like? His historian describes them as great shining silvery shields, spitting fire around the rims… things that came from the skies and returned to the skies.”

Another similar account from around the same time period was given by Italian UFO researcher Alberto Fenoglio, who gives an account that supposedly happened in 332 BC, in the midst of Alexander the Great’s Siege of Tyre, during his campaigns against the Persians. The account reads:

“The fortress would not yield, its walls were fifty feet high and constructed so solidly that no siege-engine was able to damage it. The Tyrians disposed of the greatest technicians and builders of war-machines of the time and they intercepted in the air the incendiary arrows and projectiles hurled by the catapults on the city. One day suddenly there appeared over the Macedonian camp these ‘flying shields’, as they had been called, which flew in triangular formation led by an exceedingly large one, the others were smaller by almost a half. In all there were five. The unknown chronicler narrates that they circled slowly over Tyre while thousands of warriors on both sides stood and watched them in astonishment. Suddenly from the largest ‘shield’ came a lightning-flash that struck the walls, these crumbled, other flashes followed and walls and towers dissolved, as if they had been built of mud, leaving the way open for the besiegers who poured like an avalanche through the breeches. The ‘flying shields’ hovered over the city until it was completely stormed then they very swiftly disappeared aloft, soon melting into the blue sky.”

Once again, there are no known ancient sources for this account, leaving us to wonder just how much veracity it has. Neither of these accounts seems to have much in the way of concrete historical data to back them up, and they are mostly known from the book by Edwards. Despite the complete lack of any identifiable sources, the story of Alexander the Great and his UFOs has managed to work its way into the lore and will pop up from time to time in discussions on ancient UFO sightings. It is a shame that there is so little to corroborate any of it, and is likely a fabrication or very loose and twisted interpretation of historical events, but it is all a damn strange story all the same.  

In the first century AD, Roman-Jewish historian Josephus, writing about a war between Roman and Jewish forces, recorded a supposed “aerial battle” between UFOs in AD 65. He would describe “chariots” in the sky, and “armed battalions hurtling through the clouds.” It was thought at the time that this might be an omen of Roman victory. 

Another curious classical UFO is recorded by the Greek writer Plutarch in his work Life of Lucullus, a Roman general. Lucullus’ forces were getting ready to go to battle with King Mithridates VI of Pontus when a strange object appeared between the two armies, of which is written:

“Suddenly, the sky burst asunder, and a huge, flame-like body was seen to fall between the two armies. In shape, it was most like a wine-jar (pithos), and in colour, like molten silver. Both sides were astonished at the sight, and separated.”

What was this thing? A meteor or something else? Jumping ahead to 779 AD, we have an account from Liber de Grandine et Tonitruis, Chapter XI, by Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, where it is written:

“We have, however, seen and heard many men plunged in such great stupidity, sunk in such depths of folly, as to believe that there is a certain region, which they call Magonia, whence ships sail in the clouds, in order to carry back to that region those fruits of the earth which are destroyed by hail and tempests; the sailors paying rewards to the storm wizards and themselves receiving corn and other produce. Out of the number of those whose blind folly was deep enough to allow them to believe these things possible, I saw several exhibiting in a certain concourse of people, four persons in bonds—three men and a woman who they said had fallen from these same ships; after keeping them for some days in captivity they had brought them before the assembled multitude, as we have said, in our presence to be stoned. But truth prevailed."

It is unclear what happened to these mysterious strangers after this, or if this story is anything more than mere myth and legend. From 1211 AD, there is an account from Gervase of Tilbury, an English chronicler of historical events and curiosities, who wrote:

“There happened in the borough of Cloera, one Sunday, while the people were at Mass, a marvel. In this town is a church dedicated to St. Kinarus. It befell that an anchor was dropped from the sky, with a rope attached to it, and one of the flukes caught in the arch above the church door. The people rushed out of the church and saw in the sky a ship with men on board, floating before the anchor cable, and they saw a man leap overboard and jump down to the anchor, as if to release it. He looked as if he were swimming in water. The folk rushed up and tried to seize him; but the Bishop forbade the people to hold the man, for it might kill him, he said. The man was freed, and hurried up to the ship, where the crew cut the rope and the ship sailed out of sight. But the anchor is in the church, and has been there ever since, as a testimony.”

What in the world was this? Next, we come to the year 1492, with Christopher Columbus and his crew in uncharted waters, reaching out over unexplored horizons to penetrate a new era, on their way to the eventual discovery of the New World. There were many strange and exciting discoveries to come, but before that, a bizarre series of events would supposedly play out, beginning with a strange sighting made on the evening of September 15, 1492. The Diario of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America, written by the Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas, describes how the crew witnessed a strange phenomenon in the sky, which is described as follows:

“They sailed that day and night 27 leagues and a few more on their route west. And on this night, at the beginning of it, they saw a marvelous branch of fire fall from the sky into the sea, distant from them four or five leagues.”

While this very well could have been a meteor, it seems curious that it was spectacular enough for them to make mention of it and emphasize it as a “branch of fire,” especially when they were likely to have witnessed many meteors in the sky during the voyage. Oddly, many interpretations of this sighting claim it as having been the opposite, and that the light was actually coming out of the ocean to shoot up into the sky. It is intriguing at the very least, but this was only one of several weird incidents they witnessed, according to Casas’ account. The following month, on October 11, 1492, the expedition was only hours away from their historic discovery of the Americas, and on this evening, the Admiral spotted something very unusual on the horizon. It seemed to be a light bobbing up and down in the air, and it was odd enough that the Admiral called others to come look at it. Cases writes:

“After sunset he [Columbus] steered on his former course to the west. They made about 12 miles each hour and, until two hours after midnight, made about 90 miles, which is twenty-two leagues and a half. And because the caravel Pinta was a better sailor and went ahead of the Admiral [Columbus] it found land and made the signals that the Admiral had ordered. A sailor named Rodrigo de Triana saw this land first, although the Admiral, at the tenth hour of the night, while he was on the sterncastle, saw a light, although it was something so faint that he did not wish to affirm that it was land. But he called Pero Gutierrez, the steward of the king's dais, and told him that there seemed to be a light, and for him to look: and thus he did and saw it.

He also told Rodrigo Sanchez de Segovia, whom the king and queen were sending as veedor [inspector] of the fleet, who saw nothing because he was not in a place where he could see it. After the Admiral said it, it was seen once or twice; and it was like a small wax candle that rose and lifted up, which to few seemed to be an indication of land. But the Admiral was certain that they were near land, because of which when they recited the Salve, which sailors in their own way are accustomed to recite and sing, all being present, the Admiral entreated and admonished them to keep a good lookout on the forecastle and to watch carefully for land; and that to the man who first told him that he saw land he would later give a silk jacket in addition to the other rewards that the sovereigns had promised, which were ten thousand maravedis [silver coins] as an annuity to whoever should see it first.”

It was apparently seen by many witnesses on several of the ships, leaving us to ask what this light was? This was all surrounded by various compass oddities they had experienced during the voyage. In short, the compass reportedly was constantly going haywire without any discernible reason, to the point that it had become quite unsettling for the crew. In a 1792 manuscript called The American Geography, by Jedidiah Morse, it is written of this anomaly:

“On the 14th of September he [Columbus] was astonished to find that the magnetic needle in their compass, did not point exactly to the polar star, but varied toward the west; and as they proceeded, this variation increased. This new phenomenon filled the companions of Columbus with terror. Nature itself seemed to have sustained a change; and the only guide they had left, to point them to a safe retreat from an unbounded and trackless ocean, was about to fail them. Columbus, with no less quickness than ingenuity, assigned a reason for this appearance, which, though it did not satisfy himself, seemed so plausible to them, that it dispelled their fears, or silenced their murmurs.”

All of this has been taken in modern times as a sign that Columbus and his men saw UFOs, and that either these or their proximity to the Bermuda Triangle at the time caused the compasses to malfunction. The case was famously shown on The History Channel and has generated quite a bit of discussion, but what are we really looking at here? One of the main problems with the reports is that, although they are often claimed as being from Christopher Columbus’ diary, the fact is that there is no known actual copy of that diary remaining. It all comes from the work of Bartolomé de las Casas, which was a supposed copy of the original log and diary, and it is important to note that Casas was never actually on the voyage and wrote this 50 years after the fact. Since it is not the actual original, there is no way to know how much of it was really from Columbus’ pen and how much was perhaps extrapolated or even exaggerated by Casas.

However, Casas was a well-respected historian not given to changing things around, and for the most part, it seems that Columbus and his men saw something, but what? There have been many interpretations and ideas thrown around, including that he saw bioluminescent sea life, a meteor, some sort of atmospheric phenomenon, or even Natives with torches on a canoe, but the most popular theory is that they simply saw lights from land. The October sighting was made just hours before land was sighted, so it seems reasonable to suggest that it might have been lights from the Natives on shore. Even Casas thought this, writing:

“I feel about this is that the Indians at night throughout these islands, as they are temperate without any cold, go out or used to go out from their straw houses that they call bohíos at night to comply with their natural necessities and take in hand a firebrand, or small torch, or a chink of pine or of another very dry and resinous wood which burns like a torch, when it is dark night, and with which they guide themselves back again, and in the manner could be seen the light which Christopher Columbus and the others saw the light three or four times.”

In the end, there is no way to really know for sure what happened here. We are left with a second-hand copy of the original journal and no way of really verifying any of it. Was this UFOs, Natives with torches, or what? It is all a curious little footnote in the history of Christopher Columbus, and likely will remain a mostly forgotten curiosity and historical oddity that will never be fully solved.

Another early case that stands out as flat-out spectacular and bonkers is an odd phenomenon that purportedly played out in the skies over Nuremberg, Germany, in 1561. On April 14th of that year, normal life ground to a halt as citizens looked upwards with a mixture of awe and fear as something very strange happened up there. There whizzing about in the heavens were reportedly hundreds of mysterious objects of all shapes and sizes, including spheres, cylinders, tubes, saucer-like objects, crosses, ovals, lunar crescents, a black spear, and myriad others, which seemed to be engaged in some sort of free-for-all aerial battle, scorching the sky with their hostilities, after which one of them was said to crash somewhere out in the wilderness. The objects moved erratically and with great speed, and an article that appeared in the local paper at the time said of this bizarre scene:

“At first there appeared in the middle of the sun two blood-red semi-circular arcs, just like the moon in its last quarter. And in the sun, above and below and on both sides, the color was blood, there stood a round ball of partly dull, partly black ferrous color. Likewise there stood on both sides and as a torus about the sun such blood-red ones and other balls in large number, about three in a line and four in a square, also some alone. In between these globes there were visible a few blood-red crosses, between which there were blood-red strips, becoming thicker to the rear and in the front malleable like the rods of reed-grass, which were intermingled, among them two big rods, one on the right, the other to the left, and within the small and big rods there were three, also four and more globes.

These all started to fight among themselves, so that the globes, which were first in the sun, flew out to the ones standing on both sides, thereafter, the globes standing outside the sun, in the small and large rods, flew into the sun. Besides the globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour. And when the conflict in and again out of the sun was most intense, they became fatigued to such an extent that they all, as said above, fell from the sun down upon the earth 'as if they all burned' and they then wasted away on the earth with immense smoke. After all this there was something like a black spear, very long and thick, sighted; the shaft pointed to the east, the point pointed west. Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows."

The whole thing apparently lasted for a full hour, after which all of these various objects flew off towards the sun. The article was accompanied by a woodblock print depicting the battle, which was also brought into modern discourse when it was published in Carl Jung's 1958 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, and it has left people scratching their heads ever since. At the time of the article it was largely seen as some sort of celestial battle and a sign from God, but of course in that era flying spaceships would not have really been a thing since it was an age when we didn’t even understand the cosmos in the first place, let alone flying machines that could traverse the stars. It only makes sense that they would try to explain it in a religious context, with something they could understand. In later centuries, it has come to be seen as perhaps some sort of atmospheric phenomenon such as a sundog, flying swarms of insects, clouds, birds, a sensationalized tall tale, or even an actual mass battle between UFOs. It is likely we will never know, considering how lost to time the report is, but it is definitely curious.

Also from the 16th century is an event that allegedly took place outside of Tübingen, Germany on December 7, 1577, and which was written of in the 1594 posthumous edition of Pierre Boaistuau’s Histoires Prodigieuses. The report reads:

“About the sun many dark clouds appeared… Out of these clouds have come forth reverberations resembling large, tall and wide hats, and the earth showed itself yellow and bloody, and seemed to be covered with hats, tall and wide, which appeared in various colors such as red, blue, green, and most of them black… It is easy for everyone to think of the meaning of this miracle, which is that God wants to induce men to amend their lives and make penance. May Almighty God inspire all men to recognize Him. Amen.”

Again, is this an extraterrestrial phenomenon posing as a religious vision? In 1628, the English Puritan settlers of the New World established the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was the second major settlement in New England following the Plymouth Colony. A very important figure at the time was a lawyer named John Winthrop, who was in charge of a huge wave of settlers coming to America, and he would serve as the governor of the colony for 12 years starting from 1629. Winthrop would also be the founder of various other communities along Massachusetts Bay and the Charles River, and was also known as an authoritarian and religiously conservative leader, known to be against pure democracy, once calling it “the meanest and worst of all forms of government.” Despite this, he was still a well-respected leader and politician who has made his mark upon the early history of the United States, with some of his writings serving to influence politicians to this day, but a lesser-known aspect of the man is that he also wrote some pretty weird stuff in his journals, including what is thought to be among the very first UFO accounts in the New World.

Tucked away between the pages of various mundane accounts of colonial life is a very curious entry dated March 1, 1639, in which Winthrop writes of a very bizarre and outlandish  incident involving a man named James Everell, whom he describes as a “discreet, sober man.” According to Winthrop, Everell had been rowing with two other men up a section of the Muddy River, about two miles from the village of Charlestown, when they saw a “great light in the sky,” which seemed to dart about back and forth. He would describe the account as follows:

“When it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square; when it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine: it ran as swift as an arrow towards Charlton [Charlestown], and so up and down about two or three hours ran as swift as an arrow, darting back and forth between them and the village of Charlestown, about two miles away. They were come down in their lighter about a mile, and, when it was over, they found themselves carried quite back against the tide to the place they came from. Diverse other credible persons saw the same light, after, about the same place.”

The men claimed that after the sighting, they had inexplicably found themselves transported about one mile upstream, with no idea or memory of how they had gotten there, nor any sense of the time that had passed. This is an odd detail, as it would mark this incident as not only one of the first reports of a UFO in America, but also the first account of missing time and possibly even the first of alien abduction. One of the explanations at the time was that the men had merely seen illumination from a light phenomenon springing from swamp gas, called ignis fatuus, caused by the combustion of gas from decomposed organic matter. Others thought it was just a misidentified meteorite, and one skeptic was a man named James Savage, who added his footnote to the sighting in a published version of Winthrop’s journal in 1839, saying:

“This account of an ignis fatuus [pale light over marshy ground] may easily be believed on testimony less respectable than that which was adduced. Some operation of the devil, or other power beyond the customary agents of nature, was probably imagined by the relaters and hearers of that age, and the wonder of being carried a mile against the tide became important corroboration of the imagination. Perhaps they were wafted [carry lightly], during the two- or three-hours’ astonishment, for so moderate a distance, by the wind; but, if this suggestion be rejected, we might suppose, that the eddy, flowing always, in our rivers, contrary to the tide in the channel, rather than the meteor, carried their lighter back.”

In the end, neither swamp gas nor meteorites seems to adequately explain what the men reported as written in Winthrop’s journal, and considering that it is only mentioned in one entry and happened so long ago, we will probably never know for sure. Interestingly, this isn’t even the only weird such account to be found within Winthrop’s journals. Five years later there is another entry dated January 18, 1644, which makes mention of a light rising from the water that was witnessed by several boatmen near Boston. This light was apparently “in form like a man,” and “went at a small distance to the town, and so to the south point, and there vanished away.” A few weeks after this yet another journal entry mentions another strange report from Boston Harbor, in which Winthrop writes:

“A light like the moon arose about the N.E. point in Boston, and met the former at Nottles Island, and there they closed in one, and then parted, and closed and parted diverse times, and so went over the hill in the island and vanished. Sometimes they shot out flames and sometimes sparkles. This was about eight of the clock in the evening, and was seen by many. About the same time, a voice was heard upon the water between Boston and Dorchester, calling out in a most dreadful manner, ‘Boy! Boy! Come away! Come away!’; and it suddenly shifted from one place to another a great distance, about 20 times. It was heard by diverse godly persons. About 14 days after, the same voice in the same dreadful manner was heard by others on the other side of the town towards Nottles Island.”

Winthrop would muse that the voice he heard was perhaps from the ghost of a sailor who had died several months before the UFO sighting when his ship had exploded when gunpowder had accidentally been ignited. Whatever the case may be, it is a pretty bizarre report, and it is hard to know what might be going on here. Once again, it only appears in one entry and is never brought up again, leaving it firmly and forever in the realm of speculation. It is all quite a strange case and series of events, and we are left to try and make sense of it all. Was any of this real, and if so, what was it? Or was this just a gag thrown into an important historical figure's journal, and if so, why? It is certainly a bizarre historical oddity, which has definite repercussions on the UFO discussion and which many are not aware even exists at all.

An otherworldly series of events allegedly occurred in April of 1665 in the skies over Barhöfft, which was then in Sweden, but is now in Germany. On this occasion, there were supposedly seen several disc-shaped objects that were battling amongst themselves, after which they scattered, and one remained hovering there, which apparently made all those who looked upon it sick. One Erasmus Francisci would write of this in a 1689 article entitled Der wunder-reiche Ueberzug unserer Nider-Welt/Oder Erd-umgebende, in which he says of the battle and its aftermath:

“After a while out of the sky came a flat round form, like a plate, looking like the big hat of a man… Its color was that of the darkening moon, and it hovered right over the Church of St. Nicolai. There it remained stationary until the evening. The fishermen, worried to death, didn’t want to look further at the spectacle and buried their faces in their hands. On the following days, they fell sick with trembling all over and pain in head and limbs. Many scholarly people thought a lot about that.”

As with the Nuremburg case, this has been speculated as being mirages, birds, or some other mundane phenomena, but the detail of the fishermen falling sick is intriguing, and makes one wonder if this could have been an effect of radiation sickness in an era when we didn’t even know what radiation was. What do we make of this account?

Looking at such cases as we have examined here, it is plain to see that the UFO phenomenon is far from a modern-day construct. It is also interesting that, although some of the very earliest biblical accounts seem to look at it through a cultural lens, many of the accounts are spookily similar to any report you might read today, suggesting that these aerial phenomena spotted in modern times might be the very same entities sighted centuries ago. Could this be, and if these are alien forces, might they have been on Earth for far longer than presumed? Or is this all just misidentification and tall tales? In any case, it all deepens the landscape of the UFO phenomenon and adds another layer of strangeness. 

Flying humanoids with jetpacks or some sort of advanced winged suit go way back. In as early as 1880 there are a couple of reports along these lines. The first comes from John Keel’s book The Mothman Prophecies and describes a bizarre scene that played out on July 28 of that year in the area of Louisville Kentucky, in the United States. On this day, two witnesses named C. A. Youngman and Ben Flexner were out taking a leisurely stroll on a clear, calm afternoon when they saw something quite odd in the sky above. They at first took it to be a toy balloon, but as it approached they could see that it was in fact what appeared to be “a man surrounded by machinery which he seemed to be working with his hands,” with some kind of wings and fans perched upon his back. This enigmatic flying man worked his machinery to have him dip and rise several times until he passed out of view. This sighting would be followed by a UFO sighting the same evening, in which a bright object was seen “hopping” over Madisonville, Kentucky before disappearing, its connection to the flying man unknown.

In September of that same year, there is another report mentioned in a 1972 article in Fate Magazine by authors Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark, which seems to fit into the theme of flying suits. On September 11, 1880, a strange flying humanoid was seen over Coney Island, New York, which seems to have been perhaps using a flying contraption of some sort. The original news article in the New York Times says of it:

“One day last week a marvelous apparition was seen near Coney Island. At the height of at least 1000 feet in the air a strange object was in the act of flying toward the New Jersey coast. It was apparently a man in bat’s wings and improved frog’s legs. The face of the man could be distinctly seen, and he wore a cruel and determined expression. The movements made by the object closely resembled those of a frog in the act of swimming with his hind legs and flying with his front legs….When we add that this monster waved his wings in answer to the whistle of a locomotive and was of a deep black color, the alarming nature of the apparition can be imagined. The object was seen by many reputable persons and they all agree that it was a man engaged in flying toward New Jersey.”

In 1936 a 15-year-old girl named E.E. Loznaya was on her way to school in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan on a cold winter morning. As she wound along the rural path lost in her thoughts, her attention was drawn to something in the sky, and when she looked carefully she would claim that she had seen it was a a medium-sized man in black clothes and a matching helmet that hid his face, and who was wearing an oval-shaped backpack. She also noticed that there was a deep, mechanical rumbling noise coming from this bizarre man. She was snapped out of her astonishment when the flying man suddenly made a quick course change to come hovering directly towards her, sending her into a mad dash to find a place to hide. As she tried to bury herself in a nearby snowbank, she looked up to find that the mysterious flying figure had vanished. 

Moving on in years we come to 1948, which has a few such reports. In the years after World War II, there were some strange encounters with what seems to have been a person or people in some sort of flying mechanized suit. In early January of 1948, a 61-year-old witness named Bernice Zaikowski claimed that she had been out in the yard of her home in Chehalis, Washington at around 3:00 PM when some neighborhood children began looking up at the sky and chattering away about a “flying man” up in the sky. It was at this point that Zaikowski allegedly heard an odd noise from above that sounded like “a sizzling and whizzing,” and when she looked up she could see something very odd indeed hovering up over a nearby barn around 20 feet in the air.

The witness insisted that what she saw looked like a man wearing a pair of long silver wings fastened to his shoulders with some sort of strap rig, which he seemed to control with some sort of high-tech panel attached to his chest. The mysterious man with his bizarre flying suit apparently then performed some aerial acrobatics, ascended into the air, and flew off into the distance in an upright posture. At no point could the witness discern any obvious source of propulsion such as a jet pack or propeller, and the contraption the man wore seemed to be mostly silent except for that odd whizzing sound. The whole sight was seen by Zaikowski and several other witnesses, all of whom were dumbfounded. Was this some sort of flying gadget crafted by a mad genius or something more otherworldly? Later that same year, in April of 1948 the mysterious figure was purportedly seen again in the same general vicinity, and this time he was apparently with friends. The two witnesses, laundry workers Viola Johnson and James Pittman, claimed that they saw “three men in flying suits” making circles over the city at a height of around 250 feet. Johnson would say of the spectacle:

“They looked like three men in flying suits flying through the air. They wore dark drab flying suits and as far as I can judge – I’m not very good at judging distance – they were 250 feet high, circling the city. They were going at about the same speed as a freight train and had some kind of apparatus on their sides which looked like guns but I know it couldn’t have been guns. I couldn’t see any propellers or any motors tied on them but I could hear motors which sounded like airplane motors, only not so loud. When they first came into sight I thought they looked like gulls but as they got closed I could see plainly that they were men. I couldn’t make out their arms but I could see their feet dangling down and they kept moving their heads, like they were looking around. I couldn’t tell if they had goggles on but their heads look like they had helmets on. I couldn’t see their faces.”

The two frightened witnesses’ story was somewhat corroborated when several local people later recalled hearing strange sounds in the sky at around the time of the sighting. Who were these flying men and where did they get those amazing suits? Were these some eccentric inventors who had come up with a new way of flight? If so, whatever happened to this incredible invention? Or was it something else, perhaps time travelers or visitors from another parallel dimension? Could it have all just been a hoax or a tall tale? It’s hard to say.

Moving on to the 1950s, in the winter of 1956 a witness by the name of John Hanks was walking home from work when there appeared a “demonic entity” from the darkness above him. The creature was described as humanoid in basic form but measuring about 9 feet tall, with brown leathery skin and clad in some kind of a mechanical winged harness that allowed it to fly through the air. The wings on the otherworldly apparatus looked metallic and allegedly were covered with scintillating multicolored lights along the bottom. On the center of the entity’s chest was what looked like some sort of square control panel that it seemed to manipulate in order to control its flight, and the whole of it emanated a ghastly hissing noise. Before Hanks could really process what he was seeing, the creature gazed at him with “large, watery eyes” and sped off into the night. 

Perhaps even more bizarre than this is a report from 1968, in the Bolivian village of Potosí. In the spring of that year, a shepherdess named Valentina Flores was herd herding her sheep and llamas back into the stables when she had a most incredibly surreal encounter, indeed. As she approached one of the sheep pens, she caught fleeting movement that she knew was not one of her animals but rather seemed like a human intruder. As she turned the corner of the stable, she saw not a person, but rather a diminutive humanoid creature in a dark jumpsuit with a net floating over it, a metallic pack on its back, and a sharp instrument in its hand with which it was in the process of using to disembowel a sheep. 

Now most people would have probably run away screaming at this point, but not Valentina. Rather than try and get out of there as fast as possible, she began throwing stones at the odd entity, which caused it to stand up and face her, blood and viscera dripping down off the hooked blade it held in its hand. It was described as standing just about 4 feet in height and wearing a helmet that covered its face. After a couple more stones bounced off of it, the entity then wielded the curved blade like a boomerang, throwing it at Valentina to cut her, after which the blade flew back to its hand. It did this several times, causing minor lacerations to the stunned witness. It then went to a box-like apparatus, and after pushing some buttons the floating net retreated into it and the creature secured the box to its backpack. It then picked up a bag of sheep entrails and rose into the air as a buzzing sound exuded from its backpack, which now seemed more like a jetpack. The unknown assailant then disappeared over the horizon, and it was later found that dozens of sheep had been left dead and dismembered by the humanoid intruder. What was going on here?

In 1978 there was a series of bizarre sightings in the USSR, the first supposedly happening in February of that year. Late one evening a militia captain by the name of Avtandil Bukhrashvili woke at his home in Tbilisi, Georgia to see a bright light, followed by the strange sight of two objects that looked like giant black birds, but which upon closer inspection did not seem to have any actual wings, but rather jetpacks of some sort. The two objects descended lower until they were close enough to see that they were indeed two humanoid beings in tight-fitting suits and helmets, through which it could be seen that they had frog-like faces. The entities then produced a tablet and forced him to swallow it, after which they took off and flew off into the distance while emitting a whirring sound. The witness then lost all memory and the next thing he knew he was in bed with a case of lost time.

In April of that same year, 14-year-old Valentine Valentinovich Gubsky was on vacation with his family and some friends in the Ryazan region of Russia. One foggy evening he was out walking with his friend when the two boys allegedly saw a series of bright, multi-colored flashes, after which they heard a mechanical drone that seemed to be approaching their position from a nearby hill. Through the mist, they could then see a shadowy figure coming towards them about 20 meters up in the air, and it continued until it had passed overhead, visible enough for them to make out that it looked like a flying man with his arms outstretched. The witnesses would describe the figure as wearing some sort of metallic silvery suit with metal rings along its limbs and torso, as well as a belt-like contraption with what looked to be a control panel embedded within it.

Whatever it was also seemed to be wearing a backpack of some sort, with what looked like oxygen tanks, upon which could be seen some sort of jet tubes or air inlets. There were no straps visible on what looked to be a jetpack of some sort, and the being also seemed to have some sort of membrane attached from its fingers to the belt, which the boys guessed served as wings. Upon the strange creature’s head was purportedly a helmet with what looked like a respirator. Whatever it was seemed to be heading towards the light seen previous to its arrival, leading the witnesses to believe there had been some connection.

In more recent years we come to 1989, when in October of that year shop owner Yannis Clonaris and his wife were driving home one evening in Lardos, Rhodes Island Greece. The wife looked out the window to notice a low-flying form that looked like a man dressed all in white and covered with hair, possessing wings where its arms should be. This would have been startling enough as it was, but mounted upon its back was some sort of device that seemed to be enabling it to fly, as it was not moving its wings at all. The bizarre apparition apparently looked directly at the witnesses before accelerating in the direction of Tsambika Mountain.

In 1998 we have another report from near Athens, Greece, this time on September 14 of that year, when two women were sitting out on a balcony at around sunset. They would spy an object in the sky headed towards them, which they at first took to be a helicopter but which was odd in that it emanated no sound. As it got closer, they could see that it was a humanoid being in an upright position, wearing what was described as an “astronaut suit.” This odd humanoid figure then descended to land at a nearby park and then sort of did a massive hop toward the forest on Ardittos Hill not far away. The creature then seemed to hover about and then transform into a bright spot and vanish.

A few years later, in July of 2000, there was a strange report in which the witness, Gerardo Valenzuela, filmed a tall dark humanoid object descending from the sky to disappear behind a hill in a valley near the active volcano in a place called Tepoztlan, in the Mexican state of Morelos, located between the Nevado de Toluca and Popocatépetl volcanoes. The strange flying man was filmed and again the video has been picked apart and debated as to its veracity. Then in October, there was a sighting made by an airline pilot and co-pilot while preparing to land in Mexico City. The figure was described as a “little flying man” wearing what appeared to be a backpack and who matched the altitude and speed of the aircraft for some time before flying off. This is a notable sighting in that these were trained pilots who would have been familiar with aerial phenomena and not prone to making up wild tales.

A particularly bizarre report from Mexico occurred on February 14, 2004, when Ana Luisa Cid and two others witnessed a decidedly unearthly sight above Mexico City. They saw in the sky a rather strange object that at first looked to be some sort of mechanical, vibrating machine on top, under which dangled what looked like a large black humanoid shape, the whole of which seemed to be hovering in the same position. To make matters more bizarre, a smaller object was allegedly seen to drift up from below to merge with the larger figure, after which it detached from the upper structure and revealed itself to be what appeared to be some sort of humanoid wearing a cloak or cape of some sort, while the thing above it now, in fact, looked like a living winged beast of some kind. It is then reported that the smaller object broke off from the cloaked creature to fly off, after which the cloaked one reattached to the winged monster and the whole surreal thing took off out of sight. What in the world was this thing? Whatever it is, what has come to be known as “The Entity Reunion in the Sky” remains one of the strangest sightings ever to take place in Mexican skies.

In 2004 yet another video of these things emerged from near Cerro de la Silla, also in Mexico, which showed a dark object with a humanoid form floating through the air at great speed while hunched over. The video of course has generated a whole bunch of debate as to what it could be, with many saying that it is merely a cluster of balloons or some garbage blowing through the air. The next year, on June 17, 2005, witness Horacio Roquett would also film a flying humanoid in a seated position atop some type of device over Mexico City. Roquet was out with his sister at Unidad Habitacional Lomas de Platero in the middle of the afternoon on a clear day when they both saw a tall humanoid figure cruising through the air and leering at them menacingly. In this case, the figure seemed to be perched atop some sort of gravity-defying vehicle that emitted a strange red glow, with its legs dangling underneath. The video they took has become one of the most famous pieces of footage ever taken of one of Mexico’s flying humanoids.

Even more recently headlines were made when a mysterious figure in a jetpack was reportedly seen on numerous occasions over Los Angeles, California between the years of 2020 and 2022. It all began on August 30, 2020, when two different airline pilots reported seeing a "guy in a jetpack" hovering near Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) at 3,000 feet (910 m), and dangerously close to the flightpath of incoming and outgoing planes. Over coming months, other pilots also reported a man in a jetpack zipping around LAX airspace, at altitudes of up to 5,000 feet (1,500 m), to the point that some flights were even diverted or canceled due to the intruder’s antics. Before long the figure was being called the “Jetpack Man” and “Iron Man” in the media, and authorities were scrambling to figure out who or what it was, with theories including humanoid balloons, drones, or even yes, unauthorized advanced jetpack tech. Despite a massive investigation, no definitive answers have ever been found and the Jetpack Man remains a perplexing mystery. 

Even more recently still is a series of encounters in rural Peru in 2023, with what were described as “7-foot-tall aliens” wearing jet propulsion boots and jetpacks. Witnesses reported that these flying humanoids had tried on numerous occasions to kidnap people, leaving some of them with injuries. Some villagers also claimed that the mystery figures were impervious to arrows and bullets. As to their appearance, one village official from the local Indigenous Ikuta group would say:

“These gentlemen are aliens. They are using state of the art technology, like thrusters that allow people to fly. They seem armored like the green goblin from Spider Man. I have shot one twice and it didn’t fall. Instead, it elevated and disappeared. We’re frightened by what is happening in the community. Their color is silver, their shoes are round in shape and with those, they rise up. They float one meter high and have a red light on their heel. Their heads are long, their mask is long, and their eyes are sort of yellowish.”

Peruvian law enforcement officials launched an investigation and concluded that they were, umm, illegal gold miners and drug cartel members, wearing, er, high-tech jetpacks. This was the serious official consensus, with the rationale being that these miners were using this advanced technology and scary suits to terrorize the locals into staying away from the lucrative gold mines and drug stashes. This sophisticated jetpack technology could also be used to make drug runs, it was surmised. Using Tony Stark-level high-tech suits to scare humble villagers and deal drugs. Right, then. As of yet, there have been no arrests made and no suspects questioned in the jetpack aliens phenomenon. 

What are we looking at in these cases? From jetpack sightings well before such technology existed to mysterious humanoids using such technology far beyond what it known to be available now, how do we explain such encounters? Surely jetpacks do exist in modern times, but they are mostly seen as a novelty item too impractical for serious pursuit and lacking the technology to reach the lengths of being airborne, the maneuverability, and the altitudes described in some cases. Is there perhaps someone who has perfected such technology, perhaps even decades ago? Could these be aliens or even interdimensional intruders? Just what is going on here? It remains to be seen. 

A bizarre vanishing related by missing persons researcher David Paulides, author of the Missing 411 series of books concerning people who have disappeared under bizarre circumstances, happened in the summer of 1938, when 4-year-old Alfred Beilhartz was on a fishing and camping trip with his family at Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. As the boy and his parents were taking a hike along a river, little Alfred suddenly disappeared without explanation. One moment he had been there walking in a line behind them, and the next the parents had turned around to find he was gone without a trace. There had been no shout or sign of distress, and all calls to him went unanswered. He had seemingly just ceased to exist.

Although the parents claimed that the boy had gone nowhere near the water, authorities were nevertheless convinced that he had fallen into the river, and immediately went about blocking off the river so that it could be thoroughly searched and so that his body would not float too far away. A 6-mile stretch of the river where Alfred had vanished was searched and dredged for 5 full days without turning up any sign of the boy, and when bloodhounds were brought in they oddly tracked his scent to around 500 feet uphill from where his parents had been when he had disappeared, which was odd considering he had supposedly gone missing as he was walking behind them. Also strange was that, allegedly, the bloodhounds followed the trail for some time before reaching a fork and suddenly stopping and simply lying down, an odd behavior for trained scent dogs to display, and also strange because it seemed that the trail had just abruptly stopped to vanish just as surely as the boy had.

Even more bizarre than this was an odd report that came in from some hikers in the area in the early stages of the search, the very day after Alfred had vanished. The hikers, who were a couple, had been on Old Fall River Road about 6 miles away over rugged terrain and around 3,000 feet higher from where Alfred had disappeared, and at the time had had no idea that there was a missing boy in the area, yet they reported seeing a rather worrying sight. They claimed that they had seen a young boy perched up upon a high ridge in an area ominously called “The Devil’s Nest,” near the top of Mt. Chaplin. The hikers reported that the boy had been forlornly sitting alone up there and had then suddenly moved out of sight, which the hikers mysteriously allegedly said looked as if he were being “jerked back.” At the time, they could not figure out how such a young boy would be out there in the remote wilderness by himself or how he could have possibly climbed up onto that formidably high ridge. According to the hikers, as soon as they had gotten home and seen the news, they had realized that the boy they had seen was the missing Alfred Beilhartz.

Authorities acted on the tip and made the journey out to the Devil’s Nest, a perilous hike through thick, unforgiving forested terrain littered with rough brush and dense trees, and there at the top of the looming ridge, they could find no trace of the boy. Considering the difficulty of the terrain, the elevation, and the steep, treacherous climb up to the ridge on which the hikers had claimed to have seen the boy, park rangers came to the conclusion that it would have been impossible for the boy to have made the hike out there in the timeframe involved on his own, and that he could not have possibly climbed the ridge alone without specialized climbing equipment and experience. There are several weird details about this case. How did Alfred manage to just vanish right under his parents’ noses without making a sound? What happened to his scent trail, and why did the bloodhounds following him act so oddly? How could Alfred hike all the way up Mt. Chaplin, trudging 6 miles and 3,000 feet through unforgiving, perilous terrain in such a short time, and then climb up onto that high ridge by himself? What did the hikers mean that he was “jerked back”? We may never know, and Alfred Beilhartz has never been found.

In the summer of 1952, 10-year-old Constance Christine “Connie” Smith, of Sundance, Wyoming, was excited about staying at the summer camp called Camp Sloane, in Salisbury, Connecticut. It was her first time away from home on her own, and by all accounts, she could not stop talking about it in the days leading up to the camp. Things started out great, and the typically shy Connie came out of her shell a bit to make new friends and try new things. She seemed to have been enjoying herself, which is why it is rather odd that on July 16, she suddenly walked off on her own away from camp and seems to have kept walking right off the face of the earth.

On that morning, Connie told her tentmates that she was going to skip breakfast and return an ice pack to the camp infirmary. She had apparently used the pack to nurse a bloody nose and cut lip she had allegedly gotten by roughhousing with some other campers, and she told everyone that she was just going to return the pack and be right back to join them. She made no mention of going off anywhere, and seemed to be in good spirits despite her injured nose. She then got dressed in a bright red windbreaker and blue shorts and headed off towards the infirmary, but she would never arrive there. The next time anyone saw her was a camp counselor who saw her walking towards Indian Mountain Road, and others saw her picking daisies in the area. One daughter of a private homeowner would later claim that the girl had knocked on their door and asked how to get to Lakeville, Connecticut, with tears in her eyes, and this seems to be the last confirmed sighting of Connie Smith.

When it was clear that Connie had wandered off and gone missing, camp counselors were quick to find that the girl had never arrived at the infirmary, and indeed she had left the ice pack behind in her tent, along with her money and most of her belongings. The only thing missing was a black zippered purse in which she had kept photos of her friends. The area was searched, but no sign of the girl could be found, and calls out to her were answered with silence, after which she was officially reported missing to police. The area was searched more extensively, but again, no trace of the girl could be found, and in the meantime, police began questioning other campers, camp counselors, and motorists who had been passing by the road she had been on.

Questioning people at the camp immediately turned up some sinister clues, as there were some campers who claimed that, although Connie had told counselors she had bloodied her hose just roughhousing, it had actually been from bullying and getting in a fistfight. Other campers also claimed that Connie had been miserable there and had expressed wanting to go home, so this led to the idea that she had perhaps run away, but why do that without her money and belongings? Also, when Connie’s mother was questioned, she claimed that she had visited her daughter just two days before the vanishing and that Connie had been in good spirits and told her she was having so much fun she wanted to stay longer, so it seems strange that she should want to run away when she was so dead-set on staying. Another ominous clue that police were able to dig up was a trucker who claimed that he had seen a girl matching Connie’s description get into a vehicle on Route 44 near Belgo Road at about 8:45 a.m. on the day of her disappearance, leading police to think she might have been kidnapped. As all of this was going on there was a massive search for the girl taking place, with fliers distributed all over the country. This managed to bring in sightings of Connie from all over the place, but none of these led anywhere, and indeed it would not be until April of 1953 that they would get their first real lead.

It started with a traveling jewelry salesman by the name of Frederick Pope, who came to the police in Ohio claiming he knew what had happened to Connie Smith. He told them that he and his partner, Jack Walker, along with a woman named Wilma Sames, had picked up Connie hitchhiking up on Route 44, and they had promised to take her as far as Wyoming. He then told a shocking story of Walker attacking them in Arizona and killing Connie, after which Pope had attacked him and killed him with a tire iron in self-defense. However, no bodies could be found, and no woman named Sames, nor a Jack Walker, could be proven to have ever even existed at all. Pope would later admit it was all a demented hoax.

Rather eerily, the investigation into this false lead managed to turn up the skeletal remains of a girl in 1958 at a place called Skinner Ridge, in the Grand Canyon National Park, which have never been identified but were eventually found to not belong to Connie Smith. These remains have been nicknamed “Little Miss X,” have never been identified, and are just as mysterious as Connie’s vanishing. In later years, there would be some other leads and even suspects in connection with Connie’s disappearance. One of these was a man named George Davies, who in 1957 was doing time and awaiting execution for the brutal murders of two girls named Gaetane Boivin and Brenda Doucette in Connecticut. While languishing in prison, he came forward to admit that he had also killed Connie Smith and had buried her body on the bank of the Naugatuck River. However, police could not find the body, and Davies would toy with them by claiming he had made the whole story up. Considering that he was executed shortly after, any secrets he may have had he took to the grave with him.

Another promising suspect was a man named William Henry Redmond, who was charged in 1988 with strangling a Pennsylvania girl a year before Connie’s disappearance and was thought to have been in the Lakeville area at the time, but police could never prove this or find any hard evidence to pin him to the vanishing. Considering he died in prison in 1992, we will never know. There would be no further suspects found, but over the years, sightings of Connie Smith alive came in from all over the country, and there was even a woman who claimed that she was Connie Smith, but a DNA test refuted this. Connie’s family would continue to doggedly search for clues, but tragically her mother and father would die without ever finding the answers they sought, leaving it up to Connie’s brother, Nels J. Smith, to carry on, but the case has gone very cold. However, it is still open, and current investigator Detective Michael Downs has said of it all:

“There were some leads that were dead ends. My thoughts are that it’s a good case. It all happened so long ago. In 1952 things were done differently, and technology was very old-school. If you think back to childhood, one could walk anywhere. Times change. A 10-year-old walking down an old dirt road crying would be remarkable today. Back then, it was nothing. No one knows what actually occurred. It’s been 66 years, and no one has found her. With the Internet and technology, you would think something would have come up, but no. If a child were missing today, it would be found. With this case, there is hope for the family’s sake. I tend to be hopelessly optimistic that something will come.”

What happened to Connie Smith? How did she just wander off with so many other people around, only to vanish off the face of the earth? Did she run away, was it foul play or what? It is frustrating to know that all of these decades later, there have been few clues and no answers, and her ultimate fate remains unknown. All we know is that she walked away from that camp and has never been seen again, leaving us to merely wonder and speculate.

In 1971, 8-year-old Douglas Legg went on a family trip to a place called the Santanoni Estate, now called the Santanoni Preserve, near the town of Newcomb, in the Adirondack Mountains of Essex, New York. Also commonly called the "Great Camps," the sprawling, 12,500-acre estate was a popular summer resort for wealthy New Yorkers at the time and featured forty buildings and a 24-room main lodge. The owners of the estate, the wealthy Melvin Family, were relatives of the Leggs, and so they often made family trips there to enjoy the remote wilderness and serene vistas of forests and lakes. On this particular occasion, it was to be the extended family’s last trip there before the estate was due to be sold, but it would also be the last time anyone would ever see little Douglas again.

On July 10, 1971, Douglas went on a hike with his uncle on a clear summer day for what was meant to be an easy, short hike. As they walked along, at around 3:30 p.m., Douglas’ uncle realized that they were probably going to encounter some poison ivy along the way. In fact, he had spotted patches of it as they walked, and noticing that Douglas was wearing short pants, his uncle told him to run back to camp and change into long pants. Although he was only 8 years old, the camp was just a short distance away, just a stone’s throw, in fact, only around a half a mile along a straight path, and despite his young age he was very experienced being in the outdoors and had been to the camp many times before. As he ran off to go change his clothes, it would not have seemed like a particularly abnormal thing, so it was with some surprise that the uncle waited and waited, but Douglas never came back.

After some time waiting, Douglas’ uncle went back to camp, where he learned that the boy’s older brother had seen him near the main lodge building but had thought nothing of it. One of the boy’s cousins also claimed that he had seen Douglas near a nearby ridge, but again, it hadn’t seemed particularly strange. Indeed, everyone seemed to think that the boy was still with the uncle. When the uncle told them what had happened, they immediately fanned out to look for Douglas, calling out his name and sweeping the entire area, but there was no sign of him. As the evening approached and the temperature dropped, authorities were notified, and an official search was launched.

The ensuing search would be one of the largest the state of New York had ever seen, using helicopters, planes equipped with heat-detecting infrared FLIR, search dogs, rangers, a mountain rescue team who flew in from Sierra Madre, California, and 1,000 volunteers, although it was described as not being particularly well-organized and hampered by bad weather and treacherous terrain. Even psychics were brought in. At one point a bloodhound picked up the boy’s scent and followed it for around 30 miles over difficult terrain choked with brush and trees, which would have been nearly impossible for such a young child to have navigated on their own, where the trail ended at a pond, which was subsequently dragged and even drained but no body was found. After that, the scent trail ended, as if he had just evaporated from the face of the earth. The search would go on for 6 weeks, searching every bush and crevice, even in areas that no 8-year-old would have been able to pass through, and dragging streams and lakes, but no further traces of the boy were found, not a single clue as to where he had gone or what had happened to him. He had seemingly just ceased to exist. It was at the time assumed that the boy had simply gotten lost in the wilderness and succumbed to the many bogs and swamps in the area, but in later years, some eerie clues would seem to refute this.

In 1993, a woman came forward claiming that a relative of hers had killed Douglas Legg and dumped his body in a lake in Lewis County. She even showed authorities which specific lake it was, but there was no sign of any body found, and it was discovered that the woman was a psychiatric patient with false memory syndrome. That very same year a Montana man would come forward to claim that he had been hunting in the area back in 1973 and had stumbled across some skeletal remains that could have been those of a child, but he had shied away from coming forward with the discovery at the time because he had been on Navy leave and not supposed to be hunting there at the time. Despite all of the time that had passed, the area was thoroughly searched to no avail. It is unknown just what he actually found or what connection it has to Douglas Legg’s disappearance. Even more recently was a lead that came in 2020, when members of the New York State Police Troop B Underwater Recovery Team were doing training at a lake in front of the Santanoni Estate and came across an unidentified skull fragment. It was seen as an exciting new lead until it was analyzed and determined to be non-human.

In the end, there have been no other possible leads, no new clues, and although the case is officially still open, there has been no sign of the missing Douglas Legg, the tragic vanishing still frustratingly unsolved. What happened to him out there? How could he go so completely missing in such a short amount of time practically right under everyone's noses? Did he just get lost, despite the fact that he was within eyeshot of camp? Did he get distracted and roam off into the unknown? Was this all foul play? Or was it something else? It seems like only the trees know the answers to these various questions, and the mysterious vanishing of Douglas Legg remains unsolved, perhaps forevermore.

Sunday, March 24, 1991, started out as a great day out for four-year-old Michael Dunahee and his mother, Crystal Dunahee, and father, Bruce. It was a clear, sunny day, and the family was out at Blanshard Park Elementary School in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada to watch Crystal play in a playful practice game of flag football. Shortly after arriving at the field around 12:30 PM, little Michael asked his mother if he could go to the playground right nearby. Seeing as how there were many parents and families out playing on that fine day and the playground was just a few yards away, she said it was OK, on the condition that he wait for his father when he got there. Little did anyone know that as he walked off towards the playground, this would be the last time she would see him.

Michael walked off, and his mother bent down for just a moment to put on her cleats as she called to her husband to go watch their son. However, when she looked up moments later, the boy was nowhere to be seen. She literally looked down, tied her shoes, and looked up to find him nowhere. Bruce Dunahee was at the park in moments, but couldn’t see Michael anywhere. A look around showed happy families playing and children laughing, but no Michael, who should have stuck out considering he was wearing a bright blue hooded jacket with red lining and red cuffs, as well as multi-colored rugby pants and blue canvas shoes with bright red and orange trim. It had been less than a minute since the boy had ventured towards the park just right there, just feet away from his parents, in broad daylight in a public, crowded park, so it didn’t make any sense. It was as if he had just vanished into thin air.

At this point, it was still thought that he couldn’t be far, so Crystal and Bruce searched the whole park and its surroundings but saw no sign of Michael. They managed to recruit several dozen other people from the practice game to help look, but they had no luck at all, and asking around to other people in the park proved that no one even remembered seeing the boy at all. This was enough to cause the increasingly panicked parents to call the police. The entire area was thoroughly searched, but Michael could not be found, and the search efforts would quickly escalate into one of the largest Canada had ever seen. Yet despite this massive search, wide circulation of fliers, and a reward that would reach $100,000, initially there were no leads at all. How is it that this boy could have so thoroughly disappeared within moments, mere feet from his parents in a public place, and no one had even seen anything? There were no witnesses, no clues, nothing. It was as if Michael Dunahee had just evaporated.

There would eventually be hundreds of tips that would be called in as the case gained national and then worldwide attention, but none of these led anywhere at all. One promising tip was that someone had seen a man in his 50s loitering about by the park near a brown van on that day, but there is no way at all to know if this was connected to the disappearance, and the reported brown van could not be located. Also rather chilling was a call that Crystal and Bruce Dunahee received from a man demanding a $10,000 ransom for the return of their son, but whoever it was never followed up on it, and police believe it was just a sick prank. In June of that year, there was another rather chilling lead, when a girl claimed a man had tried to abduct her and she had seen a boy tied up in the back of the van who she thought resembled Michael Dunahee, but this could not be confirmed. There were various other alleged sightings of the missing boy from all over British Columbia, but none of these panned out, and with no clear answer, there are only theories.

The best thing authorities could come up with was that it must have been an abduction that was carried out by an opportunistic perpetrator, probably a stranger, but it is unclear how they could have done it in such a short time in such a public place without anyone seeing anything suspicious at all. Police interviewed every known sex offender and criminal who had been anywhere near that park, but came up empty, with no suspects whatsoever, and since no one had witnessed anything strange, they didn’t even have a description of the kind of person they should be looking for. The case had hit a wall.

It would not be until 2006, over a decade later, that a truly promising lead would come in when it was reported that there was a young man who had been living in a small town in British Columbia who bore a striking resemblance to posters that had been released showing an age-enhanced Michael Dunahee. In fact, the resemblance was so uncanny that even Michael’s distressed parents believed it to be him, yet when authorities tracked the man down and performed a DNA test, it was found not to be Michael. There would be more cases of people looking like Michael popping up in the coming years, but in every instance, DNA testing proved otherwise. Perhaps one of the spookiest new leads came in 2009, when a 62-year-old man in Milwaukee named Vernon Seitz confessed on his deathbed that he had killed two children in 1958, and this spurred a search of his home. Police would chillingly find reams of child pornography and missing children posters, one of them eerily featuring the missing Michael Dunahee. Police could find no link between Seitz and Michael and no evidence that he had been in British Columbia in 1991, leaving it uncertain if he had anything to do with the case. If he did, then there is no proof, and he took any secrets he had to the grave with him.

The tragic and mysterious case of Michael Dunahee’s vanishing has gone on to become one of the darkest and most perplexing unsolved mysteries Canada has ever seen, and it even led to changes in the way such disappearances are handled, through the introduction of an Amber Alert system in the province. Although the case remains officially open, there has been very little progress made on it and there have never been any suspects found. Indeed, what happened to Michael Dunahee remains largely just as baffling today as it ever was, and Deputy Chief John Ducker has lamented: “I've never seen an effort like that in my history in policing. That was a very frustrating part of it. We didn't get that one piece of information we needed to." We are left to merely wonder and speculate as to what happened to this little boy and how he managed to so fully vanish in such a short time in full view of so many, and hope it doesn't happen to any of us.

In August of 2004, 12-year-old Garret Bardsley was in high spirits. He and his father, brother, and a group of Boy Scouts had just arrived at Cuberant Lake, in Utah’s majestic Uinta Mountains, for a camping and fishing trip, which he had been looking forward to for months. The trip was meant to be a fun late summer excursion before the start of the coming school year, and as they happily set up camp, no one would have had the slightest clue of the strange circumstances that were about to unfold.

On the morning of August 20, 2004, Garrett, his father, and some of the other Boy Scouts got up in the early morning hours to head off to the lake for some fishing. Things went well until the boy managed to soak his shoes, pants, and socks after accidentally falling into the water, and began complaining that the wet clothes were bothering him. According to varying reports, the campsite was just 150-300 yards away along a straight, well-marked trail he was very familiar with, so the father thought nothing of letting him go back to camp to change clothes. Some reports say the camp was a mere “150 paces” away. In fact, most of the trail back was within eyeshot, so it seemed like no big deal. The boy then trudged off up a hill toward the campsite, and as his father watched him go, he would not have been aware that this was the last time he would ever see his son again.

After around 20 minutes, everyone thought it was odd that Garrett had not yet returned to do some more fishing. Thinking that the boy had maybe decided to stay back at camp, the father hiked over there to find that the boy was not there, and no one had seen him arrive. A quick search of the area turned up no signs of the boy, and shouts out into the wilderness produced nothing but silence and the wind rustling through the trees. It was then that everyone realized that something was very amiss.

Authorities were contacted, and a massive search was launched for the missing Garrett. A huge search of the area with hundreds of official and volunteer searchers scoured the vicinity of a three-mile radius but were unable to uncover anything except a lone white sock belonging to the boy about a half a mile from where he had disappeared. Other than that, there was no sign whatsoever of the boy or his fishing pole. The official search for Bardsley was called after nine days, leaving many unanswered questions and theories on what had happened to him swirling.

Authorities believed that the location of the found sock seemed to suggest that the boy may have tried to seek shelter from the coming cold of night in a nearby boulder field, but there could be found no evidence that he had gone into the boulders. He might have also succumbed to the freezing temperatures or starvation, as he had not been carrying any warm clothing and had not had any provisions on him. A wild animal attack was not ruled out either, but there had been no screams for help, and there was no sign of the torn clothing and blood that an animal attack would have inevitably left behind. One Reddit user called “dt_diego” claims he participated in the search and believes Garrett may have fallen into a nearby stream. He says of this;

“I participated in the search for Garrett. I remember our search team met up in a meadow after we finished our assigned route. One side our our line got ahead of the other, and we ended up waiting for a bit. There was a gentle stream that passed through the meadow. The stream was unremarkable, small--perhaps two or three feet across; very easy to hop over. For no real reason other than passing time, a member of our search team picked up a big log, I remember it being several feet in length (4 feet or so), and threw it in the stream vertically. It went completely into the water, deep enough you couldn't see it all, and never came back up; apparently stuck in the muck at the bottom. We were all shocked because the stream was so small, and we all thought the log was taller than the stream was deep. The fact that the stream was so much deeper than we thought, and the muck at the bottom was thick enough to prevent a rather large log from floating back up was shocking. We also discussed the possibility the stream was wider under the top soil.

I remember everyone in my search party looking at each other as we realized Garrett could be in the water, and we'd never be able to find him. I was a volunteer, and am not a search and rescue professional. I am not suggesting that this is necessarily what happened, but I thought the story worth recording. Between all the water in the area, and the mine shafts mentioned by another poster, it saddens me, but does not surprise me, that he still has not been found.”

An even more ominous claim comes from Reddit user “Detail3347,: whose father was apparently a part of the search and would find some menacing clues pointing to perhaps an abduction. He explains;

“When this happened my dad was one of the people who went up to search, while he was up there he talked to some other volunteers who said they ran into some people acting weird when they asked questions about Garrett, they asked if they could check their tent and see who was in it but the people said their wife was in the tent and didn’t want to wake her up, the volunteers not wanting to be annoying left but after just a few minutes felt like they should go back, when they went back the tent was gone along with any trace of people, I think they kidnapped him and that’s why theirs no trace of him, and that the claims of seeing him at a grocery store years later are true.”

None of these ideas has turned up any evidence of what really happened to Garrett, and the only possible leads ever found are that sock and one report that the boy had been sighted with two men at a grocery store in Nevada at the end of July, but this has led nowhere. In the end, it is unclear just how Garrett Bardsley managed to completely vanish without a trace so close to camp and without leaving any trace, and the answers may elude us forever. 

Also, from 2004, on July 31 of that year, 9-year-old David Gonzales was camping with his family at the Hanna Flat campground campsite in the Big Bear area of Northern California’s San Bernardino National Forest. At one point, at approximately 8 a.m., David asked his mother for the car keys so that he could go get a box of cookies that he wanted to eat. The mother gave him the keys and watched as he made his way towards the car, which was only 50 yards away. At this point, the mother claims that she turned to look away just for a moment and that when she looked back, David was gone. When a cursory search of the area turned up no sign of the boy, the authorities were contacted. His mother would lament, “A second is an eternity. Witnesses will tell you, I take good care of my children ... This was a tragedy.” And so would unfurl a bizarre vanishing of an innocent child in the wilderness, surrounded by strange clues and no closer to being solved now than it was then.

It was soon found that the box of cookies that David had wanted was still in the car, meaning that he had never reached his destination, but the keys were gone. This had all happened within the space of minutes, and his parents were left baffled. A team of over 200 people in San Bernardino County meticulously scoured the woods for Gonzales, finding no trace of the boy, no signs of a struggle, nothing at all to show that he had ever even been there at all. Nothing. Even after nine days of intensive searches, there was nothing, no one at the campsite had seen him or could offer any further information, and no one had a clue as to what was going on. David’s mother remembered hearing a car speeding off at around the time of the disappearance, but there was considered to be no strong evidence that the boy had been kidnapped. An intensive, 9-day search of the area failed to find any trace of the boy, no blood or any other sign of struggle or foul play, no scraps of clothing, and he had seemingly blinked out of existence. The only clue that was turned up was some witnesses who claimed to have seen the boy walking along a road near the campsite not long after he disappeared, but that was about it. Police also questioned dozens of known sex offenders in the region, but found nothing to link them to the increasingly mysterious disappearance.

One year later, some hikers came across the decomposed remains of what were believed to be David, a mere mile away from the campsite from which he had disappeared, in an area that had already been well searched. The remains would, through dental records, prove that they were of the missing boy. They showed no obvious signs of severe trauma or injury, yet despite this, the prevailing theory at the time was that he had been attacked and dragged off by a mountain lion. There was no reason to think that it was any sort of foul play pulled off by another human being, and Sgt. Frank Bell of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s homicide unit said this:

"Everything we’re finding is pointing toward a natural death, and nothing that we’re finding is leading us to believe anything criminal occurred. The location would be too difficult for a murder suspect to carry a boy to. It would’ve taken hiking down a steep ravine and carrying the boy nearly a mile to get back there. A murder suspect is not going to do that."

The main idea continued to be that he had been attacked by a mountain lion, with the scattering of the bones and a reported mountain lion sighting in the area seeming to support this, but this seems to be a rather odd conclusion considering that the mother had been right there not far away when David had gone missing, yet had heard no scream or sound of struggle, and there had been no blood or any evidence that such a violent attack had taken place. Authorities were not entirely sure of what had happened here, but one thing that did seem apparent is that the location of the remains on the surface of the ground out in the open in such a remote area with no attempt to hide them tended to discredit the idea that the body had been dumped by a kidnapper or murderer. When pressed about why the mountain lion scenario was being entertained, San Bernardino County sheriff’s spokesman, Chip Patterson, was rather evasive, saying:

"Explanations can be found in the lack of evidence. It was such a thorough search, and there were so many resources used, you wonder why we couldn’t find him there. We searched that exact area…. Why couldn’t he hear or see the people looking for him? Why couldn’t we find him? This theory fits with what we don’t know. We were told the big cats can drag their prey one to three miles away, that they like to take it to a secluded area. There had to be a reason he wasn’t being seen."

However, others were not so sure of the mountain lion theory, with other forensics experts questioning this line of inquiry. One such expert is California Department of Fish and Game wildlife biologist Douglas Updike, who, while initially also suspecting a mountain lion attack, changed his mind as the forensic evidence came in, notably the lack of any tooth holes or damage to the bones consistent with such an attack. He would explain:

"There are many aspects consistent with the possibility that a mountain lion attacked this young boy: where he was found, the animal’s swift ability to take prey quietly and take it away from the site of an attack. However, I didn’t see anything that implicated a mountain lion. I didn’t see any evidence today that amounts to a smoking tooth hole. The animal typically jumps on the prey’s back and holds on with its claws while biting at the base of the skull. These are full-strength bites that typically leave marks or punctures through the skull or crush part of the vertebrae. In most lion attacks that we’ve seen, there would have been punctures or crushing. And that is not the case here. If they can find some clothing that belonged to the young boy, maybe we can find some hair on the clothing that shows a wild animal attacked the boy. But at this point, we have found nothing to indicate that it was a wild animal."

Although there were some light scratches on some of the remains, he insists that these were likely from scavengers after death and not the result of a lethal attack. Another oddity that seemed to discredit an animal attack was that the area where the body had been found had been thoroughly searched with sniffer dogs, so how had it managed to completely evade detection if this was just a random animal attack? There have been few concrete answers, and all we know for sure is that a young boy was there one second, gone the next, and ended up dead under mysterious circumstances. Debate has continued on what actually happened here, and at the moment, it remains an inexplicable mystery.

More recently, on July 10th of 2015, Jessica Mitchell and her fiancé Vernal DeOrr Kunz Sr., of Idaho Falls, Idaho, suddenly decided to throw everything in the car and take a spontaneous camping trip along with Mitchell’s grandfather Robert Walton and his friend Issac Reinwand, and Vernal’s 2-year old son DeOrr Jay Kunz Jr. It was seen as an exciting little spur of the moment adventure at the time, and as they headed towards the Timber Creek Campground, in the Salmon-Challis National Forest, in Lemhi County, Idaho, they were all in generally good spirits, especially little DeOrr Jr. However, things were soon about to take a detour into a dark and sinister mystery that has yet to be solved.

After their 2-hour drive, the group arrived at the remote and mountainous campground and set up their camper trailer, after which they made a fire and sat around it while Walton retreated to rest in the trailer and Reinwand went off to do some fishing. After a while, Mitchell and Vernal decided to take a walk to explore the campground and shouted to Walton that they were leaving the boy there with him. They were then gone for about 10 minutes, but when they came back their son was nowhere to be seen. Walton, who had had the camper door open, would claim that he had not heard them call out that they were leaving, and so had not been keeping an eye on the boy, although he had seen him out playing when he looked outside. It was thought that he had just wandered away, but a look around showed no sign of him, even though such a young boy should not have been able to get far through that terrain in such a short amount of time. However, calls to the child remained unanswered, and the father would later say, “He just vanished.” Oddly, he had left behind his blanket, cup, and toy monkey, items his parents claimed he never went anywhere without.

After looking all around the campground for 20 minutes, the parents called 911 at approximately 2:30 PM, and soon the hunt was on. Searchers on horseback, foot, and ATVs fanned out throughout the area, meticulously combing every inch with no sign of the missing boy. The Stone Reservoir and Creek was repeatedly searched by divers, and the search team grew to over 200 people. As the days grew into weeks, it was increasingly suspected that they were not dealing with a lost kid, but rather a possible abduction, but this seemed odd as there was no one else in the area, there was no sign of a struggle, and it was such a remote area.

As the news of the strange disappearance hit the news and investigators looked more deeply into the case, some odd details emerged that seemed to point the finger at something ominous happening with DeOrr Kunz Jr.’s parents. One oddity was the 911 call that the boy’s mother made at the time of the vanishing. It has been pointed out that during the entire 4-minute call, Mitchell seems incredibly calm and devoid of emotion, although this might not mean anything. Another suspicious detail is that police were unable to find an outside, reliable witness who could definitively place the boy at the campground at all, and this was compounded when a convenience store worker would claim that she had seen the missing boy with his parent at her store at around 8 PM on the day he disappeared. The parents have insisted that this must be a mistake, and the lead has not gone anywhere.

Not helping their case was that several inconsistencies were found in the parents’ reports, and they both failed lie-detector tests to boot. As a result of all of this, police and even their own private investigator, Phillip Klein, began to see them as persons of interest. The idea was that DeOrr had been killed, either intentionally or by accident, and that the whole vanishing story was just a cover-up, which of course the parents and the rest of the group vehemently denied. Despite these suspicions, with a lack of any physical evidence to connect them to a crime and no arrest records, none of those who were on that camping trip have ever been formally charged with anything related to the case. In 2019, there was a possible break in the case when cadaver dogs had a “hit” near the campsite where DeOrr disappeared, and bone fragments were found, yet a DNA test showed that they were not from a human being. The parents have long since broken up, and Walton died in 2019, leaving a lot of unanswered questions that will probably never be answered.

What happened to this boy? Where did he go? How could he just evaporate within minutes in such a remote place with no sign of what happened? Was this foul play, perhaps even from his own parents? Or is there something more sinister and mysterious going on here? National Parks have become a hotbed of such mysterious disappearances, so it does make one wonder. Until there is more information, the strange vanishing of DeOrr Kunz Jr. is likely to remain an unsolved mystery, and a reminder of the disturbing trend of people just stepping off the face of the earth in national parks.

There are many more cases of bizarre missing children, and I have merely selected some of the more intriguing and mysterious here. What happened to these kids? How is it that they have so completely managed to vanish right in front of people, and what is going on with those who are found in circumstances orbited by such inexplicable weirdness? Are we dealing with animal attacks, kidnappings, lost children who have wandered off, murders, or something even weirder? Why are they able to elude discovery, ultimately turn up in well-searched areas, and in many cases baffle trained bloodhounds and search crews? Vanishings of children tend to attract to them not only tragedy and sadness, but also mysteries we have yet to fully solve or understand. What has happened to these children and how they have managed to end up where they are may remain an enigma, a shadowy secret lurking along the periphery of our perceptions, and one can only hope that it will not happen again. However, we all know that it is likely just a matter of time.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

In the world of ghosts and hauntings, there are a variety of different species of ghouls and ghosts. Restless spirits, poltergeists, wandering ghosts stuck in another time - the world of hauntings runs the gamut of the odd. One denizen of this realm is the Shadow People, which are usually described as perfectly pitch-black entities appearing as two- or three-dimensional shadows. Sometimes humanoid in shape, at other times more animalistic or even more like amorphous blobs, Shadow People seem to populate their own little corner of the paranormal, and here we will look at a range of cases of such enigmatic entities. 

One very persistent quality of Shadow Person reports is that they often appear to people at night when they are in their rooms or lying in bed. A report from the site cvltnation illustrates this well, with a witness who shares that he and his wife live in a rather unassuming doublewide mobile home that by all accounts seems to have become a hotbed of Shadow Person activity. On this particular evening, while his wife slept soundly beside him, the witness found himself oddly unable to fall asleep, and that was when some weird things would happen. The witness explains:

“While lying there unable to sleep, I became aware of a presence and suddenly and silently a figure moved through our bedroom door and proceeded parallel to our bed. Then rounding the corner of our bed took up a fixed position at the foot of our bed. I was aware that this entity was conscious of us and was intently watching us as we lay there. The entity can best be described as a something that had the appearance of black smoke or a shadow, however it was more material that either of these but less material than a real person.

The most odd thing about this is my lack of fear. Although I was acutely aware of this being and the fact it was not of this earth as we perceive it, it did not seem to arouse any fear response in me, I would say it aroused a feeling that would fit somewhere between “creepy, awed, and curiosity especially considering the fact that it was aware of me as I was aware of it. After some time I almost convinced myself that I was imagining it but then I became aware of the fact that my wife was no longer breathing like she was asleep but was breathing almost silently. I then said “Honey you awake? ” to which she answered “Yes.”

Then I said “do you see anything?” Expecting her reply to be “what do you mean?” but much to my surprise she said “You mean that thing standing at the foot of the bed?” At this time I did become somewhat “nervous”. We laid there for about 10 minuets and then it was gone. It just over a period of about 10 seconds became less solid and our perception of it’s presence became weaker until it just wasn’t there any more. Then it was as if it had never been there. Nothing like this has happened since and the only evidence it ever existed is my wife’s and my memories of it.”

Strange, indeed. There is another bedroom report from Reddit user “VigoVonDoom,” who says this happened when he was a child while living in a house he describes as “rife with shadow people.” He says:

“I lived in a house as a kid up until I was 8 that was rife with shadow people. Almost nightly they would be in and around my room, sometimes just one and sometimes more than one. They would be in the doorways or peeking around them, at the foot of my bed, or creeping up the stairs. Sometimes they would talk to each other in frightening voices and one time I remember waking up to one sitting next to me on the edge of my bed, I assumed it was one of my parents and sat straight up and looked at it. One time, and this is crazy, one came at me and made me black out from terror while I was taking a bath in the tub when I was like 6 or 7. It was like a black mist entered the room and took shape next to me. All of this sounds crazy, but once we moved, I never had experienced anything like this again. It still gives me goosebumps thinking about it like 30 years later.”

From the site, My Haunted Life Too, is a report from a witness who grew up in an old country house, built near the start of the 1900s in SouthWestern Ontario, Canada. The strange events reportedly transpired during his teen years, at a time when he was bedridden with the flu. The witness recalls:

“I woke suddenly around 3am without explanation. Looking at my red-light digital alarm clock, I noticed the time and attempted to roll back over to get back to sleep. As I was beginning to nod off, I heard what I thought was one of my parents on the first set of stairs leading up to the second floor to our bedrooms. I listened for a moment and heard another creak in the stairs – typical sound of the 2nd from the bottom stair that I had come to memorize – and figured it was indeed my mom or dad coming up to check on me. I called out “Mom?” but got no response, then tried again “Dad” and again, got no reply. I continued to listen and heard another step being taken, which landed the person on the stairs onto the first landing of the staircase. Then, after a moment or two of silence, I heard the stereotypical groan of the first stair off the landing, as someone continued to make their way up to the second floor. Once again, becoming more confident in my understanding of the situation and the likelihood that one of my parents were coming up to check on me, I called to them once again – but got no response. All this time, I continued to hear the expected creaks and groans from the staircase that would be made as you ascend to the second floor. Finally, the creaks stopped, as I heard a thud of a footfall on the upstairs landing, followed by one step towards my bedroom, and then another.

So to continue further with the story – as I heard someone taking steps towards my bedroom door, I found myself feel frozen, either with subtle unacknowledged fright or anticipation of some sorts to see exactly who was coming up the stairs to my room at 3am. As if in the blink of an eye (I really don’t remember looking away at any point), I saw a tall cloaked man standing in my doorway in front of my open door, now covering the entirety of my white no-smoking poster hanging on the door. I laid there in silence, staring to try to understand what I was seeing: I could see no facial features, the entity or apparition or whatever it was rather solid seeming and dark, almost as if light was unable to escape the outline of the entity. I don’t know how or why I thought it was a man, but his silhouette was broad and tall, and how his, what seemed to be, cloak draped over his shoulders and how he wore his wide-brimmed hat just had a masculine aura to it. The man and I stared at one another for what seemed to be a solid minute until I was able to snap out of it and quickly spin around to flick on my bedside light. When I turned back to see what exactly I was looking at or who was standing in my door, nothing was there – my doorway was empty.”

In a similar vein to these reports is that of a witness who says:

“The first time I saw them was when I was sleeping late at night. At least I was trying to. I was awake but still very sleepy and my desk was just right next to my bed. It was a big old-fashioned house in middle of a Village also known as Brna – there was two of them – a supposed girl one with long hair and her body was all black and she was very close to me – inches away. She was under my desk. She kind of was way smaller than the one that was very slowly walking through the hallway between my room and my grandma's room. The smaller one would make a very FAST but extremely quiet move under the desk every 10 minutes. The bigger one would rarely move FAST, as I could see them perfectly fine they did not seem very physical they made no sound although I could hear the bigger one making some very weird noise for about 3 seconds but I felt as the more noise I make the more they are aware that I’m there. I think they can not see ANYTHING, but can hear extremely well. The more I made any kind of noise, the more they would get closer, so I just decided to remain quiet all the time and it worked.

I tried to make sure that this was not a dream so I quickly and super quietly took my phone, opened Minecraft on it and made a new world what I called “The Shadow People Are Real”. So then when I wake up in the morning and unlock my phone I would just open Minecraft and see if the world was still there, and there it was. The world was there and out of curiosity, I decided to open the world and there was a sign placed right in front of me. It said “indeed we are.” I was shocked because when I was researching the shadow people, it said nothing about manipulating technology, so I figured maybe they somehow unlocked my phone and did it themselves.

Years have passed and I still can see them. I somehow over the years started enjoying their company so I sometimes stayed up late only to try and have a chat with them. After a year of trying to figure out how to talk with them, I figured out a few ways. The easiest one was to leave them notes on a paper on my desk and they would actually sometimes reply to me but by using this method it would take a few WEEKS only to ask them 2 or 3 questions so I decided to use a way simpler way. I decided to use their manipulation of technology powers to my advantage so I would open chats with my old phone number and say “Hello, Shadow people” late at night and sometimes I would have long chats with them.”

Another creepy bedroom report comes from a witness named Ian Spike. In this case, the witness was not trying to fall asleep or just waking up but was rather just lying down waiting to be called for dinner. The witness says of the eerie encounter:

“The only light in the room was a small lamp that dimly illuminated a yellowish-orange glow. I wasn't doing anything, just thinking or maybe daydreaming. All of a sudden, I got the feeling that I was being observed, so I glanced to my right and saw someone watching me through the window. At first, I thought one of my male cousins had come to our house and tried to scare me, because it looked maybe around my age. His silhouette had a short, spiky hairstyle, similar to the ones sported by '90s boy bands. However, I couldn't see any features since he was completely dark.

I got up from the bed to see who it was, and he didn't run or disappear as I approached. We were about two feet away face-to-face, separated only by the window screen. I was even squinting to see details, but he was completely black. Distant light from neighboring houses hit the plants around him, but not even the whites of his eyes were visible. Strangely, the closer I got to him, the farther he moved away from view, as if he were slowly receding into the back of the window frame. His movements were so unnatural and perfectly in sync with mine, like a shadow. But unlike shadows, he wasn't two-dimensional. Annoyed and thinking someone was playing a trick on me, I quickly grabbed the bedroom door —which was only a step away—to catch whoever it was. I ran outside and bumped into my brother on his way to get some food from the main house. It couldn't have been him because he was in his early thirties at the time and had a different hairstyle, while the mystery person was a child or was simply small in stature.

I asked my brother if he had seen anyone running away, and he said he didn't. There were bushes in our unlit backyard, but none thick enough where someone could hide. Additionally, no intruder could have possibly jumped over the tall fence that quickly without being noticed by my brother or me. The realization of a possible supernatural encounter hit me late. It was only after searching the backyard with a flashlight and finding no one that I got the goosebumps. Up to this day, I still think about that experience and wonder who or what it could have been.”

Was it just his own shadow or something more ominous? Bedrooms are certainly not the only places where Shadow People have been reported. A report on Reddit comes from a witness who says this happened during a “haunted hike” with friends in a secluded rural area not far from their homes. On this particular night, there was a bright full moon, giving them plenty of good visibility and they ambled about trying to spook each other. The witness explains what happened as follows:

“Quite a few things happened on the buildup to the actual encounter. But my friend saw one shadow figure that was only an upper torso come out of a tree in the full moonlight, and then as it approached him from the grove of trees it came out of, another figure came out of that one, and moved up the trail through the brush, and he heard it going through. He ran back to our group and grabbed the girls with us that night and started yelling at them to run, that “there’s more than one!” I brought up the rear to make sure no one fell behind and we weren’t being followed, and as we crossed a bridge that was no more than 10 feet above a creek bed, I felt we were being watched and I could see us from the creekbed as we ran across. I have this sixth sense I guess where if someone or something is watching me, I can see myself through their eyes, and that’s what I saw. I stopped midway across and I had to know what was watching us that night, and that’s when I saw it. It was standing the the creekbed, fully illuminated by the moonlight. It was the outline of a person, pitch black, with no discernible features at all. Just pitch black, I guess maybe it was a bit distorted on the edges? I don’t really know. But it wasn’t a shadow of something because I can see it standing between the rocks in the creek bed. I didn’t feel like it was evil. It just felt like we weren’t supposed to be there that night, maybe if we kept going up the trail something would have happened other than my friends being scared shitless. Anyways we made it back to the car and I asked my friend what he meant by “there’s more than one” (at this point I didn’t say what I had seen because who would believe me right?) and he said “I was standing there looking into the grove of trees I heard noises coming from, and this shadow thing came out of the tree but it was only shoulders and a head, but it was pitch black. And then another shadow ‘person’ I guess would be the best way to describe it came out from it and moved up the trail, and that’s when I didn’t want to stick around and ran back to you guys.” I was freaked out because we saw the same exact thing, in different places, and I didn’t even tell him what I had seen yet. After I told him we were going nuts. It was the first and only time we had ever seen anything out there. We got back to school and the girls wanted us to walk them to their dorms, afterwards him and I went to get food and talked about it the rest of the night.”

In another report from My Haunted Life Too, we have a witness who on this evening was working after hours at a mall pet shop. His initial encounter is explained as follows:

“As I moved about the store, I became aware of a large, black shadow in the shape of a man. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and paced up and down the hallway of our clinic. I greeted him with a casual “G’day,” as I continued my work. The shadow kept its silent patrol, ignoring my attempts to engage. This sighting was later corroborated by one of our clients, a self-proclaimed psychic. She not only sensed the presence of the shadow figure but insisted the whole store was haunted. She was keen to feature The Foundry on a TV show about hauntings, but the building’s owners declined. The paranormal activity persisted: machines turning on and off by themselves, figures glimpsed walking about. While it wasn’t negatively impacting our business, it was becoming a nuisance for the staff. I decided it was time to clear the space.”

It would only get weirder from there, graduating to what seems to have been some sort of poltergeist activity. It began the following morning when the witness went back to the shop in the early morning hours to investigate and take the psychic’s advice on getting rid of the spirit. Things were already odd when it turned out that none of the electricity in the building worked. It stayed like this for some time before the power suddenly jumped back to life. Odd, but not truly paranormal yet. This would change. The witness explains:

“Alone in the store, I set about my task. I’d researched various methods: pouring sea salt in the corners of rooms, placing crystals, burning incense. I performed the usual invocations, hoping to clear out any unwanted entities. I’d asked the staff to stay away until I gave the all-clear.

Around 9 AM, I finished my work and sat at the reception desk to review appointments. An hour later, an eerie silence descended, as if the world had suddenly stopped. I felt paralyzed, rooted to my chair. Then, I heard it – a voice, right by my right ear, halfway between a whisper and a scream: “You’ll pay for this.”The words were barely out of the air when the front door of the store slammed shut with a bang that seemed to shake the entire building. The silence that followed was deafening. I sat there, my heart racing, processing what had just happened. It was the first time I’d felt truly rattled by my experiences at The Foundry.

Despite my efforts that day, it seemed clear that whatever presence or presences inhabited the old building weren’t planning on leaving quietly. The Foundry, with its long history dating back to the gold rush era, had accumulated more than just years – it had stories, maybe even souls, that weren’t ready to move on. I left the store that day with a newfound respect for the unseen. While I wasn’t sure what exactly I’d stirred up with my attempt at clearing the space, I knew one thing for certain: The Foundry’s mysteries ran deeper than I’d ever imagined.”

One thing that seems inextricably linked to the Shadow People phenomenon is the irrational fear and malevolence they seem to emanate, almost as if they are willfully trying to invoke terror in those who see them. Several cases that illustrate this well come from the files of paranormal researcher and author Stephen Wagner, who brings forth some reports that are inextricably linked to fear and foreboding. In one case, a witness called Manda seems to have conjured up Shadow People while playing around with a Ouija board with friends, which doesn't seem to be a good idea even in the best of times but here we are. She says of what happened thusly:

“I'm pretty sure the shadow people are demons. One night I was having a party and I had just gotten a Ouija board for my birthday. Everyone talked me into using it, so we started playing. Then weird stuff started happening. Shadow figures started to appear in my room -- a lot of shadow people. It wasn't any of our shadows; these were different. Some had red eyes. Then red orbs started coming through my room. We had made a protective circle and we all tried to stay in it. It got really cold in my room and we could all see our breath. If some of my friends couldn't see the shadow people, they could feel them.

There was an all-out evil feeling in the room. We all got too freaked out to move. We were just like, "Whoa!" Then one of the shadow people changed -- they got all scary looking. I could explain, but I don't want to go into detail. Let's just say Pumpkin Head (the demon guy from scary movies; no, his head is not a pumpkin.) So we screamed and finally ran out of the room. My parents thought we were crazy.

That night when we went to bed, my closets were glowing red and orbs were going through my room. We didn't go to sleep until, like, 5 a.m., and even then we only slept not even four hours. That was freaky, and stuff didn't die down for a while after that. That was the last time I used the Ouija board. I threw it somewhere deep down in one of my closets. Now I've only used Psychic Circle, and even that has consequences. I'm not allowed to use it anymore because of what happened to me, my friend and my mom. But that is another story for another time.”

Another frightening case from Wagner seems to involve not only Shadow People but also all manner of poltergeist-like activity. It started when the witness’ daughter started reporting strange things from her playroom, which happened to be situated in the dank basement below the house. The child complained that there were often things moving in the corner of her eye and that at least on one occasion she had seen a shadowy figure hovering near the ceiling.  The witness illustrates the strange series of events that followed:

“In later years, I had my floral workshop in the basement and saw them constantly. It got to the point where I would talk to them with my mind, not that they ever answered back. They were black. We saw them all over the basement, but mostly along one wall, and occasionally saw them along the same wall on the first floor and in the kitchen near the back door. We did not see them anywhere else in the house or elsewhere on the property. But even when we did not get a glimpse of them, we were aware when they were present. Some of them seemed to have an evil presence.

A few years after we moved in, I told them they were not welcome in the house and the evil presence seemed to go away. Still, we had an uneasy feeling about them. Not fear. We just accepted they were there, as several steps taken over the years to make them go away didn't work anyway. Only once after the evil ones were told they were not welcome was I aware they came back. And I am not sure if they were evil or just upset. I will explain later.

Only once did it see one clearly. But it happened in a split second and I did not see it from top to bottom. I was walking through the breakfast room into the kitchen. The kitchen light was on in the corner. It was by the back door in front of the stove. I was startled. I thought someone had come into the house. It all happened very fast. But the light from behind it did not pass through as it would a shadow. It was short and stocky and appeared as a silhouette of a person. It had a head (there were no discernible features, including no eyes) shoulders, arms, and a torso. It disappeared too fast to take note if it had legs or feet. I sensed it was as surprised as I was and did not intend to be seen.

Then our house caught fire. It was a major fire that started from a shorted TV along the wall of shadows in the den. We were out of the house six months while it was repaired. About a week after the fire, I stopped by right before dark to pick up a few things. As I came onto the back porch and looked through the six-foot hole where the picture window once was, I looked across the breakfast room at the basement doorway. I sensed three shadows near the doorway. It was almost dark outside, so I did not actually see them. I also got a very bad feeling about them and told them by thought that the evil ones were still not welcome in the house whether I was there or not. Then I turned and left without entering the house. I was quite rattled. Whether I had this feeling because I was also emotionally upset about the fire... I cannot say.

The next day, I went back and it seemed the house was full of shadows, although I only caught a glimpse of them, as usual, fleeing in the basement. And I am not sure I really saw them as there were no lights on down there and the only light was from the window-well windows. It was the only time I ever sensed that they tried to communicate. It seemed they were upset that we were not there because the house was all black, there was no light for them in the kitchen, and there were strangers in the house (the workers) every day. A few weeks later, burglars tried to steal the new appliances for the house. Everything was left in the kitchen by the back door. My daughters and I joked that they met up with the shadows and were scared off. Who knows?”

Yet another case that seems to showcase the malicious and menacing nature of these entities is that of a witness called “Barbara,” who said her house seemed to be veritably infested with shadow people. She says of it:

“I have been seeing something similar to shadow people for a long time now, although the shadows I see don't look like people exactly, and they are in the bottom corners of the house. I see them from the corner of my eye and they are smoky, but they are shapeless and dissipate as soon as I look head-on at them, usually around a corner.

I definitely get a malevolent feeling from them, though. I always believed them to be demons, and still do, as I don't believe in life after death or aliens and ghosts. I am seeing a psychiatrist for clinical depression and finally told him about it as it was bothering me. I told him I thought I was going crazy and, of course, he immediately put me on a psychotropic drug and wanted to know if I heard voices, too (which I thought was crazy!). I haven't been on the drug long enough to see if it will change my seeing them. Somehow I get the feeling just having told someone that I won't see them anymore, though. Would that be a placebo effect?”

What was going on here? Another ominous case comes to us from the site Phantoms and Monsters, starting with a terrifying ordeal experienced by witness “Carlos.” The witness has quite a lot of opinions on the Shadow People, claiming that they are of a demonic nature, that they enjoy terrorizing people, and that they often work in groups. Carlos explains of his own peculiar experiences:

“Most shadow people are not alone but have partners in crime. The shadows that terrorized me were never alone. Sometimes my bedroom would be filled with dozens, big and small. Some could touch me. These shadows would pinch me. It wasn't till I was maybe about age 9 that I finally told my parents about these entities and it caused quite a stir in my family. As usual my parents thought I was suffering from nightmares and suggested I eat less before bed time.

Without fail these Shadows returned every night. It wasn't until one night I couldn't stand hearing their laughter that I resisted their powers to make people catatonic or in a paralyzed state that the reality of the situation was no longer a joke to my Mother as my bed began to shake violently as if a giant hand was shaking it. I jumped out of bed and ran so fast that I don't even remember running to my Mom's room. I jumped on her bed in the dark and her bed started shaking too. She held me in her arms as she prayed out loud to God and slowly the shaking resided. By the end of the month we moved out of that home.

Now this is what I gathered from that experience. One; That house was extremely old. I don't know if that had anything to do with it. But there was a bad vibe there from day one. A lot of crazy things happened there with my family fighting all the time. Never in the history of my family had there been soo many arguments and cases of domestic violence and abuse. Two; besides fights and arguments there was a vibe of mischievousness. When I played in that house it was almost as if all of us were in some kind of altered state, like some kind of dimensional trance. A good example of this was the movie ET where the kid gets aroused in the class room and he starts releasing the frogs. Yeah! I can't remember the whole thing. Let's just put it this way, I guess I went through intense puberty there. I remember having bad thoughts all the time. I remember my best friend Diana flirting with me and acting mature, but only in the house. When we played outside she was a normal kid. I swear this house had some effect on people's feelings and whatnot. The strange thing is that I don't remember much of my childhood in the house as I remembered most of my childhood in school or playing outside. I remember being cruel to my pets. I was never like that but I became a bad kid in the house. Outside I was quite normal.

The strange thing is that we moved about 5 blocks away from that house into a new apartment and I thought things were back to being normal for almost half a year with no incidents. No fights between Mom and Dad, when we all got together it was fun again. I noticed it right away the vibe change. I noticed that the old house was really dark inside. Half a year passed when I had my last incident one night.

It was early, maybe 2:30am I had woke up to use the restroom and I was maybe about 10 years old. I remember laying down in the bed and getting comfortable when I felt my bed got shoved from one side. At first I stood still as I thought maybe it was an earthquake. It passed and I played it off as just my imagination. As I began to fall asleep I had the sensation of being cold and clammy so I covered up. I felt feverish and I felt a small pinch on one of my toes. I became frightened as I looked around in the dark and saw 3 black outlines around my bed. The Shadows were back!

I became paralyzed as I screamed for help, I'm still not sure if I did try but nothing came out or if I imagined screaming out. The point is, I was freaking screaming! I felt some cold weight on my chest as I came face-to-face with one of these entities. Still paralyzed it looked me right in the eye and this is what I saw. Its eyes were black as black velvet and evil looking, but the outside rim of its eyes was black line yellow line, black line yellow line all around the outside perimeter of its eye in a pattern and it moved counterclockwise motion. Its two other Shadow friends had red and the other full yellow eyes. It was unreal as they all burst out in this wicked laughter and vanished and never bothered me like that again.”

Another witness called “Pema” describes being stalked by Shadow People and having multiple experiences of being menaced by them in the early 80's in Toronto, Canada.  She relates her experiences as follows:

“My experiences began with an event I will never forget when I was 16. It was summer and I had difficulty sleeping. This went on for one month approximately. Then one night I had fallen into a light sleep when I was violently awakened. I recall hearing a sound that I thought was an explosion and thinking that our stove must have exploded in the kitchen below me. I opened my eyes and looked around the room in the darkness but saw nothing to indicate anything was happening. Suddenly my bed began to shake violently up and down and it felt as though I was being electrocuted through my solar plexus. I couldn't move but I could see my feet moving as the bed was jumping up and down. Some objects rose up off my dresser and shot towards the bed I thought they would hit me as they approached with such speed. In fact, they stopped suddenly and began to swirl around in a counterclockwise direction above me and from the center of this swirl a bright white light appeared and some voices which were like high-pitched shrieks or nails on a blackboard said quite clearly. "The message we bring is to tell the people he is still alive." And then everything stopped suddenly. I was terrified and basically thought I would end up in a nut house. I remember shaking from fear so much I could barely get out of bed. I made my way to my mom's room to tell her about it at which point she assured me I was having nightmares. Say your prayers and go back to sleep she said. I returned to my room after an hour or more but I couldn't sleep. It was a long time before I could sleep there in fact.

The next event happened the following January. I was coming home very late one night and decided to take the short cut through the alley way by our street. I passed a parked van with windows all around and I saw a movement in the van which made me feel somehow by its shape, size and response that it was a doberman someone had left outside in their van. I kept walking but the thought pestered me that someone should leave their dog out in mid winter in the night. So I went back to the van cautiously peering in but there was nothing at all. Not even a cushion or anything hanging from the ceiling. Ok I thought I guess I imagined it. I happily kept walking home and when I was in the alley I suddenly heard footsteps behind me in the snow. I got a little freaked out and when I turned my head I didn't see anyone there. As I got to the end of the alleyway and turned onto my street I looked back to the entrance to see if anyone was following me. What I saw shocked and terrified me. There was a streetlight right at the corner and in the pool of its light was standing this enormous creature. It was at least 8 feet tall and huge. What struck me was that its form was completely black, there were no reflective surfaces on it whatsoever. In fact the light was shining directly on it and it seemed to absorb that light. It had large things on its head which I took to be horns or ears and its fingers ended in points like claws and the feet as well. Its eyes were red completely and staring right at me. I don't think my feet touched the ground I ran so fast.

After that experience I had a few others with the same creature. Another night I came home late again and I fell onto my bed after shutting the door just wanting to fall asleep. My cat was in the bed with me when we both heard a voice laughing in the room. A masculine voice. My cat freaked out and ran to the door scratching and miaowing loudly to get out, I opened the door and she took off. I just didn't want to believe anything was in there with me so I pointedly turned my back to the rest of the room and went to sleep. Another night I turned over and opened my eyes early in the morning and there was the same creature, smaller though, standing in front of my closet staring at me. I recall I got really mad and told it to eff off and turned around and went back to sleep. Meanwhile, my brother had seen the exact same creature but his had yellow eyes. He confided the story to me years later when we had left the house and had no knowledge of my experiences. He told me he had awakened early one morning and found that he had left the light on in his room, thinking that he should get up and turn it off he turned onto his back and opened his eyes and there sitting on his bed's headboard was the same creature, talons on feet and hands, completely black with no reflective surfaces, but his was he said about 4 ft tall and squatting on the headboard staring at him with yellow eyes. He said he was terrified and decided not to turn off the light after all. I don't remember if he said it vanished quickly or if he shut his eyes and when he opened them it was gone. He said he never saw it again but had other strange experiences in that house.

One day we decided that we should trade rooms. So I moved all my stuff out to his room and vice versa. I teased him and said he'd have to share my room with a visitor but he was disbelieving. After I had moved to his room I had my last experience in that house that was in the shadow people realm. I woke up one night to a sound in my room like rustling. I was wide awake because I thought it might be a mouse. I switched on my lamp and looked toward the other end of the room but seeing and hearing nothing I lay down again with the light still on. I turned to look at the clock and saw that it was 2:20 am then I saw these two large globes of light beyond my night stand. I was frozen up on one elbow because I had been about to turn out my light again. They moved in a way that reminded me of balloons falling. The larger of the two was golden yellow in colour and the smaller was blue. They looked like spheres lit from within and emanating a misty light from their forms. I somehow could sense that they were intelligent. They knew that I was looking at them and they wanted me to see. The larger golden one floated almost majestically to the door whereupon it flattened to a pancake shape in under half a second and slipped under the door. The second smaller one followed along and did the same. I was very nervous and scared at that point but only because I had to go to the bathroom and this meant I had to go out into the hallway where they had vanished to. Our hallway was very dark and without a proper light as the house was old and not renovated very well. I waited for as long as I could which was about 15 minutes and then I cautiously opened my door and went. The hallway was pitch black so my plan was to inch my way to the bathroom with my back to the wall so nothing could sneak up on me and once I got there I could turn on the bathroom light to illuminate the hallway. I followed my plan through and as it turned out when I turned on the bathroom light it shone down onto the stairs and the first landing. In the light were two shadow people. I've only ever thought of them that way because there was no other way to describe them. They looked like shadows, only they were in the light. They didn't look like the other creatures I had seen, in fact they looked like people in the sense that they had a head and arms and legs and torso and hands. They threw up their hands as though in surprise, like I'd caught them unexpectedly and then they flew down the stairs without a sound. It took me a long time to come out of that bathroom as I didn't want to encounter any of these things again.”

There have been many theories as to what Shadow People might be. Ghosts, aliens, demons, shapeshifters, interdimensional interlopers - all have been bandied about as possible explanations for the phenomenon. In another theory, paranormal researcher Rosemary Ellen Guiley believes that the Shadow People are in fact shape-changing demonic entities from Middle Eastern folklore called the Djinn, mostly called Genies in the West. She has said of this idea:

“There were two major avenues, both involving Shadow People, dark and menacing humanoids I had been researching since 2004. I already knew a bit about the Djinn from earlier research in demonology. I noticed that many cases of persistent negative hauntings involved Shadow People, so I began probing for their true identity.

I discovered that many Shadow People experiencers are also ET experiencers, especially abductees. Through a long process, I concluded that Shadow People are a shape-shifted form taken by Djinn. Therefore, there is a profound connection between Djinn and bad hauntings and ET abductions. Furthermore, the footprints of the Djinn are evident throughout our mythologies about ancient aliens and gods. The picture that emerged is of a major Djinn involvement in all of our entity contact experiences throughout history.

Supposedly there are give-away signs. In old Djinn lore, they could not duplicate 100 percent of a human body, and usually their animal-like, hairy legs and feet gave them away. I have speculated that Shadow People wear hats and cowls to cover up imperfect heads. Some experiencers say the eyes of the human-shaped Djinn will shift to odd colors or a reptilian appearance. I believe the Djinn and other shape-shifters are among us every day, and we never know unless we have certain experiences with them.”

So what are we dealing with here? What are Shadow People and why do they almost seem to feed on our fears and anxiety? Are they aliens, Djinn, ghosts of some kind, evil spirits, interdimensional travelers, or merely figments of the imagination? It remains to be seen. 

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The fact is, though, even without these conspiracies, the Moon is a celestial body full of anomalies. While some people might be familiar with them, before we explore some of these outrageous conspiracies and claims of our celestial satellite, it is worth quickly going over some of the truly anomalous facts about the Moon.

It is, for example, exactly 400 times smaller than the sun, and its distance from the Earth, relative to the overall distance to the sun, is also exactly 1/400th. It is worth noting that these figures are not approximate - they are exact. It is because of these astounding dimensions that total eclipses are experienced here on Earth. Moreover, if these dimensions were out in any way whatsoever, this wouldn’t be possible. Incidentally, we should also take note that the chances of these specific dimensions occurring naturally are zillions to one. What’s more, these figures and dimensions are not seen in any other known moon. Even its perfectly circular orbit is unique (most moons’ orbits are elliptical) and its rotation around the planet is such that one side permanently remains hidden from us.

Looking a little closer, the many craters on the lunar surface create further problems in our understanding of the Moon. These craters, of which there are many, are for the most part, very similar in depth, and relatively shallow at that. In terms of our understanding of modern science, these craters should be much more varied, with at least some showing greater depth at the impact point, which should be the outcome for a naturally formed rocky terrestrial body. Many researchers suggest that it is the absolute high velocity of the meteor strikes that creates these crater anomalies. However, the actual reason for this, at least according to some researchers, both inside and outside the mainstream, is because the Moon is not naturally occurring at all, but a hollow object with a metallic “casing” beneath an artificial rocky surface.  

Perhaps one of the most interesting considerations is how the Moon came to orbit the Earth in the first place. Accepted thinking suggests a small planet or large moon collided with Earth millions of years ago, causing the Moon to form out of the debris of such a collision, which then settled into its current orbit. However, not only because of the remarkable zillion-to-one dimensions and distances of the Moon we highlighted earlier but also because of several other anomalies, many people question just how true it is that the Moon was simply a “happy accident” and a product of coincidence. In fact, some people have even questioned if the Moon was purposely “placed” into orbit, perhaps even by an unknown intelligence. Author William Roy Shelton stated:

“It is important to remember that something had to put the moon in or near its current circular pattern around the Earth. It is very unlikely that any object just stumbles on the right combination of factors needed to help an object stay in orbit. ‘Something’ had to put the moon on its altitude, on its course and speed. The question is, what was that ‘something?”

Issac Asimov, a Russian professor of biochemistry, made similar comments when he wrote:

“… we cannot help but come to the conclusion that the Moon, by rights, ought not to be there. The fact that it is, is one of those strokes of luck almost too good to accept…Small planets, such as Earth, with weak gravitational fields, might well lack satellites…In general, then, when a planet does have satellites, those satellites are much smaller than the planet itself. Therefore, there would be every reason to suspect (the Moon) would be a tiny world, perhaps 30 miles…but it is a giant satellite, 2,160 miles in diameter. How is it, then, that tiny Earth has one?”

There are plenty of other people who have expressed similar sentiments. NASA scientist, Robin Brett stated that “it seems easier to explain the non-existence of the Moon than its existence,” while Irwin Shapiro from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics offered that “the best explanation for the Moon is an observational error!”

Perhaps some of the most intriguing and thought-provoking claims are those that suggest the Moon is a hollow object. Of course, if the Moon were hollow, it would suggest it was artificial, as Carl Sagan noted, “A natural satellite cannot be a hollow object!”

Perhaps one of the first people to legitimately question whether the Moon could be a hollow object was NASA scientist, Dr. Gordon MacDonald, who wrote in 1962, “If the astronomical data are reduced, it is found that the data require that the interior of the Moon be less dense than the outer parts. Indeed, it would seem that the Moon is more like a hollow than a homogeneous sphere!”

In November 1969, when Apollo 12 left the Moon, rocket boosters were purposely jettisoned into the surface where seismic measuring equipment had been set up to record and measure the impact. To say scientists were shocked by the returning data would be an understatement. It was noted that the Moon “reverberated like a bell” for almost an hour following the impact—something that would only be seen in a hollow object.

Indeed, as we can see, the Moon has undoubtedly been an object of fascination since the beginnings of the human race…or has it? Without a doubt, one of the most thought-provoking claims about the Moon is that at some point in human history, it didn’t exist. There was, essentially, a time before the Moon. As we might imagine, almost all mainstream historians and astronomers reject such an idea that there was once a time in (relatively speaking) recent history – certainly recent enough to be human history – when the Moon was not in orbit around our planet, not least as, at least as far as our current understanding of the world is, life on Earth would be almost impossible without it. However, while we most certainly should treat such considerations with caution, there are some intriguing and thought-provoking arguments to be made.

We might consider, for example, that this “time before the Moon” was when a now-lost civilization called the planet home. Perhaps backing this up somewhat are the many legends and myths of such a time and just such a civilization from around the world. Many researchers suggest that such legends hold at least partial truths within them, with one such researcher – Michael Tellinger – stating that these legends of a time before the Moon could very well be one of humanity’s earliest collective memories.

One of the earliest accounts of a time before the Moon comes from the Greek philosopher Aristotle. In his history of the Arcadian region in Greece, he refers the Pelasgians, a civilization, he claimed, who had resided in the area “since very old times,” during a time “when the Moon did not exist!” Moreover, Aristotle wasn’t the only ancient Greek philosopher to have spoken of such a time. Apollonios, for example, wrote of a time when the Moon didn’t orbit the Earth and even when all the celestial objects were yet to be present in the sky. During this time, the only civilization on Earth was the Pelasgians, who resided in the mountains of Arcadia.

Is it really possible that the Pelasgians did exist? And if so, did they reside on Earth before the Moon orbited the planet? Once more, current knowledge suggests that life on Earth would be almost impossible. Could the Pelasgians, however, have managed to survive in Arcadia, perhaps one of the few habitable locations on Earth? Might they have even lived under the ground, perhaps giving birth to the many legends of an ancient civilization living inside the “Inner Earth”? Or might we even consider that this civilization was not entirely human and was of extraterrestrial origin, perhaps even with connections to “the Gods” themselves? Perhaps above all else, though, if the Pelasgians did exist, just how long ago were they present on Earth? Could it be tens of thousands of years ago, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years?

We can find another writer from antiquity who speaks of a time before the Moon in Plutarch, who wrote of a “time before the birth of Zeus” when the “Arcadians possessed their land,” adding that “these folk are older than the Moon!” Hippolytus also made similar statements, offering that the Arcadians “brought forth Pelasgus,” the ancestor of the Pelasgians, who are “of greater antiquity than the Moon!” While perhaps not endorsing the claim, in his work Astrology, Lukianos also states that “the Arcadians foolishly claim they are older than the Moon!”

There are also such claims to be found in Biblical writings. In the Book of Job, for example, it states that “the Lord makes peace in the heights” during a time “before there was a Moon and it did not shine!” In Psalms, there is also a passage that states “since the time of the Sun and before the time of the Moon”, an era that was said to be “a generation of generations ago” – seemingly a length of time that is perhaps so great that it is immeasurable.

Similar claims are found in many other ancient writings and creation stories around the world, including other Biblical stories, such as The Flood. Just one example is the oral traditions of the Colombian civilizations in the Bogota highlands of South America, which speak of the “earliest times when the Moon was not yet in the Heavens!”

If we turn our attention to the Zulu legends from Africa, we find even more remarkable accounts of a time before the Moon. Their legends state that the Moon was brought to the Earth thousands of years ago by two extraterrestrial brothers named Wowane and Mpanku. We might note that this story of two extraterrestrial brothers coming to Earth thousands of years ago is remarkably similar to the accounts of the Anunnaki from ancient Sumer, which speaks of two brothers, Enlil and Enki, who “descended from the Heavens” and ruled over the Earth. Could this once again suggest that Pelasgians – if they are the same ancient civilization described around the world – were of extraterrestrial origin? Another interesting detail is that the Pelasgians’ language was described as “barbaric!” Could this description have been so because it was simply incomprehensible to humanity because it was, quite literally, an alien language?

With the detail of an alien race bringing the Moon to Earth in deep antiquity in mind, we should turn to the ancient writings and symbols in the courtyard of Kalasasaya in Bolivia, a site said to be around 15,000 years old. The ancient writings there suggest that the Moon was “brought to Earth” many thousands of years ago. What’s more, it replaced a smaller moon that had been orbiting Earth previously. If there is any truth in such legends, might this explain how civilizations could have existed before the Moon we see today (Lunar) because another moon was present in the skies before that which provided the stabilization needed for life to flourish? It is also possible that the arrival of this new moon could have caused temporary cataclysmic events on Earth, which could also have given rise to such legends as The Flood, and even the lost civilization of Atlantis.

What is further interesting about the idea of a second (or previous) moon orbiting Earth before the arrival of our current moon is that several researchers have put forward genuine suggestions that Earth could have had a moon – perhaps even several – before our current moon “arrived” and began its orbit. Some have gone even further, offering that our current moon could have collided with one of these previous moons before settling into its orbit. Do these theories, if they were to be true, offer corroboration to the legends in the courtyard of Kalasasaya? We might also consider just how many records of the Americas, particularly those of South America, were lost to the actions of the Spanish conquistadors, who destroyed almost all of the records of the respective civilizations of the continent. Many of these records could very well have told us much more about our collective history than many of us could perhaps imagine, including of a time before the Moon. We should also note that in antiquity, writing was not as widespread, or as cheap as it is today. Indeed, it was costly to record information, and time-consuming. As such, writing – at least official records and documentation – was reserved for events that were of great importance and not fanciful stories. We might consider, then, that such ancient writings that speak of a time before the Moon should be contemplated a little more seriously.  

We have already explored what an anomaly the Moon is. Could it be so because its history and origins are much more explosive, fascinating, and far-reaching than current mainstream thinking suggests it is? And could there have been a time in human history when the Moon didn’t exist, at least not in our skies?

The suggestion that the Moon was brought to Earth by an extraterrestrial race was not only made in ancient times. Alex Collier, for example, offered that his research suggested that the Moon was, in fact, a transport ship that brought “reptilians, human-reptilian hybrids, and the first humans to set foot on Earth!” He made the claims, along with several others, in the book Letters from Andromeda, a book he put together, he claimed, through telepathic communication with extraterrestrial entities from a constellation called Zenetae. Of the Moon as it is today, he wrote:

“The Moon is hollow. It contains huge underground facilities built by E.T.’s and later humans from Earth. There are seven openings into the Moon’s crust and the underground bases. Conservative scientists have wondered why so many craters seem so shallow, despite their size. The Andromedans say it’s because much of the surface was built on top of a metallic shell of a circular space crest; or “A War Carrier”, as the Andromedans describe it!”

Collier also claimed that bases from this ancient war – which raged 113,000 years ago - remained in ruins on the Moon, adding that both extraterrestrials and humans are living on the Moon “right now” in underground bases that housed over 30,000 people and contained several “great lakes!” Even more remarkable were his claims that there were plans to send many more people to the Moon in the future. Moreover, he claimed that advanced weapons, vehicles, and anti-gravity technologies were tested on the Moon and that over 50 “Earth-built spacecraft” were housed there.

Whether he meant to or not, Collier also appears to corroborate some of the many conspiracies regarding secret societies of the world elite and their private missions to and on the Moon when he wrote:

“When the Apollo astronauts landed on the moon, the World Order had been there for some time. This knowledge and technology was withheld from the lower levels of NASA and our military. NASA has been used as a blind to keep people from truly knowing what was going on there. The astronauts were silenced under threats and remain so today!”

While most dismiss Collier’s claims, they are thought-provoking, perhaps, particularly his claims of secret societies and their equally secret missions to the Moon. It has been claimed by some that these secret societies have retained knowledge that goes back to the crusades of the Knights Templar in the twelfth century and preserved before that since Biblical times. Researcher and author Mike Bara made very similar claims in his book Ancient Aliens and JFK: The Race to the Moon and the Kennedy Assassination. Before we move on to those, it is worth briefly examining the Apollo 11 moon landing mission and the alleged Masonic rituals and practices that surrounded it.

The fact is that the Freemasons had, at the very least, an active interest in the Apollo missions was no secret. In the November 1969 edition of The New Age Magazine, Buzz Aldrin – one of the men who would eventually walk on the Moon – was featured speaking of his Masonic connections, with one particular quote stating, “When man reaches new worlds, Masonry will be there!” Moreover, it wasn’t just Aldrin of the NASA astronauts who had such alleged Masonic and secret society connections. Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr, Virgil Grissom, and Donn Eisele were all said to be Freemasons, while John Glenn was also rumored to be a member of another secret society.

If we move on to the moon landings themselves, the landing site – the Sea of Tranquility – was selected due to the flat surface which made landing easier. However, in the decades that have passed since, some researchers have suggested there could have been other reasons for this specific selection. One of the people not only responsible for selecting the landing destination, as well as planning multiple other aspects of the moon landings, was Farouk El-Baz, right down to developing the strict timings of the launch window and actual landing itself. Not only was El-Baz a Freemason, but his father was an expert in ancient Egyptian rituals, which makes for interesting reading when some of the conspiracies surrounding the moon landings are explored.

The landing site, for example, including the exact time and date, was meticulously worked out so that at exactly 33 minutes after landing, Orion’s Belt would be perfectly aligned with the Moon’s horizon. Of course, the fact that it was worked out that this occurred 33 minutes after landing is yet another sign of Masonic involvement when we remember how important the number 33 is in Freemasonry (representative of the 33rd degree Freemasons of the Scottish Rite), and it is not the only time the number 33 surfaces. The launchpad where the Apollo 11 mission began, Launchpad 33, is a good example (of further interest when the first shuttle returned to Earth, it landed on Runway 33).    

As well as the alleged rituals, it is also claimed by some that Aldrin left various Masonic “gifts” on the Lunar surface, all of which contained very specific Masonic symbols and were an apparent offering to Osiris. Furthermore, after landing back on Earth he is said to have “gifted” a Masonic scarf that had been “blessed” as part of a ritual on the Lunar surface to the Scottish Rite Masonic Lodge in Washington DC.

Another detail about the moon landings is the moon rocks that were brought to Earth by the Apollo astronauts – many of which have suspiciously “gone missing!” Some researchers have suggested that the missing moon rocks were not moon rocks at all, but ancient alien technology – technology that, at least according to some researchers, was the real reason the moon landings went ahead in the first place.

Claims of ancient alien technology on the Moon lead us very nicely into one of the most interesting people of the Masonic conspiracies surrounding the moon landings – James Edwin Webb. Webb served as NASA’s administrator from 1961 to 1968, leaving right before the Apollo 11 moon landing. Like many others involved in the Apollo program – and NASA, in general – Webb was a known Freemason and began placing fellow Masons into positions of power almost as soon as he took the position with NASA. Moreover, according to the previously mentioned Mike Bara, he is arguably at the center of not only the moon landing conspiracy but the assassination of President John Kennedy. Ultimately, it is claimed that the reason, at least partially, behind Kennedy’s assassination was his desire to pursue a joint American-Soviet mission to land on the Moon – and the reason why the alleged shadow government of the United States chose such a drastic course of action was because of their knowledge of ancient alien technology in alien bases on the lunar surface left by none other than the Anunnaki, the gods of ancient Sumer.

Whatever the reason, Webb wasn’t alone in immensely disliking even the idea of a joint mission to the Moon with the Soviet Union. Another person was Congressman Albert Thomas, a close friend of Webb’s, and someone with ties to fellow Texan and Vice President Lyndon Johnson. He had publicly stated his opposition to any joint space missions with the Soviet Union, and because of his position, he would have had complete access to the budget and direction of NASA, as well as, unofficially, of course, influencing its direction.

In his book Ancient Aliens and JFK, Mike Bara includes a photograph that, while not offering conclusive proof, is highly suggestive of some kind of plot involving Thomas and Johnson (as well as many others). The picture was taken in the seconds following Lyndon Johnson being sworn as President of the United States, and only hours after John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. You can see Johnson turning to look over his right shoulder towards none other than Albert Thomas, who, rather than having a solemn, shocked look on his face like almost everyone else in the room, appears to be smirking and winking at Johnson. Although we can’t see (now) President Johnson’s face, his left cheek is raised slightly, as if he is smiling back at Thomas – almost as if they knew something and realized the plan had come together just as they desired. It is also worth pointing out that Johnson, like almost everyone else we have mentioned here, was a Freemason (a member of the 33-degree Scottish Rite Freemasons). It is important to point out that these actions or those of individuals who happened to be Freemasons and not actions condoned or supported by Freemasonry in general.

While such claims are undoubtedly up for debate, if there was any truth in the suggestion that members of a secret society (not necessarily the Freemasons – these individuals could have been Masons and also members of another, unknown organization) orchestrated a mission to the moon to retrieve ancient alien technology – technology that they became aware through their secret society connections and that knowledge of had been guarded and handed down for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years, then it forces to reassess so many aspects of our world, history, and reality.

Here it is worth our time to briefly explore the remote viewing experiments of Ingo Swann, who was one of the CIA’s most skilled remote viewers during the 1970s and eighties as part of the Project Stargate program that aimed to, essentially, keep a close eye through remote viewing on their Cold War adversaries the Soviet Union. One particular episode, however, in February 1975, is of particular interest to us here.

Swann was approached by a mysterious individual who introduced himself as Mr. Axelrod, informing him that he was required to work on a top-secret remote viewing mission. A month passed before Swann heard from Axelrod again. This time, Swann was told to meet him at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C., which Swann agreed to. Once there, a car promptly pulled up and Mr. Axelrod got out, and confirmed who he was to Swann before asking him to get into the car. At this point, they were driven to an unknown location somewhere just outside of the city where a helicopter was seemingly waiting for them. Before boarding the helicopter, however, Swann was blindfolded and told that where he was going was an ultra-secret location.

After the helicopter touched down on the ground, still blindfolded, Swann was led to what seemed to be an elevator. A moment later, he felt the lift descending, a journey that seemed to take a considerable amount of time, leading Swann to conclude that he was being taken to a secret underground military facility. Then, the elevator came to a sudden stop and the doors opened. Swann was led to a room a short distance away and the blindfold was finally removed. There, standing in front of him, was Mr. Axelrod.

Here, Mr. Axelrod introduced himself properly, offering that his name was indeed a pseudonym and that his real identity was protected given the nature of his work. He then began to question Swann about remote viewing, asking him all kinds of questions, including how he achieved his results. Eventually, he told Swann bluntly that he was prepared to offer him a lot of money for his services. Although he didn’t feel it was an offer he could refuse, Swann accepted the invite. Then, Axelrod began to question Swann and what he knew about the Moon. Following this brief conversation, Swann was then given a piece of paper with coordinates written on it and asked to “remote view” what was there.

Swann focused on the coordinates and soon found himself “leaving the Earth” and heading to the Moon, specifically, the dark or far side. Moments later, much to his shock, he could see tall buildings and huge glass dome-like structures. He went towards one of these structures and went inside. As soon as he did so, he could see there were living entities inside. He began describing what he was seeing to Axelrod who listened intently. When Swann offered that whoever the living entities were they were “aware of his presence” Axelrod suddenly became animated, insisting to Swann that he should “come away from there right now!”

Swann suddenly felt uncomfortable by the entire experience and quickly found himself rushing back to his physical body. After taking a moment to come to his senses, he asked Axelrod what exactly he had just seen, and asked if there was a colony of some kind on the far side of the Moon. Axelrod, though, simply remained quiet, now having returned to his ultra-calm demeanor. Swann asked again, this time adding that he thought the living entities could have been extraterrestrial. To this, Axelrod simply replied, “Isn’t that something, huh?” He then left the room and Swann was returned to the city.        

Whether or not there are extraterrestrial bases on the Moon or not remains open to debate. There are, though, many intriguing anomalies on the lunar surface – anomalies that many people believe are artificial structures. These structures are thought-provoking to say the least. Some people, for example, have claimed they have spotted pyramid-like structures on the surface of the moon, structures that appear to be too precise to be the result of geological processes.

Near the Aristarchus Crater is another apparent artificial structure known as the Tower of Babel. As its name suggests, this alleged building is a towering, column-like formation that appears to be of significant height (some estimates suggest it is as tall as seven miles high), although skeptics argue that this tower-like appearance could be, essentially, a trick of the light, making what is, they say, a natural rock formation appear much larger than it actually is. A similar alleged artificial structure can be found in the Ina Caldera region. Known as the Ina Bridge, this bridge-like structure appears to be an artificial structure – essentially, a bridge connecting two parts of the lunar surface.

Another apparent anomaly on the surface of the Moon is known as The Shard, which appears similar to the previously mentioned Tower of Babel in that it seems to tower above the Moon’s surface. To some people, this is clear evidence of some kind of alien outpost or possibly even proof of a civilization that once called the Moon home. Although skeptics have claimed – as usual – that The Shard is nothing more than an optical illusion, the fact that it appears to cast a shadow would suggest that whatever it is, it is something real and physically there. It is also worth mentioning the castle-like structure, unsurprisingly dubbed The Castle, that was captured in one of the images of the Apollo missions. What has perplexed many who have viewed the picture is that this seemingly artificial structure seems to be somehow floating above the Moon’s surface.  

At this point, it would be beneficial to explore one of the strangest of all conspiracies surrounding the Moon – those of the “secret” Apollo missions that ran, at least according to some, under the name Project Horizon. The origins of the project go back to the 1950s and looked to build a permanent base on the lunar surface. It was brought to a close not long after, but some people have suggested that the project continued to operate behind closed doors – specifically following the official closure of the Apollo missions. Although Apollo 17 was the last official Apollo mission, some researchers have suggested that the Apollo 18, 19, and 20 missions went ahead in secret without the public being aware of them. While it is easy to dismiss such claims as outlandish nonsense, it is interesting to note that the three missions (18,19, and 20) had already been budgeted and paid for when they were scrapped, something which simply made no financial sense.

Although information on the alleged secret missions is limited, it is claimed that the Apollo 18 and 19 missions did indeed find evidence of alien bases on the lunar surface (some sources claim that Apollo 19 was lost in a collision during its respective mission). During the alleged Apollo 20 mission, however, they discovered not only the remains of alien bases and technology but of a female alien humanoid. One of the alleged pilots on these discreet Apollo missions – William Rutledge – released a video on YouTube in 2007 that appeared to show parts of the Apollo 20 mission, including footage of the “alien girl” they discovered.

Several years after the release of the footage, in 2011, Italian UFO researcher, Luca Scantamburio investigated the case and spoke directly with Rutledge, who told him that he wasn’t employed for the missions by NASA but by the United States Air Force. He elaborated that he had previously “worked on the study of foreign technology – Russian only,” as well as working on the N1 Project, the AJAX plane project, and the MIG Foxbat 25. He further stated that he “had some skills for using computer navigation and was a volunteer for the MOL-Gemini Project!” Even stranger, especially when we consider the claims that President Kennedy was assassinated – at least in part – because of his desire to embark on a joint moon landing mission, Rutledge stated that the Apollo 20 mission was a joint American-Soviet mission and launched in 1976 (a year, incidentally, after the famous “Handshake in Space” that saw American astronauts meet Soviet cosmonauts during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in the summer of 1975).  

Rutledge detailed how the Apollo 20 mission headed to the Delporte-Izsak region on the far side of the Moon. Almost as soon as they touched down and ventured outside, they made remarkable discovery after remarkable discovery. They found, for example, the crashed and crippled remains of an “ancient spacecraft” that they estimated was around two and a half miles long. Not far from the remains of this crashed craft they came upon the remains of what appeared to be an old and abandoned city – a location they referred to as Moon City but was labelled Station One by those in charge of the mission on Earth.

When they ventured into the city and explored some of the buildings, they discovered that it was littered with what they described as “space garbage” and various gold parts of scrap (we might note – if there is any truth to the idea that the Anunnaki constructed the bases on the moon, the discovery of gold makes a certain amount of sense given their desire to mine gold on Earth, as well as its value for space travelers). One building, however, appeared to be relatively undamaged and largely intact – a building they named The Cathedral. The most enthralling discoveries, though, occurred when they returned to the ruined spacecraft and prepared to investigate inside.

Upon entering the craft, they discovered several strange triangular rocks, as well as what appeared to be vegetation growing inside the vehicle (this notion of vegetation inside a UFO, as bizarre as it sounds, has surfaced in several other reports of close UFO encounters, with one particular incident from the United Kingdom in the mid-1970s suggesting this vegetation was somehow connected to the propulsion of the craft). They also found the bodies of several “small beings, (each) about four inches long” that seemed to “spend their lives in tubes!” These strange beings were discovered throughout the vehicle.

Without a doubt, the most remarkable discovery, however, was of two humanoid bodies. One of these was “destroyed” although it was unclear what had happened or caused such damage (the crew preserved the head of this first body). The other, however, was undamaged and well-preserved. The crew eventually dubbed this second humanoid Mona Lisa. Rutledge elaborated that Mona Lisa was in some “state of suspended animation (and was) neither dead nor alive!” Ultimately, the crew decided to transfer this female humanoid to their craft. Rutledge informed Scantamburlo that he didn’t remember who had named the girl Mona Lisa, whether it was himself or Leonov (a cosmonaut), but he could recall that she was around five and a half feet tall with long hair and five fingers and a thumb, which led them to guess that “their mathematics are based on 12” as opposed to ten, like humans.

He continued that she was clearly a pilot and that there was a “piloting device fixed to (her) fingers and eyes!” They removed this device, which included having to cut through two cables that were connected to the nose. After doing this, “concretions of blood or biological liquid erupted and froze from the mouth, nose, eyes, and some (other) parts of the body!” It also appeared that the humanoid’s skin was “protected by a thin transparent film!” Although none of the crew had medical training, they decided to fix their bio equipment to the body of Mona Lisa, and the “telemetry received by (the) mission control meds was positive!” In other words, she was alive. He finally stated that she was returned to Earth with the Apollo 20 vehicle where she remains today (at the time of speaking).

Interestingly or not, Rutledge half-acknowledged how bizarre and outlandish his claims sounded, but he insisted he was genuine, stating, “I’m the whistleblower. What can NASA or the United States Air Force do now? Blocking or suing me would be an acknowledgment. They can (only) speak of a hoax or fiction!” It is certainly something to think about.

It is perhaps fitting to end by exploring future visits to the Moon, or more to the point, locations that are said to be “off-limits” to any future moon landing missions. While there are several locations that have been officially designated as restricted, several whistleblowers have come forward over the years stating that NASA has ulterior motives for designating these locations as forbidden and that they have several other “unofficial” locations that they seek to avoid any missions exploring.

We know, for example, that Tranquility Base – the landing site for the Apollo 11 mission – is under the protection of these laws as initiated by the United States government, and is akin to a cosmic cultural heritage site that might one day be visited by future astronauts, and perhaps, as technology develops, will be a destination for space tourists. However, some people have questioned NASA’s true motives for putting the destination off-limits, offering that the real reason is to protect against the discovery of the remains of ancient alien bases and technology. This speculation becomes even more intriguing when we factor in the alleged recordings of Armstrong and Aldrin discussing seeing alien vehicles on the lunar surface (although debate remains as to exactly what was being discussed and indeed if the recording is authentic).

What about these other locations, though? One such alleged forbidden lunar destination is the Mendeleev Ridge, which could very well hold an abundance of information about past volcanic activity on the Moon. However, it has also been suggested that the location would be ideal for building hidden lunar bases – ones built by humans under highly secret space programs. A similar location is the Compton-Belkovich Volcanic Complex on the Moon’s far side. This volcanic structure likely holds similar information, with some scientists arguing that it could have been active (relatively) recently. Like the Mendeleev Ridge, though, it would be another ideal location for discreetly built structures. Moreover, the location could also be home to highly valuable materials and minerals that could be discreetly transported back to Earth.

We can find another highly interesting and, to some, suspicious location near the center of the Moon’s near side in the Sinus Medii region. While we should treat the claims with caution, some have claimed that highly advanced and secret observation equipment has been left here monitoring events on Earth, as well as equally advanced lunar facilities. Furthermore, unlike some of the other locations we have looked at, there appears to be no good reason why NASA or any other organization would want access to the location restricted.

If we move to the Moon’s South Pole, we find the Leibnitz Plateau, another alleged off-limits location. This region sits on remarkably flat and elevated terrain, which once more has caused speculation of advanced lunar bases and even landing zones for advanced space vehicles being present there. There are also several craters that, at least according to some, have been designated as no-go areas. One such location is the Tycho Crater, while another is the Tsiolkovsky Crater. Once more, there could be very reasonable reasons as to why NASA would wish to keep such areas preserved, not least the possibility of studying ice deposits there. However, like many of the volcanic regions, such craters would present the option for discreet lunar bases.

Only time will tell if these, and other, locations of the Moon will be studied up close and transparently. For all of the missions to the lunar surface, the majority of the Moon remains unexplored and uncharted, at least officially. And perhaps because of that, such conspiracies and wild claims as we have examined here are allowed to flourish in that void of information. That is not to say that there might not be at least some truth to some of those claims – as we have established, the Moon is a genuine anomaly that, for all the official theories, remains largely unexplained.

Could the Moon have been placed in orbit by an unknown intelligence, and is that intelligence still present on the Moon today? Could our cosmic satellite be an artificial construct, something more akin to a space station that once brought extraterrestrials to Earth many thousands of years ago? And, if so, did it replace our natural Moon that had sustained life on Earth perhaps for many thousands of years before that? The fact is, there remain many unanswered questions about the Moon, its origin, and whether it might have served as a colony for an ancient space-faring civilization. While many of the claims about the Moon we have examined here should be treated with caution and are, admittedly, unlikely, they remain a possibility and a part of the mystery of the already fascinating object in our night sky.