A couple of days ago, I shared with you a very eerie case – from the 1950s – of a Woman in Black and an Alien Big Cat. I thought that, today, I would expand on this eerie issue of the WIB and share with you what the Women in Black phenomenon is really like. Within the world of UFO research, the Men in Black are about as legendary as they are feared. These pale-faced, ghoulish entities have for decades terrorized into silence both witnesses to, and researchers of, UFO encounters. Theories for who or what the MIB might be are legion. They include: extraterrestrials, government agents, demonic creatures, vampires, time-travelers from the future, and inter-dimensional beings from realms that co-exist with ours. There may very well be more than one explanation for the unsettling phenomenon. While much has been written on the sinister and occasionally deadly actions of the MIB, very little has been penned on the subject of their equally bone-chilling companions: the Women in Black. Make no mistake: the WIB are all too real. And they are as ominous, predatory and dangerous as their male counterparts. In the same way that the Men in Black don’t always wear black, but sometimes wear military uniforms or specifically beige-colored outfits, so do the WIB, who are also quite partial to white costumes. In that sense, “WIB” is, just like “MIB,” a term that is somewhat flexible in terms of actual nature and description.

 (Nick Redfern)

The creepy companions of the Men in Black

The WIB may not have achieved the iconic status of the MIB – until now – but these fearsome females, and their collective role in silencing those that immerse themselves in the UFO puzzle, as well as in the domains of the occult and the world of the paranormal, are all too terrifyingly real. Not only that: the WIB have a long and twisted history.  Years before they plagued and tormented flying saucer seekers, the Women in Black roamed the landscape by night, stealing babies and young children, and plaguing the good folk of 19^th century United States and United Kingdom. They were also up to their infernal tricks in the 1920s. A definitive WIB surfaced in nothing less than a piece of publicity-based footage for a Charlie Chaplin movie, The Circus, which was made in 1928. The footage, undeniably genuine and shown not to have been tampered with, reveals what appears to be an old, short lady, wearing a long black coat and a black hat pulled low over her face, while walking through Los Angeles in west coast heat. If that was not strange enough, she is clearly holding to her ear what appears to be a cellphone and is talking into it as she walks. Weirder still, the Woman in Black sports an enormous pair of black shoes, which look most out of place, given her short stature. She also seems to be taking careful steps to avoid her face being seen clearly. Might she have been some kind of time-traveling Woman in Black, working hard – but spectacularly failing – to blend in with the people of Los Angeles, all those years ago?

Fifteen years later, a terrifying WIB haunted the Bender family of Bridgeport, Connecticut. It so happens that a certain Albert Bender, of that very clan began the Men in Black mystery. In the early 1950s, Bender, after establishing the International Flying Saucer Bureau, was visited and threatened with nothing less than death by a trio of pale, skinny, fedora-wearing MIB. They were visits which firmly set the scene for the decades of MIB-themed horror and mayhem that followed. Bender’s visitors were not secret-agents of government, however. He said they materialized in his bedroom – a converted attic in a creepy old house of Psycho proportions – amid an overpowering stench of sulfur. They were shadowy beings with demon-like, glowing eyes. We surely cannot blame the CIA, the FBI, or even the all-powerful NSA, for that! In 1956, UFO sleuth Gray Barker penned a book on Bender’s confrontations with the Men in Black. It was titled They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers and became a classic. Six years later, Bender penned his very own book on his encounters with the MIB: Flying Saucers and the Three Men. It was these two books that brought the MIB into the minds and homes of flying saucer enthusiasts across the world. After which, Bender dropped each and every one of his ties to Ufology. He was careful to avoid speaking about the subject ever again, and, thereon, focused his time on running the appreciation-society of composer Max Steiner.

Back in the 1930s, however, the Bender family had a black-garbed woman in its midst that tormented both young and old in the dead of night. Predating Albert Bender’s own experience with the MIB by years, the hideous silencer in black haunted the Benders near-endlessly. For the Bender family, long before the MIB there was a Woman in Black. In the 1960s, the emotionless, evil-eyed WIB turned up in the small, doom-filled town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. And right around the time that sightings of the legendary flying monster known as Mothman were at their height. Claiming to be “census-takers,” these pale-faced, staring-eyed WIB practically forced their way into the homes of frightened witnesses to Mothman. What began as seemingly normal questions about the number of people in the house, of the average income of the family, and of the number of rooms in the relevant property, soon mutated into something much stranger: persistent and intrusive questions about strange dreams, about unusual telephone interference, and about beliefs regarding the world of all-things of a paranormal nature soon followed.

(Nick Redfern)

Women in Black and Mothman, a strange connection

One of the WIB that put in an appearance at Point Pleasant claimed to have been the secretary of acclaimed author on all-things paranormal, John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies. Just like her male counterparts, she turned up on doorsteps late at night, waiting to be invited in, before grilling mystified and scared souls about their UFO and Mothman encounters. Then vanishing into the night after carefully instilling feelings of distinct fear in the interviewees. Only when dozens of such stories got back to Keel did he realize the sheer, incredible, scale of the dark ruse that was afoot. Keel had to break the unsettling news to each and every one of the frightened souls who contacted him: “I have no secretary.” In the 1970s, wig-wearing and anemic-looking WIB made life hell for more than a few people who were unfortunate enough to cross their paths. Something similar occurred in England, Scotland, and Ireland during the 1980s: a weird wave of encounters with “phantom social workers” hit the UK. They were out of the blue encounters that eerily paralleled the incidents involving WIB-based “census-takers” that manifested in West Virginia back in the 1960s.

In early 1987, Bruce Lee, a book-editor for Morrow, had an experience with a WIB-type character in an uptown New York bookstore. Lee’s attention to the curious woman – short, wrapped in a wool hat and a long scarf, and wearing large black sunglasses behind which could be seen huge, “mad dog” eyes – was prompted by something strange and synchronistic. She and her odd partner were speed-reading the pages of the then-newly-published UFO-themed book, Communion, by Whitley Strieber. It was a book published by the very company Lee was working for. Lee quickly exited the store, shaken to the core by the appearance and hostile air that the peculiar pair oozed in his presence. Both 2012 and 2014 saw incredible and frightening encounters with the Women in Black across the United States. And, as you will now learn, the above-accounts amount to the mere tip of what is a gigantic, much under-appreciated iceberg. When paranormal activity occurs, when UFOs intrude upon the lives of petrified people, and when researchers of all things paranormal get too close to the truth for their own good, the WIB are ready to strike. They dwell within darkness, they surface when the landscape is black and shadowy, and they spread terror and negativity wherever they walk. Or, on occasion, silently glide. They are the Women in Black. Fear them. Keep away from them. And never, ever, let them in the house.

 (Nick Redfern)

Since time unremembered we have sought to penetrate out beyond what our maps show and trudge out over the horizon to explore and conquer the uncharted lands that lie beyond. It is an innate characteristic of the human spirit to wonder at what lies beyond what we know and to delve into the mysteries these wildernesses hold. For centuries explorers have gone out into the unknown and brought back information that has helped us to better understand our world and even our place within it. On occasion, these explorers have brought back some strange stories indeed. It seems only natural that the intrepid explorers who first step foot into new, unexplored realms that are strangers to civilization should come across things no one has ever seen before, and often this comes in the form of coming across creatures that seemingly should only inhabit the wilds of the imagination. One explorer who brought back myriad tales of strange beasts within his journals is an intrepid explorer of the South American jungles, who went out looking for a lost city and would come back with a whole list of weird creatures never seen before.

One of the most well-known explorers of the Amazon jungle is the famed explorer Percy Fawcett, who is most famous for his ambitious and ill-fated expedition in 1925 to find a lost city he was convinced existed in the forgotten, unexplored depths of the Amazon jungle, a journey during which he would vanish off the face of the earth to become one of the most baffling disappearances in history. I have written of Fawcett and his various expeditions, in particular that of his lost city, in much more depth here at Mysterious Universe before, but one of the more interesting and lesser discussed aspects of his adventures are all of the strange and mysterious creatures he allegedly encountered along the way in that maze of wilderness. Throughout his journeys, Fawcett kept rather detailed journals of his expeditions, and flipping through the normal, more mundane everyday trials and tribulations of the expedition, one can at times find some rather amazing, bizarre accounts involving myriad strange creatures that just seem to jump off the page. Indeed, Fawcett’s journals hold a veritable zoo of strange and bizarre beasts that have never really been identified or explained, and he once cryptically and eerily wrote of the Amazon as being:

A poisoned hell that could never be explored on foot, 60 foot anacondas capable of picking a man out of a canoe, savage ape men, an infested plain of deadly snakes, bats so big they looked like pterodactyls, ferocious black panthers, white Indian tribes, swarms of biting bees, fires in the distance.

Percy Fawcett

Some of the strange creatures that are mentioned in his journals, and which are obviously something not officially known, are frustratingly mentioned only briefly or in passing, as if they are just a part of everyday life for them, another one of the menagerie of poisonous snakes and spiders, vampire bats, giant anacondas, electric eels, ferocious piranhas, jungle cats, and other dangerous animals that all conspired to make the expedition members miserable. One of these was something he called the “sauba ants” which could apparently reduce clothing and bedding to threads in a single night, mentioned in passing but obviously no normal ants that we presently know of. There are also casual mentions made of millipedes that “squirt cyanide” and a type of gigantic spider larger than a dinner plate he calls the Apazauca Spider, which he says has poison that could kill a grown man nearly instantaneously and liked to enter tents at night. Another creature described in only passing detail is what is described as a cat-like canid with a double nose, and he also makes mention of a shark called the manguruyú, which he writes is “a freshwater shark, huge but toothless, said to attack men and swallow them if it gets a chance.” These are all strange in that they give such short shrift to these oddities, maddeningly brief and lacking in detail, which was a bit odd for Fawcett, who normally went to great lengths to take meticulous and detailed notes during his expeditions. Fawcett made another brief mention in his many notes of something very strange, large, and seemingly very much like a dinosaur in the wilds of Bolivia, of which he wrote:

Some mysterious and enormous beast has frequently been disturbed in the swamps – possibly a primeval monster like those reported in other parts of the continent. Certainly tracks have been found belonging to no known animal – huge tracks, far greater than could have been made by any species we know.

What was it? It is hard to say because he never mentions it again, although he at several points talks about hearing from natives of enormous, mysterious tracks along the Acre River, near where the borders of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil collide. Of the actual creature itself, no more is said of it, an afterthought in his otherwise sprawling details of the expedition. It is frustrating to say the least, and this is only just the beginning of tales of Fawcett’s encounters with mystery beasts in the remote rainforests of South America, but other reports get a bit more meat to them and are also at times quite a bit more spectacular. One of these is his expedition’s supposed encounters with a giant snake far larger than anything known, and also apparently more aggressive. Compared to the brief, matter-of-fact write-ups on the creatures already mentioned, Fawcett in this case goes into great detail about the team’s harrowing encounter with the serpent, writing:

We were drifting easily along in the sluggish current not far below the confluence of the Rio Negro when almost under the bow of the boat there appeared a triangular head and several feet of undulating body. It was a giant anaconda. I sprang for my rifle as the creature began to make its way up the bank, and hardly waiting to aim smashed a .44 soft-nosed bullet into its spine, ten feet below the wicked head. At once there was a flurry of foam, and several heavy thumps against the boat’s keel, shaking us as though we had run on a snag. With great difficulty I persuaded the Indian crew to turn in shore-wards. They were so frightened that the whites showed all round their popping eyes, and in the moment of firing I had heard their terrified voices begging me not to shoot lest the monster destroy the boat and kill everyone on board, for not only do these creatures attack boats when injured, but also there is great danger from their mates.

We stepped ashore and approached the reptile with caution. It was out of action, but shivers ran up and down the body like puffs of wind on a mountain tarn. As far as it was possible to measure, a length of 45 feet lay out of the water, and 17 feet in it, making a total length of 62 feet. Its body was not thick for such a colossal length-not more than 12 inches in diameter -but it had probably been long without food. I tried to cut a piece out of the skin, but the beast was by no means dead and the sudden upheavals rather scared us. A penetrating foetid odour emanated from the snake, probably its breath, which is believed to have a stupefying effect, first attracting and later paralysing its prey. Everything about this snake was repulsive. Such large specimens as this may not be common, but the trails in the swamps reach a width of six feet and support the statements of Indians and rubber pickers that the anaconda sometimes reaches an incredible size, altogether dwarfing the one shot by me. The Brazilian Boundary Commission told me of one killed in the Rio Paraguay exceeding 80 feet in length!

That is certainly a really big snake, far beyond the size of anything known. Again, this is an isolated report in his journal, leaving the reader to decide what ever became of it. Besides giant snakes, Fawcett also wrote quite a lot on his encounters with a tribe of hairy, man-like beasts that he calls the Maricoxi, and which are mostly described as being little more than beastly hairy ape-like savages. By far his most detailed entry on these creatures is also the most sensational, in which Fawcett provides a blow by blow description of his expedition’s frightening encounter with these beasts as follows:

I whistled, and an enormous creature, hairy as a dog, leapt to his feet in the nearest shelter, fitted an arrow to his bow in a flash, and came up dancing from one leg to the other till he was only four yards away. Emitting grunts that sounded like ‘Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!’ he remained there dancing, and suddenly the whole forest around us was alive with these hideous ape-men, all grunting ‘Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!’ and dancing from leg to leg in the same way as they strung arrows to their bows. It looked like a very delicate situation for us, and I wondered if it was the end. I made friendly overtures in Maxubi, but they paid no attention. It was as though human speech were beyond their powers of comprehension.  

The creature in front of me ceased his dance, stood for a moment perfectly still, and then drew his bowstring back till it was level with his ear, at the same time raising the barbed point of the six-foot arrow to the height of my chest. I looked straight into the pig-like eyes half hidden under the overhanging brows, and knew that he was not going to loose that arrow yet. As deliberately as he had raised it, he now lowered the bow, and commenced once more the slow dance, and the ‘Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!   A second time he raised the arrow at me and drew the bow back, and again I knew he would not shoot. It was just as the Maxubis told me it would be. Again he lowered the bow and continued his dance. Then for the third time he halted and began to bring up the arrow’s point. I knew he meant business this time, and drew out a Mauser pistol I had on my hip. It was a big, clumsy thing, of a caliber unsuitable to forest use, but I had brought it because by clipping the wooden holster to the pistol-butt it became a carbine, and was lighter to carry than a true rifle. It used .38 black powder shells, which made a din out of all proportion to their size. I never raised it; I just pulled the trigger and banged it off into the ground at the ape-man’s feet.   

The effect was instantaneous. A look of complete amazement came into the hideous face, and the little eyes opened wide. He dropped his bow and arrow and sprang away as quickly as a cat to vanish behind a tree. Then the arrows began to fly. We shot off a few rounds into the branches, hoping the noise would scare the savages into a more receptive frame of mind, but they seemed in no way disposed to accept us, and before anyone was hurt we gave it up as hopeless and retreated down the trail till the camp was out of sight. We were not followed, but the clamor in the village continued for a long time as we struck off northwards, and we fancied we still heard the ‘Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!’ of the enraged braves.

What were these creatures? Considering they are only ever mentioned in Fawcett’s report in passing and there are no further details we will probably never know. Although it might be tempting to chalk some of these reports up to instances of Fawcett being a little imaginative and sprucing his journal up a bit, the thing is he was not really known for that at all. Fawcett was a respected explorer and naturalist, a consummate professional who kept very good and accurate journals for what he saw or witnessed, with no real hint that he was prone to just sudden flights of fancy or making things up, and these tales are also interspersed between totally normal accounts of mundane things and observations, so why would he do this in the first place? It seems to be unlikely he would have just made these stories up, and he was knowledgeable enough about the region and its wildlife that he likely would not have been making misidentifications that he spun into tall tales. In the end we are left to just wonder what was going on here, and they are all just more cryptic accounts brought back by explorers penetrating out into realms beyond our understanding.

Well, the answer to the question above is a definitive “Yes!” The U.S. government may not have much understanding of who the Men in Black really are, but the military, and various agencies, have certainly followed the activities of the MIB. As you will see now. Thanks to the phenomenally successful Men in Black movie franchise, there can be very people who have not heard of the sinister MIB. In the movies starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as agents “J” and “K,” the MIB are employed by a secret government body that is dedicated to wiping out hostile aliens on the Earth. The reality of the Men in Black, however, is very different. Unlike their movie counterparts, the real MIB are described as looking definitely non-human: their skin is extremely pale, they have large, bulging eyes; they are extremely skinny and often very tall. In other words, they don’t even look like regular people. This has given rise to the theory that the MIB may be alien-human hybrids. Possibly, even supernatural entities. Not only that, there is strong evidence that suggests the U.S. Government has secretly investigated the MIB phenomenon, to try and figure out who – or what – the Men in Black are.

(Nick Redfern) 

Men in Black: What does the U.S. Government Know?

Thanks to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act legislation, we now have in our possession a number of official, previously secret, U.S. military documents that confirm those secret investigations, that were clearly covered up at the time the government was doing its utmost to solve the mysterious riddle of who these strange characters were. Now, to the next part: John Keel was not only the author of the acclaimed book, The Mothman Prophecies. He was also someone who dug very deeply into the matter of the MIB, who they were, and where they came from. In February 1967, Keel had the opportunity to speak with Colonel George P. Freeman. Colonel Freeman, of the U.S. Air Force, made the following, written statement about the MIB. Keel took careful note of it: “Mysterious men dressed in Air Force uniforms or bearing impressive credentials from government agencies have been silencing UFO witnesses. We have checked a number of these cases, and these men are not connected to the Air Force in any way. We haven’t been able to find out anything about these men. By posing as Air Force officers and government agents, they are committing a Federal offense. We would sure like to catch one – unfortunately the trail is always too cold by the time we hear about these cases, but we are still trying.”

Less than one month later, specifically on March 1, 1967, Lieutenant General Hewitt T. Wheless, USAF, penned the following memo. It was widely circulated within the military: “Information, not verifiable, has reached HQ USAF that persons claiming to represent the Air Force or other Defense establishments have contacted citizens who have sighted unidentified flying objects. In one reported case, an individual in civilian clothes, who represented himself as a member of NORAD, demanded and received photos belonging to a private citizen.” The document continues: “In another, a person in an Air Force uniform approached local police and other citizens who had sighted a UFO, assembled them in a school room and told them that they did not see what they thought they saw and that they should not talk to anyone about the sighting. All military and civilian personnel and particularly information officers and UFO investigating officers who hear of such reports should immediately notify their local OSI offices.” Clearly, not only does the above-documentation demonstrate that the Men in Black were nothing to do with the government; it also shows that the government had no more understanding of who the MIB were than did the average UFO researcher. Moving on to the FBI…

(Nick Redfern)

Bender, Barker and the G-Men

In 1956, paranormal/UFO investigator Gray Barker wrote and published a book titled They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. A significant percentage of the book was focused on the MIB-themed experiences of Albert Bender, who, in the early 1950s, established the International Flying Saucer Bureau (in Bridgeport, Connecticut). It wasn’t long before the IFSB was no more. Bender supposedly closed it down after receiving repeated, menacing visits from the Men in Black. Bender’s MIB were far less like 1950s-era G-Men or agents of the CIA. They were far more like something from the pages of a Bram Stoker novel, mixed in with a greater than liberal sprinkling of H.P Lovecraft. As a result of the publication of Barker’s book, a number of people contacted the FBI, demanding to know who the dark-suited silencers really were – and particularly because certain ufologists, such as Barker, were claiming the MIB were from “the government.”

The FBI has declassified some of its documents on Bender and Barker. They demonstrate something notable. Namely, that just like the U.S. military, the FBI too had no real understanding of who the MIB were; but, they knew the MIB existed and were terrorizing people. On January 22, 1959, none other than J. Edgar Hoover instructed the Chicago office of the FBI: “The Bureau desires to obtain a copy of the book written by Gray Barker entitled ‘They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.'” Records demonstrate that behind closed doors and after reading Barker’s book, the FBI was as baffled in the Fifties as the Air Force was, almost a decade later.

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In October 2017, a post appeared on the 4chan message board from an anonymous account calling itself “Q Clearance Patriot.” This poster, who became known as “Q,” claimed to be a high-ranking government insider with access to classified information from President Trump’s administration, about an alleged global cabal against Trump. Since then, despite many postings, much speculation on both political sides and numerous investigations, the identity of Q has never been proven with certainty. That may have changed with the announcement that two independent groups of linguistic detectives using machine learning software to track speech patterns in Q’s myriad of social media messages have put a name to the letter … in fact, two names. There is much information about QAnon online – you can start here if you need some. The purpose of this article is examine the techniques each group used to make their determinations.

“The two analyses — one by Claude-Alain Roten and Lionel Pousaz of OrphAnalytics, a Swiss start-up; the other by the French computational linguists Florian Cafiero and Jean-Baptiste Camps — built on long-established forms of forensic linguistics that can detect telltale variations, revealing the same hand in two texts.”

The New York Times was the first to reveal the results of these independent analyses which both used stylometry — the statistical analysis of variations in literary style between one writer or genre and another – albeit in different ways. The groups began with text samples, including more than 100,000 words by Q and at least 12,000 words by each of the 13 other writers that they identified as likely suspects in the quest to out Q. The Swiss researchers used AI which searched for three-character patterns across multiple texts and compared vocabulary and syntax. The French group used AI that learned to recognize patterns in writing the same way facial-recognition software learns patterns in human features. Both techniques had their doubters.

“Gerald McMenamin of the University of Nevada, Reno, a renowned forensic linguist critical of the machine-learning techniques, said he doubted that software could pick out the telltale individual variations from the quirks of the distinctive voice assumed in the Q messages — full of short sentences, cryptic statements, military jargon and Socratic questions.”

Both groups focused primarily on Q’s tweets so the comparisons between writers were apples-to-apples. At some point, the Swiss and French groups heard about each other and decided to share resources. The Swiss team identified six writers as possible Q’s, while the French examined those and seven more people from inside the Trump administration. In the end, both AIs pointed to the same person — make that persons.

“At first most of the text is by Furber. But the signature of Ron Watkins increased during the first few months as Paul Furber decreased and then dropped completely.”

Florian Cafiero says the conclusions were the same – the first Q was Paul Furber, a South African software developer and tech journalist whose name appeared on message boards as an early follower but who the AI determined was actually the first writer of the messages. Eventually, minute aspects of the messages prompted the AI to show that Furber had left and Ron Watkins, who operated a website where the Q messages began appearing in 2018 and is now running for Congress in Arizona, became the new Q. While not perfect, the Swiss team said its software linked the writings of these two men to that of Q 93 percent of the time, while the French team said its software linked Watkins’s writing in 99 percent of tests and Furber’s in 98 percent. The New York Times says it contacted two prominent experts in linguistic detective work who both called the conclusions “credible and persuasive.”

“(Q’s messages) took over our lives, literally. We all started talking like him.”

When contacted by The New York Times, Furber denied being Q, implying the real Q’s influence made his own writings sound like him. Watkins, known to QAnon fans as CodeMonkeyZ, simply said, “I am not Q.”

The Times calls this “the first empirical evidence of who invented” QAnon. Forensic analyses, linguistic detective work, artificial intelligence and machine learning are all accepted science whose results regularly hold up in the court of law. Will they hold up in the court of public opinion?

Are Paul Furber and Ron Watkins Q?

A couple of days ago I wrote an article here at Mysterious Universe on the matter of the late author Mac Tonnies and his theories on what he termed the Cryptoterrestrials. As I said in the previous article about the mysterious beings: “If you don’t know them, it basically like this: that the UFO phenomenon has nothing to do with extraterrestrials, but everything to do with an ancient, advanced, human society that has lived here in stealth for possibly tens of thousands of years. Maybe, even longer. And, as Mac saw it, the Cryptoterrestrials present themselves as aliens from other worlds (or even from other solar-systems) so we don’t discover their true origins. If you don’t know them, it basically like this: that the UFO phenomenon has nothing to do with extraterrestrials, but everything to do with an ancient, advanced, human society that has lived here in stealth for possibly tens of thousands of years. Maybe, even longer. And, as Mac saw it, the Cryptoterrestrials present themselves as aliens from other worlds (or even from other solar-systems) so we don’t discover their true origins.” As I also said in the article, the main issue I had with Mac’s theory was the idea of worldwide caves , caverns, and underground bases – and all dotted around the planet, but not seen taking off regularly from their presumably huge, underground silo-style facilities. Now, we come to someone else who has looked deeply into this issue of the Cryptoterrestrials. His name? Walter Bosley (he writes, however, under E.A. Guest). First, though, let’s take a quick look at the legendary crash itself.

(Nick Redfern)

One of the U.S. Air Force’s reports on the Roswell enigma

When it comes to the issue of what really happened on what was once known as the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico in early July 1947, there are things we know, things we suspect, and things we will probably never know. But, that something happened – something which caused the U.S. Air Force to offer multiple explanations for the event – is not a matter of any doubt at all. It was an incident that clearly concerned elements of not just the military, but the government, too, and to a highly significant degree. Eye-witnesses – both military and civilian – were warned not to talk about what they had seen and / or heard. More than a few of those warnings crossed the line and can only accurately be described as death threats. People were plunged into states of fear. Lives were changed forever. And multiple theories for what happened were put forward. They include: a weather-balloon, a Mogul balloon, a Japanese balloon, a Russian craft and more.

(Nick Redfern)

Welcome to Roswell!

Back in the 1950s, Bosley’s father worked on certain, classified programs that benefited the pre-NASA U.S. space program, much of it in relation to flight medicine training. On one memorable occasion, Bosley Sr. was ordered to make a flight to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, located in Dayton, Ohio. It was a day that Walter Bosley’s father would never forget: he was briefed on what really happened near Roswell, New Mexico in early July 1947; the most famous UFO case of all. Bosley’s father was told that nothing of an extraterrestrial nature came down in the wilds of New Mexico. Walter Bosley said that “…The civilization…exists in a vast, underground system of caverns and tunnels beneath the southwest and is human…They are human in appearance, so much so that they can move among us with ease [and] with just a little effort. If you get a close look, you’d notice something odd, but not if the person just passed you on the street.” Now, finally…

Mac Tonnies contemplated on this particularly fascinating and alternative theory for what happened back in 1947: “The device that crashed near Roswell in the summer of 1947, whatever it was, featured properties at least superficially like the high-altitude balloon trains ultimately cited as an explanation by the Air Force. Debunkers have, of course, seized on the lack of revealingly ‘high-tech’ components found among the debris to dismiss the possibility that the crash was anything but a case of mis-identification; not even Major Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer who advocated an ET origin for the unusual foil and structural beams, mentioned anything remotely resembling an engine or power-plant. The cryptoterrestrial hypothesis offers a speculative alternative: maybe the Roswell device wasn’t high-tech. It could indeed have been a balloon-borne surveillance device brought down in a storm, but it doesn’t logically follow that is was one of our own. Upon happening across such a troubling find, the Air Force’s excessive secrecy begins to make sense.”

(Nick Redfern)

Out at the Roswell Crash Site

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Early in the movie “Planet of the Apes,” human astronaut George Taylor is shot in the throat by gorillas, but his life is saved by two chimpanzee doctors: Dr. Zira and Dr. Galen. That simple act reveals that the apes have crossed the traditional ‘line in the sand’ separating humans from animals – empathy … which they demonstrate by their prosocial occupations as doctors who voluntarily treat the ailments of others of their species. While apes and monkeys have shown actions that appear to demonstrate treating their own wounds or gastric ailments, they’ve never been seen attempting to heal others … until now.

Tell us more.

“In 2019, I was following a female chimpanzee named Suzee, and watched as she tended to the injured foot of her adolescent son, Sia. I noticed that she appeared to have something between her lips that she then applied to the wound on Sia’s foot. Later that evening, I re-watched my videos and saw that Suzee had first reached out to catch something which she put between her lips and then directly onto the open wound on Sia’s foot.”

In a study published in the journal Current Biology, Alessandra Mascaro, a volunteer at the Ozouga Chimpanzee Project in Gabon, West Africa, describes the shocking scenario she witnessed of a mother chimp treating a wound on her adolescent son’s foot with a chewed insect. It’s fortunate she was able to record the event because her superiors have been watching this group of chimpanzees for 7 years and had never seen anything like this. In fact, no one has.

While they had observed many instances of self-medication with chewed insects, Simone Pika, a cognitive biologist at Osnabrück University and Mascaro’s supervisor, says this was the first example of prosocial behavior in chimps. Even more shocking – it was far from the only one. A week after Mascaro observed it, PhD student Lara Southern watch an adult male named Freddy do it again. Over the course of 15 months, they witnessed 22 events of chimps treating their own wound or on another individual with masticated bugs. Then Southern observed a new twist.

“An adult male, Littlegrey, had a deep open wound on his shin and Carol, an adult female, who had been grooming him, suddenly reached out to catch an insect. What struck me most was that she handed it to Littlegrey, he applied it to his wound and subsequently Carol and two other adult chimpanzees also touched the wound and moved the insect on it. The three unrelated chimpanzees seemed to perform these behaviours solely for the benefit of their group member.”

Did you read about this in Silverback’s Anatomy?

This was not just treatment — this was nursing care, post-op and therapy by a group of chimps towards a non-related sick individual – it doesn’t get more prosocial or empathetic than that. Behavior like this has rarely been seen in non-humans and this group provides an on-going operating theater for humans to observe chimp medical treatments and recovery. While the psychologists will watch the chimps to track who gives and who receives the ‘treatments’ and how this knowledge and empathy is passed on to others, the biologists hope to sample the chewed insects to determine what gives them the healing power that so many chimps know about and use. Finally, they hope to branch out to other chimp groups to see if this is localized behavior or if empathy can now be ascribed to all chimps.

If chimps are prosocial, what about gorillas? Monkeys?

Have they crossed a line into the Planet of the Apes?