Following on from my previous article on journalist Dorothy Kilgallen – on an alleged crashed UFO and a crew of dead aliens said to have been found in in the U.K. during the Second World War – I thought I would share with you a couple more very weird stories from that same time-frame. Declassified U.K. military papers tell an incredible story. The documentation goes under the title of  “Report by the Crew of 61 Sqdn. A/c ‘J,’ Captain W/O Lever, of object seen during raid on TURIN, night of November 28/29th, 1942.” That’s a pretty big title! Nevertheless, it gets to the point of the incident. A report prepared for Bomber Command included these words: “Herewith a copy of a report received from a crew of a Lancaster [aircraft] after a raid on Turin. The crew refuses to be shaken in their story in the face of the usual banter and ridicule.” Now, let us get to the heart of the story that can be found in the National Archives, U.K. Along with more tales of strange, aerial objects, I should stress. With that said, back to the content of the document:

Lancaster bomber

“The object referred to above was seen by the entire crew of the above aircraft. They believe it to have been 200-300 feet in length and its width is estimated at 1/5th or 1/6th of its length. The speed was estimated at 500 m.p.h., and it had four pairs of red lights spaced at equal distances along its body. These lights did not appear in any way like exhaust flames; no trace was seen. The object kept a level course. The crew saw the object twice during the raid, and brief details are given below: (i) After bombing, time 2240 hours, a/c height 11,000 feet. The aircraft at this time was some 10/15 miles south-west of Turin traveling in a north-westerly direction. The object was traveling south-east at the same height or slightly below the aircraft. (ii) After bombing, time 2245 hours, a/c height 14,000 feet. The aircraft was approaching the Alps when the object was seen again traveling west-south-west up a valley in the Alps below the level of the peaks. The lights appeared to go out and the object disappeared from view.” The documentation reveals this, too: “The Captain of the aircraft also reports that he has seen a similar object about three months ago north of Amsterdam. In this instance it appeared to be on the ground and later traveling at high speed at a lower level than the heights given above along the coast for about two seconds; the lights then went out for the same period of time and came on again, and the object was still seen to be traveling in the same direction.”

Whatever this immense craft was, it was never identified. Now, let’s take a look at another bizarre case from the Second World War. It begins as follows: “From the latter part of the Second World War (the exact date is missing) comes the following from the in-house newsletter of the British Royal Air Force’s, 115 Squadron: “Under this heading there occur from time to time reports of weird and wonderful apparitions seen during our (and the American) attacks on Germany. We have asked our local Inner Circle bloke to comment on the latest species of wizardry. Here is his story…believe it or not.” The paperwork becomes somewhat amusing: “On the 11th December the Yanks paid one of their daylight visits to Emden. Visibility was good and the weather clear. An unidentified object was seen in the target area. It was about the size of a Thunderbolt and passed 50 – 75 yards beneath the formation.

“It flew straight and level (No chaps it was not a Lanc. gone mad…) at a terrific speed, leaving a streak like a vapour trail which remained visible for a long time. The object passed so quickly that the observer could not determine it more accurately. Suggestions will be welcome…serious ones…as to what this Loch Ness Monster of Emden might have been. (Prize… one year’s free issue of this News Sheet…if the publication survives as long.) Another of the attacking aircraft was hit by a length of wire which bit deeply into the nose. Twenty feet were coiled around the nose and something caused the bomb door to open. The wire may have been towed behind a fighter which had just made an attack upon the bomber; some form of explosive charge or weight may have been attached to a parachute fired from a rocket projectile, though no parachute was seen. An examination of the wire is taking place and it is hoped that this will shed some light on the occurrence. In another attack, this time on Bremen, there were many reports of ‘silver and red discs above the formations [italics mine].’ These have been seen before but up to now no-one has been able to decide their purpose. Suggestions please.” Neither case was ever solved.

Some places seem to draw UFO phenomena to them for reasons we may never understand. These places have some unseen quality that makes such forces gravitate towards them, and one such place lies out in the Pacific Ocean. The Solomon Islands consists of six major islands and over 900 smaller islands, islets, and atolls, and is located in Oceania to the east of Papua New Guinea. The region has a long history of human habitation, with the first settlers arriving between 30,000 and 28,800 BC, and it is also notable for seeing some of the fiercest fighting in the Pacific during World War II. The islands are also known for political unrest and its natural beauty, but lesser known are some of the very strange phenomena that goes on here, including very menacing and dangerous UFOs that seem to congregate here.

One old legend of the Solomon Islands is that of a flying reptilian beast ominously known as the “Dragon Snake,” said to be somewhat like a stingray in shape, with greenish-brown skin, a long tail with flukes red eyes sometimes described as glowing. On many occasions they are described as being somewhat bioluminescent, with their bodies giving off an eerie glow. More fantastical tales tell of the creatures spitting fire, and of attacking people or whisking them off to vanish. The creatures are mostly said to inhabit caves in the thickly forested mountainous interior, only coming out at night to feed, when they prefer to prowl about the coastal areas, where they are known to often attack boats. Due to their ability to glow, the creatures are often seen as just lights in the sky, zipping about and hovering as they go about their business. While mostly known by the local population, the creatures are seen by outsiders as well. One notable example is an ex- former RAAF engineer by the name of Marius Boirayon, bought a house in Cape Esperance and quickly became familiar with the local lore and legends. One of these being the stories of the Dragon Snake, which he heard from a local named Joseph, and which he first dismissed as myth until the night he saw one for himself shortly after moving in. In an article for Nexus Magazine, he would say of this experience:

I had become quite an enthusiastic fisherman with my fishing rod, and had been pulling scores of beautiful reef fish. Joseph was renowned by all in the village as being the best spear fisherman. One time he decided to do some night spear fishing, as it was easy to do at night by torchlight. So I decided that while Joseph was spear fishing, I would throw some lines in and see what kind of fish I caught. I was cleaning fish with Ci-Ci, another good friend of mine, when Joseph came out of the water with his dugout canoe full of fish to add to our already large pile. While we were inspecting his catch, Joseph suddenly shouted for our attention: “There! There! There! The Dragon Snake! The Dragon Snake!” He was pointing to the right, down the beach. As I looked down the beach, I couldn’t believe what I seeing. About a kilometer away there was a very bright, luminous, white object flying slowly over the water.

I remember asking myself whether I was really seeing it. I called out for my wife Miriam to bring my binoculars. After focusing in on the star like, brilliantly lit object, I noticed that it was about 60-foot round and seemed to make no noise. We watched it for a couple of minutes until it submerged itself into the sea. Joseph told me to wait about 10 minutes and I’d see it come back out again—which it did! When it came back out of the water, it was glowing twice as brightly as when it went in. We continued to watch it with my binoculars as it returned to the coast in the direction whence it had come and until it disappeared out of sight over the top of the coconut trees. Somewhat startled by this experience, we went back into the house and sat talking about this “Dragon Snake” until the early hours of the morning. They told me that if you didn’t see it one night, you were quite likely to see it the next. They were right. In fact, over a seven-month period, I lost count of these sightings when they reached the 60 mark.

Although the indigenous people of the islands had long spoken of the Dragon Snake as a living flying creature, Boirayon had a different hypothesis. To him, these were UFOs that the locals, who had no idea of spaceships and extraterrestrials, had explained away into simple terms they could understand. In his hypothesis, these were possible alien craft, and that the fire-spitting was actually beams being emitted by them. Through extensive interviews with the locals it would also dawn on Boirayon that these objects were decidedly malevolent, being blamed on missing people and with many stories of attacking and incinerating people. He would say of his attempts to explain these ideas to the locals and his thoughts on the UFO connection:

While we sat talking about this object, I explained the structure of the Universe to Joseph. I showed them my copy of a Time–Life book called The Universe, with its space-type pictures, and said that these so-called “Dragon Snakes” are what white men call “Unidentified Flying Objects”. They were absolutely amazed, as they had spent their whole life fearing this thing with superstition and having no real understanding of it. Yet, for that matter, I was also a little fearful. This first sighting had completely changed my mind about the existence of extraterrestrials, and a little investigation revealed that this so-called Dragon Snake had been in the area for well over a century. I realistically began thinking in terms of extraterrestrials inhabiting our planet.

My extensive investigation into the presence of extraterrestrials on Guadalcanal and Malaita has revealed that these supposedly “hidden to the eye” aliens have displayed unacceptable and unfriendly behavior towards the Guadalcanal and Malaita people; indeed, there have been several outright abductions and murders. Because of this, they can’t be considered friendly. For example, the grandfather of a good friend of mine was incinerated by one of these UFOs around the early 1900s. Several independent sources have verified this. Countless horrific stories can be heard throughout these islands. I made my way to the two chiefs and respectfully introduced myself. As we were talking, I brought up the topic of the Dragon Snake. My suspicions were right: the chiefs knew a lot about it. One of the chief’s brothers had been killed by it when he was only a little boy. They told me several stories of deaths and abductions, all of which confirmed to me that these UFOs are definitely not friendly. They may be friendly in other places in the world, but certainly not here.

The threatening manner of these objects would become a recurring theme in his writing, featuring heavily in many reports. Things would get even weirder still when he began to realize that the supposed lairs of the “Dragon Snake” were likely some sort of underground UFO bases from which the craft were operating from in the region. In order to investigate this theory, he purchased a topographical map of northwest Guadalcanal Island and began questioning locals on where the Dragon Snake’s “home” was. In the meantime, his friend Joseph told him excitedly that a local fisherman had been attacked by a Dragon Snake at a nearby village and was in the hospital with severe burns to much of his body. Seeing this as a chance to find out more information, Boirayon headed to the hospital with Joseph to talk with the man. He says of what happened:

Following some enquiries as to where the fisherman was, we arrived at his bedside. He was covered in bandages from head to toe and was in a great deal of pain, but doped up with pethidine. Joseph began to speak with him in the Guadalcanal language to try to find out exactly what had happened to him. He had been out fishing in his fiberglass boat at about 3.00 am, when he saw the Dragon Snake flying along. In foolishness, he started flashing his torch at it. That was when it flew over to him in an instant and hovered overhead. Panicking, he started the motor and took off to get away from the Dragon Snake, but it followed him as he “zigzagged” his way back to shore. It was during this short pursuit to the beach that it fired some form of light at him but it only partially hit him. A later inspection of his 19-foot fiberglass boat showed traces of scorching upon some of the boat’s interior paint. He said that when he drove his boat up the beach and ran into the bush, the Dragon Snake followed him to where he was hiding behind a tree and hovered above. When he moved around to the other side of the tree, it also went around to the other side. It was then that he literally got down on his knees and began to pray to God with his hands clasped in front of him. With that, the Dragon Snake moved on. After that, he stumbled his way back to his village and was taken to hospital.

As he researched more into the phenomenon, Boirayon not only deduced a promising location for where the UFO base might be located, but he also found that the sightings of these objects seemed to mysteriously congregate towards an area of the coast where there had been a huge battle during World War II. He made several more sightings of UFOs in this area, also noting that the craft seemed to have the ability to vanish into thin air or cloak themselves. He would say of this:

I had initially only gone to the Solomons to enjoy an early, youthful retirement and certainly had not expected to be chasing UFOs. But as a former military man, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that this UFO was continually coming and going near ships that had been involved in a great battle where thousands of men had lost their lives in the cause of freedom. It seemed as if this UFO was robbing graves. This weighed heavily on my mind for weeks. One night, though, while I was sitting fishing, my indecision changed. I had been watching the UFO submerge into the sea near the wreck of the USS Chicago and then surface again shining more brightly. I had my binoculars fixed well on it when I saw the lights of a ship that was travelling toward my direction. From the trigonometric perspective, the UFO couldn’t see the ship because of the point that was shielding its view. However, I had both the UFO and the ship in my field of view. After about 30 seconds, when the UFO did see the ship it instantly vanished. The UFO didn’t seem to go anywhere; it simply vanished as if it had turned off its lights.

I took my binoculars from my eyes. I was not sure if the craft had instantly accelerated or had somehow cloaked itself. Yet it seemed that the UFO didn’t mind the indigenous people seeing it, but it did mind when someone saw it who would possibly know of its real identity. My subsequent investigation into the UFO’s ability to cloak itself revealed that this characteristic was commonly known by all within the area and had become part of the superstition about the Dragon Snake. There are just too many stories about the Dragon Snake’s sudden “disappearance” to discuss here.

He continued his investigation into the phenomenon, finding that there were many places around the Solomon Islands that seemed to be “bases” for these UFOs, including a mountain he called “Mount Dragon,” and a mysterious reef located off the island of Malaita, and others, of which he says:

There is a 50-meter-diameter, bottomless circular reef in amongst the surrounding 10-meter-deep coral reef a few miles north of Kwoi Island (which is on the border of the Kwaio and Kwara’ae tribes) and south of Namo’ere’ere in central east Malaita. Singalanggu Harbour is slightly further south. UFOs can be seen going in and out of that reef virtually every night. My friends like fishing down this UFO hole during the daytime because it saves them from having to go out into the danger of the ocean and because there’s a plentiful supply of big ocean-type fish that can be caught in its depths. They have let down over 200 meters of 100-pound line and still haven’t been able to hit the bottom. I always think of this hole as having been made by a huge spaceship that hovered above it and shot a big laser into the crust of the Earth, for whatever reason! On mainland Malaita, about three to four miles directly inland from that circular reef entrance is a lake which has two connected entrances/exits. When the boys are out fishing at night, they see the UFOs going in one entrance and coming out the other. A UFO coming out of this lake at dusk incinerated my good friend’s grandfather, and everyone in the area knows about it. The aliens have instilled fear in these people for generations, and many people have gone missing.

In the Kwaio and Kwara’re areas, there are three entrances in their jungle mountains that I know of where these “ball of light”–type UFO vehicles can be seen entering and exiting. It is my belief that these entrances are not individual bases but are all connected, making up one big UFO base under the island. I may be wrong, but I also believe that one of the many reasons why they are there is that, for reasons of their own, they are mining a very rare type of gemstone under this kimberlitic rock volcanic island. The gemstones which my wife’s relatives possess have a far higher specific gravity than that of diamonds, and a refractive index such that when you put the stone in light you see your mirror image in the centre of the stone.

What is going on out there in the Solomon Islands? Why should these forces be drawn here? Why are they so incredibly aggressive and menacing? It is unknown. It is all a pretty strange case of a mostly forgotten little corner of UFO strangeness, melding local lore with UFOs, and we can only wait and see what becomes of all of this.

Just when you think you haven’t heard of a mysterious cattle mutilation in a while, a mysterious case of cattle mutilations pops up in the current mutilation capitol of the U.S. – Oregon — and in Argentina, South America’s cattle mutilation hotspot. Are they related? Has anyone checked if their latitudes match?

Let’s start in Oregon, where the Thomas Angus Ranch reported finding a prize purebred Black Angus bull, valued at $4,500, dead and mutilated on Aug. 14 at the Greenbar Ranch in Wheeler County. As in most mutilation cases, the owner found the bull missing its nose, tongue, left cheek, ear, eye, reproductive organs and part of its tail – all removed with what appeared to be precise surgical cuts. A necropsy could not be performed because the bull was decomposed, having been dead for more than 24 hours.

Capital Press reports this is the fifth case of a cattle mutilation in Wheeler County in the past 20 months, while nearby Harney County has had five cases in the past four years, two this year in May and July, and adjoining Crook County had some in early 2021. The sheriff departments in all counties are sharing information, but Deputy Jeremiah Holmes of the Wheeler County Sheriff’s Office, who has investigated a number of them, says all ten cases in Wheeler and Harney counties are still open, and all ten are “eerily similar.” Before you ask, they’ve notified the FBI but have been disappointed in its prior responses.

This is making me very angry.

“In recent weeks, unusual occurrences of mutilated animals have appeared in the province. In Hasenkamp a producer found a heifer of about 400 kilos with strange mutilations, it was missing the udder, genitals, part of the jaw, tongue and eyes. Meanwhile in Isletas, Diamante department, a cattle family found one of their mutilated goats, only missing the complete tongue, two eyes, one ear and the jawbone. The teeth were bare, down to the bone.” (Google translation)

While Oregon is the Northern Hemisphere’s cattle mutilation hotspot, Argentina holds that dubious honor south of the equator. El Once reports on two recent occurrences in Entre Ríos Province in north-eastern Argentina with the same types of mutilations as seen in Oregon. While the Chupacabra is sometimes blamed for mutilations in Argentina, El Once contacted UFO investigator Andrea Pérez Simondini, who says mysterious lights are often seen around the time of these mutations and thinks they have a “direct relationship” to each other.

“50% of the complaints are accompanied by sightings of lights and physical alterations in the animal, lack of large volumes of water in the area, such as in Australian tanks, power outages and when we measure the time and shape, a kind of alteration in the ground with electrical conductivity. We are very interested in these types of cases, because we recognized a type of cut and it is called ‘sawn’; which is a kind of saw and thanks to the photos we were able to identify it in the goat’s jaw.” (Google translation)

Pérez Simondini says that type of saw is used in genetic research and has been trying to get authorities to look at these mutilations as possible alien genetic samplings for years.

As with cattle and livestock mutilations in general, it’s difficult to fathom why extraterrestrials would only sample cows, goats and other field animals, and not humans or other livestock or wildlife. There are many who believe this is secret genetic research done by humans, either in the massive and competitive cattle business or in government, where they might be doing undercover disease research.

How about teaching all cattle to do this?

On the latitude question, the Argentine mutilations were in the southern 32nd parallel while those in Oregon were in the northern 44th parallel. Some researchers in the U.S. plotted UFO sightings and cattle mutilations on a map and found a high concentration along the northern 37th parallel, which runs from California through Nevada, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and across to Virginia, and includes Area 51 in Nevada, the alleged secret underground alien base at Dulce, New Mexico, as Taos, New Mexico, home of many mysteries including its famous hum. Is the UFO highway expanding beyond the 37th parallel and opening a southern corridor? Can it be blamed on climate change?

Cattle and livestock mutilations around the world look like a crime that should be easily solved. Why haven’t they been? The mystery continues.

Scientists have long sought a specific location in the human brain responsible for spirituality – a concept that eventually became known as the God Spot. Brian scientists have found regions responsible for human feelings of love, fear, compassion and criminality, but spirituality remained elusive, despite many humans spending more time in religious activities and spirituality than other experiences. In 1989, neuroscientist Michael Persinger developed a “God Helmet” to control communication between the right and left temporal lobes in hopes of finding the God Spot, but it eluded him. Now, a group of researchers using “lesion network mapping” think they’ve finally hit the God Spot. Will this finally bring science and spirituality together … or will it put an end to religion?

“Over 80% of the global population consider themselves religious with even more identifying as spiritual, but the neural substrates of spirituality and religiosity remain unresolved. In two independent brain lesion datasets (N1=88; N2=105), we apply lesion network mapping to test whether lesion locations associated with spiritual and religious belief map to a specific human brain circuit.”

In a study published in Biological Psychiatry, researchers Michael A. Ferguson from the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and others explain how previous studies used brain scans and functional neuroimaging to see what areas of the brain light up when a person experiences spirituality. Results have been mixed and inconclusive, so Ferguson and his team switched to lesion network mapping which links complex human behaviors to specific brain circuits based on the locations of brain lesions in patients. Their datasets consisted of 88 neurosurgical patients who were undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumor and had lesions throughout their brains, and 105 patients with lesions caused by penetrating head trauma from combat during the Vietnam War.

Of the 88 neurosurgical patients questioned before and after surgery, 30 showed a decrease in self-reported spiritual belief, 29 showed an increase, and 29 showed no change. Using lesion network mapping, the team found that self-reported spirituality mapped to a specific brain circuit centered on the periaqueductal gray (PAG), a brainstem region that has been linked to feelings of fear, pain, altruism and love. As noted in the study press release, results on religiosity from the second dataset aligned with these findings.

Some aspects of the study may not sit well with religious leaders. Lesion locations associated with other neurological and psychiatric symptoms – including parkinsonism (movement abnormalities seen in Parkinson’s disease), delusions and alien limb syndrome intersected with areas of the PAG circuit. More importantly, the two datasets were predominantly Christians but did not give any information on the patient’s upbringing or spiritual training. Ferguson wants to do more research in these areas.

“Only recently have medicine and spirituality been fractionated from one another. There seems to be this perennial union between healing and spirituality across cultures and civilizations. I’m interested in the degree to which our understanding of brain circuits could help craft scientifically grounded, clinically-translatable questions about how healing and spirituality can co-inform each other.”

One doesn’t need to dig too deeply into any religion’s holy books to find references to healing. Perhaps there really is a God Spot in the human brain that both science and religion can agree upon.

We’ll know for certain when medical insurance companies begin offering coverage.

There are plenty of reports of UFOs to go around, and they are mostly described as mechanical craft of some sort, whether that be alien, manmade, or something else. But there is a subspecies of UFO reports that doesn’t get nearly as much attention, and that is of strange things in the sky that seem to almost be living, bioluminescent creatures of some sort. Such creatures have appeared sporadically throughout the history of UFO sightings, and typically appear as glowing, translucent jellyfish, squid, or other creatures that seem to belong in the domain of the deep rather than the air, and here we will look at a selection of such completely bizarre sightings.

Sightings like these have supposedly gone back for years. In the 1950s a police man in England claimed to have had a run in with a low flying “sky jellyfish” as he was riding his bicycle on patrol. He claimed that it drifted right down in front of him and that he actually bumped up against it, describing the sensation as similar to brushing up against a soft blanket, and that it had a slightly unpleasant smell of mildew. In 1958 there was also report from Florida, where a policeman named Faustin Galegos found a translucent purple blob about the size of a soccer ball outside of his house. He claimed that when he had approached it seemed to be some sort of dying creature, and when he picked it up the thing just sort of evaporated in his hands.

From the same era, a very odd claim was posted on the site Norcalblogs, from a commenter calling himself Pie Guevara, who claims that his uncle, an Oscar Guevera, had taken part in a scientific survey of these sorts of creatures in the 1950s and 60s. The remote areas north of San Fransisco had apparently experienced a spate of sightings for over a decade of what were usually referred to as “Space Jellies,” which would congregate in the upper atmosphere along the coast, after which they would soar up into the upper atmosphere out of sight. Pie provides a letter that he allegedly received from his uncle, which outlines the phenomenon and his study of it, and reads:

This coalescence of “space jellies”, as we called them, was assumed to be part of a seasonal migration pattern in and about the western Pacific. With a small joint grant fund from several philanthropic scientific organizations (which shall remain unnamed), I developed a small, high altitude, long distance ultralight aircraft (the first of its kind) assisted by an in-flight deployable and detachable ovoid helium balloon. This platform was developed as it had become evident through observation and experimentation that the behavior of these creatures was disturbed by the approach of larger aircraft. It was not by coincidence that the craft bore a distinct resemblance to the large, presumably mature form, of “space jelly” creatures themselves.

Working within a shoe-string budget, I deployed a modified aqualung attached to a motorcycle helmet and a small forge bellows that was fashioned into a crude but effective and light weight re-breathing system for high altitudes. For warmth I wore a gorilla suit (procured from a costumer’s auction in Emeryville) and had it fitted with a lining of goose down. From below the aircraft was lowered a fair sized grappling hook with several large mackerels tied to it with bailing wire. Inside of six weeks in the fall of 1973 I had snagged most of these diaphanous jelly fish like buggers. None of the captured survived the experience and within minutes dissolved into an odd steamy smoke. On my final expedition, as per standard operating procedure, I reached the specified location at an altitude of 9500 feet, deployed the balloon, and floated up into the remaining few of these creatures which, apparently, died of fright on the spot, dissolving into threadlike wisps before me.

Besides the regrettable loss of the subjects under study there was one more unfortunate circumstance. On the last mission, after jettisoning the balloon, I was flying in from the Pacific over the Farallons at about 5000 feet towards my hidden base of operations in a remote area of [redacted]. I was spotted by a US Navy crew on a practice and shakedown cruise flying a restored antique Consolidated Vultee PB2Y Coronado that was to be displayed in a few days at a Fleet Week exposition near Fisherman’s wharf. They veered off course, followed me, and executed a close and slow pass-by over San Francisco Bay. So close I could see the faces of the pilot and crew. The flying boat then abruptly dropped altitude and beached near the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in what, for all intents and purposes, appeared to be an emergency landing. Weeks later I learned, through some Navy sources in Vallejo who hung out Fridays at the [redacted] Bar and Grill, that the pilot and crew recovered from the plane had babbled incoherently and for days all they could get out of them was, “Flying fish bear … flying fish bear …” Needless to say this story has never been declassified and likely never will be. The only reason I relate it now is lay to rest any fears that may still exist about these creatures and confident in the knowledge that no one in their right mind would ever actually believe it.

This is truly a far-out and spectacular account, and one can’t help but wonder how much veracity any of it holds. A guy in a gorilla suit collecting flying jellyfish from the upper atmosphere? Flying Fish Bears? It is all quite beyond bizarre. You can’t make this stuff up, folks. One quite strange sighting from later years that is really hard to classify but seems to be a type of sky squid allegedly occurred on December 24, 1999, in the country of Belarus. On this day, two witnesses in the remote Vitebsk region saw in the sky an enormous cigar-shaped object that was blue and red in color like “the color of a clouds at sunset,” with a slightly angular quality to it and with a round and asymmetric front and a rear section that was described as blurry. It appeared as brighter than the early evening sky and looked to be slightly fluorescent, semi-transparent, and seemed to pulsate as it moved along, as if swimming rather than flying, completely silent the whole time. The sky was otherwise completely clear, and the witnesses both described having the feeling that they were not looking at any type of aircraft, but rather a living creature of some sort. Rather oddly, after observing the object for a short time, one of the witnesses would say that it had suddenly seemed to “disintegrate into dots” before vanishing. In an interesting twist, there would be another report by an Aeroflot pilot who claimed to have seen the same thing while flying over the area in 1985.

From the area of Groningen, Netherlands, we have the case of a similarly bizarre object seen by a witness by the name of Harry Perton, who was outside of his home taking pictures of the sky at the time. It was apparently just after a storm, and the clouds and sky had been beautiful, but something stood out as very odd. Moving across the sky was a pulsing, flashing green light that appeared for a short time and vanished. At first he thought it must have been just a weird-looking lightning strike, some remnant from the retreating storm, but when he got home and checked his photos he saw that one of them had actually picked up a strange object in the sky that looked like a jellyfish with an eerie green luminosity around it. The picture was soon doing the rounds online, sparking much speculation as to what it could be, including that it is a camera artifact, lens flare, a small meteorite, space debris, some meteorological phenomenon, or even a hoax, although the photographer himself has stated that he thinks there is a rational explanation for it and has made no effort to play it up as some sort of UFO. It hasn’t been explained.

Harry Perton’s Sky Squid

Another mysterious photo was captured in Andenesm, Norway by witness and amateur photographer named Per-Arne Milkalsen. As he was going through photographs he had taken of the Northern Lights, he noticed in one of the images a strange green glowing jelly-fish shaped object hovering over the landscape, and it did not seem to be a lens artifact or trick of light, but rather a solid floating object in the sky. It was so strange that he posted the photograph online, and a deluge of responses came in, with many suggesting that it was the Northern Lights reflecting off of something such as a satellite or cloud, but it was also pointed out that such a reflection was unlikely to be green. It still hasn’t completely been solved, and Mikalsen himself has said “I have never seen an object like this before, and I am eager to find an explanation to the phenomenon.”

In 1998 there was a mass sighting of some sort of sky jellyfish in China. On October 19 of that year, four military radar stations in Hebei province picked up a strange radar signature hovering near a military flight training school in Changzhou, about 90 miles northwest of Shanghai. When no other known civilian or military aircraft were shown to be in the area, it was alarming enough that a Jianjiao 6 jet fighter was scrambled and sent to investigate, and when they approached both the pilot and radar officer on the jet would claim they saw a mushroom or jellyfish shaped object with a bottom section “covered with bright, dangling lights.” Whatever it was proved to be very evasive, suddenly beginning to ascend as the fighter approached, with the pilot even at one point requesting permission to fire on it, which was denied. The object seemed to toy with the jet before suddenly ascending at a rapid pace, and the jet then chased it to an altitude of 39,600 feet before being forced to return to base due to lack of fuel. Two more jets were sent out, but by the time they arrived on the scene the object was gone. It would later turn out that 140 witnesses on the ground had seen the object as well, including many cadets and officers at the flight school, all of who described the exact same thing. Considering that the original report ran in a respected newspaper, the Hebei Daily, it is considered to be credible due to the fact that mainstream Chinese newspapers hardly ever mention anything to do with UFOs or the supernatural.

A very weird report comes to us from December 3, 2004, from two witnesses who were driving from Point Pleasant to Huntington, West Virginia, along the Ohio River, when they saw something that is really hard to categorize. As they drove along in the early evening, they noticed a movement over the road in front of them, before out of the gloom came a “greyish, smooth-winged shape” that they described as looking like a “flying manta ray,” with grey translucent skin and a wingspan “wider than a 2 lane road.” The outlandish beast sort of glided towards them and then performed a figure eight maneuver and swooped right over their car to disappear. Not long after this sighting there would be a separate report from a woman and her daughter near Blackwater River, who also saw what they called a “manta ray -shaped creature” glide over their car on a lonely rural road. What could this have possibly been? Who knows? A more recent account was given on the site Phantoms and Monsters, and comes from a witness in Perth, Australia, who is referred to merely as “BD.” The witness claims that in 2012 he was out in front of his house one evening having a cigarette when his attention was drawn to the curious sight of the light patterns of the stars being disrupted by something passing over them. At first he thought it might be a plane, but it soon became apparent that this was no aircraft. The witness explains:

As it got closer, the way it moved resembled the way a jellyfish would swim if it was horizontal. It was hard to describe, but it looked to be expanding at the front like a balloon, then using that air to propel itself along. It was roughly 100 meters above me and I watched it for 10 minutes. After that it was out of sight. This was during a clear night sky in Australia. I am very familiar with aircraft as I live relatively close to Jandakot airport and we see/hear them all the time. It was certainly not a machine of any kind. I yelled out to my Mother-in-Law who was staying at the time to come out and look. She also saw it. I filmed it on my smartphone, but being 8pm at night it was pitch black and you couldn’t see anything. If I had to guess, I would say the feeling I was left with is that it was some kind of creature. It moved gracefully and gradually in large deliberate movements. Like a large bird would do with a large flap of its wings, then gliding for a bit, although this was unlike anything I could describe. It appeared to be translucent in parts and remained at the same altitude and speed but just completely silent.

Amazingly, there was a follow up report from a different witness, who claims that he and a friend saw what appears to have been the same or a similar creature around Perth at around the same time as this sighting. The witness says of the creature:

I would like to confirm the story of the flying jellyfish like creature as described on your forum by “BD,” There were two of us actually not just myself. We were in Perth CBD actually having a glass of wine on a quite loud jazz music playing balcony about 10 meters from the ground. I am so thrilled to find out there is another person who has seen this. The creature was behaving exactly as described by “BD” so basically like jellyfish but without any long tentacles – about a size of a balloon. It was kind of changing according to the different colored lighting attached to the balcony and it was flying upwards so effortlessly. It is really precious I have finally found this. I have been searching for so long. I have to be honest I don’t recall the exact day but it must have been the same night as “BD” mentioned. We had seen it around 9-10pm either friday or saturday. The creature wasn’t too shy either meaning it didn’t fly in a hurry. Would gladly put my hand on my heart on this one and now may actually try to find it again, but who knows how often do they appear.

What could such creatures be? One idea is that they are a type of theoretical organism known as an “atmospheric beast.” Atmospheric beasts, or atmospheric life-forms, as they are often called, are said to be organisms that live their entire lives floating high in the atmosphere, undetected by humans. These creatures are most often described as having bodies that are semi-solid, or almost insubstantial, with some reports even claiming that they are able to adjust their density from almost immaterial and invisible to more solid, depending on as yet unknown factors. Numerous theories have been posited as to how such seemingly fantastical organisms could manage to stay adrift in the air, such as air bladders or very low body densities.

The appearance of these atmospheric beasts varies wildly. Accounts have variously described them as amorphous and cloud-like behemoths, finned squid-like creatures, floating jellyfish, translucent, vaporous blobs, flitting rods, amoeba-like organisms, gelatinous oddities, and even dragons. The sizes of atmospheric beasts likewise run the gamut from tiny and bird-like, to gargantuan monsters hundreds of feet long. Although these enigmatic creatures are said to typically lurk too high in the atmosphere or to be too insubstantial to see with the naked eye, there are instances when one might become observable for some reason. Indeed, there has been a substantial amount of sightings reports over the years from all over the world describing unusual flying monsters that do not fit into the typical mold of UFOs, thunderbirds, or other flying cryptids. Are these anomalies some type of lifeform? Or are these some sort of rare type of alien craft, an atmospheric phenomenon, or something else altogether? It is hard to say, and such cases remain lodged into the very fringes of the world of the weird.

Now and again I get asked about so-called “Balls of Light.” Or, as some people call them: Orbs. Others just refer to them as BOLs. It’s not a particularly well-known thing that BOLs pop up in just about nearly all sorts of different aspects of the paranormal: Ufology, Cryptozoology, alien encounters, life after death, Crop Circles and more. And there’s no evidence to show they’re all interlinked. Although, there certainly could be. With that said, let’s get into it. I’ll begin with Bigfoot. While the BOL phenomenon isn’t particularly well-connected to Cryptozoology, there is a link. Much of that connection can be found in Texas’ Big Thicket. For decades, people have seen small, floating balls of light in the Big Thicket, mainly in the area appropriately called Ghost Road. Much less well-known is the fact that the late Rob Riggs – who was the expert on Big Thicket weirdness – collected a number of accounts of people seeing large, Bigfoot creatures in the Thicket, but they were very different to other cases. In this handful of reports Rob had in the BOL category, he told me that people had seen strange, approximately tennis-ball-sized BOLs, fluttering around the Bigfoot animals like butterflies might around a person. Rob had no clear theory for the cause of these “Bigfoot BOLs,” except to say that it led him to believe (even more) that there was something very strange about Bigfoot.

(Nick Redfern with the late Bigfoot-seeker, Rob Riggs)

Now, let’s get onto the matter of Crop Circles. If you know your Crop Circle lore and history, you’ll know that BOLs and Orbs are often seen above the intricately-formations. Very early on in his Crop Circle research, Matthew Williams (both a creator and a researcher of Crop Circles) came to realize something deeply strange and highly intriguing. Namely, that many people who make the formations experience unusual phenomena in the fields – and on numerous occasions in the formations of their very own making. For example, Matt has experienced (as have a number of other, well-known Circle-makers; more than a few of who are reluctant to speak on the record) a wealth of weird phenomena in Crop Circles that he himself created. That included seeing small, aerial balls of light zipping around, detecting unexplained animal-like growls and howls, and even experiencing significant periods of missing time.

(Nick Redfern)

Now, onto the 1950s-era Contactees and their “buddies,” the Space Brothers. There are numerous reports of the Contactees having encounters with BOLs. We’ll begin with Daniel Fry, the author of The White Sands Incident. According to Fry he saw, on his first encounter, what looked like an “especially bright group of stars” that “seemed to beckon me.” Truman Bethurum claimed amusing and outrageous encounters with a curvy, stacked-to-the-max, hot-looking babe from the stars who announced herself as Captain Aura Rhanes, of the planet Clarion. Interestingly, Bethurum said that prior to his meetings with the captain, he would often see “a small flare”or what appeared to be “a meteor falling though the starlit purple night.” Orfeo Angeulcci – the author of (among others) The Secret of the Saucers – said that his main encounter with a pair of human-looking aliens involved the appearance of a red, glowing, oval-shaped light that was “about five times as large as the red portion of a traffic light.” The sound of a male voice was soon heard, which was “strong,” and had “well-modulated tones and speaking perfect English.” The voice from the lights assured Angelucci that “they” were “friends from another world.”

Still on the matter of Space Brothers and BOLs: Decades ago, a man named Ralph Lael claimed amazing encounters with the Space Brothers on Brown Mountain, North Carolina. Just like those characters above, Lael reported seeing – in close proximity – eerie balls of light. In Lael’s case, the BOLs were around twelve feet in circumference. Lael felt, as one of the BOLs approached him, that “it was alive and had intelligence.” Bob Short was a Contactee who I met on several occasions – a couple of times at the UFO Congress in Laughlin, Nevada in the late 1990s, and at the Retro UFO gig, which is now no longer around. I often saw people poke fun at Bob and his Contactee-driven claims, but they really shouldn’t have. Bob’s encounters, too, began with the sudden appearances of multiple BOLs. Bob wrote (in his book, Out of the Stars: A Message from Extraterrestrial Intelligence) that he often saw, specifically before an encounter of the Space Brother kind, “luminous ephemeral spheres of light.”

Bob also said that the BOLs were “so dazzling” that “the actual form behind the light is masked and cannot be scrutinized visually.” How about BOLs being the souls of the dead? More than a few people have claimed to have seen small, BOLs in the aftermath of the death of a relative or of a close friend. Are we looking at just one phenomenon that is somehow tied into all manner of strange things: ghosts, monsters, aliens, UFOs, Crop Circles and more? Are there multiple different types of BOLs and Orbs?  Do they interact with us when the time, the location, and the nature of the phenomenon come together? Absolute definitive answers are short. Theories? There’s a bunch of them out there.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

For a lot of people, Crop Circles are the work of hoaxers or aliens. The truth is that Crop Circles don’t fall into either category. That doesn’t mean they aren’t strange – even paranormal, though – as you’ll now find out why. The fact is, there is some genuinely weird activity in Crop Circles, but there’s no definitive data to suggest it’s the work of extraterrestrials. Even in the slightest. It was back in the 1980s when I first heard about Crop Circles. And it was in the 1990s – in my twenties – when I first took a trip down to Wiltshire, England, where most of the Crop Circles were seen. That’s still the case to this day, for the most part. Now, let’s look at some of the weirdness that surrounds the Crop Circle puzzle, and why there aren’t any E.T.’s in sight. As one example of the strangeness, there’s the matter of an ancient castle and one of those circular creations, as you’ll see. I spent most of 2006 back in England, and in the latter part of July of that year, I received a telephone call late one night from deep in the heart of the county of Wiltshire. It was my good friend Matt Williams – one of just a handful of people in the world who, thus far, that have been arrested, charged and duly convicted for making under cover of darkness a “Pictogram”-style Crop Circle . In reality, the charge, as it usually is, was of causing damage to private property: a field. Blah-blah-blah. Whatever.

(Nick Redfern)

Did I know, Matt asked me in somewhat excited tones, that a fairly complex Crop Circle design had appeared only days earlier next to Chartley Castle? No, I did not, I told him. But, I soon hit the road to have a look at it, as it wasn’t far from my dad’s place. And with that information now digested, I will acquaint you with the next player in the odd saga. Jane Adams is a devotee of Wicca who I first met in a Wiltshire Crop Circle back in August 1997. She has an intriguing theory to account for the presence of those out of place feathers. She is of the opinion that the presence of the feathers at Chartley Castle is evidence that the people she believes are guilty of making the formations in the crops use the peacock’s “Evil Eye” in what she describes as “black ceremonies.” Interestingly, peacock feathers were all over the place. Now, onto Crop Circles and large black cats. In the summer of 2007, I spoke with Marcus Matthews, a researcher of mysterious, large cats in Britain, who told me that he was then currently investigating a case involving a person who had seen a “huge black cat” sitting inside the confines of a Wiltshire Crop Circle. Precisely how we explain these rogue cases that suggest a link between Crop Circles and exotic beasts and unknown animals, I have no firm idea. However, I am inclined to think we have not heard the last of such tales.

(Nick Redfern)

How about other strange things in Crop Circles? There’s plenty of them. Matthew Williams told me: “There was one time, I’d rather not say when or where exactly, as I could get into trouble for admitting I trespassed on the farmer’s land and made the formation. Plus, I had a friend named Paul helping me with this one. We were making this circle when we noticed these three bright lights – small balls of light coming towards the field. We watched them; we were fascinated.” That’s right: the strange phenomena that Matt encountered was in the very crop formation that he had created. Matt has an explanation for that: “I was given countless tales of UFO activity and even strange synchronicities which took place in the man-made Crop Circles, and which made the Crop Circle makers wonder if they were being influenced by a higher, guiding hand – perhaps at the design stage, or out in the field. I believe that the human Crop Circle makers may be guided by a connection to a higher intelligence, a gestalt or group mind; and the symbols that are put down are deep-routed subconscious expressions. This would explain why some telepaths or psychics claim to have seen Crop Circle designs before they appear – because we are all dialed into the same group-mind ‘internet.'”

An Avebury, Wiltshire Stone

(Nick Redfern)

Even more amazing, Matt told me: “The synchronistic events which happen each year in the unfolding designs that the Crop Circle makers come out with are often remarked as being too much of a coincidence. Crop Circle designs have been repeated in different parts of the country by teams who didn’t share designs beforehand. There have even been teams who have gone out on the same night to the same field, made designs, not knowing the other team was present, and their designs have had similarities.” Matt continued: “Why do Crop Circles have power? I know that crop is a living medium. Unlike any other type of canvas that an artist may use, crop has a life-force energy which, when used on such a large scale, makes crops blend natural Earth-energy magic with human-energy magic. What Crop Circle-makers may have rediscovered is the ancient art of natural magic – working with large emblems as part of the energy system of the Earth. Take sacred sites such as stone-circles: these were erected as temples for people to visit, perhaps as part of a sacred quest seeking answers. Today, Crop Circles fill a similar role, attracting people who ask questions and putting visitors closer to paranormal sources.”

My view on all of this? Yes, there is a real Crop Circle enigma. But, as all of the above demonstrates, that same enigma has zero to do with visiting aliens. It’s wilder.

Over the years (decades, in fact) there have been more than a few reports of people supposedly murdered for what they knew about UFOs. Intriguing and interesting, for sure. But, how much truth is there to these high-profile claims? That’s the theme of today’s article. We’ll begin with one of the most high-profile deaths in Ufology: that of the late alien abduction investigator-researcher-writer Professor John E. Mack. I’ll come straight to the point: Mack was not wiped out by some kind of ruthless hit-team. Anyone who thinks that such a thing could have happened is an idiot. No, hang on, that’s an insult to an idiot. Mack died because of an unfortunate set of circumstances on the night of September 27, 2004 in bustling London, England. Let’s get things into perspective: it was late at night. It was dark. And when he was hit by a vehicle – as he crossed the road by foot, no less – on a busy London road Mack had no chance of survival. There’s something else, too; something very important that many might not think of. Almost certainly, when Mack crossed the road he looked the wrong way. In the U.K. we drive on the left, while in the U.S. it’s the right. That’s what sealed Mack’s death. And not the Men in Black. Mack’s life was snuffed out all because of the way he turned his head at the wrong time. Worse still, the driver who hit Mack was under the influence of booze. Sometimes, a series of events come together – in the worst ways possible – and lead to the death of a well-known figure. In this case, Mack.

Dr John E. Mack, pioneering researcher of the abduction phenomenon.

Now, let’s look at Morris K. Jessup. He was someone who was well-known in Ufology in the 1950s. His books included The Case for the UFO and The Expanding Case for the UFO. His interests involved ancient levitation, modern-day Saucer stories, and the so-called “Philadelphia Experiment.” You know the one: the invisible ship that spawned an entire phenomenon. And a couple of movies. The first movie, in 1984, was good fun and entertainment. The follow-up was total garbage. As for Jessup, his life ended in 1959. In the early evening of April 20, the lifeless body of  Jessup was found in his car, which was parked in the Matheson Hammock Park in Miami, Florida. The car’s engine was still running and a hosepipe, affixed to the exhaust, had been fed through the driver’s side window. Jessup was dead from the effects of carbon-monoxide. Jessup’s body was found by a man named John Goode, who worked at the park. Shocked at the sight before him, Goode quickly called the police, who arrived in no time at all. It was all too late. It didn’t take long before ufologists were saying Jessup’s death was not just suspicious, but extremely suspicious. We need to look into Jessup’s private life for the answers. All of us have our lives away from things like Bigfoot, Nessie and aliens. And, sometimes, those lives don’t go well. That’s exactly what happened with Jessup. As the mid-to-late 1950s progressed, Jessup’s marriage began having problems. He had a car accident, something that played on him for a long time. His publisher turned down several of his ideas for future books. Paranoia set in that he was being watched. And, finally, the time came when Jessup couldn’t take it anymore. He took his life. No assassination. No murder. Just a tragic death provoked by a man whose turmoil became out of control.

Morris K. Jessup

That all said, there are some deaths in Ufology that I do think could have had suspicious endings. Take, for example, Miriam Bush, a figure in the world’s most famous UFO case: Roswell, of course. Miriam knew the truth of what happened back in 1947 on the Foster Ranch, saw the damaged bodies (human or alien), and was told to stay quiet. Or else. It didn’t stop her from telling her family of at least some parts of the story. And she started to take to the booze. To a significant degree. Unfortunately, Miriam was never really able to get rid of that ufological albatross. In the final month of 1989, Miriam headed off to San Jose, California. She had fears she was being watched. She probably was. The day after she hit the road, Miriam was found dead in her motel-room. A plastic bag was covered her head. The conclusion: suicide. Yeah, right. For me, the death of Miriam Bush is one that we should take a very close and careful look at.

Moving onto the 1990s, there was the death of Danny Casolaro. It was midway through 1991 when the lifeless corpse of a middle-aged man was found in a hotel room in the Martinsburg, West Virginia Sheraton Inn. Specifically, his body was lying in the shower. It was a grim sight for the maid that made the discovery. The man, it seemed, had committed suicide: his wrists were cut deep, something which effectively meant that without anyone to help him, the man was doomed. And, he was. It didn’t take more than a few moments for hotel staff to figure out who, exactly, the man was. He was identified by the person on the front-desk as Danny Casolaro. He was an investigative journalist of the Woodward and Bernstein variety. At the time, Casolaro was pursuing a dangerous group of people that he called “The Octopus.” Supposedly, they engineered the JFK assassination, Watergate, the Lockerbie, Scotland Jumbo Jet 747 crash over Scotland in 1988, and much more. As Casolaro continued his research, he found himself finding more and more UFO links to the Octopus, such as tales of UFOs, alien autopsies, Area 51 and much more. Casolaro was right on the edge of writing a book on all of this when death decided to come along. Two cases that I suspect were suspicious and two that weren’t. In other words, we have to be very careful as to how we handle such delicate events and incidents. Just because someone in Ufology dies, it doesn’t mean it has to be under suspicious circumstances. But, on the other side of the coin, we shouldn’t ignore such grim possibilities.

Danny Casolaro

For centuries, since the very first ships started making their way towards the horizon and to the edges of our own maps, there have been strange phenomena reported from the vast unknown expanses of our oceans. All manner of stories of sea creatures, unusual anomalies, and others have been brought back by vessels, and one of the more intriguing types of stories has been that of something apparently under intelligent control operating beneath the waves. Called USOs, or “Unidentified Submerged Objects,” these are mysterious objects and lights moving about underwater and inspiring awe just as their aerial brethren the UFOs do in the skies above our heads. Some of the more spectacular such accounts of USOs come from various ships at sea of all types, and here we will look at one of the more unusual and unexplained mysteries of the ocean depths.

A very early encounter with something strange in the water comes to us from way back in 1902, with a ship called the SS Fort Salisbury. In October of that year, the vessel was cruising off the rugged coast of West Africa through the Gulf of Guinea in calm seas when something very strange would occur at around 3:05 a.m. It was then that the crew was alerted by a lookout to a massive dark object a few hundred feet off their starboard side. When an officer by the name of Andrew Rayner came to look, he could see that whatever it was, it was truly huge, an estimated 500 to 600 feet in length. He would also note that “it had two lights, one at each end, a mechanism of some kind, or perhaps fins, and was making a commotion in the water.” He also noticed that it had a metallic surface. He would write of the object in his journal as follows:

This was about all he was able to see, because the enormous mechanical anomalous object then slowly sank into the black depths below. Considering that there would have been no submarines like that at the time, it is hard to tell just what this ship could have observed. It has been suggested it may have been a large sinking ship, but there was no report of such a lost vessel reported in the Lloyds Registry, and no record of a ship going missing, something that would have certainly shown up in the records for something so massive. The strange case remains unexplained.

Another odd report comes from 1947, off the coast of Malta. In June of that year, an unnamed fishing vessel was about 20 miles off the southern coast, engaged in the routine business of pulling in their nets. As the nets came up, one of the crew alerted the others to something strange bobbing about out on the water’s surface, which appeared to be what they described as a “black submarine” floating about in the waves. It was an unsettling enough sight that the crew finished hauling in their nets and went about starting up the engines to get out of there, and at that moment there was a bright flash of light from the anomalous black shape. This light was bright enough to illuminate the object and the surrounding vicinity, showing it to be smooth, black, and metallic, and there were also small figures now visible upon it, which seemed to be wearing some type of apparatus around their waists and were described as “little men.” As the frightened fishermen looked on, these diminutive figures, described as about the size of 10-year-old children, seemed to scramble into the craft, after which it began to glow so brightly that they could barely look directly at it. The object and is bizarre crew then quickly submerged and disappeared under the waves to not be seen again.

In 1963, we have the case of the Thrift, a collier from Aberdeen, Scotland, which on November 22 of that year was travelling through the area with a load of coal off the Girdle Ness peninsula, just south of the entrance to Aberdeen’s harbor, in Scotland. The crew noticed a flashing red light that seemed to be travelling around 20 feet over the waves in the near distance, going at a high rate of speed past their port side. As the astonished crew looked on at this curious sight, the light then did a sudden vertical ascent into the water with a splash, after which it could be seen to travel down through the water out of sight into the dim depths. Thinking that an aircraft had gone down and sunk, the Thrift sent a lifeboat and search crew to the spot where it had gone down, but no trace of debris could be found. What did this crew see out there? Who knows?

One very strange encounter between a vessel and a USO involved an actual alleged collision with the unidentified object. On February 3, 1965, the 70-ton trawler Star of Freedom was about 15 miles southeast of the island of Barra, in in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, traveling at about 9 knots at the time, when the entire vessel was rocked by a collision with something beneath the surface. It was obviously something very large, as the collision actually lifted the massive ship’s bow from the water and left a huge hole in the hull. A distress call was immediately made, and efforts to pump the water put into effect, but the vessel was eventually beached at Castlebay Harbor. It was a major collision, but the object that they hit remained hidden beneath he waves. At the time, the ship’s captain, a George Wood, thought they must have surely hit a submarine, but both the U.S. and British Navies denied having any subs in the area at the time. Considering this, and the fact that they were nowhere near land at the time, what could they have possibly hit that would so severely damage a 70-ton vessel and lift it out of the water? It remains unknown.

In more recent years we have a case from 1991, off the west coast of South America. The case, which was reported to the files of the site UFO Casebook, comes from a witness who claims that at the time he had been an operations and intelligence petty officer serving aboard the Knox-class destroyer escort the USS Kirk FF1087, and that they had been part of a drug interdiction force, which consisted of the USS Kirk and three other Naval vessels. Their primary mission was to patrol using a network of radar to track and then intercept drug-running aircraft flying out of Columbia, Panama and Guatemala, as well as to engage any smuggling ships they were able to find. The witness says that his primary duties took place within the CIC, or the Combat Information Center, which he and 22 other specialists manned 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with them rotating between two 11-man shifts.

USS Kirk FF1087

The witness claims that he was on CIC duty at 2 a.m. on the morning of December 16, and it was a quiet night with nothing going on. He says he took a break to go up to the ship’s bridge, and at the time the entire vessel was in a state called “darkened ship,” with all of the exterior lights turned off, as well as those on the bridge, meaning the area was only faintly illuminated by instrument panels. He began talking casually with the officer of the deck, and this is when things would suddenly get weird. He says:

All of a sudden and out of nowhere, like a huge flash from a camera, emanating from the starboard bow sea level upward was a huge flash of red glowing light, which lit up our entire ship. It only lit up our ship, not the surrounding ocean, just our ship. It happened so fast, that the OOD, the navigator and I were speechless for about 5 seconds, at which time I looked at the OOD and asked him if he just saw that light. He stated yes in a sullen voice. I then asked the navigator and he replied yes. I then took the navigator’s sound powered headset, and asked the forward and aft look outs, if they had just seen the same red flash, to which the forward look out stated, “YES! WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?” Aft lookout said yes as well. I then immediately contacted CIC, and asked the CIC officer if we had any aircraft or surface ships in our vicinity, to which he replied clear as a whistle. I asked if we had any submarine activity in the area, to which he replied, no.

What had just happened did not make any sense. The flash emanated from the sea, directly off of our starboard bow (like it was touching our bow), and ascended upwardly so rapidly, creating the effect of the bright red flash. The other weird aspect of this event was that only our ship was lit up within the red flash, not the surrounding sea, but our vessel only. Up until this event, I did not believe in UFOs or USOs. I have no doubt that our ship, steaming along at 12 knots, came right up on a submerged unidentifiable aircraft. I don’t think the aircraft or USO had any idea we were sailing up to them. I think whatever it was, took off in a very unplanned and fast manner, and wanted to quickly identify us, thus the flash.

In the end, after much consideration they decided not to wake the captain, merely logging it as an “unexplained phenomenon.” Indeed, all of these cases could be filed away as such, and there has never been any solid explanation for any of them. We are left to wonder just what these vessels might have encountered out there on the water and beneath it. What is going on in reports such as these and can we make any sense of it? Are there forces that are beyond our comprehension using the oceans or our world for some inscrutable purpose? There is no way to really know for sure, and in the meantime cases of USOs keep coming in. Perhaps in our quest for answers to the UFO phenomenon, in addition to watching the skies, we should also watch below the waves.

“What do you think is the strangest-looking cryptid creature?” That was pretty much the question put to me a few weeks ago while doing radio. It’s a good question! After all, there are multiple creatures in the field of Cryptozoology. I have to admit, though that some are much stranger than others. Let’s have a look at some of them. Their weirdness just might surprise you!  Sometimes a monster is described as being so incredibly strange that we can do very little beyond than relate the facts – chiefly because the available facts are so strange and near-unfathomable, in terms of what they might represent. A perfect example of just such a uniquely weird case dates back to the 1950s. In terms of the location, all we know for sure is that it was somewhere in the vicinity of Falls City, Richardson County, Nebraska. As for the witness, we know him only as “John Hanks,” an admitted pseudonym that the man in question chose to use to protect his real identity. When you read the details of his experience, you will undoubtedly realize why the man was determined to protect his real name from prying, inquiring eyes. It’s a case that was carefully investigated by one of the world’s foremost experts on bizarre, flying beasts, Ken Gerhard.

It was late one night, at some point in the latter part of 1956, said Hanks, when he came face to face with a true giant; a creature in excess of nine feet in height, one that was humanoid in shape, but which most certainly could never be termed a member of the human race. That much, at least, we can ascertain from Hanks’ description. Ken Gerhard says, with a great deal of justification, that “[Hanks’] description of the creature sounds reminiscent of something out of an H.P. Lovecraft story.” Ken is not wrong in suggesting that Hanks’ monster would have found itself right at home in the pages of one of the legendary horror maestro’s novels. In fact, Gerhard is right on target. Hanks’ nightmarish thing had a pair of fifteen-foot-wide wings that, rather oddly, appeared to be made of bright, shining, aluminum! It was soon gone, high into the sky, and gone. That case has to be near the top of the weird list!

Dragons on the Loose!

Now, onto another strange one: a fascinating story of nothing less than a real-life dragon can be found in the pages of Charles Igglesden’s 1906 book, A Saunter Through Kent With Pen & Pencil. Kent being a county in southern England. Of a dragon reportedly seen in Cranbrook, Kent, centuries earlier, Igglesden wrote: “The magnificently wooded park of a hundred and fifty acres is richly watered by a huge lake made in 1812 and a smaller one within the grounds, while further west is an old mill pond that rejoices in a curious legend. It is an old one and the subject of it is very ancient indeed and as rare as it is horrible.” He continued that nothing less than a flying dragon was said to haunt the pond but that “on certain – or uncertain – nights of the year it wings its flight over the park and pays a visit to the big lake yonder. But he always returns to the Mill Pond and it is said to pay special attention of a vicious kind to young men and women who have jilted their lovers. A legend with a moral is this. But a winged dragon! A dragon of the ordinary kind is bad enough. But a flying dragon! Augh!”

An undeniably odd beast with paranormal abilities is the Bunyip. It’s a “thing” that hides in the swamps of Australia. Back in the mid-1800s, the staff of the Geelong Advertiser gave its readers a description of the weird-whatsit: “The Bunyip, then, is represented as uniting the characteristics of a bird and of an alligator. It has a head resembling an emu, with a long bill, at the extremity of which is a transverse projection on each side, with serrated edges like the bone of the stingray. Its body and legs partake of the nature of the alligator. The hind legs are remarkably thick and strong, and the fore legs are much longer, but still of great strength. The extremities are furnished with long claws, but the blacks say its usual method of killing its prey is by hugging it to death. When in the water it swims like a frog, and when on shore it walks on its hind legs with its head erect, in which position it measures twelve or thirteen feet in height.”

Beware of the Bunyip

And, finally: make mention of UFOs and it will likely conjure up imagery of flying saucers and diminutive, black-eyed, large headed ETs, and alien abductions. At least some UFOs, however, may have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with visitors from far away solar-systems and galaxies. Welcome to the world of a man named Trevor James Constable. Having investigated the UFO phenomenon extensively, Constable penned two books on the subject. They Live in the Sky was published in 1958 and Sky Creatures followed two decades later. In deeply studying the UFO phenomenon, Constable came to a fascinating conclusion concerning what he believed to be the truth of the mystery surrounding flying saucers. Constable’s conclusion was that UFOs are not nuts-and-bolts craft from distant worlds, but living creatures that inhabit the highest levels of the Earth’s atmosphere. While many UFO investigators scoffed at Constable’s undeniably unique ideas, none could deny that his theory was well thought out. To be sure, the field of Cryptozoology is filled with bizarre and mysterious beasts!

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