At first glance, the 2006 court case carried out by the Santa Barbara County district attorney’s office in Santa Barbara, California, looks pretty mundane, for some boring even. It involved an action against the Greka Energy Corp., which is the county’s largest land-based oil and gas producer, for alleged health-and-safety violations at its refinery operations, as well as numerous environmental violations. While most of the counts in the lawsuit were eventually settled for $600,000, some stubbornly remained, and one of the key witnesses brought in was a former public safety officer with the company by the name of Gary Lowrey, who alleged that he had on numerous occasions pointed out safety violations that were ignored by his bosses. So far it just sounds like a dull, legal slog involving a big oil company and environmental concerns and safety protocols, more yawn inducing than anything else, but the eyebrows do pop up a bit when it gets to the part where Lowrey starts talking about horned aliens in his closet and visitations by alien forces terrorizing his family.

During the trial, Lowrey began to come out with some rather outlandish claims, to say the least. The claims were not made directly to the DA’s office, but were rather uncovered online, where it seems Lowrey was claiming that aliens had been regularly trespassing into his home and holding his family, his wife and kids, under siege. Lowrey claimed that bizarre horned, alien-like, vaguely insectoid entities were emerging from his closet at night to poke him and his family with needles as they slept, after which they would awaken with needle holes on their bodies,  often forming diamond-shaped patterns.  He himself stops short of labeling them as “aliens,” but is quick to point out that they are definitely not human. He would say of this to a Greka attorney, who was rather strangely none other than Bela G. Lugosi, son of the actor best known for playing Count Dracula:

They were bothering me. I don’t think I said they terrorized me. But I said they were bothering me. You can see his little eyes looking at you, and the horns and the eyebrow. I’m not sure that they’re — you know, that you’d call them aliens. I know they’re not human-looking. I don’t remember a lot of it because, you know, you’re asleep when it’s happening to you.

But don’t just take his word for it, as Lowrey would claim to have plenty of evidence to back his story up. In addition to recording footprints of the beasts with a sheet of aluminum foil that he had laid out, he also claimed to have found a claw from one of the creatures hanging from a towel in his closet, and even claimed to have captured video footage of them. This footage was seen by Deputy District Attorney Jerry Lulejian, who found it to be very compelling. After seeing the tapes, Lulejian would make a statement saying:

I’m going to argue in court that there is something going on in these videos that substantiates what Gary Lowrey is talking about. But I can’t tell you what that is. I can’t give away the juicy part. There are things that look really, really strange. It sort of put the hair on the back of my neck up when I saw them. He’s shown me he’s rational, he’s shown me that there are things going on outside of him, and he’s shown me proof that they’re there. Everything he’s said in his deposition so far checked to be true based on what he’s said in his – or what I’ve seen on the videos and what’s in the reports.

Images from the videos would eventually be released, but they are rather underwhelming, showing what may, kind of sort of look like a misshapen head if you squint your eyes. As to why the picture quality is so bad, one UFO researcher had this to add:

If these beings move between frames, detected on pause, on the camera as he says, they may have a sort of cloaking device, to fool our sense of vision, or their slightly out of phase with our 3-dimensions, as the camera can capture what the un-enhanced eye can’t, but not being seen as continuing motion on the videocam, that is strange. A high-speed infra-red cam plus a night vision cam, and a taser to disable the being, triggered by the cameras would sent about 50,000 volts into whatever, and maybe able to capture it, as it has mass, as exhibited by the indentation of the aluminum foil where fast-walker appeared, in the closet I think he said.

Lowrey also enlisted the help of notable UFO researcher, podiatrist, and expert on alien implants, Dr. Roger Leir, who also believed his story. Amazingly, none of this seemed to disqualify Lowrey as a credible witness in the case against Greka, despite the company seeking to use his stories of aliens as a reason to discredit him and have him booted as a reliable witness in the case. Greka attorney Lugosi would lament the court’s decision to allow Lowery to continue his involvement in the case, saying:

Don’t you find a witness who claims that he’s being visited by aliens at night and getting punctured at night rather a whacky thing to be claiming? Obviously, credibility is important. It’s not every day you have a code enforcement matter which involves aliens in the closet, mysterious claws and a podiatrist who removes alien implants. Here’s their most important witness, and the D.A. is buying into it, saying that none of this affects his credibility. We’re very surprised. Yes, there are people who believe in aliens, but we’re talking about the Santa Barbara district attorney’s office here!

As all of this was going on, Lowrey was becoming a sort of minor celebrity in the UFO field, appearing on the paranormal radio program Coast to Coast AM with host Mike Seigel, but then he began to go silent on his story, according to some because he was being told not to speak of these things, sparking tales of conspiracies going beyond even the court case. Peter A. Gersten, Executive Director of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy, would say of it all:

Several weeks before the Bay Area Expo in August, Gary Lowrey, a Bakersfield Fire Safety Officer, contacted me after numerous failed attempts to get the attention of other well-known organizations and persons in the UFO field. After listening to his story about his ongoing encounters with strange insectoid-type creatures in his home, and based upon his possession of certain physical evidence, I agreed to represent him both as an attorney and also in a joint venture to get the truth out. Though Lowrey was forthcoming in stating that he wants to help his family financially with the information and evidence he possesses, he assured me that his primary motivation is to share his ongoing encounters with the world and hopefully learn some answers as to what he and his family are experiencing. My part of our agreement included my successful efforts to get him national attention through my organization CAUS, my workshop at the Bay Area UFO Expo, and my frequent appearances on Mike Siegel’s Coast to Coast Radio show as well as other projects and forums that were being planned.

After speaking with Lowrey over the course of several weeks, I came to believe that the Bakersfield California family represents one of the best cases of contact because of the confirmatory physical evidence, the believability of the witnesses and the continuous nature of the experiences. Unfortunately because of the greed and selfishness of several people, Lowrey is temporarily silenced and his credibility forever compromised. Last Saturday, give or take a day, Gary Lowrey, after being told by a self-styled “Hollywood producer” that there was no need for him to consult me or any other attorney, signed a contract for the exclusive print and movie rights to his story. According to Lowrey, the contract prohibits him from talking to anyone about his past and present experiences. The producer even deceptively composed an e-mail for Lowrey to send to me in which he states that he can no longer appear on Mike Siegel’s Coast to Coast radio show and if I have any questions I should consult his attorney, Mark Commerford, who I later determine is actually the producer’s attorney and not Lowrey’s. Sadly, though Lowrey appeared with me on the radio show this past Monday night, he refused to talk about his experiences, which he had originally agreed to share before the producer’s gag order. 

What makes the Lowrey debacle even more unpalatable is the fact that the perpetrators of this travesty are members of the UFO community. In fact the producer is none other than Christopher Wyatt, founder, President and CEO of UFO Community.com, a company, which, as evidenced by Wyatt’s callous disregard for both the public’s right to know and the significance of Lowrey’s interaction with other life forms, is quite inappropriately named. Why Wyatt, after signing Lowrey to an exclusive contract, would want to silence him on the eve of his national coming-out-party thereby avoiding a Coast to Coast listening audience of millions and the free promotion inherent in such exposure, is very strange and suspicious. Christopher Wyatt has used the tools of deception, misrepresentation, and coercion to silence an individual who is presently interacting with a non-human form of intelligence. On Siegel’s show, Lowrey stated he was “coerced” by Wyatt into signing the contract. Wyatt has now convinced Lowrey that he has no choice but to honor their contract and that Wyatt will sue him if he shows the contract to me. I am not surprised that there are those within the UFO community who are more interested in money than in our right to know the truth. But to compromise something we all have been waiting years for, the opportunity to record and verify evidence of ongoing contact, is unconscionable and requires exposing the true nature of the beast.

Indeed, during the coming court appearances, Lowrey would freeze up and refuse to mention the aliens again, allowing the whole thing to resolve in mundane fashion. Was he silenced, and if so, by who exactly? What in the world was going on here? What are we to make of all of this? A big court case, a lawyer who is the son of the actor who played Dracula, and aliens? I seems as if it could not possibly get more absurd, and yet this all did happen and is there on the record. It is all a very bizarre case, and certainly adds some spice to the otherwise dry and humdrum business of a court case.

Among the most fascinating kinds of phenomena in the tool kit of various organisms is the unique quality of bioluminescence. From fireflies to deep ocean fish at sea, a wide range of different manifestations of natural luminescence in nature exist, which species use for everything from attracting mates, to luring in prey.

One of the most fascinating places where bioluminescent phenomena occur is in ocean environments, where a variety of different organisms deploy luminous capabilities in unique ways. At times, significant portions of ocean water may take on a glowing appearance, due to the presence of tiny luminescent organisms which produce luciferin, a compound that produces light once it becomes oxidized.

However, there are also a few instances involving peculiar phenomena that have accompanied the presence of bioluminescent phenomena at sea. Specifically, this involves the curious echoes on ship’s radars in the presence of light produced by these organisms.

A pair of notable incidents that appear to convey this phenomenon occurred beginning in March 1977. The sailing ship m.v. Ebani had been traversing the North Atlantic on this date when it began to encounter a number of false radar echoes which reoccurred throughout the day. These radar returns appeared to the crew like groups of fishing boats approximately five miles distance, which would have seemed to be a plausible explanation if not for the fact that the returns would disappear once the Ebani attempted to close its distance on the spurious targets.

At approximately 8 PM on the date in question, the crew observed the targets on radar at a distance of approximately 5.5 miles when, rather than vanishing, they appeared to move around the perimeter of the ship at this distance, encircling the Ebani within a large, 10-mile circle. Coinciding with the movement of the targets observed on radar, the crew had been able to observe a change in the appearance of the ocean water, which began to look milky and had been accompanied by a fishy odor.

At this point, the crew directed their Aldis lamp toward a region of the ocean ahead of them, which revealed the presence of luminescent organisms in the sea. The strange circle of bioluminescent organisms remained for close to 45 minutes, during which time the curious radar echoes also continued.

The following year on June 20, another sailing vessel, the Gambada, was en route between Santos and Buenos Aires when it also began to detect unusual radar echoes. Initially, the crew in this instance believed they were detecting a storm moving toward the vessel, although it appeared to be approaching against the prevailing wind. The crew noticed that the radar echo looked unlike a typical weather formation, and soon it became evident that once the ship was passing through the region producing the radar echo, there was no rain to be seen. What was plainly evident, however, was an illuminated region of the ocean surrounding the Gambada, illuminating the seawater in the same area that appeared to coincide with the peculiar false radar return.

Although there is little mystery behind the oceanic bioluminescence itself, the occurrence of odd radar returns associated with the presence of these organisms is something that is far less often reported. Explanations for it seem to be equally elusive, and it remains a curiosity as far as the many appearances of luminous phenomena at sea are concerned.

When it comes to proposing “what if” questions about UFOs and aliens, there is perhaps no bigger player on the scientific side than Harvard University astronomer Abrahma ‘Avi’ Loeb. Loeb was made famous to the general public with his proposals early on that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua was actually some for of extraterrestrial spacecraft that could have been crewed by living or robotic pilots. He’s back in the news this week with a new “what if” about ‘Oumuamua that fits right in with the upcoming Pentagon report on UAPs and the public’s wondering if any of them will be revealed as alien crafts. Loeb, as usual, has a different angle.

“A predecessor to ‘Oumuamua could have been a craft that deposited small probes into the Earth’s atmosphere without being noticed, because it visited before Pan-STARRS started its operations. Along this imaginative line of reasoning, ‘Oumuamua could have arranged to appear as coming from the neutral local standard of rest, which serves as the local “galactic parking lot,” so that its origin would remain unknown.”

In an op-ed in Scientific American, Loeb drops the idea that ‘Oumuamua may have been a spacecraft retrieving data from a previous visitor that dropped probes to Earth – one that stopped by before we had technology like Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) telescope used to discover it. before you scoff, he justifies this theory with a proposal in the style of the Fermi paradox (If there a billions of stars in the galaxy and a high percentage that could support life, where are all the aliens?) observation about interstellar objects:

“In fact, there should be a quadrillion ‘Oumuamua-like objects within the solar system at any given time, if they are distributed on random trajectories with equal probability of moving in all directions.”

If there are that many interstellar objects, where are they? Loeb says the answer might be that “‘Oumuamua was an artificial object on a targeted mission towards the sun, aimed to collect data from the habitable region near Earth.” If that was the case, then “tumbling motion of ‘Oumuamua could potentially have been meant to scan signals from all viewing directions.” Furthermore, “‘Oumuamua could have arranged to appear as coming from the neutral local standard of rest, which serves as the local “galactic parking lot,” so that its origin would remain unknown.”

While “Galactic Parking Lot” would make a great name for a prog rock album, Loeb’s theory sounds plausible. However, he states that he’s not trying to prove ‘Oumuamua is an alien ship retrieving probes – he just wants the scientific community to devote more time, and be more openminded, to collecting and analyzing data on UAPs. To wit, he issued a second Scientific American op-ed this week addressing this.

“A fresh scientific study that offers reproducible evidence for UFO sightings and resolves their nature would demonstrate the power of science in answering a question that is clearly of great interest to the public. Finding a conclusive answer on the basis of open data will enhance the public’s confidence in evidence-based knowledge.”

Not only should we “learn something new and exciting from studying them scientifically,” we could also determine “the meaning behind its existence—the intent of those who manufactured it.” And, if even one is extraterrestrial, we’ll finally know if they’re malevolent or benevolent.

Who can argue with that? Thanks, Avi! (And thanks for the cool album name.)

While many people believe crop circles are made by aliens hovering over fields in UFOs, a major complaint of crop circle skeptics is the lack of photos showing aliens, UFOs or any unusual activity during the construction of the mysterious circles. Is it because they’re all made by talented humans with ropes, boards and sometimes the clandestine permission of the farmers themselves? A man in Buckinghamshire, England, doesn’t think so after seeing a huge white dome of light over a neighbor’s field at 1 am – a field which had an unusual crop circle in it the next day. He’s not saying it’s aliens, but …

“It’s the sight of a very strange happening this morning at 1-00 am I was woken up by a very bright light shining on my ceiling? We have had a few shed break ins so I got out of bed and looked out the window to see if anyone or thing had set off a security light ! But there was no noise or anything obvious on my or my neighbours to the back or left hand side , but on the right in the field next to my other neighbours was a giant white dome, 25-30 feet high pure bright white no other marking looked like a giant tube light?”

On his Facebook page, Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire, resident Martin Hoult described what he saw recently over a farmer’s field behind his house – a bright dome of light that defied any conventional explanation. He says the farm “is quite away off” so he didn’t think he was seeing security lights. After getting “a drink of water and a pee,” he returned to his bedroom, turned off the light and noticed “the light from outside had gone.” The next morning he happened to meet the farmer and described what he had seen.

no it’s a farmer’s field behind my place ? It’s the sight of a very strange happening this morning at 1-00 am I was woken up by a very bright light shining on my ceiling? W have had a few shed break ins so I got out of bed and looked out the window to see if anyone or thing had set off a security light ! But there was no noise or anything obvious on my or my neighbours to the back or left hand side , but on the right in the field next to my other neighbours was a giant white dome , 25-30 feet high pure bright white no other marking looked like a giant tube light? Thought it might be a tractor with a giant halo light but it was raining and no noise at all ? Thought the farm which is quite away off may have had new security lights ? Looked around for a few minutes went for a drink of water and a pee shut my windows went to bed turned of my light the light from outside had gone ? Next day went to the polls came back bumped into my neighbour mentioned the above went to the field about twenty yards saw these crops pressed down with all the bigger plants still standing up massive crop circle where giant light had been ?? About 60 feet across and maybe 100-150 feet long giant rugby ball ish shape ??

 That’s when the neighbor gave Hoult a shock:

“(We) went to the field about twenty yards saw these crops pressed down with all the bigger plants still standing up massive crop circle where giant light had been ?? About 60 feet across and maybe 100-150 feet long giant rugby ball ish shape ??”

In the field where the dome of light had been was a crop circle – more of a crop oval actually. That’s pretty unusual for crop circles – they’re always round like their name. Add that to the bright dome of light and Martin Hoult may have seen the making of a non-human, ET-in-a-UFO crop circle creation. That’s obviously what he was thinking when interviewed by the Bucks Free Press.

“It’s very strange. I can’t say it was a UFO because it wasn’t flying but it was definitely an unidentified object or light.”

But wait … there’s more.

“All the grass is flat but the weeds are standing upright. And the tops of all the trees further down on Mumford’s Lane are burnt.”

A crop circle that’s oval. A crop circle whose crop is smashed down but the weeds are still standing. A crop circle underneath a bright dome of light. A crop circle whose maker may have burned the tops of nearby trees during its creation.

You never see weeds in a crop circle

Does this sound like a UFO-made crop circle?

Unfortunately, while Hoult took photos of the crop circle (see them here), they’re from the ground, not the air, and he didn’t snap any of the bright domed light. Taken in their entirety, these events are challenging to explain by conventional circumstances. We’re forced to wait for it to happen again.

Remember, when you get up to pee, take your phone!

A video which appeared on YouTube appears to show a flashing green light in a field in Salinas Valley, California, where crop circles where later discovered.

It’s no secret that I don’t believe aliens crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947. I’ve written two books on why, in my mind, we should be looking for answers that take us beyond tales of aliens and dead extraterrestrials. They are 2005’s Body Snatchers in the Desert and 2017’s The Roswell UFO Conspiracy. For many of those who believe aliens did come down on the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, they hang onto certain aspects of the Roswell story – aspects that seem to vindicate the tales of aliens. Today, though, I’m going to explain how and why some of the cornerstones of Roswell are actually nothing of the sort. I’ll begin with the yarn of Glenn Dennis and those “little coffins” in which the alien bodies were supposedly stored. At the time when everything went weird at Roswell in ’47, Dennis was an embalmer (not a mortician, as so many have incorrectly described him – including Dennis himself, no less) at the local Ballard Funeral Home. He signed a sworn affidavit confirming something sensational – namely, that a nursing friend at the base had quietly admitted to him that a preliminary autopsy of a number of strange bodies had been conducted at the base hospital at the Roswell Army Air Field. One of the most memorable parts of Dennis’ tale is the claim that in the immediate aftermath of the crash, he was contacted by someone at the base. It was someone who wanted to know to if he – Dennis – had any small coffins. And, that’s what I want to address today.

I have always thought that Dennis’ story of the small coffins was planted – by the man himself – as a piece of dramatic story-telling and the pinnacle of his claims. If bodies were taken to the base – and I believe they were, but they weren’t alien – having a military man bringing up the need for tiny coffins, and sharing the story with Dennis, makes no sense at all – and particularly so from the perspective of security. Maybe even of national security proportions. It only inflates the controversy even more. And, certainly, no-one on the base wanted that. The military would not have wanted to seed the story of small bodies in the mind of a local embalmer: who was a member of the public. Why would the military specifically ask Dennis for small coffins, when normal-sized would have done the job just as well? The answer is simple: they wouldn’t have done that. They would have operated in a very low-key fashion.Clearly, the tale of the “tiny coffins” is garbage and, for those who still hang onto the story, it’s time to walk away from it. Forever.

Now, there’s the saga of “the victims of the wreck.” One of the most intriguing pieces of Roswell-based documentation is that which has become known as the “Ramey Memo.” It is a single piece of paper and can be seen in a black-and-white photograph taken of Brigadier General Roger Ramey. In 1947, he was the head of the 8^th Army Air Force, which operated out of Fort Worth, Texas. Ramey is a key part of the story, as he is holding the memo in question in his left hand; a memo which says something about Roswell. But, what? That’s the issue UFO researchers are unable to agree upon. A number of attempts have been made to decipher the memo. The first real attempt of any major significance was undertaken on behalf of the U.S. Air Force. In their massive 1994 report on the Roswell affair, the USAF stated that it sent the photo-collection to what was only referred to as a “national-level organization for digitizing and subsequent photo interpretation and analysis.” The results, however, were disappointing, as that same unnamed organization informed the Air Force, on July 20, 1994, that even after careful digitizing, “the photos were of insufficient quality to visualize either of the details sought for analysis.”

The crash site

(Nick Redfern)

There is very little doubt that the memo includes the words “in the ‘disc’ they will ship.” Far more controversially, David Rudiak concludes from his analysis that the words “operation at the ranch” and “the victims of the wreck” can also be seen. Roswell investigator Kevin Randle noted in 2015: “While ‘Victims of the wreck’ might not take us immediately to the extraterrestrial, it would certainly start us on the path.” I’m particularly intrigued by that word, “victims.” Let’s take a look at the definitions for “victim” that Merriam-Webster provides. They include: “one that is acted on and usually adversely affected by a force or agent;” “one that is injured, destroyed, or sacrificed under any of various conditions;” “one that is subjected to oppression, hardship, or mistreatment;” and “one that is tricked or duped” If the “human experiment” angle for Roswell is the correct one – as I believe it to be – then the terminology used by Merriam-Webster to define a “victim” is most apt. After all, there is no doubt that those used in the 1940s-era experiments were “adversely affected by a force or agent.” Few would deny they were “injured, destroyed, or sacrificed.”” And they were certainly ““subjected to oppression, hardship, or mistreatment.” Still on the matter of that controversial sentence in the Ramey Memo, there is the issue of the word “wreck.” It seems very strange that such a word would have been used to describe what the military was assuring the media was just a flimsy weather-balloon.

Now, we come to another aspect of Roswell that many ufologists claim proves that aliens crashed, but that, as you’ll see, doesn’t stand up at all. When, in the 1990s, the Government Accountability Office (previously known as the General Accounting Office) was investigating Roswell, they found that a huge amount of documentation from the base was missing. Proof that aliens did crash? Nope. You have to look at the story carefully. If UFO/Roswell researchers wish to maintain that the missing files from 1947 point to a specific cover-up of the Roswell event – and Roswell occurred out of the blue in July of that year – then they have to provide a viable reason as to why documentation dating back as far as March 1945 was pulled too, and why additional documentation remains missing from as late as 1950. Saying that “the outgoing Roswell messages from July 1947 are missing” is absolutely true, and it opens eyes and it catches the attention of ufologists and Roswell disciples everywhere. Noting that, in reality, the files actually cover 1945 to 1950, and also cover general administrative issues at the base, is far less attention-grabbing.

Ironically, the fact that the files which have vanished (files which still cannot be found) span 1945 to 1950, actually adds weight to the idea that Roswell was a military experiment. Just about everyone I spoke with while writing Body Snatchers in the Desert told me that the human experimentation began in 1945 and ended in the late 1940s – with a few additional tests having occurred in the early fifties. Pulling 1945-era files for a one-off event that didn’t occur until the summer of 1947 makes zero sense. Pulling certain 1945-era files that might have compromised the handful of pre-Roswell experiments – had they reached the public domain, of course – makes perfect sense. The same goes for the decision to make the 1948-1950 files vanish, too. The fact is that six years of files are missing, not just files from the time of the Roswell crash. This is indicative of a fairly lengthy series of ongoing tests that had to be hidden – not the out-of-the-blue crash of one solitary alien spacecraft midway through 1947.

It should also be recalled that President Clinton’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments revealed that “…a number of potentially important collections could not be located and were evidently lost or destroyed [italics mine]. Similarly, the Committee reveals, a number of those same document collections related to experiments undertaken in the fields of biomedicine, defense and space exploration; and in the great majority of these cases only fragmentary data remained. Where programs were legitimately kept secret for national security reasons, states the Committee, the government often did not create or maintain adequate records [italics mine], thereby preventing the public, and those most at risk, from learning the facts in a timely and complete fashion.”  All of this is highly suggestive of an agenda to make Roswell go away – permanently. And to bury the extremely controversial “human experiment” angle of the incident.

The go-to explanation for giant iceballs from space that are too large to be hail and too non-blue and non-stinky to be waste dumped from airplane toilets is ‘megacryometeor’ – a rare frozen space ball whose cause researchers can’t seem to agree on and whose dangerous propensity to crash into homes the government doesn’t seem to be worried about protecting us from. Do we need a Pentagon investigation or should we hold a telethon? Either one might help a family in Elk Mound, Wisconsin, who is the latest victim of this insidious space invader.

“It grazed me. I would’ve probably been out, kicked the bucket [if it landed on me]. As soon as that came through, everything else was like dust of insulation. I couldn’t see.”

What next?

Ken Millermon of Elk Mound, a small village in western Wisconsin near Eau Claire, sounds happy to be alive after his bedroom was the target of a 12-pound ice ball on May 25, 2021. Millermon called his insurance agent since it looked like a lot of damage (see photos here) and they’re generally more responsive than the government. Then he called the local news media, which spread the photos around and tried to find an answer.

“While some people suggest megacryometeors really just come from airplanes. Some people say well it’s the head or the bathroom of the airplane, or maybe it’s coming out of the wheel well. That explanation doesn’t hold up if we have samples back in the 1700s.”

Well, that eliminates a plane poopsicle, according to Dr. James Boulter, a chemistry and biochemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claie (UWEC). Boulter also agrees with meteorologists who say it’s far too big to be a hailstone, along with the fact that the storm in the area that night wasn’t powerful enough to create hail. For the “I’m not saying it’s aliens, but …” crowd, Boulter has tests he runs on giant ice balls (a potential band name?) and eliminated the possibility of this one coming from outer space. However, it could still be a type of meteor.

“We think, it’s likely to be a megacryometeor. These have been observed around the world to a tune of maybe a dozen or so a year.”

Being a good professor, Boulter turned this mysterious ice ball into a learning experience for his students. While they know about the troposphere, the part of the atmosphere hugging the ground where we humans live, and the stratosphere, the next layer which is extremely stable and has no turbulence, few are aware of the thin layer in-between them known as the tropopause. Hovering somewhere between 5.6 and 11 miles up (it’s thicker over the equator), it’s the point where air no longer cools with height, instead becoming completely dry. While generally stable, Boulter says that certain unknown activities in the jet stream can create a fold in the tropopause, causing the stratosphere to mix with the troposphere, creating weird conditions that could cause ice crystals to form fast enough to accumulate into giant ice ball ‘megacryometeors’ before falling to the earth and into bedrooms.

Megacryometeor wannabes?

“The conditions to create something of this magnitude up there have to be pretty interesting, with a dozen or so of these things a year of just the ones that have been reported. Imagine all the ones that fall over oceans or forests; there’s probably a lot more of these than we actually know about.”

As Ken Millerman might say – ‘Who cares … what about our roofs?’ A study of megacryometeors sounds like the perfect subject for a PhD dissertation or a grant … or a project for certain billionaires to research as they send their private crafts to the edge of space and back.

That whooshing sound you hear is lawyers for airlines breathing a sigh of relief.

(Special thanks to BT!)

Located out in a small valley in the central part of Norway, in the municipality of Holtålen in Trøndelag county, is the scenic valley of Hessdalen. Surrounded by scenic mountains, it is an isolated, sparsely populated area, the largest settlement being the tiny village of the same name, which has a population of just 150 people. Not much typically goes on here, and the people live a quiet, peaceful life among the picturesque scenery away from the bustle of city life, but beginning in 1981 their serene lives would be interrupted by a spate of sightings of mysterious lights in the sky that have remained unexplained.

Hessdalen Valley

Although strange lights had been sporadically seen in the valley since the 1940s, the activity of the phenomenon now known as the Hessdalen lights really picked up and became known in 1981, when villagers in the valley were startled by a myriad of mysterious orbs of light in the sky that would regularly appear at various places throughout the valley both night and day. These lights could be anywhere from the size of a basketball to the size of a car, sometimes even much larger, and had a wide variety of characteristics and behaviors. They would usually be bright white, yellow or red, and depending on the report usually appearing below the horizon but sometimes above the mountains. They would alternately zip away at high speeds to vanish, slowly float about, hover in midair, speed up or slow down, away from side to side, or do aerial acrobatics. They would sometimes merely appear and disappear in a flash, while others were observed floating and zipping about for up to 2 hours, with larger orbs frequently seen to spew out smaller orbs. On occasion, the orbs were said to hover over water or approach or shy away from observers when approached, demonstrating what seemed to be intelligent control, and in some daytime sightings the objects were described as looking metallic. Whatever they were, they were sighted very frequently, in their peak being seen 15 to 20 times a week, frightening locals in the process. One article in the online science journal Frontiers in Earth Science has described the lights in detail:

In spite of their irregular occurrence—i.e., 15 to 20 times per week from 1981 to 1984 and 10 to 20 times per year nowadays— the Hessdalen lights (HL) have been consistently observed and possess a series of recurring features: (1) they have the appearance of a free-floating light ball with dimensions ranging from decimeters up to 30 m. (2) they are characterized by geometric structures that are often accompanied by small, short-duration pulsating “spikes” in the high frequency and very low frequency radio ranges, (3) they show an absolute luminosity that has been estimated to be 19 kW, and (4) they have a time duration ranging from seconds to hours. HL are also characterized by the formation of light ball clusters and the ejection of mini light balls. They may also show very high velocities. Furthermore, HL are thunderstorm-independent events, as opposed to other rare and poorly understood transient luminous phenomena occurring in the atmosphere (i.e., ball lightings, blue jets, red sprites and terrestrial gamma-ray flashes).

The Hessdalen lights quickly became big news, drawing in droves of all manner of curiosity seekers and UFO researchers, as well as mainstream scientists eager to get to the bottom of the mystery. In the summer of 1983, an ongoing scientific field investigation was launched to study the lights, and by the conclusion of their 1-year investigation there were 53 light observations made. More scientific investigations have been carried out as well, including one in 1985, and another from 1997–1998 which managed to capture footage of the lights in a bizarre pyramid shape that bounced up and down. In 1998, an automated station was installed in the valley, called the Hessdalen Automatic Measurement Station (Hessdalen AMS) to monitor the lights year round, collecting reams of photos of the lights, as well as various readings on scientific equipment, and there have been various peer reviewed papers on the lights published in scientific journals. Indeed, the Hessdalen lights constitute one of the most well researched mysterious phenomenon there is. However, despite all of this study, no one can quite figure out what they actually are.

The number of theories as to what the lights might be is vast. One idea is that some sort of combustion is occurring involving hydrogen, oxygen and sodium, helped along by large deposits of scandium in the area. Another is that they are caused by piezoelectricity, which is an electrical charge that accumulates in certain materials including certain kinds of rock such as quartz, crystals, certain ceramics, and even some biological materials like bone. Considering that the valley has large deposits of crystal rocks, it is speculated that these may build up a charge that is released to form these balls of light. Other theories include plasma balls, ball lightning, meteorites, mirages, igniting gases, and even the idea that the valley itself acts as a sort of battery that generates a current, as well as many other numerous hypotheses and speculations. However, no single explanation can really account for all of the different characteristics reported with the lights. Of course, the lights have been claimed to be ghosts and alien UFOs as well, and UFO researchers have long held keen interest in this place. Yet, as much as this lonely valley has been studied, the secrets of its strange lights have remained evasive, and we still have no idea what they are, keeping them in the realm of mystery and speculation.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

Every May and October, a curious phenomenon occurs along a 160-mile-long stretch of the Mekong River in the Isaan region in northeast Thailand. For a few nights during these two months, one can see the eerie sight of numerous glowing balls that seem to erupt from the very river itself to fly high into the air and vanish. Descriptions for these luminous orbs vary, ranging from the size of tiny bubbles or sparklers to larger ones said to be around the size of a basketball, usually a reddish color, but sometimes a bluish or yellowish hue and sometimes white. These balls typically will launch themselves upwards several hundred meters into the air before suddenly blinking out of existence, never making a sound and emanating no smoke or plume. They will continue for a time before stopping just as suddenly as they appeared, and there can be tens to thousands of these lights seen throughout a given night, rain or shine, with the most intense activity occurring during the night of Wan Ok Phansa at the end of Buddhist Lent in late-October and the most lights seen in the vicinity of a small village called Phon Phisai. Formerly called simply the “ghost lights,” they are now officially called bung fai phaya nak, and more commonly referred to by outsiders as the “Naga fireballs,” and no one is quite sure just what they are.

According to local tradition, the Naga fireballs have their origins in a type of giant river serpent prevalent in Buddhist folklore, called a Naga, in this case specifically a Naga called the Phaya Nak, or “the king of nagas.” These are said to be enormous semi-divine serpents and servants of Buddha with supernatural powers that lurk within the Mekong river or its estuaries, and are not only responsible for strange wave formations and other phenomena, but also are known from time to time shoot blazing fireballs into the air. Far from merely myth and folklore, a great many people in the rural areas of Thailand sincerely believe the Phaya Nak exist. There have been numerous sightings of them, and there are even supposed bones, teeth, and the egg of a Naga kept at a temple in Phon Phisai, and so it therefore goes without saying that for the locals the fireballs are coming from these beasts, as a display of celebration for the end of Buddhist Lent. However, of course there are plenty of other theories from scientists skeptical that the fireballs are coming from magical giant river serpents.

One theory that has been thrown around is that it is merely people firing tracer rounds, flares, or even just fireworks, the sound deadened by the distance and the often very noisy crowds of people who pour into the region to see the lights every year. Indeed, the annual 4-day Phayanak Festival in October attracts tens of thousands of people, who come to see the lights and enjoy the many festivities and events, including food stalls, Naga legend information, fireball exhibitions, a night bazaar, light and sound shows, and long-boat races prior to the main event of the fireballs themselves. With all of this activity it would seem that many of the lights might just be a show put on to draw in visitors, as the festival brings in huge amounts of revenue for the tiny rural local economy. However, while some of the Naga fireballs might be this, it does not explain the fireballs that originally began the festival, why they seem to come directly out of the water, or why they will often pop out in various different areas along the river. There are also frequent Thai boat patrols through the area to deter people from doing dangerous things like firing into the air. There is also the fact that the fireballs have been seen at other times of the year, and are only really paid attention to at the end of Buddhist Lent. They are also frequently reported as coming from smaller tributaries of the Mekong and even ponds in other areas, as well as some claims that these things have been seen for centuries. One reporter Andrew Biggs has said of the hoax angle in an article in the Bangkok Post:

First of all, the lights have been around a long time. Fishermen have reported seeing what locals still call “ghost lights” in the darkness of the Mekong River way before local governments attached the myth of Phayanak to them. Also, these lights apparently don’t just appear on the end of Buddhist Lent. It’s just that we pay attention to them on that night, which isn’t the same as saying they only pop up once a year. The biggest quandary of all is that we are living in the era of digital record. Everything is filmed, photographed and uploaded onto Instagram. People photograph their morning coffee, for god’s sake — what happens when it’s an event like weird coloured balls in the river? And yet despite all this, nobody has captured any hoax perpetrators.

It is also the scale of the operation. Just say I wanted to play a prank on Northeast believers and shoot a couple of coloured lights off the Mekong River. Who knows the specifics of the operation, but let’s say I do indeed do that. Last Sunday night, starting at 6.28pm, the first fireballs were spotted by those 300,000 visitors camped along the banks of the river at Ban Tha Muang, Rattanawapee district. Then, another one was spotted in a different district. And another. And another. All in all, a total of seventy fireballs shot up throughout the night, and that was in Rattanawapee alone. There were more in the districts of Sangkhom and Pone-pisai. By the end of the night, there were more than 300 fireballs. That’s a really big, expensive hoax!

For these reasons, it seems that surely not all of them could be caused by hoaxes or partiers, so what else could they be? Another possibility put forward is that the fireballs are caused by plasma orbs formed by the release of surface electricity, or even the old standby for UFO sightings called swamp gas. This is basically methane gas produced by the decomposition of organic material igniting when exposed to oxygen, and it has been used by skeptics to explain away a variety of ghost light and UFO phenomena, but this would not explain why it only happens most prominently at specific times of the year like clockwork, and it has also been called out as an unsuitable explanation for this phenomenon in other ways. Skeptic Brian Dunning has given a thorough and amusing skeptical debunking of the typical skeptical argument of swamp gas causing the Naga fireballs, saying:

There are two fatal flaws with this hypothesis. First, methane can only burn in an oxygen environment within a specific range of concentrations. It can only spontaneously ignite within an even narrower range, and requires the presence of phosphine combined with phosphorous tetrahydride. The needed proportions of these gases are unlikely to be found in nature. Second, in laboratory experiments designed to replicate the conditions needed for spontaneous ignition, the combination of oxygen, methane, and phosphorus compounds burns bright bluish-green with a sudden pop, producing black smoke. Under no conditions does it burn slowly, or red, or rise up in the air as a fireball. So even if the improbable conditions did exist in the Mekong river, the resulting display would not look like the Naga Fireballs.

Whatever is shooting up into the air, you’ve got to figure that it has some solid mass. When you watch the videos you can see that the red-orange lights go up very fast, consistent with fireworks, small rockets, or even tracer rounds (very much like a 12-gauge shotgun tracer round, which is comparatively slow). How is it possible for any flaming object to move that quickly through the air without blowing out? That’s not a problem for something like a firework or a tracer round, things designed for exactly such a purpose. But it’s a major problem for a burning ball of gas, which has an insufficient mass to drag ratio to move that quickly through the air. Even a pyrotechnic explosion that billows into the sky rises at a slow rate consistent with hot air rising through cold air; it does not and cannot streak like a bullet at hundreds of feet per second. For the Naga Fireballs to move as they do, they must enclose an object significantly more massive than the air they’re moving through. This necessarily means they’re heavier than air. And since they’re rocketing skyward, this means they must have been physically propelled.

So, from what we can observe, it’s actually more plausible that a river dragon is spitting flaming balls of dragon-mucus skyward, than it is for the Naga Fireballs to be naturally produced burning gas bubbles.

The Naga Fireballs have as of yet remained unidentified. What are we looking at here? Is this some rational, explainable phenomenon? Is it gases, atmospheric phenomena, or merely fireworks and people firing tracers into the air? Or is it perhaps something else altogether? The festival at the river still goes on every year, and if you talk to any local they will say it is the doing of the mysterious Naga, with perhaps even some spite thrown your way if you should say otherwise. Whatever the explanation may be, the Naga fireballs continue on, and have evaded understanding to this day.

RELATED VIDEPS, selected and posted by peter2011

There have been plenty of strange flaps of mysterious lights and luminous phenomena in the skies of our world. Such spates of sightings often come in a wave, only to just fade away leaving no explanations and plenty of awe and debate. One such case happened in Northern Europe in the region of Scandinavia back in 1946. During this one year period there would be thousands of sightings of something very odd going on up in the sky, which have never really been explained and have come to be known as the Ghost Rockets.

Beginning in 1946, mysterious objects in the sky began to appear frequently over a variety of Scandinavian countries, in particular Sweden and Finland. These objects were typically described as tubular or cigar or spindle-shaped objects, sometimes with visible wings and sometimes without, that typically streaked fast across the sky but also displayed all manner of erratic behavior. These objects were reported as speeding up or slowing down, doing aerial maneuvers, and even flying in formation, typically leaving no exhaust trail and almost always described as being completely silent, although a few reports described a hissing or rumbling sound. They were seen at all hours of the day and night, and were so bright they could even be seen in broad daylight. The first real recorded sighting of what would go on to be called “Ghost Rockets” was made in Finland on February 26, 1946, but soon the entire region would experience a surge of sightings of these things in the sky, with around 2,000 sightings reports made between May and December of that year alone, often with radar signatures to back them up.

Alleged photo of one of the lights

At times, there were even reported crashes of Ghost Rockets, usually with the rockets coming down into large bodies of water such as lakes or the sea. There were quite a few such crashes that allegedly happened, and on more than one occasion Swedish authorities moved in to investigate, even sending divers in to look for evidence of any mysterious objects on the bottom. One of the most well-known of these investigations was carried out at Sweden’s Lake Kölmjärv, where on July 19, 1946 a gray, rocket-shaped object with wings reportedly came down after an earsplitting boom, to go skidding over the surface and sink. The Swedish Air Force quickly moved in and spent around 3 weeks scouring the bottom of the lake, but they would officially find nothing but a large patch of lake bottom that had been disturbed and looked like something very big had impacted there. No fragments or reason why this crater was there could be found, and one Swedish Air Force officer would state:

There are many indications that the Kölmjärv object disintegrated itself. The object was probably manufactured in a lightweight material, possibly a kind of magnesium alloy that would disintegrate easily, and not give indications on our instruments.

Several more military investigations were carried out at other similar crash sites, but on every occasion it was claimed that nothing was found. In the meantime, sightings of the Ghost Rockets were pouring in from all over Scandinavia, and although Sweden tried to keep a lid on it all, there were simply too many reports to keep it all a secret, with headlines around the world covering the strange phenomenon. When pressed for answers as to what was going on, Sweden projected a skeptical stance that anything truly unexplainable was happening, largely writing it off as a mixture of atmospheric phenomena, meteors, aircraft, and overactive imaginations. However, they did concede that not all of the reports of Ghost Rockets were so easy to dismiss, and in October of 1946 the Swedish Defense Staff would tell a press conference:

Most observations are vague and must be treated very skeptically. In some cases, however, clear, unambiguous observations have been made that cannot be explained as natural phenomena, Swedish aircraft, or imagination on the part of the observer. Echo, radar, and other equipment registered readings but gave no clue as to the nature of the objects.

Most in the scientific community wrote it off as meteors, as several alleged fragments from the Ghost Rockets that had been examined turned out to be either pieces of meteorites or just plain old coke or slag, in other words, rocks. However, not everyone was so sure all of the phenomena could be attributed to meteorites, due to the fact that the objects often were seen doing acrobatics, flying horizontally, flying in formation, or accelerating and decelerating, none of which are things meteorites are known to do, and they also did not typically leave trails behind them.

The phenomenon also attracted the interest of the United States, and two U.S. experts on aerial warfare, a General Jimmy Doolittle and General David Sarnoff, went to Sweden in August of 1946, ostensibly on other unrelated business, but who also asked around to the Swedish military about the Ghost Rockets. In fact, they were given briefings on the phenomenon and able to interview many senior officers with the Swedish Air Force. The two generals went away convinced that the Ghost Rockets were a real thing and not a myth. When they brought their findings back to the United States, the Americans came to the conclusion that these were actual missiles being seen, likely top-secret V-1 or V-2 missiles being fired by the Germans from a rocket facility at the German seaside town of Peenemünde. Lt. Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, who was the director of the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), would write a Top Secret memo to President Truman explaining this theory, saying:

The weight of evidence pointed to Peenemünde as origin of the missiles, that a US MA [military attaché] in Moscow had been told by a ‘key Swedish Air Officer’ that radar course-plotting had led to conclusion that Peenemünde was the launch site. CIG speculates that the missiles are extended-range developments of V-1 being aimed for the Gulf of Bothnia for test purposes and do not overfly Swedish territory specifically for intimidation; self-destruct by small demolition charge or burning.

The problem with this is that not only had there been no reported launches of any sort of missile or rocket from Peenemünde at the time, but missiles don’t speed up and slow down or do the extreme aerial acrobatics seen with the Ghost Rockets any more than meteorites do. Despite the widespread belief that these Ghost Rockets must have been meteorites, rockets, or both, the U.S. government seemed to remain open to the idea that they could have been something more outlandish and mysterious. In a top secret document by USAFE (United States Air Force Europe) from 1948 that was declassified in 1997, the Swedish Ghost Rockets are mentioned, as is a supposed crash of one of them that left a crater at the bottom of the lake, and the document says:

They (UFOs) have been reported by so many sources and from such a variety of places that we are convinced that they cannot be disregarded and must be explained on some basis which is perhaps slightly beyond the scope of our present intelligence thinking. When officers of this Directorate recently visited the Swedish Air Intelligence Service, this question was put to the Swedes. Their answer was that some reliable and fully technically qualified people have reached the conclusion that ‘these phenomena are obviously the result of a high technical skill which cannot be credited to any presently known culture on earth’. They are therefore assuming that these objects originate from some previously unknown or unidentified technology, possibly outside the earth. We are inclined not to discredit entirely this somewhat spectacular theory [extraterrestrial origins], meantime keeping an open mind on the subject.

The lights would disappear just as suddenly as they started, reports would dry up, and we would be left to wonder just what was going on here. To this day there has been no clear explanation for what caused the Ghost Rockets flap of 1946, despite much discussion and debate. Were these meteorites, rockets, some weird atmospheric phenomena, or all of the above? Or was it perhaps something altogether stranger and more otherworldly? Why did it all congregate in this region in 1946 and what is it that the governments involved might not be telling us? No one really knows, and the Scandinavian Ghost Rockets remain a curious unsolved mystery.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

A great number of UFO reports that have been logged over the years have resulted in attempts at providing rational explanations which, perhaps more often than not, have drawn from weather-related phenomena as possible sources.

Naturally occurring atmospheric phenomena actually do often spark claims of UFO sightings, with sources as varied as “sundogs” or parhelion, to saucer-shaped lenticular clouds, and even more curious natural phenomena like ball lightning which, though confirmed and widely recognized, remains somewhat mysterious.

However, there are other instances where peculiar natural occurrences may point to weather-related phenomena which might account for unusual UFO-like observations. Some of these, as is the case with ball lighting, may leave us with more questions than they do answers.

Such an account was described in 1992 in an entry published in the U.K. Journal of Meteorology. The author, a Mr. Brian Hayes, wrote to the journal with additional details about a bizarre sighting that occurred in September of the previous year.

“I follow up my telephone call to you with further details of Mr. Barrie Brumpton’s unusual sighting which he related to me in October 1991,” wrote Hayes, who stated that his interview with the witness had occurred just days after the observation took place.

“Having read The Circles Effect and its Mysteries and The Goddess of the Stones I was able to pounce upon a chance remark made by Mr. Brumpton, and this led to my interviewing him closely. I hope that this will help with your investigations.”

Hayes stated that Brumpton’s sighing occurred near Colden Common, Winchester in Hampshire. The time had been approximately 2230 BST, having taken place on Saturday evening. The date was September 29, 1991.

“The weather was generally very wet and stormy,” Hayes said the witness had described to him, “but a lull had occurred during which the rain stopped and the wind dropped.” What Brumpton described as a light breeze had been blowing from the east, in the direction of New Road. The witness had been approximately 30 yards from the western end of the road, when he first noticed an “object” that was roughly 150 yard away, prompting him to think he had been “seeing things.”

Hayes then provides the following account:

“The object ‘filled the highway’, so this suggests a width of eight metres or so. It was ‘on the ground’ and ’round-topped’, suggesting to me a [hemisphere]. The ‘object’ was a ‘mass of mist’ and ‘looked very wet’. It seemed to ‘roll’ toward the subject at a speed that he estimated at 30 m.p.h. However, his estimate of half-a-minute for travelling 150 yards gives a speed of 20 m.p.h.”

“Let us not forget,” Hayes added in his report, “that time is difficult to estimate after an event.”

According to Brumpton’s description, the mysterious “mass of mist” appeared to be producing a noise that sounded almost identical to heavy rain pounding against asphalt. The observer noted, however, that there had been no precipitation at the time of the sighting, although he had considered whether a hard rain was about to fall, and that he might run the risk of “getting soaked” where he stood.

Another peculiar aspect of the incident had been that Brumpton was able to see the object very clearl at all times, despite the time of night that the observation occurred. “This suggests the possibility that the ‘object’ was luminous,” Hayes speculated.

“The observer moved into a driveway on the south side of the road, but when a few yards away ‘the object moved over’ to the north side and ‘just vanished’.”

What had the unusual object been that Brumpton observed in September 1991? Although certain aspects of the incident do appear reminiscent of UFO-type observations from over the years, the seemingly weather-related aspects of the events described appear to point to the possibility of a natural explanation.

Cases such as these cause us to wonder about the varieties of natural occurrences that might have led to at least a few UFO sightings over the years. Regardless, they are occurrences that may represent genuine mysteries in their own right, despite their apparent natural origin.

After writing articles in the last few days on UFO researchers being the subjects of government files, getting knocks on the door from “The Man,” and strange phone calls, there’s one more aspect to this particularly sinister part of Ufology: namely, those mysterious black cars that the mysterious M.I.B. drive. The number of reports that fall in this category are huge, and I don’t exaggerate. Indeed, I could write an entire series of articles on the “Cars in Black” phenomenon. One of the people whose M.I.B. experiences feature in my 2015 Men in Black book is a friend of mine, Steve Ray. After reading the book, and just a few days after it was published, Steve experienced something unusual. In his very own words to me: “I read the whole Kindle version of the book Sunday and Monday. Monday night I came home and found two black cars parked – headlights out – in non-assigned spaces directly facing my assigned parking space. When I came upstairs, I found my living-room lamp had been switched from its normal setting to the spookier black-light setting – which I have no memory of doing, and I was the last one here.” I told Steve I was not surprised. He was not comforted by my words; not at all. He wasn’t meant to be. I tell it as it is: good, bad, or worse still. Now, let’s take a look at some more cases.

Nick Redfern and one of those black cars

Dr. Josef Allen Hynek, a well-renowned UFO authority who died in 1986, was provided with the details of a fantastically-strange MIB encounter that occurred in a small Minnesota town in late 1975, and that falls firmly into just such a category. Ironically, no UFO was seen on this particular occasion, but the chief witness was harassed by the driver of a large, black Cadillac on a particular stretch of highway, and who nearly forced the man into an adjacent ditch. The irate man quickly righted his vehicle and headed off in hot-pursuit, only to see the black Cadillac lift into the air and, quite literally, disappear in the blink of any eye. Moving on: Gareth Medway has put together an excellent document on M.I.B. cases, some of which involve those black cars. As Gareth notes: “George Smyth of Elizabeth, New Jersey, went to visit two teenagers who had seen a mysterious green entity [in 1966]. The boys were surrounded by a crowd. He noticed two men emerging from a large black car, leaving a third behind the wheel. They had a slight slant to their eyes. Later, when Saucer News investigators went to visit one of the lads, Smyth noticed the same black car parked nearby, and the same two men get out and watch the house while the interview was going on. Two weeks later he received a phone call telling him to give up UFO investigation.”

Now, onto a story given to me in September 2016 at the annual Mothman Festival: one of the people who came to chat with me, as I sat at my vending table, was Irene, a woman who related a very bizarre story; one with clear M.I.B. / Women in Black overtones attached to it. As Irene revealed, she is now-retired and had a very strange experience while living in Pasadena, California in the late 1970s – in either 1978 or 1979. In the early hours of the particular morning in question she inexplicably woke up and felt compelled to go to the bedroom window. On doing so, she was shocked to see a car-sized, oval-shaped UFO – of a bright blue color – that hung in the air for a few seconds, before vanishing into the dark sky above. She raced back to the bed, terrified by what she had just seen. On the following evening, however, something even stranger occurred.

There was a knock at the door. It was a very pale-faced woman in black who claimed to work for a company that offered aerial photographs of peoples’ homes – taken by an expert photographer, then framed, and that would look very nice on the living-room wall. There was, however, something that made Irene think things were just not quite right, not at all. Her instinct proved to be right on the money. When the woman, somewhat oddly, offered to show Irene one of the cameras that the company used, she agreed to see it – although why she would need to see it at all makes very little sense. If any sense at all. The woman proceeded down the drive and got in the backseat of the black car she had arrived in. In a few seconds, however, she was back out of the car. Irene could see the camera, but was very surprised by what happened next: the woman quickly took a photograph of the front of Irene’s house, jumped back into the car, and in seconds was out of sight.

Now, onto another Irene. This one being Irene Bott, who, in the 1990s, ran the U.K.-base Staffordshire UFO Group. Shortly after establishing her group in 1995, Irene found herself plunged into a situation involving a witness to a UFO encounter – a witness who believed they had a period of so-called “missing time.” Expressing a desire to learn more about what occurred, the witness contacted Irene and related the details that surrounded his viewing in the early hours of a 1995 morning, a brightly lit aerial object. The witness was certain that there was far more to the case than he could consciously recollect, and expressed a keen desire for help in unraveling what had taken place. As a result, Irene referred the witness to a colleague in her group and the two discussed the details over the telephone. Crucial to the issues under discussion, however: shortly after returning home from work on one particular day, the witness found that a note had been pushed through his letterbox warning him not to proceed any further with his investigation.

Naturally concerned, the man asked his neighbors if they had seen anyone lurking in the vicinity of his house that might have conceivably been responsible for the strange and somewhat unsettling note. Fortunately, one such neighbor had seen something unusual on that very day. Shortly after the witness had set off for work, a black car had pulled up outside his house. A man dressed entirely in black and carrying a briefcase exited the vehicle, marched up the driveway, shoved a piece of paper through the letterbox, returned to the car and drove off at speed. One of our mysterious characters had struck again. And, no doubt, those mysterious drivers will be with us as long as the UFO phenomenon is around.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

USS Maddox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nick Redfern at Point Pleasant

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

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

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

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