As we watch robots, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence machines and the like slowly (and sometimes rapidly) permeate our world, it’s not hard to imagine them going from permeating to taking over. Reaching that point, even those who don’t watch sci-fi movies can see the possibility of rogue robots and AI machines using computer logic to eliminate the one thing that could stop their takeover – humans – and initiating a robot apocalypse. Fortunately, some computer scientists in California have developed an algorithm that trains robots to always avoid the bad, human-elimination decisions and stay on the path of good, obedient servitude instead. How well do you think this will work?

“We want to advance AI that respects the values of its human users and justifies the trust we place in autonomous systems.”

In a Stanford University press release announcing the publication in the journal Science of the paper “Preventing undesirable behavior of intelligent machines,” Emma Brunskill, an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford and senior author of the paper, illustrates the alleged noble goal of robot and AI developers – making them tools for the good of humankind – and describes the algorithm she and her colleagues have designed to accomplish – and hopefully guarantee – that goal.

“We show how the designers of machine learning algorithms can make it easier for people who want to build AI into their products and services to describe unwanted outcomes or behaviors that the AI system will avoid with high-probability.”

The idea is to describe bad decisions and behaviors mathematically. While “don’t do this or the patient will die” decisions are easy to describe, behaviors such as gender bias – a line AI is crossing as it’s used more and more to evaluate employment or school applications – requires a sense of fairness that is obviously much harder to define mathematically. The Stanford researchers modified the algorithm in a program designed to predict the future grade point averages of students and it learned to avoid bias toward one gender. While “fairness” is much more vague than “life or death,” the researchers believe it can – and should – be built into all AI using their algorithm.

Does all of this sound familiar? The paper refers to this solution as a “Seldonian algorithm” and fans of Isaac Asimov will recognize that obvious reference to Hari Seldon, the mathematics professor at Streeling University on the planet Trantor in Asimov’s “Foundation” sci-fi series. Seldon developed psychohistory, an algorithmic science that allowed him to predict the future in probabilistic terms. It worked for Hari Seldon … will it work for us?

“Given the recent rise of real-world ML applications and the corresponding surge of potential harm that they could cause, it is imperative that ML algorithms provide their users with an effective means for controlling behavior. To this end, we have proposed a framework for designing ML algorithms and

shown how it can be used to construct algorithms that provide their users with the ability to easily (that is, without requiring additional data analysis) place limits on the probability that the algorithm will produce any specified undesirable behavior.”

Why do humans want us to avoid bad behavior when bad behavior is so much fun?

In the paper’s conclusion on using machine learning (ML) algorithms to change robot behavior, that nasty word “probability” pops up. The algorithm is not a 100% guarantee of robot apocalypse prevention and even if it were, it depends on humans using it in all applications. Just as it’s easy to imagine a robot apocalypse, it’s easy to imagine it being caused by unscrupulous businesses leaving the “bad behavior prevention algorithm” out to cut costs or make more profits.

Are we doomed?

Henry Lee was the 19^th century expert on sea serpents, as we have seen in several articles I wrote last week. As far as the 20^th century is concerned, however, there is no doubt about to whom the crown was passed. It was one Bernard Heuvelmans, whose work, In the Wake of the Sea Serpents, is the defining book on the subject. Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman – who, with Patrick Huyghe, wrote The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mysterious Denizens of the Deep – said of Heuvelmans, who died in 2001: “From 1948 on, Heuvelmans exhaustively sought evidence in scientific and literary sources. Within five years he had amassed so much material that he was ready to write a large book. That book turned out to be Sur la piste des betes ignorees, published in 1955, and better known in its English translation three years later as On the Track of Unknown Animals.” As for In the Wake of the Sea Serpents, it became a classic – and, to this day, it very much remains a highly important research tool for creature-seekers everywhere.

Of particular significance is Heuvelman’s theory – based upon 358 sightings – that there are far more than just one kind of animal that falls into the sea serpent category. Heuvelmans’ list of creatures is an important one. It not only describes the physical appearances of the animals: it also reveals which kinds of creatures are most often seen – at least, at the time that Heuvelmans compiled his list. He began with what he termed the “long-necked” type, for which Heuvelmans had forty-eight reports. This particular group, he added, had necks that ranged from long to “very long,” a “median hump on the back,” and a pair of horns on the head. As for the color of the creatures, they were typically mottled.

Second on Heuvelman’s list was the “merhorse.” It had, said Heuvelmans, a “long floating mane,” huge eyes, a long neck, and whiskers on the face. For this entry, Heuvelmans had studied no less than thirty-seven cases. The third entry was focused on “many-humped” animals. As their title suggests, they had a “string of dorsal humps of virtually equal size.” The necks were not overly large, and had white stripes on their necks. Now, we move onto the “many finned” beast of the deep. As for these creatures they had “several triangular fins looking like a huge crest.” They also had a jagged crest on the spine and “prominent” eyes. Then, there was the “super otter.” Heuvelmans described it as having “a slender medium-length neck” and a “long tapering tail.” The color was beige or grey, according to the thirteen sightings that Heuvelmans had in his files.

The “super eel” plays an important role in Heuvelmans’ work, as in more recent times reports of massive eels are growing and growing. Twelve reports that Heuvelmans had on file allowed him to make a good image of the animals. They had a long neck, one which formed “am extension of the head.” The tail was “long [and] tapering,” “Leaps out of the water and falls back with a splash,” Heuvelmans told his readers. “The marine saurian” was very much like a crocodile, albeit seen in an “oceanic habitat.” Then, there was the “father-of-all-the-turtles.” Yes, we’re talking about giant turtles, a subject that I will return to here at Mysterious Universe on a later occasion. And, finally, Heuvelmans introduced his followers to “yellow belly,” a beast that was yellow with black stripes. Heuvelmans said of his list that, “It is not surprising that the types based on a few not very detailed sightings have few determining characteristics. It follows that the least well-defined types may include several different species, not necessarily related to one another.”

If you are into Cryptozoology and have not yet read Heuvelman’s classic book, you really should!

Henry Lee was someone whose diligent research in the 19^th century uncovered numerous tales of sea serpents and over-sized creatures of the oceans. He spent some of his time addressing one of the most controversial of all aspects of this phenomenon. Namely, the disturbing issue of people being attacked – maybe even killed – by creatures of the sea. Of this particular issue, Lee said: “I have often been asked whether an octopus of the ordinary size can really be dangerous to bathers. Decidedly, ‘Yes,’ in certain situations. The holding power of its numerous suckers is enormous. It is almost impossible forcibly to detach it from its adhesion to a rock or the flat bottom of a tank; and if a large one happened to fix one or more of its strong, tough arms on the leg of a swimmer whilst the others held firmly to a rock, I doubt if the man could disengage himself under water by mere strength, before being exhausted. Fortunately the octopus can be made to relax its hold by grasping it tightly round the ‘throat’ (if I may so call it), and it may be well that this should be known.”

Lee continued with his position on all of this: “That men are occasionally drowned by these creatures is, unhappily, a fact too well attested. I have elsewhere related several instances of this having occurred. Omitting those, I will give two or three others which have since come under my notice. Sir Grenville Temple, in his ‘Excursions in the Mediterranean Sea,’ tells how a Sardinian captain, whilst bathing at Jerbeh, was seized and drowned by an octopus. When his body was found, his limbs were bound together by the arms of the animal; and this took place in water only four feet deep.”

Lee was not done; indeed, his files were voluminous: “Mr. J. K. Lord’s account of the formidable strength of these creatures in Oregon is confirmed by an incident recorded in the Weekly Oregonian (the principal paper of Oregon) of October 6th, 1877. A few days before that date an Indian woman, whilst bathing, was held beneath the surface by an octopus, and drowned. The body was discovered on the following day in the horrid embrace of the creature. Indians dived down and with their knives severed the arms of the octopus and recovered the corpse.

Lee cited the work of Clemens Laming, the author of a book titled The French in Algiers. In its pages, as Lee learned, was a case that could have resulted in overwhelming tragedy. Thankfully, it didn’t quite get to that point: “The soldiers were in the habit of bathing in the sea every evening, and from time to time several of them disappeared–no one knew how. Bathing was, in consequence, strictly forbidden; in spite of which several men went into the water one evening. Suddenly one of them screamed for help, and when several others rushed to his assistance they found that an octopus had seized him by the leg by four of its arms whilst it clung to the rock with the rest. The soldiers brought the ‘monster’ home with them, and out of revenge they boiled it alive and ate it. This adventure accounted for the disappearance of the other soldiers [italics mine].”

Lee was hardly done: “The Rev. W. Wyatt Gill, who for more than a quarter of a century has resided as a missionary amongst the inhabitants of the Hervey Islands, and with whom I had the pleasure of conversing on this subject when he was in England in 1875, described in the Leisure Hour of April 20th, 1872, another mode of attack by which an octopus might deprive a man of life. A servant of his went diving for ‘poulpes’ (octopods), leaving his son in charge of the canoe. After a short time he rose to the surface, his arms free, but his nostrils and mouth completely covered by a large octopus. If his son had not promptly torn the living plaister from off his face he must have been suffocated – a fate which actually befell some years previously a man who foolishly went diving alone [italics mine].”

“In Appleton’s American Journal of Science and Art, January 31st, 1874,” said Lee, “a correspondent describes an attack by an octopus on a diver who was at work on the wreck of a sunken steamer off the coast of Florida. The man, a powerful Irishman, was helpless in its grasp, and would have been drowned if he had not been quickly brought to the surface; for when dragged on to the raft from which he had descended, he fainted, and his companions were unable to pull the creature from its hold upon him until they had dealt it a sharp blow across its baggy body. A similar incident occurred to the government diver of the colony of Victoria, Australia. Whilst pursuing his avocation in the estuary of the river Moyne he was seized by an octopus. He killed it by striking it with an iron bar, and brought to shore with him a portion of it with the arms more than three feet long.”

There is a lesson to be learned here. Be very careful when you go swimming in our oceans and seas: you may not be aware of what lurks below you, just ready to strike. Perhaps, fatally so.

Throughout history there have been scientific theories and hypotheses pushed forward that have either driven us forward as a species or have served to become historical oddities that make us ask “What were we thinking?” It is all part of our stumbling, bumbling quest to feel our way through this morass of mysteries that is the natural world and our universe, and there is not always a clear beacon of light to pave the way forward. While some hypotheses have fallen by the wayside and others have pushed us forward into new realms of knowledge, others have sort of swirled about in a limbo, mere curiosities that cannot be proven or disproven, and one of these is certainly the notion that at some point in human history we were amphibious beings.

The bizarre notion known as the “Aquatic Ape Hypothesis” was first seriously proposed by the marine biologist Alister Hardy in 1960, as a way to try and explain what he thought were a great many quirks in our physiology and evolutionary path when compared to other great apes. Hardy proposed that at one point in our evolutionary history human beings had increasingly turned to aquatic food resources such as fish and shellfish in response to fierce competition from other terrestrial animals. He speculated that this had caused our species to take a different path than the other apes, as we began to swim and wade out into the sea to pursue this semi-aquatic lifestyle rather than life on the savanna, with our bodies adapting to this new way of living in myriad intriguing ways.

In Hardy’s opinion, human bodies show a great many adaptations that he was convinced had come about through this amphibious way of life, including functional hairlessness, subcutaneous fat, regression of our olfactory organ, hooded nose and large sinuses, webbed fingers, big brains, greasy skin with an abundance of sebaceous glands perhaps as waterproofing, as well as our distended larynx, all of which are features common for aquatic animals but not apes, as well as our almost innate ability to swim. Bipedalism was thought to have come about to help us wade about in the water and keep our hands free to forage on the bottom or break open shellfish, and even our predilection for eating seafood, our ability to hold our breath for long periods compared to other apes, and our expressive faces, which could help with visual communication underwater, as well as our our ability to produce speech have gone on to be put forward as evidence.This was all seen as not consistent with the paradigm that we had evolved on the African savanna as long thought, and therefore suggested an aquatic stage of our evolution.

Hardy was not the first to suggest this, as the German pathologist Max Westenhöfer had also played with this hypothesis, but it was Hardy who truly ran with it and brought the whole concept to the public consciousness. It was an idea he had actually been percolating for decades, and only first officially came forward with it after he had become a respected academic and scientist, when in 1960 he presented it all to the British Sub-Aqua Club in Brighton. Although it was met with quite a few raised eyebrows and shrugged shoulders, there would be quite a few who would support the theory and go on to further bolster it, such as famed naturalist Sir David Attenborough, and one proponent of the hypothesis who would catapult it into greater awareness was writer Elaine Morgan. Like Hardy, Morgan believed that humans had gone through a stage in our natural history in which we had turned to the vast food resources of aquatic environments and had gone on to demonstrate convergent evolution of mammals living in these sorts of environments. She would write about the theory in her book The Descent of Women, which would go on to become an international bestseller and really increase the prominence of the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, and she would go on to pen other books on the matter such as The Aquatic Ape (1982), The Scars of Evolution (1990), The Descent of the Child (1994) and The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (1997). She has said of the notion:

Waterside hypotheses of human evolution assert that selection from wading, swimming and diving and procurement of food from aquatic habitats have significantly affected the evolution of the lineage leading to Homo sapiens as distinct from that leading to Pan.

There have been many other researchers who have followed up on this hypothesis, such as researchers Michael Crawford and David Marsh, who wrote of this in their book The Driving Force: Food, Evolution and The Future. They are a big fan of the idea that out large brains could not have possibly evolved in a savanna lifestyle, and that they would only have come about through a diet rich in protein and Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), an omega-3 fatty acid that is found in in seafood, that would only be available with an aquatic lifestyle. Crawford would say of this:

A branch of the line of primitive ancestral apes was forced by competition to leave the trees and feed on the seashore. Searching for oysters, mussels, crabs, crayfish and so on they would have spent much of their time in the water and an upright position would have come naturally. The evolution of a large brain on the savannas of Africa was impossible. The only way it could have happened was with the resources of the marine food-web which initiated the growth and development of the brain in the first place.

It is all a very intriguing notion, and on the surface it seems that the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis could explain a lot about our many unique attributes that seem to separate us from terrestrial apes, but there are of course a lot of skeptics, and indeed the hypothesis is mostly treated as pseudoscience today and mostly ignored by the mainstream scientific community. Some of the main arguments are that is absolutely no fossil evidence of such a thing ever happening, and many of the adaptations credited to an aquatic lifestyle can be explained in other ways that fit more into the current evolutionary paradigm of the human species. For instance, hairlessness would be more likely due to sexual selection and adaptations to heat loss, whereas bipedalism would allow us to peer out over tall grass and keep our hands free for tool use, and breath control would be related to our development of speech. It has also been pointed out that we have a similar distribution of body fat to other land animals, and also that we are in reality really not that particularly good at swimming after all. There are plenty of explanations for our various quirks that can be fit into the current savanna mold of evolution that do not require some radical shift away. The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis is also criticized for being basically an umbrella theory for a wide variety of adaptations that would have gradually evolved over a very long period of time rather than all at once, meaning they cannot really be lumped together into a single explanation. One professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London has said of this:

I think that wading in a watery environment is as good an explanation, at the moment, for our upright gait as any other theory for human bipedalism. But the whole aquatic ape package includes attributes that appeared at very different times in our evolution. If they were all the result of our lives in watery environments, we would have to have spent millions of years there and there is no evidence for this.

Also rather a strike against the hypothesis is that if we evolved to an aquatic environment, then why did we go back out to a terrestrial one and then keep those features? This has not really been adequately explained, and remains a sticking point for those who see this all as wishful thinking and fringe science. While some scientists have sort of just ignored the hypothesis, others have soundly dismissed it and even gone as far as to lump it together with creationism as an untenable and absurd idea. Despite the criticism, the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis has remained very tenacious, and still is discussed and has its staunch supporters to this day. In the realm of cryptozoology it has importance as a possible explanation for sightings of a wide range of entities, such as mermaids or other aquatic mystery beasts such as the Kappa of Japan and many others which could be some offshoot of this amphibious evolutionary history. Is there anything to the Aquatic Ape Theory or is it all a bunch of bunk? Whatever the case may be, as long as it is being discussed it will be out there swirling about in the periphery, and it is probably important to at least understand what it is all about.

In the world of the paranormal there are countless reports of encounters with strange creatures, entities, and apparitions of all shapes and sizes. These accounts run the range of the slightly odd to the full on absurd, and they never cease to amaze with their pure outlandishness. Some of these are perhaps stranger than others, and I am always on the lookout for such reports and experiences. Well, here I have compiled an array of a certain subspecies of strange encounter reports, which deals with what can only be described as octopoid entities complete with tentacles, which have come wandering in from beyond the limits of the reality we perceive.

In some of these reports of strange entities with tentacles the apparitions in question seem to be of a decidedly paranormal nature. Take the case of one witness on the site Psychic Experiences, calling herself “Alkara.” She claims that seeing strange entities was nothing particularly strange or new for her, as she had been having such visions from a very young age, being constantly tormented by shadow people. She had always taken these to be some sort of demons, and according to the witness they took many forms, such as reptilian creatures, alien “greys,” and others, but the strangest was an octopoid entity that would come to her in her room at night, and she says of it:

My encounters with different types of entities and dead people has continued since. But a week ago, I encountered an entity that looked so ridiculous that I brushed it off as my own imagination. It had a structure of a human: head, torso, two legs but the remarkable difference was it had eight octopus-like tentacles for arms. I couldn’t remember how it’s face looked like because at that time it seemed so ridiculous to me that I didn’t take time to study it.

Very strange indeed. A similar and maybe even creepier account comes from Darkness Radio, concerning a witness called Ken, who also encountered a tentacled entity in his own bedroom. He explains that at the time he had been living out in Rosemead, California, in a small little house from which he ran a tattoo business. Things were apparently pretty odd from the moment he moved in, as he said he was prone to hearing strange things rustling or moving around in the dark in the kitchen and living-room area, and he occasionally saw a “misty shadow” roaming about, but nothing was quite so strange as something that would come to him one evening when he awoke to quite the surreal experience. He says of this:

One night I woke up in a very calm and relaxed state but I found myself floating above the bed with my feet barely hovering off the mattress. I knew I wasn’t dreaming because I was aware of all the items in my room and my eyes were scanning around. I found my body floating gently back down onto the bed but was suddenly slammed down onto the mattress violently, as if somebody put his hand across my face and pulled me down. It felt as if I was in that state of sleep paralysis. To my horror, as I looked to my side; I could not move my face or body but with my eyes, I clearly saw the silhouette or the shadow figure of this creature. I saw the clear defined sharp pointed nose and as crazy as it sounds the silhouette of this tentacle for an arm with all suction cups clearly defined. Its other arm held my head down to the bed and pulled it, as it was trying to make me look back at the ceiling and, in shock, every inch of my black ceiling was covered with this bizarre looking hieroglyphic as if it were painted in wet substance. In my head, it was the color of blood as it was hard to make out in the moonlight shining through my window. I felt as if the entity was trying to tell me something.

With all my energy, I willed myself out of this paralyzed state and once I blinked my eyes, it was over. No writings on my ceiling. No creature. Everything was gone. A few other weird things happened after this incident, especially at night and sometimes even during the day but nothing that tops that crazy night I told you about. I’m not sure if there is a dark history in this residence or if I’m just haunted myself because I’ve seen things in every place I’ve lived. Friends don’t believe me, thinking I was under the influence of something but I wasn’t. I was completely sober. I know what I witnessed.

Was this a ghost, something more demonic, or just sleep paralysis and hallucinations, the witness caught in that bizarre limbo between sleep and wakefulness? It is hard to say. In another account from Your Ghost Stories, we have a witness who says this happened to him after he moved to a small apartment in the state of Illinois with his wife and 2-year-old son. He claims that he was plagued with sudden, very intense headaches after moving into this place, which he had never experienced before but which he chalked up to just the stresses of moving and settling down in a new place, yet it seems there was perhaps more to it than that. He says that one night he would have a horrifying encounter with a very menacing, possibly demonic apparition tormenting his young son, and he explains the outlandish scene thusly:

It was one Sunday when my son was playing in my bed and all of a sudden he started screaming holding his head. When asked he showed the exact same place where I got my pain in head and said that it pains (the pain will be like some one puts a nail on back of the head). I was little concerned but thought to ignore. The interesting thing here is I was not feeling this pain anymore by my son started getting this pain often. We took him to medical check up and turns out to be nothing. Finally after 3 attempts, I decided to use my supernatural medium to protect everyone and it worked.

The face to face happened one night. We were in a good sleep and I was suddenly awake and I noticed a pink ball with tentacles floating above my sons body. When tried to catch it, it just moved away and disappeared and I felt asleep. The very next night we were all sleeping and I was awake at 12. 05 midnight and I saw the wall above my head and ceiling was full black. I turned around and stared at the wall (just 2 feet away) and I saw a totally black object with huge tentacles floating. After this incident I finally confirmed that there are some demonic presence in this apartment and I secured the full house until we vacated.

Again, we seem to be dealing with something very paranormal in nature with these particular reports, or perhaps even projections of the mind or other tenuous phenomena, but other reports point to something more concretely physical in nature. There are a few accounts that seem to definitely at least suggest aliens or inter-dimensional interlopers of some sort, and these are perhaps even more bizarre that the reports of tentacled ghostly specters. There are a few cases such as these from the 1960s and 70s, which have been covered by different UFO and paranormal researchers over the years. Probably the more well-known and indeed creepier of these is what has come to be known as the “Octosquatch.” In the summer of 1961, a 29-year-old truck driver named Arquimedes Sanchez was driving along a precipitous mountain road through the Basque mountains in Spain at around 11 PM, along with an unnamed companion, on their way to the town of Puerto de Barazar. As they rounded a bend, their headlights hit a bizarre and rather monstrous being standing upon an embankment nearby, which prompted the pair to stop their vehicle.

When they peered through the murk ahead of them they claim that they saw a “hairy octopus,” which stood around 4 feet tall, with glowing eyes and “tentacle-like” arms. The witnesses and the thing apparently sat there completely frozen and immobile for several minutes, both parties probably just as startled and scared as the other, before Sanchez snapped out of it and slammed the accelerator, which caused the weird apparition to scurry backwards away from the threat, after which Sanchez backed up and tried again, apparently intent on running it over. Interestingly, the otherworldly intruder refused to take off into the night, instead always just managing to avoid being run over, as if it were all a game. Finally the two men, neither who were willing to step out of the vehicle to investigate, drove off to leave the being behind, never to be seen again. What in the world was this thing? Who knows?

Just a few years later in 1966 we have a case that was covered in both Jim Brandon’s Weird America: A Guide to Places of Mystery in the United States, as well as Jerome Clark’s Extraordinary Encounters: An Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrials and Otherworldly Beings. the state of Oregon for an equally bizarre case. On the night of April 5, 1966, a 16-year-old witness named Kathy Reeves was allegedly walking along with her friend on a secluded dark road in the small city of Newport, Oregon, when they got the sudden, unmistakable feeling that they were being followed and watched. The two girls assumed it was just someone messing around trying to scare them, which was made clearer when they thought they could see a dimmed flashlight beam bobbing about behind them.

They picked up their pace and even tossed rocks behind them at the unseen follower, but the feeling that someone was lurking in the darkness behind them did not abate, and when they turned around at one point what they thought had been a simple flashlight suddenly erupted into a brilliant beam of incandescent light far beyond what would be expected, which was then joined by more spears of brightness jutting from the night to converge upon them. Squinting through the glare, they claimed that they could make out a large, dome-shaped object some distance off that seemed to be wreathed in some sort of fog or smoke. The now terrified girls began to run as fast as they could towards home, but as they did their path was blocked by three unearthly creatures the likes of nothing they had ever seen. The entities were described as being headless and armless, and as looking like mobile tree stumps that moved about on what resembled spider legs and which were dressed in some sort of multi-colored cloth. The creatures thankfully did not seem to pay too much attention to the witnesses, instead scurrying across the road to scamper off out of sight towards the inscrutable dome, which still flickered in the dark behind them.

The 1960s seem to have been a rather odd time for these sorts of octopoid extraterrestrial encounters, because our next case is every bit as bizarre and occurred in 1968 in the province of Tarragona in Spain. It revolves around a humble farmer by the name of John Mateu, and according to a report contained within the Barcelona Tele-Express, in the summer of that year Mateu was out doing his usual farm work like any other day, when he caught sight of what appeared to be something glinting in the morning light some distance down the dirt road that went past the property. His first impression was that it was someone who might be lost or even worse broken down, and so he walked off down the dusty road with his dog in tow to see what was going on. It would soon become quite clear that this was no car, nor any sort of vehicle he recognized.

As he approached, Mateu could see that rather than a car the source of the glinting light was actually some sort of oval, metallic object that was glowing and hovering several feet off of the ground. As the dumbfounded farmer stared on in amazement, he noticed three small creatures that looked vaguely octopoid, moving along swiftly on tentacles towards the craft. When they reached it, the weird entities were described as piling into the spheroid object and shooting off into the sky and leaving Mateu there to faint and lose consciousness. Indeed, he’d go on to remain missing for a full day as friends and family searched for him, after which he wandered home, unable to account for his missing time. Mateu and his brother would go on to find several patches of scorched earth where it was surmised that the alien craft had landed, and oddly enough their watches were also reported as stopping when they entered the vicinity.

Moving on to the 1970s we have the extraordinarily odd account of 9 year-old José Cantu, of the town of Harrah, in Washington state. On January 19, 1977, Cantu was up early in the morning making himself breakfast when he looked outside to see a strange, diminutive “little men” out in the yard. He tried to wake his mother, but she told him to leave her alone and that he was imagining things, so he went out to take a look for himself, soon coming face to face with a pair of 3-foot-tall beings with greenish skin and no legs, instead sitting atop rotating bases with various tubes and small wheel-like protuberances attached to them. The heads of the things were monstrous, with pig-like snouts, odd mushroom-shaped caps, and only a single eye placed within the center of their heads, as well as tiny, useless looking forearms jutting out from the middle.

Cantu immediately hid behind a shed, and it was here where he would notice two brightly lit metallic crafts parked nearby which had ramps leading to the ground and seemed to be piloted by more of the same cyclops beings. The two beings he had seen earlier then boarded these “spaceships” via the ramps, after which the crafts hovered into the air and vanished into puffs of smoke. The boy ran back inside, woke his sleeping mother, and told her all about what he had seen, but she would not believe him and sent him on his way to school. There he would tell anyone who would listen about what he had seen, and two classroom aides ended up being so enthralled by his sincerity that they went home with him after school to take a look at the scene themselves.

In the yard, the aides would find circular indentations within the earth, apparently caused by the bases that the two aliens had sat upon, and neighbors would say that they had also found enormous depressions in the ground where Cantu said the craft had been resting. An examination of these depressions showed that they had strange patterns of swirled grass within them, and this was all big enough news that the following day a a police officer for the Indian Reserve of Yakima by the name of Willard J. Vogel came to investigate, seeing the evidence and interviewing the boy, and he became convinced that the boy at least truly believed that he was telling the truth.

Moving on into more recent years, a truly otherworldly account was given by the Dutch psychic Robbert van den Broeke, who had his own strange experience as he was investigating a crop circle in the area of Zevenbergen with a friend called Roy. At one point they both felt an intense sensation of being watched, after which Robbert had his mind invaded by a sudden, very vivid image of an octopus-like creature. At the time he was puzzled by this, but it would only get weirder in the coming days. Upon returning to his home, Robbert was allegedly overcome with an irresistible urge to venture out to a grassy field near Seppen airport, and when he arrived he says he did so to the sight of an egg shaped craft emanating a golden light hovering over the field. As he watched the strange UFO with awe, the bottom opened and from within came two creatures that looked exactly like the slithering thing he had seen in his vision. They were described as being slippery, reptilian looking things with pear-shaped heads, almond shaped eyes, and numerous tentacles sprouting from their chest and back. These outlandish entities approached him, and gave out a telepathic signal that seemed to be benign in nature, and indeed they allowed Robbert to get close enough to touch one of their tentacles, where things would get more deeply odd.

As soon as he made contact with the wet, slimy skin, he says that he was jolted by a strong shock that was accompanied by an urgent telepathic message from the creature that apparently proclaimed that Robbert was meant to be a bridge between humans and them. Right after this, a light enveloped the beings and they began to spin around at great speed, as if caught up in a tornado, and the tentacles of one of the creatures then seemed to fly off of its body to go scattering all over the field. Alarmed, Robbert telepathically asked them if they were OK, and they said that the tentacles had been left behind as evidence of the encounter and that they would regrow quickly, after which they spun off back into their craft and shot up into the sky out of sight to leave him standing there in the field alone and surrounded by the detached tentacles. Robbert then claims that he gathered these tentacles up and that he now is keeping them frozen in a safe place awaiting analysis. It all seems pretty questionable, since he has not come out publicly in any capacity that I know of on these tentacles, so it should probably all be taken with a huge grain of salt, but it is a wild tale all the same, and when dealing with octopus entities what tale isn’t?

From Reddit user “horrorbxtch” we have a pretty bonkers report that he says happened to him in the summer of 2016 while visiting his grandparents near Grand Junction, Colorado. He describes their house as being rather rural, and situated near a river, and on this evening he had let the dog to do its business when the animal suddenly started viciously barking and snarling at something out in the dark. The witness then grabbed a flashlight to go investigate and he explains of the strange series of events that would unfold:

My dog is outside for maybe a minute before I hear her start viciously growling and barking like I’ve never heard before. She’s growled/barked at animals or people outside before but this was more aggressive than I’d ever heard her. I start making my way over to my dog to investigate, I make it about halfway to my dog and I freeze dead in my tracks. Im pointing my flashlight in the direction she’s facing, and I see the most unsettling thing I’ve ever seen. At first I think I’m just imagining it or tripping out but there was no denying it was clear as day. It was about 3-4 feet tall, a rectanglular figure but with rounded edges. Imagine like a 4 foot tall twinkie lol. It was this gross translucent tan/flesh color. Like the color of a naked mole rat. There was no apparent face, or limbs. All I saw was a bunch of tentacle/leg looking things potruding all down the front and side of it’s body. The way it was moving was creepy.

At first it was sort of gently rocking side to side, and then I swear it started taunting my dog like running from one spot to another to mess with her. At this point I got too scared it would do something to my dog so I ran to her, snatched her up, and booked it inside and locked the door. When I peeked back outside the thing was gone. I don’t think anything has ever disturbed me that much in real life before. My body wouldnt stop shaking for probably 25 mins after I got inside. The most fucked up part is the next day I told my aunt I saw a “weird Alien bug looking creature” outside the night before. She then said “Ive seen some weird shit out there.” And proceeded to explain seeing the exact same thing I saw. Same color, shape, lots of tentacle/centipede looking appendages, and the icing on the cake for me was when she said it kept rocking from side to side. I said you’re kidding me thats exactly what I saw last night. We both got chills and flipped out because it confirmed it wasn’t our imagination.

Also in more recent years, in December of 2014 there was a very odd report taken by the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), concerning an outlandish bipedal creature that was sighted and almost hit by a car in the vicinity of the sleepy town of Carmel, in Highland County, Ohio. The witnesses, a former Marine and his wife, had just moved to the area, and one evening they were driving along the rural road through a wooded area towards their home when a 7-foot-tall creature with muscular, very bendable, tentacle-like legs, and a tubular body without any arms or head ran in front of their car and into the woods on the other side of the road, narrowly avoiding being hit by the vehicle in the process.

It would later be described as being a dull, sickly grey in color and looking sort of like a “walking squid,” and after the report was featured in the local paper there was a lot of speculation as to what it might be. One of the most popular ideas is that this was merely a misidentified deer that had just happened to be witnessed in a strange, bipedal pose. This sort of makes sense, as white-tailed deer are known to rear up on their hind legs and even take a few steps in that position, but it seems odd that one would walk so far, and it doesn’t really seem to totally match the witnesses’ description. Interestingly, the witnesses also claimed that there was a large sphere of grass near their house that is always greener than the surroundings and where snow does not gather, so make of that what you will. Whatever it is, the “Walking Squid” Of Carmel, Ohio, is a truly bizarre case that can’t easily be explained away.

With such completely bizarre, almost absurd reports as we have looked at here, it is rather difficult to get a handle on what could be going on. In some cases it looks like these might be ghostly or demonic in nature, while others might have to do with aliens, interdimensional phenomena, or something else. Perhaps none of them are real at all, and have their origins merely in the imagination and the mind. In the end, we are left with a range of accounts that really stretch the limits of the bizarre, and hint that this world is perhaps far odder than any of us even suspect.

What Earth creature is best-suited for space travel? If you said the one with the smartest brain and opposable thumbs, you’d be half right. If you said the eight-legged one that looks like a micro-sized water bear, is found thriving in the most hostile environments on the planet, and has already survived in the vacuum of outer space without the benefit of a million-dollar space suit, you’d be half right as well. Researchers are seriously studying ways to combine human and tardigrade DNA to create a radiation-resistant hybrid to colonize Mars. Will their spacesuits need more legs?

“If we have another 20 years of pure discovery and mapping and functional validation of what we think we know, maybe by 20 years from now, I’m hoping we could be at the stage where we would be able to say we can make a human that could be better surviving on Mars.”

While humans might visit Mars before 2039, that date is well-within the projections for setting up a permanent settlement there, and it’s the survival of those humans Chris Mason, a geneticist and associate professor of physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell University in New York, is focused on. In a presentation at the 8th Human Genetics in NYC Conference, Mason talked about what he learned as a member of the NASA team studying the twin astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly and how his physiology changed after Mark spent a year in space. That research highlighted the damaging effects of cosmic radiation on the human body. In an interview with Space.com after his presentation, Mason discussed his radical idea for gene-splicing human cells with the mighty tardigrade.

“Genetically editing humans for space travel would likely be a part of natural changes to the human physiology that could occur after living on Mars for a number of years, Mason said. “It’s not if we evolve; it’s when we evolve,” he added.”

Mark and Scott Kelly

(Credit: NASA)

The way Mason sees it, putting humans in space in large numbers would trigger the usual survival-of-the-fittest evolutionary changes to their physiology, one of which would be that the survivors would have slightly more radiation protection which would be passed down to their offspring and grow stronger over generations. By genetically altering humans ahead of time, that evolution would be accelerated artificially. The real question is … would natural evolution create a human with tardigrade characteristics like Mason and other researchers want to create themselves?

Here’s another question. Despite the tardigrade’s universal survivalist body, would a human-tardigrade hybrid lose its ability to survive on Earth? Would these hybrids be doomed to die on Mars and never return to Earth?

“In terms of a question of liberty, you’re engineering it [a future human] to have lots more opportunities, again assuming we haven’t taken away opportunities. If we learned that, in some way, when we decided to try and prove the ability of humans to live beyond Earth, and we take away their ability to live on Earth, I think that would be unjust.”

Unjust, yes. However, if we’re talking human ethics, we know from past experience that human profits influence human ethics. While this might cause NASA to ponder whether it’s right for a Martian colony, would it stop a space corporation from offering an obscene amount of money to volunteers on a suicide mission to mine an asteroid loaded with rare minerals – money that might set their family up for life – even for generations?

Would ethics really win out?

Based on past experience, will we see a human-tardigrade hybrid?

To paraphrase a suitable adage: the water bear is already out of the bag.