Are you ready for human-monkey hybrids? How about human-rat or human-mouse combinations? Can you accept the justification being given by scientists and government officials giving their approval that it’s for a ‘noble cause’ – creating much-needed human transplant organs – and that no actual hybrid creature will be brought to full development? That they will be interrupted or destroyed or ‘terminated’ before they reach that point? Well, get ready for some hybrids because the news out of China and Japan recently says they‘re either approved, just around the corner or already here. Can there be any scarier development in the world today?

Let’s start with the human-monkey hybrid. Announced by the Spanish news source El Pais, a team led by Juan Carlos Izpisúa genetically modified monkey embryos to deactivate the genes that create organs, then injected them with human stem cells that generated human organs instead. If his name sounds familiar, it could be because in 2017 Juan Carlos Izpisúa announced that he had created human-pig hybrids. Izpisúa works for the Salk Institute of the U.S. in conjunction with (ironically) the Catholic University of Murcia (UCAM) in Spain. The research is done in China where regulations against such experiments are lax at best. They also prefer to call the human-monkey combinations ‘chimeras’ because they’re not half-human and half monkey but merely monkeys developing human organs. Less creepy but still unethical enough that they destroy the embryos after 14 weeks to avoid more controversy. While his human-pig chimeras were ultimately unsuccessful, Izpisúa is confident it will eventually work and be accepted by the general public.

“History shows us again and again that, over time, our ethical and moral scales change and mutate, like our DNA, and what yesterday was ethically unacceptable, if that really means a breakthrough for the progress of humanity, today it is now an essential part of our lives.”

Is this the future?

This takes us to Japan, where that country’s education and science ministry issued new guidelines saying human-animal hybrids or chimeras can now be gestated to term and recently gave approval to renowned geneticist Hiromitsu Nakauchi at the University of Tokyo to create the first ones using rats and mice. In The Asahi Shimbun, Nakauchi described his plans to genetically modify fertilized eggs of rats and mice to deactivate the genes for making a pancreas, then inject them with humaniPS (induced stem) cells in the eggs, place them in rats and mice and allow them to be born, where their development will be monitored. As a precautionary measure, they will examine the brains of the rodent embryos after they reach a certain stage of development and end the experiment if the number of human cells in occupies more than 30 percent of the rat’s brain. That would signal that the human cells are taking over – a situation that is considered unethical … but still legal.

“We don’t expect to create human organs immediately, but this allows us to advance our research based upon the know-how we have gained up to this point.”

While the researchers say they plan to create human livers and kidneys as well as pancreas, Nakauchi tries to assail fears by saying the chances for living hybrids are nill.

“At that level, an animal with a human face will never be born.”

However, monkeys with human organs are already being recreated in China, where Nakauchi’s Japanese restrictions, minimal as they might be, are non-existent. You don’t have to have seen “Island of Lost Souls” (the 1932 pre-censorship horror film adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel “Island of Dr. Moreau”) to come to the conclusions of Jiro Nudeshima, a life science specialist who co-heads a civic group focusing on the ethical concerns raised by life science research. He tells Asahi Shimbun:

“It is problematic, both ethically and from a safety aspect, to place human iPS cells, which are still capable of transforming into all types of cells, into the fertilized eggs of rats and mice. There is also a risk that a certain body part unexpectedly becomes chimera, a condition in which heterologous cells exist in one body, by mixing human cells into the brains or reproductive cells of rats and mice.”

Kathleen Burke as the Panther Woman in “Island of Lost Souls”

Dr. Moreau had no restrictions and an isolated island filled with apes and big cats to experiment with. Could it happen in real life?

Has it happened already?

Thirteen years ago, mysteriously looking glass beads were discovered inside of ancient clam shells and now new evidence has revealed their origin. Researchers believe that the glass pearls are microtektites which are byproducts of a meteor impact. This is, however, the first time that they’ve been found inside of old clam shells.

A pair of microtektites found inside ancient clam shells.

Image: Kristen Grace, Florida Museum

While more research needs to be conducted on these celestial pearls, it is believed that they were created when a meteorite smashed into the Florida coast approximately 2 or 3 million years ago. “This is the first report of microtektites in Florida and one of only a few findings of space debris found in the state,” Mike Meyer, who is a researcher at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, explained to Gizmodo. He is also the lead author of the study that was published in Meteoritics and Planetary Science.

So how exactly were they formed? The glass beads were created during the impact of when a meteor struck the planet. “When a large enough impact occurs, the impactor – a meteorite or comet or what not – mostly vaporizes, but so does the rock and soil it hits,” Meyer explained, adding, “Most rocks are composed of minerals that contain silica, so there is a lot of it to melt. That melted debris flies away from the impact site and cools as it travels through the air, usually giving it an aerodynamic shape of some sort.”

Microtektites look like pearls but are clear

After the materials cool off in the atmosphere, they drop back to the ground. While the larger pieces (tektites) are mostly in the shape of teardrops, the smaller pieces (microtektites) are round. The pieces eventually end up in the water and they get collected inside of clam shells where they remain preserved.

Interestingly enough, it was Meyer and his classmates that originally found the glass beads at a Sarasota County quarry thirteen years ago. They found a total of 83 of the tiny glass pearls that measured just 200 micrometers in diameter.

Now, over a decade later, he and his colleagues decided to analyze the glass pearls. They studied them using scanning electron microscopy, back-scatter imaging, and x-ray spectroscopy in order to find out what they were made from. They even compared them to other microtektites, cosmic spherules (micrometerorites), and volcanic rocks.

(Not microtektites)

They ruled out volcanic rock because the shape and composition wasn’t right and they concluded that there was no way that a human could have contaminated the beads as they were closed off inside of fossilized clams for millions of years. The only possible explanation is that they were microtektites that were formed from “the debris created by an impact event,” Meyer stated.

What’s even more interesting is that the microtektites were discovered at four different sedimentary depths which could suggest that several impacts occurred there. The researchers plan on conducting more studies on these incredible otherworldly glass beads as well as searching for more of them along the coast of Florida. Pictures of the microtektites can be seen here.

On July 22, 2019, a NASA-operated aircraft made a long, low-altitude survey of areas struck by the recent California earthquakes. Flight tracking website FlightAware.com tracked the path of the McDonnell Douglas DC-8-70, registered to NASA under the call sign NASA817, and images of the aircraft’s flight path show it to have clearly zig-zagged directly over the San Andreas fault. Is NASA worried that The Big One is coming? 

The aircraft flew well below 1,000 feet for large portions of its flight, frightening and confusing southern California residents below. “It was scary, a little bit. You didn’t know if was going to land,” said CBSNLA anchorwoman Jasmine Viel after she saw the aircraft during her commute. “Everyone kind of stopped in their cars, looking up. It was big and loud.”

NASA’s DC-8 science aircraft

After receiving several calls about a plane flaying dangerously low overhead, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department assured the public via Twitter that the plane belonged to NASA and posed no threat. NASA has yet to respond inquiries asking why the plane was flying so low over densely populated areas.

The recent wave of earthquakes in California revealed that scientists are still working to understand the complex interactions of seismic forces and structures underneath America’s west coast. For years, many have predicted that “The Big One” is imminent, an earthquake that will destroy much of what we know today as California and create a tsunami that could send cities crashing into the waves. Is this why NASA were flying a DC-8 precariously low over California?

While some of the more conspiratorial and sensational YouTube channels and blogs are covering this flight as proof of some sort of impending doomsday, the fact is that NASA operates many of the most advanced scientific aircraft and instruments the U.S. government possesses, so of course they would want to study the aftereffects of recent earthquakes in order to assess future or even current risks. On NASA’s Airborne Science website, the space agency writes that the DC-8 “provides a unique set of NASA supported aircraft that benefit the earth science community” and “carry the sensors that provide data to support and augment NASA spaceborne missions.”

The aircraft has previously been used to study radiation and chemical gases in the atmosphere.

Still, it’s odd that NASA has yet to comment on the activities of NASA817 over Southern California. Let’s say, very hypothetically, that NASA came across evidence suggesting The Big One is coming and coming soon. Would they tell the public and most certainly create panic, chaos, and pandemonium?

In 1903, a man named Oscar Frederickson, of Winnipegosis, Canada wrote a fascinating and extensive report on his knowledge of huge lake monsters in the early decades of the twentieth century, all of which came from witnesses, both first- and second-hand. He began his account like this: “In 1903, I lived with my parents on Red Deer Point, Lake Winnipegosis. Our house was situated about two hundred yards from the shore. About a mile south of our place lived a man by the name of Ferdinand Stark. One day Stark was down by the lake shore when he saw what he thought was a huge creature in the lake. It was moving northward along the shore, a short distance out. Stark wanted someone else to see the strange animal, and as we were his nearest neighbors, he came running along the lake to our place. All the while, he could see the creature moving in the same direction as he was, only going a little slower than he was running.

“Stark arrived at our home very much excited and breathing heavily, and asked my dad and mother to hurry down to the lake to see a strange animal in the water. By the time my parents got down to the lake shore, there was nothing to be seen. Whatever Stark had seen had disappeared. Looking somewhat bewildered, but still visibly excited, Stark began to describe what he had seen. All he could see of the creature was its big back sticking out of the water, and it was very dark or black in color. A number of gulls followed it and kept flying down to it as if they were picking at it. My parents did see quite a number of gulls still flying around.

“In 1935, Mr. Cecil Rogers of Mafeking and I made a trip to Grand Rapids on Lake Winnipeg. While there, I called on Mr. Valentine McKay, a resident of Grand Rapids for many years. As we were talking, the conversation drifted to strange animals that had existed at one time. To my surprise, McKay said he had seen some such animal in Lake Winnipegosis.” McKay, very pleased by the fact that Frederickson took his story seriously and did not poke fun at him, prepared a carefully written statement for the monster hunter, which read as follows:

“In September, 1909, I was traveling alone in a canoe from Shoal River on Lake Winnipegosis to Grand Rapids on Lake Winnipeg. At the time I saw this animal I was standing on the lake shore. I had stopped at Graves’ Point to make tea. I was at the edge of the bush getting willows for a campfire, when I heard a rumbling sound like distant thunder. As I looked out on the glassy surface of the calm water, I saw a huge creature propelling itself on the surface of the water about four hundred yards out from shore. A large part must have been submerged, judging by the great disturbance of the water around it.

The creature’s dark skin glistened in the autumn sun, said Frederickson, “and I estimated it was moving at the rate of two to three miles an hour. As I watched it, a member of the body shot up about four feet, vertically, out of the water. This portion seemed to have something to do with the creature’s method of locomotion. The course it was taking was toward Sugar Island or Sleep Rock. I watched it till it went out of sight. The number of gills, hovering around this creature, followed it as far as I could see.”  Frederickson had something notable to say on this particular story: “Mr. McKay said he had described this creature to a geologist by the name of Craig who said it was quite possible that it was a remaining specimen of a prehistoric animal that was once plentiful.”

On the matter of the two men in question – Ferdinand Stark and Valentine McKay – Frederickson made a number of observations and comments: “A great many people will think these two men just made up a story about seeing some strange animal or creature in Lake Winnipegosis. But, it is hardly probable that both men would think up a yarn about the gulls. Stark and McKay never met, as far as I could find out. Stark moved from Winnipegosis about 1904 or 1905, and where he is now, if still living, I have not been able to find out.”

Muskellunge — the type of monster normally seen in Canadian lakes

Frederickson had yet another account to relate on this particular matter of unidentified, large beasts on the loose in the early part of the twentieth century: “In 1934, Captain Sandy Vance lived on Graves’ Point. One day he was over at Sitting Island, which is on the northeast side of the point. He saw what he thought was a huge animal a short distance off shore. Vance said it was the biggest living creature he had ever seen in water. Mr. Vance had been captain on freight tugs for many years on Lake Winnipeg and Lake Winnipegosis. He said he had often seen moose and deer in water, so there is no reason not to believe that he saw some strange living creature. Captain Vance died some years ago. He was well known here.”

And, finally, there is the following, short but intriguing, account from Frederickson: “There are quite a few Natives who have seen some strange thing. They call it ‘the big snake.’ Those of Shoal River claim that a monstrous animal was seen often off Sugar Island and Steep Rock in Dawson Bay during the latter part of the 19^th century.”

Details about the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Applications Program (AAWSAP), sometimes also referred to as AATIP, or the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, have been trickling out over the last few years, although there are contradictions and misdirections aplenty. 

What we do know is that largely thanks to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, the Defense Intelligence Agency at some point was spending dozens of millions of dollars a year in order to study alleged unknown flying objects or aerial phenomena in the name of national security. We also know that Luis Elizondo, the counterintelligence officer and tactical-backpack-sporting star of the History Channel’s somewhat controversial Unidentified series, was involved in some way, although his exact role is still unclear.

Luis Elizondo, who is strangely comfortable on camera and may or may not have been the director of AATIP/AAWSAP.

While many journalists and ufologists have pointed to the program as evidence of the U.S. government’s knowledge of extraterrestrial visitation or other high strangeness, the reality is likely more prosaic. The Defense Intelligence Agency is well aware that like the U.S., other nations are testing advanced new aerospace technologies including space-based weapons and vehicles, hypersonic technologies, radical new forms of stealth techniques, and more. AAWSAP was most likely created to determine where the U.S. stood in the race to test or deploy those technologies and weapons in the field.

Case in point: investigative reporter George Knapp has released another document (PDF download link here) that sheds light on at least some of the activities of AAWSAP. Knapp shared the document “Detection and High Resolution Tracking of Vehicles at Hypersonic Velocities” created by Dr. William Culbreth, a professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. It’s unclear when the document was written, but Knapp writes that Culbreth was “already looking at this challenge a decade ago as part of a classified Pentagon program.”

The Boeing X-51 Waverider hypersonic aircraft.

The document is one of 38 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs) that AASWAP produced and explores various methods that could be used to counter hypersonic objects like next-generation intercontinental ballistic missiles and space-based reentry weapons. Infrared systems, LIDAR technologies, seismography, and even infrasound detection methods are discussed in the paper as possible methods of detecting and tracking these next-generation weapons and vehicles that China, Russia, and the United States are currently developing. According to the Silva Record, the document was produced by the Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies program and submitted to AASWAP as part of a Pentagon contract Bigelow secured.

One interesting section of the document states that “technology changes in aircraft will generate the need for newer detection and tracking techniques,” and lists five categories of objects capable of hypersonic speeds: space debris, reentry craft, meteors, missiles, and hypersonic aircraft. Apparently, Culbreth’s research even included stranger topics. “We looked at technology people had envisioned, that included chemical rockets, nuclear fission rockets, nuclear fusion rockets, anti-matter and even the possible use of rotating black holes in order to create propulsion systems,” Culbreth told Knapp in an interview. “All of these seemed very blue sky. Right now at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), people are putting, in little bottles, anti-matter, anti-hydrogen. And anti-matter is an extremely dense energy. So, we’re getting there.”

Images of two of the Navy’s patented theoretical hypersonic aircraft.

Ultimately, the document is far from a smoking fun of anything, but adds more context to ongoing revelations surrounding AATIP/AAWSAP and the mysterious objects detected by Navy pilots in now-infamous encounters that have attracted the attention of members the United States congress. Was this shadowy program designed solely to get out ahead of the next generation of aerospace weapons and technologies, or could there be more to the story as many observers suspect?

Futuro houses look like flying saucers with an airplane-style front door and windows. The circular space inside of the houses contain a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and sitting area. Originally, the pre-fabricated plastic houses were created as ski chalets that were so light they could be airlifted to any location. The ones in Wanli, however, have pebble-concrete steps in addition to the flying-saucer-type legs.

Wanli, Taiwan

According to Atlas Obscura, it was Finnish architect Matti Suuronen who designed the houses, but the ones in Wanli apparently weren’t sanctioned by him. So the question of where the houses originated from and when they were built remains a mystery.

In addition to the strange-looking homes, there is no real explanation as to why the town was abandoned in the 1970s, although people suspect that it had something to do with a property development that was built close to the area, as well as the fact that the construction of the houses became much too expensive to complete.

Not only has the town been mysteriously abandoned and has UFO-shaped homes, it also has a reputation for being haunted. There were numerous mysterious accidents and suicides during its construction that suggests that something paranormal is lurking there, according to Insh. Even construction workers who were at the location were scared away due to the alleged ghost sightings. A video taken by Insh (which can be seen here) gives an inside look at the abandoned town.

Unfortunately, many of the UFO-shaped homes are in really poor conditions with the insides crumbling apart, wallpaper torn off the walls, and wrecked furniture from the mist of the salty sea water as well as typhoons that have battered the area. Old yellow-colored newspapers, unmade beds, and rusty old tea kettles litter the dirty floors of many of these homes.

On a positive note, there are a few residents who have cleaned up some of the homes and who are currently living in them. Some developers are interested in the “UFO village” and so far four of the Futuro houses have “vanished” from the site. It’s unclear whether the flying-saucer-themed houses will eventually be demolished, but for now this is one of the most bizarre-looking places on Earth and an interesting spot for UFO enthusiasts who want to check out the location.

Throughout the Eastern United States, particularly in southerly states that include North and South Carolina, there are a number of unique, elliptical features of unexplained origin. Known as the “Carolina Bays,” theories of their origin favors ancient, naturally occurring lake formations, although some have proposed that the features could be the remnants of ejecta from an ancient comet strike.

While the Carolina Bays remain a popular (and controversial) item of geological discussion, elsewhere in the world there are similar enigmatic elliptical features that have garnered attention over the years.

One particularly curious series of long grooves that score the landscape of the Argentine pampas near Rio Cuarto have long suggested evidence of an ancient multiple-impact site. The location was first observed by an Argentinian Air Force pilot, Captain Ruben Lianza, who wrote a summary of his observations for an astronomy publication, providing photographs he obtained from air. The images he provided showed teardrop-shaped features on the landscape which were similar in appearance to low-angle impact features previously observed on the planets Mars and Venus, and even on the Moon. They had not, however, been observed anywhere on Earth to-date.

The Rio Cuarto “craters”

(Credit: USGS/NASA Landsat Program/Public Domain).

Lianza went on to co-author an article with P.H. Schultz which appeared in Nature two years after his initial observation, where the authors described the discovery as follows:

“During routine flights two years ago …, one of us (R.E.L.) noticed an anomalous alignment of oblong rimmed depressions (4 km x 1 km) on the otherwise featureless farmland of the Pampas of Argentina. We argue here, from sample analysis and by analogy with laboratory experiments, that these structures resulted from low angle impact and ricochet of a chondritic body originally 150-300 m in diameter.”

A total of ten features were noted across a distance of 50 kilometers. Analysis of geological samples from around the gouges produced evidence of meteoritic fragments and vitrified glass (i.e. stone or sand melted due to intense heat, which is often associated with meteorite impact sites). This led Schultz and Lianza to conclude that there was ample evidence that the sites were produced by an impact; it was also determined that the locations were just a few thousand years old, and likely occurred “well within the time of human habitation.”

The Rio Cuarto features

(Credit: Planetary and Space Science Centre University of New Brunswick).

As it turns out, the newly discovered impact regions had long been known to geologists in the region, although they had never been examined prior to the work conducted by Lianza and Schultz. Following the publication of their Nature article, American geologists also traveled to the site to provide further study and analysis.

The appearance of the impressions led to their being given rather unique names; one of the areas, measuring an impressive 2000 feet in length and 600 feet wide, was called “Drop.” A pair of nearby depressions were dubbed the “Eastern” and “Western Twin.” Yet another, which was comparable in size to the “Twins,” was named the “Northern Basin.”

Fundamental to the theory of an extraterrestrial impact site, each of the depressions shared a similar alignment with an orientation toward the northeast, which the researchers believed could support the idea of a low-angle impact.

However, some ballistics experts have challenged the impact theory over time, since the low entry angle proposed by Lianza and other proponents of an impact theory is an uncommon occurrence. In addition to this, key elliptical features of known impact features of this kind also produce a “butterfly wing” pattern of ejecta, which remains absent from the anomalous Argentinian features. To account for the depth of the Río Cuarto features as craters, an impact with a resulting blast 30 times greater than the 1908 Tunguska event would be required, which must have produced more visible ejecta.

Site of the Tunguska blast, circa 1927-1930

(Public Domain).

While ideas vary about the age of the features, it is interesting to note that the depressions have been suggested to have originated around the beginning of the Holocene; this could possibly have coincided with the Younger Dryas, a period of abrupt cold reversal that occurred approximately 12,900 years ago as Earth was emerging from the last ice age. However, estimates as to the age of the Río Cuarto craters places them anywhere between 10,000 years and as much as 100,000 years old. 

Further comparing the features to their cousins, the Carolina Bays, is the fact that satellite data indicates there are as many as 400 similar elliptical features in the same region. One theory proposed for the frequency and appearance of these elliptical features throughout the region is natural dune formations produced by wind over time, which could account for their shared angular orientation (a similar mechanism has been proposed in relation to the Carolina Bays, as outlined in a paper by Geoarchaeologist Christopher Moore and a number of colleagues, titled “The Quaternary evolution of Herndon Bay, a Carolina Bay on the Coastal Plain of North Carolina (USA): implications for paleoclimate and oriented lake genesis.”

Based upon physical and numerical modeling, proponents Río Cuarto event suggest that the object struck at an angle of no more than 15 degrees from the horizontal, with the impact itself having 10 times more explosive energy than the Barringer Crater event and 30 times more than the Tunguska event.[1] Although the age of the depressions has not yet been determined precisely, it is believed by some researchers[who?] they are about 10,000 years old, placing them at the start of the Holocene, though the EID gives a broader age of less than 100,000 years old.

Unique features such as these remain fascinating, whatever their ultimate cause, and provide compelling clues about the ancient world which, with any luck, will one day be well understood and easily recognized. Until that time, our many questions about the ancient world will rely on further studies of such features, which may ultimately help us unravel several key remaining questions about the ancient world, and abrupt changes that were occurring in the paleoclimate of the ancient Americas.

The number of crop circles is rising around the world, with France seeing a high volume of this in 2019. In addition, the complexity of these crop circles keeps improving as the aliens/pranksters get better at making them and keeping them concealed until they’re done despite the increasing prevalence of drones. One thing you don’t hear very often at these sites are chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” That’s mostly because the U.S. has so very few of them. Another reason might be that our alien/pranksters are just plain bad at plane geometry. That was proven once again this week in Alabama, where five people were arrested as they were creating what has to be the world’s worst crop circle. It shouldn’t even be called a “circle” but there’s no category in this field (pun intended) for crop blobs. Talk about embarrassing. (You can see the ‘circle’ here.)

“I think they may have actually made the pattern, came out of the field, and then re-entered the field, and made a second trip. So, it was a little bit of an adventure for them, it wasn’t just a quick thing.”

Wrong tool for the job

Sheriff Jonathon Horton of the Etowah County Sheriff’s Office told WSFA 12 News that a neighbor of the owner of the crumpled cornfield saw a suspicious vehicle on a security camera video (Big Brother even watches cornfields) and notified the authorities (after also posting it on social media) and it wasn’t long before Brandon Allen Whitlock, Noah Michael Brown, Rex Dakota Brown, Jeni Beth Vaughn, and Stephanie Marie Helm were arrested and charged with totally embarrassing everyone in Etowah County. Also, they were charged with 3rd degree criminal mischief, a felony. The estimated damage to the field was put at $7,500 – that’s a lot of corn.

5 arrested after damaging cornfield

(Source: Etowah County Sheriff’s Office)

What’s sad is that if you were going to pick a place in Alabama to fool the public or send a message to fellow aliens, Etowah County would be the perfect place. Located in northeast Alabama, it’s the state’s smallest county by area but one of the most densely populated. It also is home to Alabama’s most famous cryptid – the White Thang. Reported often in the dense woods of the county, the White Thang is a white Bigfoot-like humanoid creature, usually said to be over 7 feet tall and covered with white fur or hair. It reportedly has a unique howl, stands on two legs but moves extremely fast on all fours and has a foul odor.

Not a circle

Etowah County has also had its share of UFO sightings. While some may be attributed to the Goodyear blimp hangar at the local tire plant, there have been others with a few allegedly attracting military jets. The country also has legends of a river monster and giants, not to mention plenty of ghosts, according to Mark Goodson’s book Haunted Etowah Country, Alabama. But no crop circles.

Don’t look for Goodson to be revising his book for this one either. It’s an embarrassment to Alabama, White Thang and any aliens in the area.

We can’t be good at everything, but how hard are crop circles? After all … France!