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!

The news that there are no hotel rooms available for miles around Area 51 hasn’t deterred the millions who have sworn in Facebook commitment blood that they will storm it on September 20th. Those planning a Burning Man-style campout have no doubt heard that Lil Nas X has offered to perform there, and more music is planned. Now all they need is some food and adult beverages for themselves and any aliens they may liberate during the storming – not to mention to share with any soldiers who don’t shoot them first.

“We can’t confirm if there are aliens at Area 51. But, if they do show up, they deserve the best meats on Earth. If not, Arby’s will still be there serving the planet’s best meats to everyone else attending this historic event.”

Jim Taylor, Chief Marketing Officer for Arby’s, announced via Twitter that the “We have the meats” people will be sending their ‘Arby’s Roadside Meathouse’ to Area 51 on September 20th to feed the storming masses (hopefully before they get shot) from a “secret menu” developed especially for the event. While some reports suggest that the sandwiches will be free, that hasn’t been confirmed – although it seems likely that aliens will certainly eat free – providing there’s anything left if two million people show up.

You shouldn’t storm on an empty stomach

For the adult beverages, Anheuser-Busch announced a “Screw it. Free Bud Light to any alien that makes it out” promotion offering free Area 51 Special Edition Bud Light in a specially-designed can for any aliens liberated who have a taste for “a light bodied space lager with a fresh taste, a crisp, clean finish, and a smooth drinkability.” It’s a safe bet that there will be some additional cans/cases/truckloads for sale for the hot stormers who might need to cool down while cooler heads prevail (although getting drunk won’t help that).

For those who aren’t fans of country rapper Lil Nas X, Matty Roberts – the infamous college student who came up with the Storm Area 51 idea – is trying to make amends by repainting the event as an EDM festival and is recruiting artists from the electronic dance music world to perform there. He says he’s also been contacted by indie rock bands and other performers, but hasn’t named names nor announced a schedule yet.

Play Freebird!

Finally, if you have a conflict on that date or fear being shot or not getting an Arby’s sandwich or Bud Light but still want to experience the thrill of the storming, you can stay home and play the ‘official’ Storm Area 51 video game from Keemstar.

“Can you survive the break in, find the helpless alien captives and get them safely to their UFO to pilot them out of Area 51 and show the world what the government has been hiding all these years? Find and explore hidden back routes and enter the legendary Area 51, avoid the guards using classic stealth mechanics, locate the captured aliens and escort them to their mothership! Utilise the other runners as human cover or provide the ultimate sacrifice so that others might succeed!”

Add your own fast food, beer and gunshots and it’s just like being there – although reviews of the early access version are “mostly negative” at Steam. Then again, maybe “mostly negative” WILL be just like being there.

If there’s one thing for certain about the Storm Area 51 event, there’s money to be made and plenty of non-aliens lining up to get their piece.

The PR people at To the Stars Academy sure know how to keep their name in the headlines, even if they’re only good at rehashing worn out, unsubstantiated claims or repackaging previously reported incidents. Now that the buzz of the first season of Unidentified has died down, the company which claims itself to be at “the forefront of socializing the UFO conversation through entertainment media in the public” has now revived a decades-old claim about possessing and studying alleged exotic metamaterials. 

While many similar claims have been made in the past about what appear to be the exact same samples, I can’t help but notice that some of the language in their press release and accompanying social media posts sounds oddly familiar to descriptions of other recent strange developments loosely related with TTSA and the Navy’s ongoing UFO “revelations” or whatever you want to call them.

The latest press release claims that TTSA is now in the possession of “multiple pieces of metamaterials and an archive of initial analysis and research” of their properties. Accompanying that announcement are statements by Steve Justice, current director of TTSA’s Aerospace Division and the former director of Advanced Systems at Lockheed Martin’s “Skunk Works.” In the press release, Justice claims that while the claims surrounding these materials still cannot be substantiated, these metamaterials could completely revolutionize science as we know it – if they are ever able to be manufactured:

The structure and composition of these materials are not from any known existing military or commercial application. They’ve been collected from sources with varying levels of chain-of-custody documentation, so we are focusing on verifiable facts and working to develop independent scientific proof of the materials’ properties and attributes. In some cases, the manufacturing technology required to fabricate the material is only now becoming available, but the material has been in documented possession since the mid-1990’s. We currently have multiple material samples being analyzed by contracted laboratories and have plans to extend the scope of this study. TTSA will also seek to engage the potential partners who have expressed interest in helping accelerate ADAM [Acquisition and Data Analysis of Materials] research and development. 

If the claims associated with these assets can be validated and substantiated, then we can initiate work to transition them from being a technology to commercial and military capabilities. As noted in our October 2017 TTSA kickoff webcast, technologies that would allow us to engineer the spacetime metric would bring capabilities that would fundamentally alter civilization, with revolutionary changes to transportation, communication, and computation.

While many hopeful ufologists and believers take this press release to be evidence of extraterrestrial technologies, note that Justice never mentions anything about aliens or advanced civilizations. Instead he says merely that “the structure and composition of these materials are not from any known existing military or commercial application” (emphasis added). The fact that Justice states these samples are “not from any known existing military or commercial application” leaves open the possibility that they could be from a highly classified program not yet made public outside of highly compartmentalized special access programs. 

Writing for The War Zone, I previously reported on a series of strange patents patented assigned to the Navy which concern new forms of energy production and incredibly advanced hybrid craft which are claimed to travel at incredibly high speeds and maneuver with disregard for their own inertia equally well through air, water, or the vacuum of space thanks to a radical new form of electromagnetic propulsion. Despite the claims made in those patents, I’ve yet to speak with one physicist who believes the underlying mechanism for that type of quantum physics-bending electromagnetic propulsion is possible.

Still, in a 2019 aeronautics conference presentation describing one of those patents, the inventor Salvatore Pais claimed that these new Navy patents represent “a highly disruptive technology, capable of a total paradigm change in Science and Technology,” and adds that their “military and commercial value is considerable.” Notice the curious similarities with the language of Justice’s statements in the press release.

Even more curious is the Harold Puthoff connection. Harold Puthoff has traveled among the hard sciences and the fringe sciences for years, making somewhat out-there claims at times. Puthoff isn’t mentioned anywhere in this latest press release, but is acknowledged in several of Pais’ publications and Navy patents. Puthoff now sits on the TTSA board, is listed as a co-founder, and is the Vice President of TTSA’s Science and Technology division. Puthoff has for years published theoretical research into so-called “Space Time Metric Engineering,” the same type of physics-bending propulsion described in the Navy’s advanced aerospace patents – patents the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise claims are already operable.

In a presentation given in 2018 at a Conference for the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) and the International Remote Viewing Association (IRVA), Puthoff says that while he’d “love to talk about really fancy materials,” he can’t do so because “they’re classified.” However, Puthoff adds that there are plenty of examples of such metamaterials “provided even in the public domain.” A sample of one such material he’s studied, Puthoff claims, is an “excellent microscopic waveguide for very high frequency electromagnetic radiation.” 

Images of two of the Navy’s patented aerospace craft.

Again, the language Puthoff used in that speech to describe the properties of these materials echoes the language of the Navy’s strange electromagnetic propulsion patents, and during the same presentation Puthoff claims the objects observed in the alleged Navy sightings behaved “as if the craft didn’t have any inertial mass” – the exact language used to describe the abilities of the “hybrid aerospace-underwater vehicle” patented by the Navy. Is this proof of any connection between TTSA’s research and the Navy’s patents? There are only so many words for describing these types of theoretical propulsion methods and alleged aeronautical abilities after all, so it’s likely a coincidence. Still, the Puthoff connection between the patents and these alleged metamaterials is odd. 

What’s odder still is why someone like Steve Justice would now throw his name into the ring with fringe scientists or even pseudoscientists who for decades have made what some would describe as dubious, unfounded claims about alien metamaterials. Justice never goes so far as to say that these materials are in fact legitimate or extraterrestrial in origin, though, only that TTSA has received them and will study them.

I’m also drawn to Justice’s statement that the “manufacturing technology required to fabricate the material is only now becoming available.” Could this be why the Navy suddenly decided to patent such radical-sounding technologies and appeal them so forcefully with the U.S. Patent Office? I’ve been toying with an idea lately and it’s still nothing but a flight of the imagination, so take it for what it is.

Imagine that the U.S. government has indeed been researching electromagnetic propulsion methods, advanced metamaterials, and hybrid craft for years and has encouraged the extraterrestrial hypothesis in order to keep these projects a secret. What if they were finally ready to go public with these new advances, but the new administration elected in 2016 decided to keep it under wraps in order to continue kowtowing to the fossil fuel industries? Could that be why Steve Justice, Chris Mellon, and others decided to form TTSA to take these technologies into the private sector or as a means of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for the public? Could that be why the Navy made their curious patents available to the public? Just a thought.

Returning to TTSA and this latest press release, be sure to take into account how the “Invest Now” button is now permanently anchored to the TTSA website’s masthead, so as usual, take everything they say with a shaker of salt or two. Until they cough up anything more than a cable TV program and social media buzz, there is no way of knowing if they are any better than any other charlatans who have for years made unfounded claims of exotic technologies for profit.

The jungles of the Amazon are one of the last great wildernesses of the world, and have served as the siren’s call for explorer’s since time unremembered. Many have come here to never return, and just as many have come back with amazing tales of adventure and discovery, and it is a place steeped in legends, intrigue, and the unknown. It is a realm of lost tribes, strange mysteries, and weird beasts that roam the gloom, a place perpetually in a sort of shadow and existing unto itself. One very odd account that comes from these wilds is that of an intrepid explorer who came here looking for mysteries, and would soon get more than he bargained for, embarking on a quest that would include lost, uncontacted tribes and strange powers of the mind.

Loren McIntyre was a seasoned explorer, photojournalist, and writer for such esteemed publications as National Geographic, Time, Life, Smithsonian, GEO, Audubon, and South American Explorer, and was in many ways a sort of real-life Indiana Jones figure, spending much of his life doggedly exploring the forbidding, uncharted, and most impenetrable reaches of the Amazon rainforest of South America. Indeed, it was he who would be the first one to discover the source of the mighty Amazon River, when he made an expedition in search of it in 1971. He would make history when he found that the largest, longest, and most powerful river in the world began with a runoff of snow at a mountain in the Andes called Mismi, some 6,400 kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean, which trickled down to pond now called Laguna McIntyre, which in turn emptied into a brook named Carhuasanta, in Peru, after which it began its inexorable growth and meandering journey through some of the most remote wilds on earth. Yet, although this is McIntyre’s most famous discovery it certainly wasn’t his only one, and he would have a very mysterious encounter out in those jungles that he would keep to himself for years.

In 1969, McIntyre embarked on an excursion into the unexplored depths of the Amazon jungle of Brazil. His target was the little-known Mayoruna tribe, also called the Matsés, who were so elusive that they had never been successfully contacted by outsiders and were known as “The Cat People,” due to the arrays of imposing spikes that they wore implanted into their faces. Next to nothing was known about this enigmatic tribe, and they were only ever fleetingly glimpsed. They were like ghosts, and McIntyre had little to go on when he was basically dumped off on the shores of the Amazon River in a place called the Javari valley, on the border between Brazil and Peru, and left to continue on his own, penetrating into dense jungle that no outsider had ever set eyes on in an attempt to find these mysterious people. Little did he know that it would be they who found him.

Loren McIntyre

As the brave, seasoned explorer made his way through mosquito infested jungle he got perhaps too focused on finding the lost tribe, and soon realized that he was hopelessly lost. His journey then turned into aimlessly wandering through the perilous wilderness, and it became obvious that he was not going to be in time for his scheduled pick up at the point where he had been dropped off. He began to resign himself to the fact that he just might end up another mysterious lost explorer, like his childhood idol Percy Fawcett before him, a fellow explorer who had mysteriously vanished while looking for a mythical city he called “Z.” Making this trek more ominous was when at some point McIntyre would stumble across a clearing littered with the bodies of what appeared to be four lumberjacks, half devoured by ants and with arrows sticking from their silent corpses.

This grim discovery had the explorer watching the trees carefully as he aimlessly wandered around half expecting death to come for him at any moment through the shadows, and more sure than ever that he would not see civilization again. It was as he was in this fog of panic and fear that some figures crept out of the forest before him, spikes embedded into their faces, necklaces made of bones, possibly human, around their necks, and looking upon him with a mixture of apprehension and surprise, but not aggressiveness. These were the Mayoruna, and this was the closest any outsider had ever gotten to them. At least any who were still alive.

The frightened explorer immediately and very slowly pulled out some gifts that he had brought in the event that he actually made contact. From his bag he produced some cloth and mirrors, which he dropped before the tribesmen as they looked on with inscrutable expressions on their pierced faces. They stepped closer to accept the gifts, and then seemed to beckon for him to follow them as they began to melt back into the forest. The weary McIntyre stumbled after them, barely able to keep up with their nimble navigation of the jungle, and so would begin the next chapter of his strange adventure.

They arrived at what seemed to be a makeshift camp full of other members of the tribe, and they seemed to show a strange mixture of curiosity and aggression towards him. Upon examining his tennis shoes they went about burning them to ashes, and his watch they found fascinating, but they destroyed that too. Indeed, most of his possessions would be either stolen from him or destroyed, and even his camera, which they oddly showed no interest in, was broken when a monkey descended from the trees to take it from him. Although there was no outright aggression against him, there were some grim reminders that he was very much in danger. He would claim that they possessed trinkets made of human bone and that they drank out of hollowed out skulls. They were also very well armed and never far from their bows, and one tribesman with red face paint, who he called “Red Cheeks,” took to menacing him and scowling at him.

McIntyre would end up staying with this lost tribe for two months, and during this time made many observations. He noticed that they were constantly on the move, perpetually moving to a new camp, sometimes suddenly and without warning, and they clearly had a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They also seemed to have no concept of individual possessions, freely sharing everything with each other and taking or using whatever they liked without repercussions. Even odder still, he noticed that these people often moved quite bizarrely in sync, knowing what the others would do or acting in precise tandem without speaking to each other. For some time, he pondered this anomaly, but he would soon learn that the explanation was far odder than anything that he had ever guessed at.

One day he was approached by the one he took to be the chief of the tribe, an ancient looking, sinewy and grizzled tree trunk of a man, covered in warty growths that would earn him McIntyre’s nickname “Barnacle.” When the chief approached he spoke to McIntyre, and the explorer found that bizarrely, after weeks of being unable to understand anything any of them had said, he clearly comprehended what Barnacle had to say. This utterly perplexed him, but he soon realized that this chief was not moving his mouth when he spoke, and that he was talking directly into his mind, using a sort of telepathy that McIntyre would later call “beaming,” and which Barnacle called “the other language.”

Barnacle explained that the tribe existed as a sort of hive mind consciousness, and that their thoughts were all linked to each other, although only the tribal elders were proficient at focusing this telepathic power and truly using it to its full potential. Here he learned that there was no real “self” as Westerners would think of it, and that to them the concept of an individual “self” made little sense. The chief also telepathically explained that they were under constant threat from loggers and other outsiders, and that the reason the tribe moved so often was that they were on a spiritual journey to what he called “The Beginning,” or the literal beginning of time, where they hoped to be beyond the reach of the intruding outside world. Indeed, the tribe seemed to have a very strange grasp of how time worked that was rather alien to anything the explorer was familiar with. A 1991 article in The Los Angeles Times about McIntyre’s bizarre experience explains the tribe’s philosophy on time as follows:

The main feature of time, by western definition, is its passage. But for the Mayoruna, time is at once mobile and static. It moved with man, stopped with him, advanced and retreated with him. It is not the implacable judge, condemning man to a tragically brief life. Time is a shelter, an escape into safety and regeneration, a repository whose chief function is not piling up the past, intact yet dead, but rather keeping it alive and available. And, in the face of violent encroachment on their land by white settlers, that past assisted them with an alternative to a menacing present.

The chief invited McIntyre to come along with them on their journey to “The Beginning,” and for the next few weeks he followed them on their mystical quest and engaged in their rituals, often taking psychoactive jungle concoctions that warped his perceptions. He found that if he concentrated he could pick up on a sort of static fuzz that contained the interlinked thoughts of all of the tribe members, through processes he could never hope to fathom. However, he knew at some point he would have to part ways with them and try to leave this land of jungle, telepathy, and time travel behind him to get back to the civilization that was no doubt convinced he had vanished. The only problem was that he had no idea where he was, and on top of this, although he had been invited and was not physically threatened by the Mayoruna in any way, he had no illusions that he was anything other than their prisoner, and wondered what they would do if he tried to flee. However, in the end the decision was made for him, a flood swept through during a torrential rain, and McIntyre would be whisked away as he clung to a balsa raft, emptied into the river and incredibly found the next day by a pilot flying over.

Upon getting back to civilization, McIntyre would keep what had happened to him a secret for years, and it is quite likely that the whole fantastical tale would have died with him in 2003 if it hadn’t been for a Romanian-American writer, director and movie producer, by the name of Petru Popescu. In 1987 Popescu met McIntyre by chance while on a river boat trip up the Amazon River. The two men hit it off, and for some reason McIntyre confided to him about what had happened all of those years ago with the mysterious Mayoruna tribe. It was all rather amazing, and when Popescu asked why he had never told anyone about it, McIntyre said that he didn’t think any one would ever believe him, and he had been worried about maintaining his reputation as a respected explorer, writer, and photographer. He would say of this:

I’m pretty reluctant to voice very much about the beaming experience because I didn’t want my friends to think I’d gone around the bend. ‘What is this? The guy’s hallucinating?’

Popescu would finally manage to convince McIntyre to let him write a book on his adventures, and in 1991 released The Encounter: Amazon Beaming. The explorer would claim that in his dealings with dozens of other tribes in the same region he had never before or since experienced anything like he did during his time with the Mayoruna, and he did not know what became of them. We are left to wonder just how much of this account is true, and if it is just what was going on with these elusive people of the jungle. The tribe itself has sort of disappeared, they have never been formally studied, and since McIntyre passed away in 2003, we are left only with Popescu’s book as a window into this strange tribe and their world and ways. One wonders if they are still out there, or if they managed to make that journey to “The Beginning,” finally at peace and forevermore out of our reach.