In 2010, in a disturbing and eye-opening article, the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper reported the following: “More and more police forces and government agencies are exploring the potential of unmanned drones for covert aerial surveillance, security, or emergency operations across the UK, the Guardian has learned.” According to the Guardian, one of the departments of the British Government that is at the forefront of keeping the population of the United Kingdom under surveillance is SOCA, the Serious Organized Crime Agency. SOCA has a close working relationship with MI5, which is the U.K.’s equivalent of the United States’ FBI. Government documentation secured by investigative journalists of the Guardian revealed that the growth of the use of drones in the U.K., by regional police forces, is growing at an extremely rapid rate.  And it’s not just the Guardian that has reported on such issues in the United Kingdom.

The BBC, in April 2015, told its readers that, “Police guarding London airports will start using drones for surveillance following a review by counter-terrorism officers. An 18-month analysis by the National Counter Terrorism Policing Headquarters, which helps develop police policy, found the technology could be ‘transformative.’ Privacy campaigners said they were concerned about the plans. Police are also to take over investigations into drone misuse.”

It’s decidedly disturbing that the very people who, in the U.K, are tasked with investigating the misuse of drones, are the same people who are using such drones, namely the police. The BBC had more to say on this issue. Revealing that, at the time of writing, more than 50,000 drones were in use in the U.K. – whether owned by the public and / or law-enforcement personnel and the intelligence world – the BBC noted how this growing increase in the employment of drones threatened the privacy of the people of the U.K. It quoted the words of Big Brother Watch’s Emma Carr, who said that, in regards to drones it’s vital that we have a fuller grasp of “how they’re used and who they’re being used by.” Amen to that.

Now let us move onto Australia. In 2014, Australia’s ABC News reported that, “The Australian Federal Police has told a federal parliamentary inquiry that drones are among the latest tools it is using in major crime investigations. A parliamentary committee has begun examining the growing use and popularity of drone technology, as well as the privacy concerns it raises for Australians.”

The extent to which the AFP was using drones, and the nature of the technology involved, became very clear in 2013. That was when the AFP used drone-based technology to search for the remains of an anti-drugs proponent in the New South Wales area of the nation. Mark Harrison, the Commander of the AFP, told the Australian press the following: “We assisted in the imagery and the recording of that search and excavation and the UAV provided a different and unique perspective to aid and assist in that process.” Notably, this was the very first occasion on which the AFP acknowledged it had a drone program. As is the case in the United States and the United Kingdom, the citizens of Australia have their deep concerns about how drones may be misused, all in the name of what passes for national security.

Certainly, the provisions of the Australian Freedom of Information Act have demonstrated that more and more people have lodged complaints with the world of law enforcement, chiefly to express their outrage at what they see as flagrant disregard for personal privacy. Much of this was revealed by Australia’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner. Timothy Pilgrim, the Commissioner himself, admitted that, “There are cases where people have woken up in the morning, pulled their curtains open and there’s been a drone hovering outside. It’s starting to suggest to us that there’s a point in time at which we need to sit back and say: ‘Do we have the right laws in place to make sure that we can regulate to the best extent possible how these devices can be used?’ That is the challenge now facing lawmakers in Federal Parliament and across Australia.”

In Australia, at least, there is some degree of oversight: the police, the military, and the intelligence community are now required to secure a warrant before any kind of drone-driven surveillance of citizens and residents can go ahead – which is very encouraging. We can only hope that such rules and regulations are being adhered to.

In a paper published in the journal Ecology, integrative biologist Alex Smith described the finding as an “unexpected and fascinating case of plants eating vertebrates in our backyard, in Algonquin Park.”

Pitcher Plant

Even though the plants at the provincial park have been observed for hundreds of years, nobody – until fairly recently – has reported seeing a salamander species being trapped by a pitcher plant anywhere in North America. In fact, it was in the summer of 2017 when Teskey Baldwin, who was an undergraduate student at that time and on a University of Guelph field ecology course, discovered a salamander trapped inside of a pitcher plant.

In the fall of 2018, a team of researchers studied pitcher plants that were located around a single pond and they noticed that approximately one in five of them contained tiny salamanders that were around the same size as a human finger. Even more surprising is that numerous plants held more than one salamander.

Since there are a limited number of fish in the bog ponds, it is believed that the young salamanders could have fallen into the plants because they were looking for insects. Another possibility is that they crawled into the plants in order to escape from predators. While some of the salamanders that were trapped inside of the plants died within just three days, others lived up to 19 days.

Smith stated that the pitcher plants could have turned carnivorous in order to get nutrients, such as nitrogen which is lacking in the soil of the bogs. In other parts of the world, flesh-eating plants – such as the sundews and the Venus flytrap – have also been found in environments that lack important nutrients.

Pitcher Plant

Other meat-eating pitcher plants have been discovered in other parts of the world since the eighteenth century, but it is believed that this is the first time such a plant has been found in North America. One example was a pitcher plant that was found in Asia a decade ago and it ate spiders and insects, but also mice and small birds.

Let’s hope that the pitcher plants stick with small vertebrates, as it would be quite concerning to see a large sign near the bog that reads, “Stay on the boardwalk and watch your children. Here be plants that eat vertebrates,” as Smith said.

A picture of a salamander caught inside of a pitcher plant, as well as a photo of the bog where the plants were found can be seen here.

In this age of government UFO revelations and presidential candidates promising disclosure of secret UFO files, you would think that the town which claims to be the home of the “only historically documented UFO sighting in the United States” would be proud of a monument touting the event. In this case, you would be wrong.

“The monument was removed at considerable expense to the town. Unfortunately, the party responsible was not responsive.”

The Berkshire Edge interviewed Selectman (a New England term for a member of the local government board) Martin Mitsoff about the removal this week of the Sheffield UFO monument located near the Sheffield, Massachusetts, covered bridge where in 1969 Thomas Reed, then age 9, and his family found themselves “being taken aboard a tarnished circular looking vessel where an image of a willow tree was displayed.” The next thing he says he remembers is being back in the car and a couple of hours had passed.

Sheffield? Looks like a good place to land.

His grandmother reported the incident to the police and found that at least 20 others had also reported seeing a UFO and a local radio station said they received 40 calls from witnesses. Reed claims he took a lie detector test and got a 99.1 truth rating. Based on that, the Great Barrington Historical Society declared the UFO sighting “historically significant and true” and money was raised to create a 6-foot tall, 5,000-pound concrete memorial (you can see photos of the monument and the park here) with an inscription that reads in part:

“This Governor’s Citation [is] in recognition of the off-world incident on Sept. 1st, 1969, which engaged the Reed Family, which has been established.”

Cool! What’s Selectman Mistoff’s problem? Well, the monument attracted graffiti and was discovered to be on government property, so it was moved 50 feet and updated with lights and a bench. Then it was discovered to be on a town right-of-way easement. That prompted a year of meetings and email exchanges which resolved nothing. On June 4, this happened:

“A crew from the town highway department arrived at around 8:30 a.m. with a front-end loader/backhoe combination and hauled away the monument, a bench and a row of crushed stone.”

The story doesn’t reveal where the monument was hauled away to, but Reed considers this to be an act of theft and plans to file charges.

Wait a minute! Why doesn’t the governor’s office get involved, since the plaque on the statue is from current Governor Charlie Baker? Doesn’t that make this an official state monument? An earlier story by The Berkshire Edge has a possible answer:

“Tim Buckley, then Baker’s communications director, said in 2016 the citation was issued in error after a persistent Reed repeatedly asked the governor’s staff to put his signature on it. The text of the citation is all in capitals and is poorly written. It appears to have been notarized by a justice of the peace in Connecticut.”

Remember … you promised a monument.

Uh-oh. It looks like the local officials agree with the governor’s former communications director and not with Reed nor the producers of the TV show “Unsolved Mysteries,” which had just been in town to do a segment on Reed and his UFO story. Should Reed try to enlist some UFO disclosure proponents like former US Senator Harry Reid or Tom DeLonge? That might help, but for now it appears the parties have their lawyers aimed at each other and will shoot it out in court.

Has anyone considered asking for help from the crew of the UFO?

The Bolshaya Udina volcano is a stratovolcano situated in the middle of the Klyuchevskaya volcano group on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia. It had been previously classified as an “extinct” volcano, meaning that it hasn’t erupted in a very long time and it more than likely would never erupt again. However, experts are now saying that the 10,000-foot-tall volcano has woken up and could possibly cause an eruption as big and devastating as the one that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum nearly 2,000 years ago.

While the exact date of when the volcano last erupted is unknown, scientists have detected seismic activity, possibly indicating that the volcano has woken up. They wrote about this in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Researchwhich can be read here.

Bolshaya Udina volcano

Over a two-month period last year (May and June of 2018), researchers from Russia, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia conducted an investigation of the volcano by installing four seismic stations. During that time, they recorded 559 events around Udina volcano. The activity formed an “elliptical cluster” with the seismic activity occurring three miles deep. The researchers wrote, “These seismic properties may indicate the presence of magma intrusions with a high content of melts and fluids, which may justify changing the current status of this volcano from ‘extinct’ to ‘active’.”

They also noticed seismic activity that connects the Udina volcano to an area that’s believed to store magma called the Tolud zone. “Based on the results of this study, we conclude that during 2018, the Tolud magma source appeared to have built another pathway to Bolshaya Udina,” they wrote.

Ivan Kulakov, who is the lead author of the paper, told the newspaper Science in Siberia that if the Udina volcano erupted, it would be catastrophic, comparing it to the devastation Mount Vesuvius caused in 79 A.D. He told the newspaper, “When a volcano is silent for a long time, its first explosion can be catastrophic,” adding, “A large amount of ash is thrown into the air, it is carried far away, and not only the surrounding settlements, but also large territories all over the planet can suffer. Recall Pompeii: the awakening of Vesuvius was preceded by a lull for several thousand years. And the eruption in Peru in 1600 led to a cooling in Europe and famine in Russia.”

Bolshaya Udina volcano

Researchers are planning to study the environment around the volcano with hopes of discovering where the magma is located. It remains to be seen when or if Udina volcano will erupt, but for the safety of those around that area – and even other parts of the world that could be affected by the devastation – let’s hope it stays asleep.

In December 2018, a strange radar anomaly appeared over the Midwestern United States. Civilian weather radar showed a massive, stationary blob that hovered near Evansville, Indiana for over ten hours in a relatively tight formation. Months later, similar anomalies appeared on radar systems in Sydney, Australia and near Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico.

Many aviation insiders quickly floated the theory that these anomalies were caused by a new type of chaff, a type of aircraft countermeasure which involves launching clouds of metallic fibers into the air to confuse enemy radar systems. If that’s the case as has been assumed, why test it over civilian areas, though?

A pair of B-1B Lancers deploy chaff and flares during a military exercise.

Now, three months after the New Mexico incident, another strange radar anomaly has appeared in the United States, this time over Southern California. Meteorologists throughout the area spotted a dense blob on weather radar covering some 80 square miles (130 sq km). As in previous cases, the anomalous formation appeared on a clear day without any cloud cover. “It was very strange because it was a relatively clear day and we weren’t really expecting any rain or thunderstorms,” National Weather Service meteorologist Casey Oswant told NPR. “But on our radar, we were seeing something that indicated there was something out there.”

Residents of America’s western deserts are no stranger to aerial mysteries and curiosities given the region’s numerous military aerospace and weapons development facilities, but the explanation offered for this most recent radar mystery is odd. According to the National Weather Service in San Diego, this radar anomaly was caused by a massive swarm of ladybugs flying miles above the ground.

This particular phenomenon is known as a “bloom” and occurs whenever large populations of ladybugs all migrate at once to seek food or warm weather in winter. Still, experts say the timing is odd; these blooms typically appear earlier in the year as winter gives way to spring. “It’s not exactly clear why we’re seeing this big swarm now that we haven’t before,” says Cornell University entomologist John Losey. “Is that just sort of a random effect of what happened in the weather and the prey populations? Is it having something to do with climate change that’s sort of condensing when they all are going to fly?”

Not all ecologist and entomologists are buying the ladybug bloom story. James Cornett, senior scientist with the aptly-named James W. Cornett Ecological Consultants, says a ladybug swarm that size would have darkened the skies and created a panic. “There would have been unbelievable numbers of telephone calls to the police,” Cornett said. “It merits some investigation.” The San Bernardino County Fire Department received no reports of massive ladybug swarms.

Apparently, the ladybug theory was put forward by a single weather service spotter who reported a high number of ladybugs in the area at the time of the swarm. Could these ladybugs be a convenient scapegoat? This is only the latest in several strikingly similar radar anomalies, yet insects were not cited in any of the other incidents.

Judging from radar footage posted to Twitter by the National Weather Service, this alleged ladybug swarm was spotted moving south from what suspiciously seems to be either Edwards Air Force Base or the Fort Irwin National Training Center, one of the U.S. Army’s premier training centers. The Fort Irwin site houses mock cities and villages designed to resemble urban areas around the world and frequently uses both live and simulated unmanned aerial vehicles to prepare units to face these threats in the field. Edwards AFB, meanwhile, is home to all manner of Air Force testing and research centers which develop black budget aerospace projects and the most bleeding edge aircraft technologies. Much of the airspace surrounding the area where the “ladybug swarm” was spotted is restricted to military use.

According to the radar images shared by the NWS, the swarm appeared to originate from a point just northwest of Barstow. Hmm…

The location of this anomalous radar blob pretty coincidental, and the fact that nobody saw or photographed an 80-mile wide swarm of insects flying just a few thousand feet off the ground is pretty weird. Could this ladybug bloom have actually been a swarm of tiny drones, a test of some radar-spoofing electronic warfare technology, or something far spookier? It wouldn’t mark the first time the military has tested a swarm of micro-drones over California. Which seems more likely, particularly given that some ecologists doubt the ladybug story?

Frances Swan was a woman from Eliot, Maine, USA who claimed, in May 1954, startling contact with extraterrestrial beings via automatic-writing. As for what automatic-writing actually is, there’s this from the Psychic Elements blog: “Automatic writing, also known as Spirit writing, is a psychic gift and may be the one of the easiest psychic abilities to develop. Successful automatic writing is a powerful experience. Automatic writing is a way to channel information (including predictions and prophecy) and spirit energy through writing. It is the ability to allow intuition from outside you to flow through you. Automatic writing is a form of intuition that has been around for thousands of years. But it wasn’t until the late 1800’s and early 1900’s that it became better known through the worldwide spread of the Spiritualism movement.”

UFO researcher Grant Cameron says: “Mrs. Swan began receiving messages in April 1954 from a group of aliens who claimed they were orbiting the earth in two large satellites. The two main aliens in the group were AFFA who commanded ship M-4, and PONNAR who commanded ship L-11. These aliens told Mrs. Swan that they had a base on the moon, and that they were here to warn against many earthly pursuits such as the development of atomic weapons. These messages continued for decades, and drew the interest of the FBI, Navy Intelligence, and the CIA.”

It transpires that Swan’s activities had been indirectly brought to the attention of the FBI by retired Rear Admiral Herbert Bain Knowles. He just happened to be Swan’s next-door neighbor. And who lived down the street from Swan and Knowles? None other than famous alien abductees Betty and Barney Hill! Coincidentally or not, Knowles later became a board director with NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, which was formed in 1956. Knowles helped Swan to pen a letter sent to Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith, which he, Knowles, personally endorsed. It was a letter that outlined Swan’s claims. From there, the letter was forwarded to the Secretary of Defense, whose office then circulated it to the FBI, Navy, Army, Air Force and, finally, the CIA. For those who may not know, under the leadership of Major Donald H. Keyhoe, Marine Corps (Ret.), NICAP was practically obsessed with the “interplanetary” theory for the UFO phenomenon.

FBI records on Swan exist and provide the following (along with much more of a different nature, which I’ll relate in a later article): “…Mrs. Swan stated that there were two spaceships from which she had been receiving messages. They were described as 150 miles wide, 200 miles in length, and 100 miles in depth…these ships are designated as M-4 and L-11 and they also contain mother ships which measure approximately 150 to 200 feet in length…there were approximately 5,000 of these mother ships…’Affa’ is the Manager of the Commander of the ship M-4 which is from the planet Uranus and ‘Ponnar’ is the Manager or the Commander of the ship L-11 which is from the planet Hatann…”

The FBI continued: “These contacts with ‘Affa’ and ‘Ponnar’ were for the purpose of protecting our own earth from destruction caused by the explosion of the atomic bomb, hydrogen bomb, and wars of various kinds which they, ‘Affa’ and ‘Ponnar,’ say disrupt the magnetic field of force which surrounds the earth…’Affa’ and ‘Ponnar’ are presently working the area of the Pacific Ocean repairing ‘fault lines’ which are in danger of breaking.”

As is almost always the case with messages received via automatic writing, they did not live up to their initial promise. The mysterious Affa had assured Swan that he would appear in person for officials from the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), or would make contact by other means, on a particular date in the summer of 1954. He did not. Nor did Affa’s prediction to Swan come true that: “…this earth is really going to end as stated in the Holy Bible around 1956.” All attempts by ONI personnel to contact Affa via telepathy, in the company of Swan, also failed.

According to a classified report prepared by Project Blue Book’s Major Robert Friend, a secret meeting was held on July 9, 1959 at a CIA office in Washington under the direction of Arthur Lundahl – of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center. Present at the meeting was a representative of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and seven CIA officers. Three days prior to the July 9 meeting, a Naval Intelligence officer, one Commander Larsen, discussed with Lundahl the failed Frances Swan/Naval Intelligence contact experiment of the summer of 1954. Larsen was encouraged to repeat the experiment, which involved him “going into a trance,” Friend later told writer and filmmaker Robert Emenegger. This time it was said to have been successful: a flying saucer suddenly appeared on the scene.

Documentation on this later incident referred to the sighting of an aerial craft described as being “round with the perimeter brighter than the center.” But when checks were made with radar operatives in Washington, “for some unknown reason radar return from the direction in which the ship was supposedly seen had blocked out at the time of the sighting.”

The report also noted that, “The Navy indicates that through these contacts Mrs. Swan has been able to answer technical questions beyond the level of her education or background.” While the Navy clearly did not rule out all that had gone down, I should stress that, in relation to Frances Swan’s claims, the Navy could certainly have put things in a far less condescending and insulting fashion when it came to the matter of  her “level of her education or background.”