A roundup of mysterious, paranormal and strange news stories from the past week.
The famous Phoenix Lights UFO incident took place on March 13, 1997, but we now know another incident occurred that same night that should have equal significance – at least that’s according to retired USMC Sgt Roderick Castle, who revealed on a recent podcast the heretofore untold story of his experience during the USMC Hunter Warrior Advanced Warfighting Experiment in Southern California in early Marcj 1997; Castle says he and other Marines were performing overnight AV-8B Harrier crash retrieval duties when they were sent to investigate “unidentified flare activity”, but they instead saw what he described as a 200-300 foot black triangular craft hovering 150-200 feet above the ground; underneath it was 30 heavily armed men in black gear with no identifiable markings; these men surrounded the Marines and ordered them to keep their heads down; Castle says he peeked and saw the triangle fly off silently at an incomprehensible speed with no visible signs of propulsion; Castle says he’s met with whistleblower David Grusch, Congressman Eric Burlison and researcher Steven Greer and plans to testify before Congress about this sighting, which may be related to the Phoenix Lights. If waiting until all of the witnesses are deceased is the government’s strategy, these witnesses need to hurry up.
Residents of Liverpool may soon find out what happens to ghosts when the house they haunt burns down after the historic but abandoned Woolton Hall was destroyed by fire recently; it was built in 1704 and purchased by Richard Molyneux, the 1st Viscount Molyneux, and for 200 years was a residence for the rich and powerful; in the 20th century, the hall was used as a private school and an army hospital, but fell into disrepair; plans to transform it into a retirement home never materialized but a new owner hoped to turn it into a haunted hotel for paranormal enthusiasts after investigators encountered ghosts of monks in the cellar and one of a pregnant woman who fell down the stairs, plus plenty of disembodied footsteps; unfortunately, the fire destroyed it before the owners could get local government approval. There are plenty of other haunted buildings in England, but do spirits share the human problem of overcrowding?
The Bigfoot research community and those just curious about Sasquatch are arguing over how much validity to give the announcement from Bigfoot hunter Charles “Snake” Stuart, who not only claims he found a dead Bigfoot body in the Adirondack Mountains but has it on display at The Great New York State Fair in the horticulture building where anyone can purchase a ticket to see the remains of ‘Dack’ (for Adirondack) – which is ‘something’ that looks like an 8-foot tall, hairy, muscular Bigfoot with an ape-like face; Stuart says the cause of its death is a mystery, but he and his team found scat which showed it was an omnivore (plants and meat) with parasites, indicating it was a scavenger; Stuart hope to get more financial support for DNA testing to prove to skeptics Dack is a real Bigfoot; those skeptics call this a fake and a money-making hoax, and in fact one says Stuart is actually Brian Andrew Whiteley, a visual artist. Is a fake dead Bigfoot really considered to be ‘art’?
The ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain in Vermont is a science and nature museum, but recently it opened an exhibit on Champ, Lake Champlain’s famous legendary lake monster; the exhibit tales a “Dive into the science and history of Vermont’s most iconic legend” by examining hundreds of years of reported sightings and theories on the cryptid, with a life-sized 30-foot sculpture of a plesiosaur, one of the prehistoric creatures used to explain Champ; there is also a Champ Design Studio where budding cryptozoologists can design their own version of Champ and release it into ECHO’s interactive digital aquarium. If this doesn’t boost Champ’s popularity past the Loch Ness Monster, nothing will.
Does Nessie have a museum?
Our close encounter with the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS isn’t until the end of October 2025 but that hasn’t stopped it from being in the news, especially with Harvard astronomer and physics professor Avi Loeb issuing comments about it weekly – his latest observation is that 3I/ATLAS as seen through NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has a “glow of light” like the coma surrounding a comet, but there is no sign of a cometary tail, causing Loeb to speculate that the interstellar space object is generating “its own light”, which means either 3I/ATLAS is emitting radiation because it is a “rare fragment from the core of a nearby supernova that is rich in radioactive material” or it’s a “spacecraft powered by nuclear energy” and the light is from “dirt that accumulated on its surface during its interstellar travel”; as usual, Loeb says more research is needed and NASA has agreed – it will point the instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at 3I/ATLAS and see what they pick up. If 3I/ATLAS really is an alien spaceship, we’re going to be too tired of hearing about it to get excited – or is that the plan?
For an alternative perspective on 3I/ATLAS from someone with real UFO experience, Nick Pope, the former UK Ministry of Defense UFO investigator, lists six simple reasons why people besides Avi Loeb think it is an alien spacecraft; 1) it’s too large (12 miles wide) to be an asteroid; 2) its rate of acceleration (130,000 mph) is too fast for a natural object; 3) it cam from the center of the galaxy on a path that was hidden from us by obstacles, light and stars; 4) that hidden course continues in our solar system (it is blocked by the sun) so chances of interception are limited; 5) it will pass close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter as if it is on a mapping mission; and 6) the only intelligent beings in the solar system (us) won’t be able to see it; proof it is an alien spaceship will happen when it either change courses and come to Earth or it deploys probes that will probe us. Thanks, Nick – now show us how to hop on for a ride.
On a recent podcast, Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna, who heads the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, said that she has investigated an incident at Eglin Air Force Base where many pilots reported seeing UAPs, another at Vandenberg Space Force Base where multiple people and a pilot claimed to see a red cube UFO bigger than a football field, and her own personal experience while serving in the Air Force at the Portland Air National Guard Base where there was “an airspace incursion” which she tried to investigate, only to be told by pilots that “we can’t really talk about it” because they were afraid of being “taken off flight status”; Luna also claimed she has seen evidence of technology created by “interdimensional beings” that can move “outside of time and space” and there were “books of the Bible that have been removed that explain and kind of touch on these topics”. You may not agree with her politics, but listen to her comments on disclosure because UFOs are definitely what makes Luna tick.
A witch on a broomstick is a classic Hollywood staple, but a woman in France claimed she saw the real thing and uploaded a video to prove it; the clip shows a “strange humanoid figure” in the sky which the woman recorded from her apartment window; unlike the fast-flying Wicked Witch of the West, this broom rider seemed to be stationary, leading some commenters to believe she had unusual powers, while skeptics thought it was more like an optical illusion, a drone, a computer generation or some other form of hoax; there was no word from the local authorities, government officials or the military, and no further sightings. A flying house would have helped settle this identification issue.
The long debate over how the massive three-ton bluestones of Stonehenge were transported there from Wales, Scotland and parts unknown moved one step closer to resolution with the positive identification of a tooth in a cow’s jawbone discovered in 1924 at Stonehenge’s south entrance – scientists using modern isotope analysis of the third molar discovered details about the cow’s diet, environment and movement and determined it came from an area with Palaeozoic rocks like the bluestones found in Pembrokeshire, Wales, before it walked to Salisbury while pulling stones that eventually became the inner circle of Stonehenge; the analysis also showed that the cow was female and was pregnant at one time; this is proof that humans used animals to move at least some of the stones with animals. The cows were eventually eaten, which shows labor laws haven’t changed much.
If you are afraid of a Quija board, you are not alone and a new study in in the journal Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice explains this fear – using 84 volunteers over two years, researchers had them use Quija boards at Montserrat Mountain near Barcelona which is famous for its supernatural legends; the experiments were conducted at night in front of an abandoned hotel that had been used as a hospital during the Spanish Civil War which would stimulate thoughts of spirits; the participants answered questionnaires before and after the sessions and the responses of those who already believed in the paranormal showed high levels of anxiety, altered states of consciousness and the perception of supernatural occurrences, while those of skeptics showed none of these signs; this led the researchers (Álex Escolà-Gascón, Neil Dagnall, and Andrew Denovan) to conclude that the belief in the Ouija board itself produced the fear, not any supernatural activity; they also noted that the research showed that “simply using a Ouija board is perfectly safe”. Sorry if this ruins your horror movie script.
This was more fun in high school.
If you fear that AI and robots are taking over the world and may one day destroy humanity as we know it, your fears are reinforced by movie director James Cameron (Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Titanic, Avatar) who said in an interview that “I do think there’s still a danger of a Terminator-style apocalypse where you put AI together with weapons systems, even up to the level of nuclear weapon systems, nuclear defense counterstrike, all that stuff” even though he uses AI professionally and thinks that it is both the problem and “super-intelligence is the answer” to preventing a Terminator apocalypse; meanwhile, the Chinese tech firm Kaiwa Technology announced the development of the world’s first “gestation robot” – a humanoid with an artificial womb designed to carry a human fetus through ten months of nine months of gestation and deliver a live baby; Kaiwa Technology says the gestation robot will be available in 2026 for the low, low price of around $13,900 and will be marketed as an Artificial surrogate mother for those who wish to avoid the pain of human gestation. Don’t give up yet, James Cameron – this sounds like a great movie plot.
Mysterious livestock deaths usually stirs up talk of Chupacabra, especially in Mexico, but residents of Tlacotepec de Benito Juárez, Puebla, might be thinking Bigfoot, Dogman or some other upright creature after seeing a video posted by a family in the La Virgen-La Rápida area which shows what appears to be a large animal-like creature standing upright; while some comments say it is a large dog or a panther and others think it is a person in a costume, the recent strange and violent animal killings by an unknown predator have many calling for hunts and investigations by government officials. Or is it a Chupacabra in a Bigfoot costume?
The so-called ‘missing link’ between the first humans and their ape ancestors is still missing, but the number of early hominins has gone up as Arizona State researchers in Ethiopia digging near where ‘Lucy’ – the 2.95 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis – was found have uncovered more previously unknown species of Homo from the same time period; according to ASU paleoecologist Kaye Reed, “Here we have two hominin species that are together. And human evolution is not linear, it’s a bushy tree, there are life forms that go extinct”; the Ledi-Geraru Research Project found 13 teeth in sediments that date back between 2.6 to 2.8 million years ago which included samples from the oldest member of the Homo genus, and some from an unknown Australopithecus genus that the researchers concluded was a new species of Australopithecus that’s distinct from the ‘Lucy’ species; this puts three species of early humans living together, making it “a critical time period for human evolution”; because the fossils are teeth, the researchers can now find out they were eating and possibly whether early Homo and this unidentified species of Australopithecus eating the same things, living together, fighting over resources, and possibly sharing yet another common ancestor. It’s time to get a longer evolution bumper sticker for your car.
Looking to the future of humans, scientists are looking at current trends in our diets, technology and environment and making predictions on what humans will look like thousand of years from now; if they have photos of us, they will notice they lack five body parts we have: 1) the researchers say our fixation on hair removal will lead to hairless humans who no longer need it for warmth, protection or vanity; 2) while they may be wise, they won’t have wisdom teeth due to soft diets which will shorten our jaws and crowd the big molars out; 3) the tailbone or coccyx is already nearly obsolete – this remnant of a tail still supports some pelvic muscles – but our evolving chairs will make it go away completely; 4) those soft foods will eliminate the appendix, which once helped digest cellulose-rich plants but is now just a source of emergency room visits and surgery; 5) if you can wiggle your ears, be thankful because future generations will lose those highly specialized muscles which were once used to fold over ears to protect us from loud sounds. Those future humans may wish we didn’t also lose snot, ugly toenails and belly buttons.
I don’t see the resemblance – these must be your relatives.
Most people in the U.S. don’t eat wild boars, but if you do, watch out for the ones with ‘neon blue meat’; according to Dan Burton, owner of Urban Trapping Wildlife Control, “It’s not just a faint shade of blue—it’s vivid. We’re talking neon blue, blueberry blue”; while the cause of the fluorescent blue hue is a mystery, scientists suspect it is the result of the wild boars eating rats, mice and squirrels which have eaten difacinone, a dyed rodenticide commonly used by farmers and pest control companies; the pesticide causes fatal internal bleeding and the boars may have eaten some of it as well as poisoned rodents; no matter how the boar got blue, the meat is harmful and potentially fatal to humans, so the authorities ask anyone finding it to report it to the Department of Fish and Wildlife. And then go have a McRib or a pulled pork sandwich.
According to a new study published in Cell, researchers at Stanford University have developed a brain prosthesis that can interpret internal thoughts in real time using sensors implanted in the motor cortex, which is responsible for sending commands to the vocal tract; a machine-learning model interprets the neural signals and predicts which words the user intends to express by thinking about them; four participants: three with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and one with a brain stem stroke, had the sensors implanted and merely thought of wht they wanted to say and then watched the words appear on a screen in real time; the device supports a vocabulary of up to 125,000 words, making it a tremendous tool for helping people with ALS and stroke survivors communicate easily and quickly, carryon on ‘conversations’ at 120 to 150 words per minute. Just think of the conversations Stephen Hawking could have had with Dr. Sheldon Cooper on ‘The Big Bang Theory’.
