A roundup of mysterious, paranormal and strange news stories from the past week.
Crop circles are generally a UK phenomenon, but the Brazilian town of Ipuaçu is the location of the first crop circle (or agroglyph as they are called in Brazil) in that country in 2025, and farmers say the town has been hit by these mysterious agroglyphs since at least 2008; the crop circle in a wheat field in Ipuaçu, in the West of Santa Catarina, baffled local UFO researcher ufologist Luiz Prestes Júnior, who sent a team of investigators immediately after it was reported and found “several points that indicate the authenticity of the crop circle” but no evidence of footprints, tire tracks, or human traces; instead, the wheat was perfectly bent with no signs of breakage and the design “showed precise alignment, and the plants remained intact, just lying down”; Ruan Ramilo, an Ipuaçu resident, also saw the circle and told the media his dogs were barking a lot that night but “We didn’t see any lights or anything like that”; he believes it’s human made but neither he nor other residents have any idea why Ipuaçu gets so many crop circles. Maybe the aliens know no one will spot them in a Brazilian Carnival parade.
The Bigfoot Research Organization received a report from an unnamed man who claimed he and his wife were driving on west on Interstate 80 around 5:30 p.m. on October 4 about 11.5 miles northeast of Bellefonte when he saw “something” on the right shoulder walking to the left on two legs; the creature walked in front of a Subaru in front of him and the head was higher than the car; he described it as “completely dark, all the same color” with a “slender/slim build” and long arms; the creature appeared to glide rather than walk and appeared to pass over a guardrail without slowing down to climb or jump over it; unfortunately, his wife did not see it and he had no time to stop and record it, but said he’s a hunter and it was not a bear; the BFRO investigator thinks it was a Bigfoot and a media report notes there was a Bigfoot sighting on game lands near the Penn State campus earlier this year and Pennsylvania is in the top ten states with the most Sasquatch sightings. Penn State needs more Bigfoot sightings to help students get through its horrendous football season.
Biblical archeologists from the Associates for Biblical Research (ABR) say they followed hidden clues, geography and submerged ruins to the town of Kurisi in Israel where they believe they have discovered the site of the tale of a famous biblical miracle in which Jesus exorcised a man possessed by a ‘legion’ of demons, then cast them into a herd of pigs which then ran off the edge of a cliff into the Sea of Galilee; the location in Kurisi has elements matching the tale – a cliff and a submerged harbor where the boat Jesus was on could have landed; Kursi was part of the Decapolis, a league of ten Greco-Roman cities, and the pigs were probably raised to feed Roman troops stationed nearby – a nearby Byzantine chapel has a mosaic floor that some scholars think shows the pigs. It looks like strong evidence, but no smoking gun or smoked pork chops.
Subways are popular haunted locations with their dark corners and secret passages, so it’s no surprise that an unusual event in a busy Mexican subway is being blamed on ghosts – a security camera for the Mexico City Metro Collective Transportation System was watching Line 1 recently when it recorded a cleaning machine on the edge of a platform suddenly move on its own and drive off the platform onto the tracks, where it caused a fiery short circuit; workers in the immediate area looked shocked, so people watching the video on social media added things up, threw in other stories of ghost on the Metro, and decided a ghost moved the equipment; others thought the equipment malfunctioned or the video was an AI hoax; no other info was made available. Is there a ghost version of a human resources department where disgruntled spirits can complain about poor working conditions rather than cause a scene?
Fans of The Matrix and other believers of the theory that our universe is nothing more than a simulation on some superior civilization’s giant computer got hit with science recently when mathematicians from UBC Okanagan (The University of British Columbia – Okanagan Campus) scientifically proved that this is impossible; in simple terms, according to Dr. Mir Faizal, Adjunct Professor with UBC Okanagan and leader of the study, “We have demonstrated that it is impossible to describe all aspects of physical reality using a computational theory of quantum gravity. Therefore, no physically complete and consistent theory of everything can be derived from computation alone. Rather, it requires a non-algorithmic understanding, which is more fundamental than the computational laws of quantum gravity and therefore more fundamental than spacetime itself”; in other words, “Any simulation is inherently algorithmic—it must follow programmed rules. But since the fundamental level of reality is based on non-algorithmic understanding, the universe cannot be, and could never be, a simulation”. No wonder Keanu Reeves now prefers ‘Waiting for Godot’.
The death of former U.S vice president, defense secretary and presidential chief of staff (over three presidencies) Dick Cheney brought up recollections of statements he made over the years about UFOs; in an April 2001 interview, Cheney was asked if he’d ever been briefed on the subject and said, “Well, if I had been briefed on it, I’m sure it was probably classified and I couldn’t talk about it”; this was after a campaign event in July 2000 when then candidate George W. Bush promised that Dick Cheney’s first White House job to get the answer to the UFO mystery; in October 2000, a month before Bush and Cheney were elected, Cheney visited Roswell, New Mexico, site of the alleged 1947 flying saucer crash and retrieval – this was also six days after 30 cattle were found dead under mysterious circumstances on a ranch outside of town; UFO proponents linked both events to Cheney’s seemingly timely visit, but Cheney said nothing about aliens, flying saucers, cattle mutilations or any other related topics, causing some proponents to suggest a coverup – UFO Roundup editor Joseph Trainor asked, “Was he on some kind of clandestine mission for the Pentagon?”; others suspected Cheney was giving a subtle signal that he was aware of aliens, UFOs and the like, just as many suspected Ronald Reagan did when he made a speech in 1982 near Hanger 84 at the Roswell Air Force Base where the bodies of the dead aliens from the Roswell crash were allegedly held. Now he’s gone and we’ll never know … unless his family releases ‘The Cheney Files’.
Movies like the ‘Poltergeist’ series and ‘The Sixth Sense’ promote the theory that ghosts are linked to children in a house, and now a survey by Higgypop.com supports it; the site questioned 330 people and found that 96% of them reported experiencing something ghostly in their current or former home, with 66% of the experiencers saying the paranormal activity occurred in houses with children living in them; of these households, 70% reported paranormal activities like apparitions, unexplained noises, and moving object; 22% reported these were daily occurrences; 77% said their houses also had pets; the survey concludes that “paranormal experiences in homes are quite common, with a significant number of these occurrences happening in households with children.” Think twice and look three times before discounting your child’s stories about invisible friends.
I knew I should have joined the union.
She’s no longer a ‘child’ but Riley Keough is the offspring of Lisa Marie Presley, who was the only child of Priscilla and Elvis Presley and Riley says she’s been getting messages from her late mother, who passed away in January 2023 at the age of 54; Riley said in a recent interview that “There are certainly moments that are very… too weird to not be something”, beginning with a “feeling” she had before hearing her mother had died: “I felt this sort of surrender in the moment and I just had a little bit of a sense”; Riley also said she has received signs that her mother approves of her memoir, “From Here to the Great Unknown”, which was just released in paperback. That’s nice, but Oprah’s approval carried more weight – dead or alive.
In this week’s Avi Loeb commentary on the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, which made its closest pass to the Sun and is now headed towards Earth, the Harvard professor notes that the 12-mile-wide object has gained speed, moved off of its predicted path, and changed colors to a luminous blue hue; NASA is sticking to its statements that 3I/ATLAS is a comet and picked up speed from the heat and gravitation force of the Sun, but Loeb and other scientists insist these are signs it is an “extraterrestrial artifact”, the blue hue means it is artificial, and it about to make first contact with us; Loeb also points out that 3I/ATLAS lacks a cometary tail made of dust as gases, and he’s still very upset with NASA for not answering his questions and not releasing more information he knows it has: “I think it’s inappropriate to withhold the scientific information from the community because we are planning future observations based on what we know about 3I/ATLAS. We will continue to push for answers.” Since we’ve already seen films about similar encounters, maybe it’s time we put a movie director in charge of NASA.
An interesting and unexplained UFO was filmed over Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the boyfriend of social media uploader Samantha Allard who noted that “My boyfriend has a phone with super zoom on it and was only trying to film the plane” but she watched it and saw a flying saucer-shaped disc passing under the plane, which became more disc-like when the video was lowed down (as seen on YouTube); Allard notes that “We’ve all been trying to come up with something logical as to what it could be”, while commenters on YouTube either agree or think it’s a camera anomaly or a hoax. Has the availability of cell phones made us lazy and more receptive to poor quality instead of making the effort to film UFOs with high-quality cameras, fast film, zoom lenses, tripods, and experienced photographers?
Arachnophobes would do well to avoid a dark area of Sulphur Cave, a cavern on the border between Greece and Albania, after spelunkers led by István Urák, an associate professor of biology at Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania in Romania, found what may be the world’s largest spider web – the colossal collection of silk and spiders covers 1,140 square feet (106 square meters) of a ceiling near the entrance of the cave and is home to 111,000 arachnids of two species: Tegenaria domestica or barn funnel weavers or domestic house spiders, and Prinerigone vagans, a small spider that prefers damp areas; the species have never been known to cohabitate, not to mention within the same web structure in such massive numbers; in fact, the researchers had expected to see the barn funnel weavers eating the P. vagans, but the lack of light in the cave may confuse them and instead both species subsist on non-biting midges, which eat white microbial biofilms that protect microorganisms from sulfur-oxidizing bacteria in the cave. Arachnophobes agree that there aren’t enough roll-up magazines in the world to combat 110,000 spiders.
We’re going to need a bigger newspaper.
In an example of nature demonstrating it has a sense of humor, Andrew Melville-Smith, a veterinarian from Whyalla in South Australia, was shocked when an object hit the windshield of his Tesla automobile – a car hated by many which was at the time operating on Autopilot – with such force that he saw the glass appear to soften and partially melt as cracks spread out from the point of impact; Melville-Smith said the Tesla continued in self-driving mode while he found himself covered in glass shards and bleeding; he later took the car to the South Australian Museum which is analyzing the windshield for any debris that could prove the Tesla was hit by a meteorite – making it just the second known incident of a meteorite hitting a moving vehicle. Even more amazing and ironic – the meteorite managed to pass through the thousands of orbiting Starlink satellites also owned by an Elon Musk company.
Retired NASA astronaut Astronaut Nicole Stott, who spent more than 100 days in space, most of them on the International Space Station, talked about sex in space during a recent interview; Stott first described the challenges involved, pointing out that astronauts are constantly “floating in any direction” and must first find a place to anchor themselves and their partner (or partners?) before moving on to the main event; once anchored, Stott said, “I don’t think there’s anything that would physically prevent you from having sex in space”; however, she answered the ‘big’ question by saying, “I don’t know that anybody has while they were there”. If astronauts aren’t having sex in space, how come their hair is always so messed up?
Mysterious booms from the sky and eerie sounds from the deep are often attributed to aliens before more logical and natural explanations are found – but not in all cases as we see in two recent incidents; in the Bairnsdale region of Victoria’s East Gippsland in Australia, residents recently reported a huge boom from overhead that shook houses and people, with one witness describing it this way: “The impact – it felt like a pressure that went right through me”; the multi-second boom sounded more like a meteorite than an earthquake which normally rattle the region, and experts agree that this is the most likely explanation; meanwhile, residents of Santos, Brazil, complain of hearing a strange noise coming from the sea that witnesses describe as sounding like a metallic creaking “as if something gigantic were moving beneath the water” and “It was as if something was breathing… but enormous. It didn’t sound like a boat or wind”; according to local media, this has been reported in Santos for decades and residents call it the “sound of the breathing sea”, but the most recent one was said to be one of the most intense ever recorded; there have also been reports of bright green lights in the sky in the same area of Santos but they have not been linked to the “sound of the breathing sea” and both remain unexplained. Stop dancing in parades or lounging on those beautiful beaches and figure these mysteries out!
If you are more interested in Unidentified Submerged Objects than Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, then perhaps you should invest in the new Vanguard steel underwater living pod from DEEP which measures 40 feet long by 12 feet wide and is equipped with individual bunks, a kitchen, a toilet and all the amenities for up to four ‘aquanauts’ to live and work up to 164 feet underwater; Vanguard also has a dive center to allow long term underwater excursions, and a surface support buoy which provides air, water, waste removal, electricity and communications for at least a week or more of living underwater; while it’s perfect for watching for USOs, DEEP sees Vanguard as the start of “a global network of underwater habitats that could give humans a permanent presence in the ocean”. Sounds exciting, but one gets the eerie impression that underwater aliens will look at it and laugh.
The very active Popocatepetl volcano in the states of Puebla and Morelos in Mexico is ringed with towns and cameras pointing at it to warn townspeople of upcoming eruptions, but the rest of the world watches these feeds to catch sight of UFOs flying in, out and above the glowing hot opening; a recent video showed what appeared to be a glowing UFO hovering over the volcano’s opening as if to be monitoring the activity before shooting off into space; while there were many cries of “UFO!”, the National Center for Disaster Prevention reported 19 low-intensity eruptions accompanied by vapor, gases and ash on October 30, the day of the mysterious object sighting; no surveillance drones or helicopters were reported but they are also a possibility; that never convinces believers like UFO investigator Jaime Maussan who claims that Popocatepetl is an “inter-dimensional portal” in space-time that allows intergalactic travelers to visit Earth; there are also theories that some alien visitors use the energy of volcanoes as fuel for their ships. Why don’t they stay for a while – the food in Mexico is great!
I told you to get the deluxe model with air conditioning.
If you’re looking for someone or something to thank for your existence, Jupiter (the planet, not the god) just became a good candidate as a result of a new study by scientists at Rice University in Houston, who developed hydrodynamic models of Jupiter’s growth in the early days of our solar system when the Sun was young and had a protoplanetary disk surrounding it; besides disrupting the disk to created holes and clusters that helped form planetesimals and protect them from falling into the Sun, the models showed that Jupiter’s powerful gravitational influence created barriers in the gas flow from the Sun, protecting the young planets like Earth and keeping them in stable orbits so they could evolve, grow and spawn life; the models also match what astronomers using the ALMA telescope have seen when observing young solar systems with stars surrounded by similar protoplanetary disks and growing planets. Giving thanks for a ball of hot gas sounds weird – unless you have an opinionated old uncle who comes over every Thanksgiving with a turkey.
