Bigfoot in Court, the Devil's Footprints, a Real Star Trek Holodeck, Nostradamus and Baba Vanga See WWIII and More Mysterious News Briefly

A roundup of mysterious, paranormal and strange news stories from the past week.

We just can’t seem to give up on the three-fingered ‘alien’ mummies of Peru as this week we received a report that UFO and paranormal investigator Jaime Maussan presented at a news conference what he called a new 'alien' specimen named Montserrat who he claimed was pregnant at the time of her death – the press conference was interrupted by officials from the Peruvian Ministry of Culture accompanied by police officers who attempted to seize the mummy … only to find that Maussan brought photos and videos but not the real thing; forensic analysts with Maussan said the tridactyl mummy had been left behind for further analysis. Three fingers were not enough to display the response these government officials wanted to give Maussan.

It has been a while since mysterious craters began appearing in Siberia and were eventually attributed to ‘pingos’, which are methane gas bubbles trapped under solid permafrost domes that defrosted, collapsed and exploded, leaving behind deep, wide craters; recently, a new “portal to the underworld” opened on the border between Russia and Ukraine in Gukovo – while locals believe it is possibly a coal mine shaft collapse, a theory government officials say is not true, many speculate it might be an "alien base", a bottomless "portal to the underworld", or a failed attempt to drill 40,000 feet below the surface like the failed Kola Superdeep Borehole. Should they feel comforted that at least it’s not a methane implosion due to climate change?

A new documentary on the famous 1973 ‘alien abduction’ of Calvin Parker and Charles Hickson has brought forward another witness in Maria Blair, who claims she saw the event from her car as it happened – she testified that she saw five-foot tall aliens come down from an oval-shaped UFO with flashing blue lights, abduct the fishermen from the Pascagoula River, and transport them away; she then remembers seeing the aliens return and drop off the men, who were slumped over and unconscious; Blair says she was afraid to come forward until now for fear of ridicule. Her account doesn’t prove the event happened, but it shows once again that there is no simple explanation for these incidents and that all analysis – from the physical to the psychological – should be examined and made public so other witnesses come forward.

In February 1855, a mysterious trail of hoof-like footprints appeared one morning around the Exe Estuary in Devon, England, after a heavy snowfall and, because they were cloven and seemed to go for 100 miles across gardens, fields, and even rooftops, they became known as ‘The Devil’s Footprints’ – while no one could prove Satan made them, their source was a mystery for 170 years until recently when documentary filmmakers retraced the route of the footprints by air and concluded they were made by an escaped 'big cat' prowling the countryside, a theory confirmed by reports of private animal collections and menageries in the area whose pens were destroyed by the blizzard, making this the first alien big cat sighting in the UK. The devil would like to see more evidence.

Military attacks around the world generally bring out predictions of World War III and the recent drone attacks by Iran on Israel were no exception as analysts quickly found prognostications by psychics Baba Vanga and Nostradamus – Baba Vanga predicted 2024 would see an escalation of the original Israel-Hamas battle of 2023, along with an increase in terrorist activities in Europe with a possible "major country" using biological weapons; meanwhile, Nostradamus forecast that in 2024 we would see when a "Red adversary will become pale with fear, putting the great Ocean in dread" – a prediction which could apply to either the recent attacks by the Houthis on ships in the Red Sea or the tensions between China and Taiwan … or both. If only someone would interpret these predictions BEFORE they happened.

A modern-day Baba Vanga and a self-described ‘living Nostradamus’ also weighed in on the potential for World War III when Russian psychic Adelina Panina proclaimed that the invasion of Ukraine will end soon, possibly in April or May, with victory going to Russia, but Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy “will escape, and he will try to do it quietly and unnoticed”; meanwhile, Brazil’s Nostradamus wannabe Athos Salomé says he correctly predicted a suspected Israeli strike on the Iranian embassy in Syria on April 1 and Iran’s drone and missile strike on Israel in retaliation on April 13, and he forecasts that Israel will retaliate. One thing Baba Vanga and Nostradamus didn’t predict – their modern counterparts are much better looking and TikTok ready.

In a rare admission of guilt, NASA has confirmed that a mysterious cylindrical object that crashed through a home’s roof in Naples, Florida, in March 2024 was a chunk of space junk from equipment discarded by the International Space Station in 2021 when old batteries which were secured to a pallet and sent on a trip to burn up in the atmosphere somehow lost the 1.6-pound piece of metal. Talk about disappointing – everyone was hoping a Harvard professor would declare it was from an alien spacecraft and it was worth a fortune.

In the late 1960s, the San Francisco Bay Area was terrorized by a serial murderer who called himself Zodiac and communicated with police and the public via four coded messages, one of which has finally been decoded after 50 years; in it, the Zodiac Killer taunts the cops with statements like “I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me. That wasn't me on the TV show. Which brings up a point about me. I am not afraid of the gas chamber. Because it will send me to paradice [sic] all the sooner. Because I now have enough slaves to work for me.” Experts think they need to decode all four to identify the Zodiac Killer; then maybe they can go back to something simpler like communicating with aliens.

Speaking of speaking to aliens, researchers from the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, claim they have "conversed" with a humpback whale in Alaska and believe that this is a key step in communicating with aliens, since whales are "intelligent creatures with a language that is foreign to us" - animal behaviorist Dr. Josie Hubbard says “They could be making commands” like “Go up, down, go here and there.” It’s time to start worrying when one of those whales makes the universal cellphone sign and says, “Call me, Ishmael”

In perhaps the most paranormal murder cases of all time, a man in Oklahoma on trial for killing his South Canadian River fishing buddy is using the Bigfoot defense – he claims he murdered the man because he was threatening to summon a Sasquatch to eat him; a psychiatrist is expected to testify that the man had a "methamphetamine-induced psychotic disorder" that gave him hallucinations of Bigfoot and led him to commit murder; if convicted, he could face life in prison, but even the defense attorneys thin he should stay in a state mental health facility indefinitely if found innocent. Bigfoot will not be called as a witness to the relief of the court stenographer who doesn’t understand howls.

Officials at Lakeside Academy, a K-8 school set to open in Beacon Lake, Florida, in the fall of 2024, announced that the school’s official mascot will be a Sasquatch because residents believe a Bigfoot has long lived in the woods next to the school. Floridians should get ready for some very confusing headlines about Bigfoot beating cougars, gators, lions, tigers, bears, Minutemen, Crusaders and Ironmen.

One of the best inventions of science fiction has become a reality as the Holodeck from Star Trek: The Next Generation, the 3-D simulator where Captain Picard and the crew requested scenarios to prepare for missions and entertain themselves in between them, has been created by computer science professors at Stanford, the University of Washington, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) – the new ‘Holodeck’ (same name) generates an infinite range of typical and atypical indoor environments using AI (of course) – while they can’t enter the Holodeck themselves, the researchers see it being used “to help robots interact with their environment more safely by preparing them to inhabit places they've never been before." Can’t enter it? We need Captain Picard to “make it so.”

The 600-year-old Voynich manuscript has long baffled exerts with its encrypted text and illustrations of plants, animals and people, but a new study led by Dr. Keagan Brewer of Macquarie University claims the drawings of nude women holding objects is a clear sign that the manuscript was a censored guide containing sex, contraception, and gynecological information – the guide was in code because, even in the medieval 15th century, men were concerned about women being able to read the guide and be influenced to have premarital sex. Maybe its purpose would have been clearer if the Voynich manuscript had been named ’50 Shades of Gray Areas.’

Although Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot was one of the most sophisticated humanoid robots available today, the hydraulic hose trailing behind it was always a sign of its limitations; now, the latest version of Atlas 2.0 unveiled this week has shed its ‘tail’ and gone electric with a faster and smooth-moving robot equipped with high-powered, flexible actuators which Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter says gives it a “huge range of motion” that “packs the power of an elite athlete into this tiny package”. In their lifetime, boomers may see both a human Charles Atlas and a robotic Atlas 2.0 kicking sand into bullies’ faces at the beach.

Speaking of batteries, a new and readily available source of lithium for lithium-ion electric vehicle batteries has been found by scientists at West Virginia University in pyrite, a substance better known as ‘fool’s gold’ for its resemblance to the real precious metal – sulfur-rich pyrite from the Appalachian basin doesn't require as many resources during the extraction process so has a lesser environmental impact than lithium-ion processing; this could turn old abandoned industrial mines into valuable pyrite producers across the country. Ironically, one day soon only fools will own real gold.

It was a bittersweet day at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab this week as engineers and mission specialists received their last message from NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which in 2021 became the first ever aircraft to fly on another planet and went on to far exceed its expectations by operating for three years and making 72 flights – Ingenuity will continue to operate as a stationary monitor taking pictures and collecting temperature data which will be recorded for future Mars missions to pick up in person. They could at least send it a watch.

The London-based mental health and wellbeing charity released a White Paper titled ‘The Impact of Exceptional Experiences and disclosure on mental health and wellbeing’ in which it calls for the UK government to publicly recognize Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) sightings as real rare, spontaneous experiences involving a person’s non-ordinary interaction with their environment which generate intense emotions both positive and negative, and to give the experiencers better care and support, especially when they suffer from stigmatization and ridicule when they “report seeing exceptional things that they cannot explain”. This is a noble and much-needed cause – but could we make it available to people who haven’t seen UAPs too?

Going to court for any reason is scary, but people visiting the St Landry Parish courthouse in Louisiana fear ghosts more than judges, juries and prosecutors as Parish President Jessie Bellard says he has seen a lot of paranormal activity there recently during renovations to the courthouse which was built in 1939 on a site used since 1805 for government purposes and as a jail – Ballard has joined others who report seeing out-of-order elevators suddenly working, smelling strange smells where jailhouse toilets were once located, hearing gavels pounding when the courthouse is empty and more things that paranormal investigators have confirmed. Would the ghost assistant of a ghost lawyer be called a para-paralegal?

‘Monster’, ‘black hole’ and ‘near Earth’ are not words one wants to see in the same headline, but that’s the case this week as astronomers using the European space telescope Gaia, whose function is to track the motion of billions of stars in our galaxy, discovered a monstrous (in size) stellar-mass black hole (stellar-mass black holes are created when a large star collapses) measuring 33 times more massive than our Sun and located just 2,000 light years from Earth – named Gaia-BH3, it is the second-closest black hole to our planet ever discovered and the most massive stellar black hole found in our galaxy, but it is fortunately much, much smaller than the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), which has a mass 4.2 million times that of the Sun. We saw Stella Mass open for Starship.

Those puny Bigfoot statues at your local home and garden stores are nothing compared to the one erected by Terry Carrigan of Skywater Studios in Monroe, Washington, which is 8 feet tall and weighs 1500 pounds – the concrete Sasquach is hairily realistic and for sale for the incredibly low price of just $15,000, provided you have a truck big enough to haul it home. You may also want to check with your neighbors whose second-floor bedroom window Squatchie will be peering into.

Most house flippers who buy cheap structures to remodel and sell for a profit are most concerned about finding black mold in the walls, but Mandy and Donald Corns say they were “panicked and sick” when they took photos of the interior of a three-bedroom flip house they bought in Madison, North Carolina, for $30,000 and saw a large black blob coming out of the master bedroom floor and other black masses inexplicably appearing on walls and ceilings; while they believed they felt ghosts in the building, they fixed the house up anyway and flipped it for $100,000 but still feel bad that they may have disturbed the ghost of a woman who died in the house, although many looking at the photos think the black blobs were a cellphone anomaly. The real question is: does this story belong on a home improvement channel or a paranormal one?

The most commonly accepted scientific explanation for the birth of the universe is the Big Bang, which most scientists conclude will have a corresponding Big Un-Bang when the universe ends, but researchers working on the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in the Sonoran Desert or Arizona, are warning that the universe is expanding rapidly and that may weaken the energy which makes up atoms, causing dark energy to decrease over time, resulting in a "big crunch" where the universe will slowly grind to a stop and collapse into itself – it may be so slow that one researcher says it will look harmless as it gradually crushes us into oblivion. There goes all plans for the candy industry to release a new bar called ‘Big Crunch’.

If you wonder why people with time machines only travel back a few hundred years, they may be afraid of running into prehistoric creatures like the giant snake discovered in India recently which lived 47 million years ago and measured an estimated 50 feet (15 meters) long and weighed up to 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg), making it the longest and heaviest snake ever – paleontologists name it Vasuki indicus after “the mythical snake king Vasuki, who wraps around the neck of the Hindu deity Shiva”.  Never travel back in time with anyone who thinks nothing of picking up cool stones that look like eggs.