Taylor Swift's Flying Saucers, Lone Star Skinwalker, Polish Vampire Burials, Spiders on Mars and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

A new documentary by Mark Christopher Lee called “The King Of UFOs: Royal UFO Secrets Revealed” (accompanied by a book of the same name) tells of the various links between members of the British royal family to UFOs and extraterrestrials, including Queen Victoria’s strange seances, Lord Louis Mountbatten’s sightings, King (then Prince Charles’ alleged piloting of a UFO, and the latest revelations about Prince Philip’s scheduled meeting with an alien named Janus, which was arranged by Philip’s aide, Sir Peter Horsley, but may have been nixed by concerns that Janus could have been a Russian spy.  If Janus was a short Grey alien, perhaps the Queen would have been a better emissary.

It seems that no place on Earth is safe from Taylor Swift and that includes the world of UFOs as the singer sent that world into a spin by wearing a minidress adorned with flying saucers and other spaceships to the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards; she changed outfits afterward and attended an afterparty wearing another UFO outfit consisting of a saucer-covered tapestry jacket and a coordinating miniskirt and corset with the same flying saucer motif; Swift’s Eras Tour concerts feature a UFO illuminating her onstage as she sings the song "Down Bad" about being beamed up “just to do experiments on”. She’s hoping aliens know it’s just a song or at least they are Kansas City Chiefs fans. 

A UFO over Mexico City has a chance to be seen by nearly 9 million people, but most seem to have missed one recorded recently near the Latin American Tower – the red light moved irregularly across the night sky making unconventional maneuvers that prompted suggestions on social media ranging from UFOs to witches to the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl in the form of a feathered serpent, to an insect to a technical camera glitch. Meanwhile, another UFO sighting in Michoacán west of Mexico City looked more like a diamond or a silver saucer, but some observers suggested its daytime appearance was due to a local festival that was launching balloons and lanterns. The job of UFO researcher keeps getting more complicated.

Michael “Dumas” Demel of Schulenburg, Texas, caught something on one of his trail cams in nearby Dubina that caused many who viewed the photo on social media to speculate that it is the Texas version of the Chupacabra, a Lone Star Skinwalker, a visiting alien or an escaped monkey; at first, Demel himself thought the mystery creature was a monkey, but he later said it was like nothing he’d ever seen before in his years of hunting in the area; even the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department said “a positive identification of the animal is not possible” but felt confident it was “too small to be a white tail deer fawn”. More lights would help, but Texas has all of its bright ones installed around football fields.

In another case of things not being what they first seem to be, what hunter Kirk Price recorded on his trail cam set up in the Appalachian Mountains of southwest West Virginia looks at first like a Bigfoot but clearer photos show this hairy creature walking upright on two legs is actually a bear born with no arms that has been seen periodically in the area since at least 2018 and estimated to be about eight years old; wildlife experts say this is a birth defect because the bear has nubs rather than scars where its front legs should be; its size and longevity indicate it has little trouble finding food and avoiding hunters. Could Bigfoot be secretly helping it out of professional courtesy?

Matthew Pines, a Managing Consultant at the cybersecurity and geostrategic intelligence consultancy the Krebs Stamos Group, said in a recent podcast interview that he believes another country, most likely China, has UFO/UAP technology which it is rapidly reverse-engineering; he claims the U.S. government knows about this and must disclose the existence of this "exotic technology” for security reasons; the government must then be prepared to “answer questions from civil society about what has been going on for the last 80 years”. If only we could get Taylor Swift to endorse UFOs.

If UFO/UAP disclosure is to happen this year, its next (and possibly last) best chance may be at the upcoming Congressional hearing confirmed by New York Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, and the hearing takes on new importance due to the appearance of a mysterious large cylindrical object flying over Montana’s Malmstrom Air Force Base, a critical U.S. Air Force nuclear site, which was recorded by a couple who believe it was something other than Starlink satellites and said to have been witnessed by up to 2,000 other people. Perhaps the Pentagon can explain why no jets were called in to rendezvous with the UAP or shoot it down like the balloons over Canada in 2023 – actions that would seem appropriate when the airspace of a military installation is breached.

Archeologists with the Lublin Voivodeship Conservator of Monuments in Poland were digging on the grounds of the Christianity Uniate bishop’s Palace in Chelm when they uncovered the graves of two children whose burials showed signs the people of the Middle Ages believed they were vampires because one had their head removed and their skull and body placed face down and covered with heavy stones so they would not rise from the dead; also, postholes at the burial site held grave markers signifying this was a special or monitored grave; the archeologists suspect the children were victims of tuberculosis, a mysterious malady in the Middle Ages. Nothing says “some things never change” like stories of ancient superstitions and practices around Friday the 13th. 

Australian endurance swimmer and athlete Duncan Roberts says swimming across Scotland’s Loch Ness was “one of the toughest things I've ever done mentally” and although he’s swum with great white sharks, he was more terrified when something bumped against him halfway across, explaining that “I was focused on getting across as quickly as possible so the hit was a shock” – after he made it to the other shore, Roberts then got out of the Loch, put on a kilt, climbed Ben Nevis (Britain's highest mountain), played the bagpipes at the summit and climbed back down all in one day. After hearing him play the bagpipes, Nessie was afraid of Roberts. 

UFO preparedness is on the minds of U.S. police chiefs as evidenced by the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) producing and distributing a handbook detailing investigations into UFO encounters, testimonies of 'whistleblowers' such as former United States Air Force officer and intelligence official David Grusch, articles about the US government and its potential link to alien life, links to various UAP reporting websites, and instructions on how police officers can report sightings – the 11-page document warns that UFOs “pose significant safety risks to law enforcement air support units” and cautions officers to be careful when pursuing them in helicopters. I wonder if extraterrestrials have a similar handbook for when their ships are pulled over by police for speeding or weaving.

Once again we see how hard the cryptid investigation and identification business has become with the social media posting of something that a motorist claims to have seen along the side of a road in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; ‘Wink Barnette’ managed to photograph the anomaly and asked for help in identifying it, which is the modern equivalent of throwing turds against a wall to see what sticks; some commenters suggested it was Bigfoot, the ghost of a woman, a Michigan Skin Walker or a Dogman, but others merely saw a stump or a splash of bird poop on the windshield. How about a shapeshifting stump running to avoid being hit by a car covered in bird poop? 

Across the pond, East Sussex motorist Tim Moon was driving with his son when they spotted a "huge" creature emerge from the side of the road and cross in front of them, getting recorded for social media posting by his vehicle’s dashcam; Moon is convinced they saw the famous "Beast of Bexhill", an alien big cat reported by many people in the area – including Tim Moon himself 22 years ago when he says he saw something smaller than the one he and his son recorded, which he estimated that “the total length was between five and six feet". Making dashcams mandatory in the U.S. would eliminate a lot of arguments and false claims on social media – something Musk and Zuckerberg would hate.

“House on Haunted Hill” is a 1959 American horror film classic starring Vincent Price as eccentric millionaire Frederick Loren who invites five people to a "haunted house" party with the incentive that whoever stays in the house for one night will earn $10,000 as compensation for being scared out of their wits; while remakes have been made, none are as scary as the original, but that may change with the announcement of a new one being produced by Victoria Price, Vincent Price’s daughter, who will also act in the film along with Mitchel Wyatt, the great-grandson of Haunted Hill actress Julie Mitchum who played partygoer Ruth Bridgers – this remake changes the guests to a team of reporters “investigating the infamous Hill House on live television, only to face dire consequences”. Let’s hope no one on the writing team is nicknamed “A.I.”.

David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust may have played guitar and jammed with Weird and Gilly and the Spiders from Mars, but no one could prove the existence of spiders on Mars until recently when NASA scientists recreated on Earth a phenomenon called araneiform terrain that resembles black "spiders" on the surface of Mars, which have been seen by Mars orbiters since 2003, in a wine barrel-sized specialized laboratory chamber called the Dirty Under-vacuum Simulation Testbed for Icy Environments (DUSTIE) where subsurface carbon dioxide ice suddenly turns into gas without first melting into liquid (a process called sublimation) which makes the spiders on Mars in a temperature of minus 301 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 185 degrees Celsius). Appropriate dress for the celebration party would be screwed-up eyes and screwed-down hairdos.

Eno Alaric, calls himself @radianttimetraveller on TikTok where he claims to be from the year 2671 and warns that we are just weeks away from the discovery of 70 unknown animals in Australia including giraffes the size of skyscrapers, the Sun blasting us with an unknown type of energy that gives some people immortality, a dead musician reveals he’s still alive, the Sun changing its mind on immortality and disappearing for a week which causes mass destruction, and the discovery of an alien artifact buried beneath the ice in Antarctica which releases a mysterious and deadly disease for which there is no cure. Why do these people have the ability to travel through time but not to create a better platform to use to tell us we’re doomed? And will the ‘dead’ singer have time to record a new song before they’re really dead this time?

If you watched the first-ever spacewalk by billionaire private citizens onboard a SpaceX-operated Polaris Dawn ship, you may have also watched the first-ever crime in space, as the four civilian astronauts violated Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967 by the US, the Soviet Union and other leading nations, which states that “the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty”, which in this case is the United States – while the Outer Space Treaty is not actually a code of law, it could provide the framework for one as more private space companies send people into space. Where is counsellor Deanna Troi when we need her?

New research from Monash University in Australia suggests that Earth had a ring similar to Saturn about 466 million years ago which was formed by a passing asteroid, stayed in place for tens of millions of years, caused an increase in craters around the equator, and played a major part in the cooling of the climate during the Ordovician Era 485 million to 443 million years ago by shading the planet. Don’t go getting any more crazy ideas, Elon Musk.

Suppose the idea of Earth having rings isn’t strange enough (see above). In that case, a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters proposes that over a billion years ago a star measuring about four-fifths the size of our Sun passed by our young solar system at approximately 110 Earth-sun distances at a 70-degree angle to the ecliptic plane, knocked 85% of the Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) out of the solar system and about 7% into the paths of the giant planets, turning them into the moons of Saturn and Jupiter; some astronomers disagree with the hypothesis, saying the close proximity of another star would have caused major disruptions in the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter. If this is true, we need a better word for the trivial disturbances we call ‘chaos’.

While the hunt for evidence that the Tasmanian tiger is not extinct gets most of the media attention, along with the quest to de-extinct it if it is, researchers studying fossils at the northwestern Queensland Riversleigh World Heritage Site, which is more than 1,550 miles from the island of Tasmania, found fossils of a new species of ancestors of Thylacinus cynocephalus that lived 23–25 million years ago during the Late Oligocene; the largest was the Badjcinus timfaulkner, which was about the size of a large Tasmanian devil making it much smaller than the modern thylacine, but it had a powerful jawbone for crushing through the bones and teeth of its prey; all of the species but the one leading to the modern thylacine were extinct by 8 million years ago. The more we know, the more tragic the extinction of the Tasmanian tiger becomes.

Infamous 1970s hijacker D.B. Cooper is still at large but his parachute will be on display at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma in an exhibition devoted to only this artifact and a limited interpretation of its part in the hijacking; it was one of four given to Cooper and left behind on the plane when he jumped out over Washington with the $200,000 ransom money; the museum says it will not discuss any more about the hijacking because “while no one was physically harmed during the hijacking, we recognize that the crew and passengers experienced a traumatic event with lifelong impacts. It is important that we do not perpetuate theories about this unsolved case." In other words, they don’t know what happened to him either.

While it may look like a clear case of pareidolia, a purple “smiley” face discovered by the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter is actually much more than a figment of fertile imagination – ESA astrobiologists have determined that the anomaly is made from craters rimmed with ancient chloride salt deposits that could be remnants of habitable zones from billions of years ago that may have once been filled with water and teeming with life forms on the red planet. On the other hand, the smiley face you see on your burnt toast is a combination of an old appliance, your imagination and your religious upbringing.

Two hikers descending Longs Peak in the Colorado Rockies took photographs as they hiked and were shocked when one of them appeared to show what looks like a 20-foot-tall skinny grey creature going up the side of another mountain; magnified images of the alleged creature show what appear to be arms, legs, a torso and a head that could have been caused by rock formations and shadows but looks more like “an alien” to Camille Avarella, one of the hikers, who says the pair won’t be hiking in that location again anytime soon; commenters on their social media post had few logical identifications and tended to agree. Has Slender Man taken up rock climbing?