Mysterious Universe

Author’s Note: This is the first in a three-part series about Dan Mitchell of Wisconsin, U.S.A., and his struggle to identify the entity that’s haunted him throughout his life – the Harlequin.

It only visited at night. As five-year-old Dan Mitchell lay in his bed in southern Wisconsin, his parents down the hall, a thin, androgynous creature with large, wide-open eyes appeared, bringing with it a damp, fresh smell, like summer rain. The entity pranced around Mitchell’s room telling him stories through dance, theatrics, and sometimes through its always open, round mouth.

“Its face looked like it was in a perpetual state of shock,” Mitchell, now 35 and married with children, said. “I would tell my mom about this and she always thought it was just my imagination getting the best of me.” But it was real. With its motley, strange clothing, the entity looked “like a harlequin,” but it called itself the Tooth Fairy. “For whatever reason I was never afraid of it,” Mitchell said. “My overall feeling toward this being was one of total familiarity. Looking back now, I can also say that there was something very potent about this being, like a strength of presence.”

What was this thing visiting young Dan Mitchell in the night, this thing that visits him still? It now relegates itself to the periphery of Mitchell’s life, shuffling along the edges of reality, popping into existence just to let Mitchell know it’s still around – watching him.

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When it comes to the UFO topic, there can surely be few more emotive issues than that relative to so-called “Nazi Flying Saucers.” So, the story goes, in the latter stages of the Second World War, Hitler’s hordes began working on radical, circular-shaped aircraft designs, but failed to capitalize on them to any meaningful degree as a result of the Allies fortunately gaining the upper hand, and ultimately, achieving victory.

The theory continues that, in the post-war era, the secret Saucer technology was clandestinely transferred from Germany to the U.S., successfully developed, and duly deployed. In other words, Nazi Saucer proponents say, what we are seeing today are not alien craft from far-away worlds, but highly-advanced flying machines of a definitively terrestrial nature, whose origins can be traced back to wartime Germany.

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The danger’s of sleep walking along with some bizarre medial mysteries are explored on this weekend exclusive.

We also investigate TibetanVardøgers and mysterious Tulpas before a lengthy feature on the Min Min Lights from Australia and around the world.

Read on for show notes, music, and books.

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Gigantic structures in the deserts of China lead us down the conspiratorial path this week where we find ourselves treading upon the mystery of the Toynbee tiles and their elusive creator.

Teen bigfoots make an appearance along with killer lake creatures from New Zealand and 30ft tall reptilians in outback Australia.

Read on for show notes, music, and books.

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Taos, New Mexico is a place I like a lot, and which I like to visit a lot, too. It has a cool vibe to it, there always seems to be so much going on, and the architecture – some of which dates back centuries – is amazing. And it’s a place with more than a few tales of the high-strangeness variety attached to it. In fact, very, very high-strangeness…

Salvador was an intriguing guy who I met almost a decade ago. Having inherited a considerable sum of money in his early thirties, he was retired by the age of forty-three, and  lived, as he worded it, “on a permanent vacation” in northern New Mexico. As I sat in the living-room of his spacious, Pueblo-style house in 2002, and ate a fine lunch of chicken and rice, Salvador related to me a remarkable story of truly bizarre proportions. It all began, he explained, on an August evening in 1997.

A keen astronomer, he had taken his truck out to a particularly remote spot north of Taos that was free of light pollution, and where he could set up his telescope and scan the night sky. It was around 1.00 a.m., Salvador recalled, when he heard at an uncomfortably close distance a strange sound that “was like a high-pitched whistle, but that had a human feel to it. But, it was way too high frequency for a man.”

Salvador’s curiosity turned to concern, and then to outright fear, he added, as the whistle was replaced by “an aggressive growl, and heavy footsteps, like something was warning me and marking its territory.” Salvador estimated that the source of the ominous growling was within thirty feet of him. Disturbingly, he got the distinct impression that a hostile entity of some form was actively “circling” him and “getting ready to attack.” That attack never came, however.

Salvador then painted an incredible picture: he sat tight in the back of his truck for about ten minutes as the growling and heavy footsteps continued to torture his terrified mind, when suddenly, in the distance, he could hear the unmistakable sound of helicopter rotor-blades.

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Occasionally, stories of strange phenomenon are so weird in their specifics that, even once several decades separate them from the present day, they still manage to capture our minds and induce paranoia. The odd story of Robert Taylor is one such incident, which involved the observation of a spherical “flying saucer” that, according to Taylor, may have attempted to accost him.

Taylor’s story began on a November morning in 1979, as he was entering a forest alongside the M8 Motorway, joined only by his trusty dog. Taylor had been carrying out his usual business as an area developmental officer, with intent of observing some sapling trees in the forest nearby. The two had traveled by foot into the forest, and upon reaching a clearing a few hundred feet into the area, Taylor was surprised to see a large, circular object hovering above the ground.

The “craft”, which really was just a large, dark-colored metallic sphere, seemed void of any identifying characteristics, save only the appearance of some kind of rim along it’s center, and a series of “portholes” just above this area. Curiously, the craft somehow also managed to appear translucent in certain areas; Taylor likened this to being what he believed was some kind of an attempt by the craft at camouflaging itself. Despite the strange, seemingly otherworldly technology present before him, Robert Taylor then ensured that his encounter would go down in UFO-history (though he knew it not at the time), and started off in the direction of the craft, hoping for a better look…

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Just recently, I re-read a few books from the early years of Ufology, including Harold T. Wilkins’ Flying Saucers Uncensored, Gray Barker’s They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, and The Humanoids, edited by Charles Bowen. And, on doing so, something important struck me. Back in those bygone days, when face-to-face alien experiences were all the rage, the ET’s very often provided the witnesses with names. Unlike today’s modus-operandi of, mostly, downright extraterrestrial anonymity.

While those early alien monikers often sounded like they came straight out of the world of science-fiction (and maybe, in some cases, they did!), the fact of the matter is that, today, even in close encounter cases of a definitively alien kind, the entities seem to be far more anonymous in nature than they were in decades-past. And there’s certainly no better way to gain an understanding of the sheer wealth of curiously-named ETs of the past than An Alien Who’s Who, by Martin S. Kottmeyer, which is published by the good people at Anomalist Books.

Depending on your own personal perspective regarding what lies at the heart of the UFO puzzle, An Alien Who’s Who reveals a great deal about (a) the dizzying variety of weirdly named extraterrestrials that have visited the Earth for a good many years; (b) the tall-tales of a whole range of fantasists and con-merchants; or (c) the way in which the UFO phenomenon, and those within it, are constantly being manipulated and exploited by a true trickster of a type that would make both John Keel and Jacques Vallee very proud.

Or, maybe it’s all three theories, or perhaps none of them. Whatever the case, I know only this much for certain: Martin Kottmeyer’s book is damned good fun and highly informative – and in equal measures, too.

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