Ghost on a Ship, Hubble Down Again, ‘Champ’ Gets an Honor and More Mysterious News Briefly — November 3, 2021

Mysterious News Briefly — November 3, 2021

A paper published in July 2020 claimed that 30,000-year-old stone tools and flakes found at the Chiquihuite Cave site in Zacatecas, Mexico, proved humans were in the Americas 17,000 years before the Clovis people arrived after the last ice age ended, but a new paper shows those stone tools are just rocks formed by natural cave processes. A fitting study for Halloween when many people remember Charlie Brown’s famous lament after visiting a house: “All I got was a rock.”

A cryptid hasn’t made it big until it gets a marker, so congratulations are in order for Lake Champlain’s Champ which received a new sign acknowledging that Bulwagga Bay is the home of the mythical underwater creature. “I still have more commercials,” thought Bigfoot.

A video posted on Reddit claims to show footage of a floating orb and then a ghost appearing in front of a ship's security camera as the vessel sailed near the coast of Somalia with its lights off to help sneak past Somali pirates. Ghosts don’t scare pirates unless they’re standing in front of the ship’s safe.

The US Navy has completed its investigation into a mysterious incident in the South China Sea where the USS Connecticut was damaged hit by an unknown object and concluded the nuclear-powered attack submarine ran aground on an uncharted undersea mountain. Unidentified submerged object pilots trying to avoid detection breathed a collective sigh of relief.

A mysterious field of glass fragments scattered across Chile's Atacama Desert for 75 km (46.6 miles) has finally been explained – researchers have concluded they were created by the thermal radiation and winds from a fireball exploding just above the surface of the Earth around 12,000 years ago. This could be the first evidence extraterrestrials had a hand in convincing Earthlings to wear shoes.

Everyone who is friends with a dog has seen it – now a study explains that dogs tilt their heads when they’re processing relevant and meaningful stimuli, like their owner saying the name of a favorite toy, and showing a sign of concentration and increased attention. That’s interesting – now explain why your dog always sniffs the butt of the one guest who hates dogs.

The Hubble Space Telescope has entered into a protective safe mode for the third time this year and mission team members have no explanation for the error codes that caused it. Can a space telescope be jealous of all the attention the yet-to-be-launched James Webb telescope is getting?

Contrary to the generally accepted advice that people who drink in moderation live longer than people who abstain entirely, a new study found no difference between the lifespans of moderate drinkers and those who don't drink alcohol because many of those abstainers had recovered from alcohol use disorders, addictions and other ailments which increase mortality. This may explain why alcohol abstainers also abstain from reading studies.

The Andromeda galaxy has a strangely-shaped cluster of stars at its center that has baffled astronomers for decades – now, new computer simulations research suggest it’s the result of two supermassive black holes at the center of two galaxies crashing together and pulling the orbits of millions of stars near the center of the resulting merger into a strange elongated pattern. Was the sound of this galaxy being painfully pushed and pulled out of shape the first Andromeda strain?

An astronomer from the National Science Foundation (NSF) NOIRLab and a geologist from California State University made the first estimates of rock types that exist on exoplanets orbiting nearby white dwarf stars and concluded that most rocky exoplanets are more diverse and exotic than previously thought, with types of rocks not found anywhere in our Solar System. We saw Rocky Exoplanet fight Apollo Galaxy for the heavyweight title.