New Amelia Earhart Evidence, UFOs Tracking Whales, Vegan Vampire, Chinese Lake Monster and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

The U.S. Department of Defense has released a new document disclosing the 'world's UFO hotspots' and it reveals that Japan’s Nagasaki and Hiroshima, sites of nuclear attacks in 1945, Iinomachi in Fukushima Prefecture in Japan, the east and west coasts of the US, and Iraq and Syria in the Middle East are all leading hotspots for UFO sightings – the map is published on the new website of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). There are so many UFO sightings these days, many nervous people are clamoring for a map of ‘not spots’.

While we’re on the subject of disclosure. The Washington Post reports that the South American countries of Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Peru have long had public government programs that study and investigate UFO activity, regularly release reports to the public on these objects, and pass on details to United States; Brazil is also releasing more UFO files; on the other hand, the U.S. government and military has long been secretive on what they know and its current attempts at disclosure are painfully slow and inadequate. Don’t be surprised if the aliens tell American officials to go to the back of the line at their first meet-and-greet.

A forensic imaging specialist is analyzing an underwater picture taken during an expedition to Nikumaroro in 2009 that experts such as Ric Gillespie, head of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) and The Earhart Project, think shows an engine cowling (cover) like one on Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra – if it is, it supports TIGHAR's long-held belief that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan landed and eventually died on the island of Nikumaroro while attempting to make Earhart the first woman to fly around the world. This is not just a cold case – it’s a cold, wet and possibly giant crab-eaten case.

Senior Chief Operations Specialist Kevin Day was at the radar station aboard USS Princeton during the USS Nimitz carrier strike force mission on November 14, 2004, when he and many other military personnel and pilots reported seeing "multiple anomalous aerial vehicles" circling the ships off San Diego – Day now publicly says what he thought then … those 40-foot-long “Tic Tac” UAPs were not hostile but were instead tracking whales in the area, possibly to communicate with them since they are the largest beings on this planet. In a Star Trek world, Day would have been stationed on the USS Enterprise.

Jennifer Billock of Chicago, Illinois, is a tyromancer or, as she puts it, a “kitchen witch” who does psychic readings at cheese shops and wine and cheese tastings using blocks of cheese which you select and break open while telling her your questions, which she answers by reading the mold patterns, colors, crumbles and other aspects of the cheese block – she says the practice of reading cheese dates back to second century ancient Greece and Rome. What wine goes with cheese that says you’re going to get a divorce?

Farmers Emelia Ruiz Santos and Segundina Quispe de Palomino of Peru fear a chupacabra killed 30 of their sheep (16 of Emelia’s and 14 of Segundina’s) because they found their corpses with their eyes and brains missing, and all had tiny holes in their heads; while some people suspect a puma, this is the same general area where villagers claim to be under attack by 7-foot-tall 'face-eating aliens' which caused police and the military to come in and investigate. Maybe they should introduce the chupacabra to the face-eating aliens and let nature take its course.

Speaking of chupacabras, retired San Antonio Spurs basketball star Manu Ginóbili posted a video of what looks like the Texas version of the Chupacabra running in his neighborhood – local wildlife experts suspect it was a hairless coyote suffering from mange, but that doesn’t stop many from fearing the legendary bloodsucker is out looking for barnyard animals or pets. The Argentine Ginóbili should know the difference, but he may have been hoping it was a mascot for a seniors team looking for a shooting guard.

A tourist visiting Lake Tianchi in northwestern China recently filmed what she thinks is a lake monster in Lake Tianchi – the woman claims she heard splashing and saw what first appeared to be a line of fish but later convinced her that it was a 50-foot-long lake creature which makes wakes and ripples in the video; local wildlife experts say the lake has rainbow trout and other marine animals but nothing resembling what is in the video. No doubt they’re hoping it comes back so they can cash in on it like Loch Ness.

It is not just US Navy ships seeing UAPs - sailors aboard the Argentine Navy ship San Matías I reported seeing what looked like eight unidentified flying objects rising out of the water near their ship, with the objects having an orange-red color and moving quickly but seemingly aimlessly in a zigzag pattern before disappearing; the crew reported the sighting to the Naval Prefecture of Puerto Madryn but were not able to photograph the objects nor identify any of their signals. The real question being asked by the public is: what kind of candy did they resemble?

In alien big cat news, a family was out for a walk near the Fernworthy Reservoir in Dartmoor National Park in southern Devon, England, when they saw a large black cat too big to be a house cat; they turned and went back the way they came, only to find half-eaten deer carcass with many broken bones just off the path in the woods; as they kept walking, they believed they heard a roar behind them; they feared they were either going mad or gong to be eaten by the big cat, so they ran for their car and left. If you don’t have a photo of what you saw, is a photo of the pants you soiled during the encounter the next best thing?

Researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois say they’ve discovered a fluoride electrolyte in toothpaste that improves the performance of next-generation non-lithium-ion batteries in electric cars by enhancing their density and prolonging life to the point where it could revolution the electric vehicle industry. Dentists are hoping that changing the fluid in electric car batteries will become a new way to help make their boat payments.

We sadly report the passing of Calvin Parker, the Pascagoula man who with Charles Hickson claimed they were abducted by aliens on the night of Oct. 11, 1973, while fishing in the Pascagoula River – for the rest of their lives, Parker and Hickson stuck to their story of being examined by three aliens, and retold it in interviews, presentations and books; they both passed lie detector tests and it became known as the Pascagoula incident and one of the best documented cases of alien abduction. Let’s hope Calvin has finally learned what happened.

In a new paper published in the Astronomical Journal, astronomers Patryk Sofia Lykawka of Kindai University in Osaka and Takashi Ito of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Tokyo predict that there is an 'Earth-like' planet hiding in the Kuiper Belt ring of space objects just beyond the orbit of Neptune which they call the Kuiper Belt planet (KBP) – they estimate it to be three times the mass of Earth but too cold to sustain life, even though it would be much closer to the Sun than the theoretical Planet Nine. Needless to say, the ‘Make Pluto a planet again’ people are not thrilled with the competition.

From the “Things you’ve never thought about and now will be unable to forget” file comes a French perfumer who took a mummy found by British archaeologist Howard Carter (22 years before he discovered King Tut’s tomb) and recreated one of the scents used to mummify the noblewoman named Senetnay who died around 1450 BCE – a jar contained the balms made from a blend of beeswax, plant oil, fats, bitumen, an unidentified balsamic substance, resins from trees of the pine family and other ingredients; the smell resembles pine, balsam, vanilla and other exotic notes and tells us what both the mummy and the workshop smelled like. Look for Chanel No. 500 BCE in stores soon.

A new study published in the journal Science reveals that humans came close to extinction about 900,000 years ago when a so-called “severe bottleneck” occurred for about 117,000 years and reduced the population to a low of just 1,280 breeding individuals – fortunately, the study says this contributed to the development of our intelligence and brain evolution by natural selection; the near-extinction was due to climatic changes and the extinction of other species which were  food sources. Are we heading for a severe plastic bottleneck?

From the “This is the science we need” file comes a study by the Dalian Medical University in China which claims that the polyphenols, fiber and ethanol in beer boosts the body's immune system by inducing the growth of healthy bacteria that benefits the gut – the research found that the beer bacteria are more effective than probiotics when drunk in moderation, which is generally accepted to be 14 cans of 5 percent beer per week or two per day. Bud may not be your beer, but beer may be your bud.

Space logistics startup TransAstra won an $850,000 Phase 2 Small Business Innovation Research contract from NASA to build an inflatable bag that will open up in space, capture orbital debris, like rocket parts and dead satellites, close up and look for more trash – eventually bringing the whole bag of garbage to an orbiting processing plant where it can be inspected, repaired, recycled or disposed of in the Earth’s atmosphere. You know we’re in trouble when these bags attract extraterrestrial raccoons that rip them open and strew the trash all over the place.

A team of deep-sea researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to inspect an underwater volcano 250 miles off the coast of Alaska when they spotted a mysterious gold orb stuck to the volcano two miles beneath the surface that resembled an egg, prompting one scientists on the live feed to exclaim, “Something tried to get in ... or to get out” – they picked It up and took it to a lab, where it hasn’t been identified, but researchers there say it reminded them of something from “The X-Files.” Until it is identified, we’ll go with an egg laid by Poseidon’s goose fish.

From the “If you’re reading this in a magazine, this is for you” file comes a study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society by researchers at NYU's School of Global Public Health who found that that moderate and regular internet users were half as likely to develop dementia as their non-Internet-browsing friends – although surfing the Internet is not a cure for the cognitive disorder. This is good news … except it gives Elon Musk something else to take credit for.

If you’d like the experience of ghost hunting from the comfort of your own non-haunted home, 'Incubus - A Ghost-Hunters Tale' offers an immersive experience into a haunted residence located at number 6 Dread Pitt Road on London’s East End – the point-and-click game is said by reviewers to be a 360-degree adventure into a haunted house based on many true ghost hunting stories, with AI ghosts programmed to be "aware", actual ghost-hunting tools and devices, and even some new kinds of ghosts called 'clickers', 'pushers' and 'chatters'. We’ll know it’s good if the local resale shop is suddenly inundated with Ouija boards.

American football season means watching players with massive shoulders and ball-flinging elbow, which a new study reveals were inherited by our primate ancestors who developed them to allow the beings to fully extend their arms above their heads when climbing down from trees – thus paving the way for later humans to live on the ground, walk upright and use those shoulders and elbows for gathering food, throwing spears and punching each other. The first human to elbow someone in the ribs may have been the human to tell an inside joke.

Astronomers at the University of Hawai‘i’s Institute for Astronomy have discovered a bubble of galaxies 1 billion light-years across and about 820 million light-years from Earth which they believe could be a “fossilised” remnant from the Big Bang as a byproduct of density ripples called Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) which eventually became this bubble containing several galactic superclusters, each containing 10 clusters of galaxies, surrounding the Bootes void, which is a 330 million light-year empty expanse. And that is this week’s two-fer for great band names: Bubble of Galaxies and Boots’ Void.

The 15th century prince Vlad III, better known as Vlad the Impaler who killed over 80,000 people, has long been considered the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s vampire Dracula, so it comes as a shock to learn that a recent chemical analysis of human proteins found on letters written by Vlad shows an absence of animal food proteins, which means Vlad may have been a vegan vampire. Did he drink bloody marys and use his imagination?