Elvis' Ghost in Vegas, Doomsday Fish Appears, an Invisibility Shield for 6, Human-Tardigrade Hybrids and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

From the ‘Harry Potter Props That Become Reality’ file comes the announcement by the London-based and aptly named Invisibility Shield Co. of its new product – a 6-foot-wide ‘invisibility megashield’ that can cloak up to six standing people by using a precision engineered lens array to bend light around them, making it look like there is no one behind the clear shield but whatever is in the background; if that is not enough, the invisibility megashield is available now for the incredibly low price of only $880 (£699). Before you stand behind it naked, make sure it’s the latest release and not the beta test model.

She may not be human but a security guard at the Iron Palace in the Historic Center of Mexico City thinks the Amazon Alexa virtual assistant is religious after he encountered several of them at 2 am reciting the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy (“Eternal God, in whom mercy is endless and the treasury of compassion inexhaustible …”) – a video of the event was shared on TikTok by @platicameunahistoria and showed that the voices are synchronized as they pray and respond to the Chaplet, as well as the Sign of the Holy Cross, the Lord's Prayer, Hail Mary and the Creed. Some commenters suspect a hoax, but it could be the Alexa AI praying that Amazon and Jeff Bezos starts treating it better.

It’s bad enough when a piece of space debris crashes through your roof and narrowly misses your family members, but a man in Naples, Florida, to whom this happened last month, is having a worse problem with his insurance company because NASA picked it up and has yet to determine if it was made in the U.S., which would allow the company to collect damages from the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, or if it was from the pallet it was launched on, which was made by Japan and would require the company deal with the Japanese government to collect. Maybe the insurance company with the reptilian gecko can help with this space money problem.

From the ‘Why didn’t you tell us sooner?’ file comes another ‘doomsday fish’ story from Taiwan, where a 7.4 magnitude earthquake, the largest in 25 years, hit the island on April 3rd with the epicenter at 11 miles south of Hualien City – the hundreds injured and thousands left homeless probably wish they would have been notified by fishermen in Kalanggaman Island, roughly 900 miles south of the epicenter, who caught a five-foot-long oarfish, an traditional harbinger of earthquakes and tsunamis, just 30 hours before the seismic event. We saw Doomsday Fish open for Great White.

It is hard enough to deal with the challenges of being left-handed and the prejudices they have suffered historically, but a new study has found some rare variants of specific genes that cause left-handedness in humans also can cause people to have neurodevelopmental disorders or develop neurodegenerative diseases - researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands analyzed genetic data from more than 350,000 people worldwide and found that people with variations in two genes previously associated with autism, DSCAM and FOXP1, may have substantially higher chances of being left-handed. Not surprisingly, all the middle fingers given to this study were left ones.

A 150,000-year-old nearly-complete skull of a male found in Harbin in north-east China was named Homo longi or “Dragon man” – the skull was as big as a modern human’s and had a flat face with delicate cheekbones – and new research by Prof Xijun Ni of the Chinese Academy of Sciences using advanced techniques not requiring DNA has determined that the mysterious Denisovans had “a broad nose, thick brow ridges over its eyes and large tooth sockets”, which makes him “believe that the Denisovans were members of the Homo longi species”; the researchers will now attempt to determine when homo sapiens and homo longi diverged and if they, like the Denisovans, had sex with humans. Who would have predicted that the field of anthropology would become such a soap opera?

A joint investigation by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and CBS's 60 Minutes found an FBI official who was investigating a suspected Russian spy in Florida in 2021 when she claims she was “hit by a crippling force” and immediately began suffering the mysterious symptoms of Havana Syndrome – the news organizations spoke with retired Army lieutenant colonel Greg Edgreen, who until recently ran the Pentagon’s investigation into Havana Syndrome, who confirmed that most cases of Havana syndrome happened to Defense Intelligence Agency officials successfully investigating Russians for nefarious activities – while new studies by the National Institute of Health concluded that U.S. government employees who had experienced Havana syndrome showed no evidence of brain injury, these ‘anomalous health incidents (AHIs)’ are still a top government priority. Is it time to drop the ‘mysterious’ from this ongoing problem?

Elvis has not left one building in Las Vegas, the former International Hotel, now the Westgate, where the King had a residency in the 70s, according to David Stanley, Elvis’ stepbrother and one of his bodyguards until the singer’s 1977 death, who says he still lives there, talks to Elvis’ ghost and can get him to turn lights on for him – he also says he feels “his presence and an energy like the spirit of Elvis is here at The Westgate”. If Elvis’ ghost ever leaves the Westgate, will it become David Stanley’s Heartbreak Hotel?

Get ready for human-tardigrade hybrids as an international team of researchers led by the University of Wyoming took the proteins that allow the water bears to enter a state of suspended animation called biostasis and introduced them into human cells, causing those cells to gel and slow down their metabolism just like in tardigrades; even more exciting is the discovery that the process is reversible – when the tardigrade gels dissolve, the human cells return to their normal metabolism, making this a tool which may one day be used for slowing down aging and aiding in long-term space travel. The tough part will be finding test subjects who don’t mind ending up looking like giant moss piglets.

Engineers at The University of Texas at Austin have created a wearable brain-computer interface (BCI) using a black and red cap lined with brain wave-detecting electrodes that allows users to play video games just by using their minds without a need for extensive calibration or invasive surgical procedures like other BCIs – a decoder allowed users to learn to play both a car racing game and a simple task of balancing the left and right sides of a digital bar simultaneously, which will make the interface more versatile for users with motor impairments to deal with multiple challenges. Super Mario wants royalties.

The movie ‘The Men Who Stared at Goats’ starred Geroge Clooney as a psychic spy and was said to have been inspired by real-life psychics; one of them, ex-CIA employee Major Ed Dames claims he used remote viewing to identify the vicinity in Le Vernet, France, where the body of two-year-old Emile Soleil, missing since July 2023, was found – Dames said he searched for two days and saw the body “located at, or in proximity to” a field that ended up being right next to the site where the body was found recently in an area that had been searched before. It’s time to get the old goat gang back together – we’ve got plenty of things for them to remote view for.

Funerals are normally somber times, but two recent ones took a turn for the surreal and possibly paranormal. A video posted on social media shows a wake in the Dominican Republic where a funeral wreath appears to be shaking and rocking with no visible cause – while some commenters suspect the wind or a hidden thread, many are at a loss and suggest it is the spirit of the deceased. Meanwhile, Sharon Taffs from Maldon, Essex, who died at age 68 from breast cancer made arrangements for the ‘Grim Reaper’ to attend her memorial and point to people saying "You're next" – while morbid, the Reaper is believed to help transport souls to the next life, so some mourners enjoyed the joke while others decided to stay away. When did funerals become funnier than sitcoms?

UFO researcher and author Mark Olly has updated his recent book, ‘Europe's Roswell: 40 Years Since Impact’, with new information suggesting that the Wales Federation of Independent Ufologists "recovered about half a dozen pieces of metal and foil from the wooded area adjacent to the fields" near the small Welsh village of Llanilar where an object appeared to crash into some trees in 1983 before flying away, an event now referred to as  Europe's Roswell, and that debris has bee reanalyzed at two independent labs and determined by one to be ‘Aluminums Foam’ and by the other to be almost pure Lanthanum, an exotic and extremely expensive to produce – neither of which were available in 1983, leading Olly to wonder whether it was “one of ‘theirs’, or was it some kind of back-engineered or hybrid technology?" At least the public is still allowed to analyze the debris from Europe’s Roswell – when will that ever happen in the U.S.?

Fishermen casting in a lake in England’s South Downs National Park recently are reporting multiple encounters with a "growling" creature seen running down a "dangerous" hill so steep that "no human" would attempt it, causing the anglers and local residents to fear the park is home to Britain’s Bigfoot  - members of the Cryptid and Paranormal Investigations Facebook group say one fisherman left the lake in terror after seeing "something large running on what I think was two legs on the opposite bank in the darkness" and the growls made "the hairs on my arms" stand up" – while none of the witnesses managed to photograph the creature, they seem convinced it was not a hoax. The real question is: what does the British Bigfoot think of the whole Princess Kate scandal? 

With the number of encounters he’s allegedly had, Robbie Williams could be considered the favorite pop singer of extraterrestrials and he recently offered proof of that description by claiming that aliens have chosen to contact him because he's well-known and has a large public platform in which to carry their messages – although he’s British, he has lived for 15 years in Los Angeles where he says “it's like there's vortexes here” and “I feel closer to the woo-woo in Los Angeles than I do in England”.  We saw Closer to the Woo Woo open for Goo Goo Dolls.

Northern Canada is farther from the woo woo but residents of Dawson City, Yukon, have been reporting many UFOs recently with the odd distinction of starting out like a star or slow-moving orb, then picking up speed like a meteor, but quickly developing a long tail like a comet, with the head a blue color and the tail more orange  – astronomer Christa Van Laerhoven, president of the Yukon Astronomical Society, has investigated some of these reports and says the color and slow speed makes her think these were not s meteors but space junk which " comes through the atmosphere and starts glowing” in colors “that can be more irregular, because of the variety of materials that go into a spacecraft"; she also warns it’s not aliens because "If aliens were coming to Earth, we would know" when they did something dramatic to announce their arrival. A multi-colored glowing ball with a tail isn’t dramatic enough?

In what is becoming a regular weekly occurrence, Brazilian psychic and self-proclaimed 'Living Nostradamus' Athos Salomé conducted an interview where he talked about the Moon, currently advancing towards its big role in the upcoming solar eclipse, saying that “(The Moon) could be an advanced artifact, placed in orbit for purposes that transcend conventional human understanding, and that has been altered over the years” and that it “could be a key element in an advanced system of cosmic interaction and influence, and a structure or advanced outpost possibly constructed by a civilization or by humans in a future era” – in other words, he thinks the Moon could be an ancient alien artifact. Sorry, Not-Noz – good psychics don’t get to use the word ‘could’, like Baba Vanga’s predictions that 2024 would have “an economic crisis" (ask England and Japan) and "drastic developments" in healthcare (see the lung cancer vaccine announced to be in the works).

The ‘could’ rule also applies to time travelers and this week we have TikTok time traveler Eno Alaric (@Radianttimetraveler) assuring us that he is really from the year 2671 and sharing warnings that in the remainder of 2024, we will see the creation of a monkey-human hybrid, World War III, a massive super-volcano eruption, a hurricane with over 500 mph wind speeds and the discovery of living dragons in the Rocky Mountains that can fly, breathe fire, and speak. It’s about time we had a pay-per-view battle royale between psychics and time travelers.

If astronauts were on the Moon during the upcoming solar eclipse, they wouldn’t know what time to look for it because there is no standard lunar time, so this week the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy ordered NASA to establish by December 2026 a time standard for the moon called “Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC)” which will “develop celestial time standardization with an initial focus on the lunar surface” because “knowledge of time … is fundamental to the scientific discovery, economic development, and international collaboration that form the basis of U.S. leadership in space.” It also gives a reason for watch companies to sell timepieces showing lunar time.

Many Bigfoot believers point to the ongoing discovery of new large animals on Earth as proof the hairy cryptid will be found one day and now they have more hope as researcher Javier Barrio announced his team has found a new species of the world’s smallest deer in the central Andes in Peru which they named the Pudella carlae (after biologist Carla Gazzolo who helped save Barrio’s life after a vascular problem) and revealed it lives only in the dry valleys of the Huancabamba Depression – there are now three known species of pudu, with the  Pudella carlae having paler ears and a unique body fur color described as a “rich reddish brown or orange-red”. Maybe we should be looking for a mini Bigfoot.

It hasn’t been confirmed that the plane-shaped anomaly it found 16,000 feet below sea level on the Pacific floor is indeed the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s plane which disappeared 87 years ago, but Deep Sea Vision has already moved on to its next missing plane cold case as the company announced it will use one of its underwater drones to search for the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared after leaving Kuala Lumpur on March 8, 2014 – Deep Sea Vision CEO Tony Romeo says the Hugin 6000 drone has “big eyes, looking at everything it can see, sucks and stores data, comes back up to the surface, we pluck a thumb drive into it, pull the data out, and we watch it on a computer exactly what it looked at” and he believes the Malaysian government will support his search. Maybe he can help Boeing find its missing plane safety inspection instructions too.

We may no longer be in awe of solar eclipses when we can just wear our special glasses and watch things like the nuclear fusion reactor which scientists in South Korea claim has set a new world record for the longest time at sustained temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius, which is seven times hotter than the sun’s core — the scientists had the KSTAR fusion research device or “artificial sun” operate at a temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius for 48 seconds, beating the previous record of 30 seconds, by using tungsten instead of carbon in the “diverters” which extract heat and impurities produced by the fusion reaction. It’s a record, but 48 seconds of artificial sunlight isn’t long enough to replace going to Florida for Spring Break.