Vampire Bigfoot, Zombie Grave, Robot Priest, Purple ETs and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

Bigfoot researcher and documentary filmmaker Kelley Lockman, from the I Believe In Bigfoot YouTube channel, has shared photos of animals he believes were killed by a Sasquatch that then drained out their blood and ‘gifted’ or left them out in the open as a warning to intruders in the undisclosed area in North Carolina - Lockwood says the dead buzzard and dead deer he came across both had their necks snapped back and twisted; he also interviews another witness who believes her German shepherd-sized dogs believes her dogs were killed by a Sasquatch that vaulted over an 8-foot-tall fence into their pen because they also had snapped and twisted neck and no blood, which she suspects was drained via some puncture wounds. If Bigfoot can vault 8-foot fences, it could be eating much better by competing in the upcoming Summer Olympics in Paris.

Astronomer Konstantin Batygin, who is already a well-known proponent of the existence of a Planet 9 (or 10 or X) in our solar system, has released a new paper with what he claims is “the strongest statistical evidence yet that Planet 9 is really out there” – his team looked at a set of unstable trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) beyond Neptune and simulated reasons for their instability; they were able to eliminate the gravitational pull of Neptune, the “Galactic tide” that comes from the Milky Way, and passing stars, and concluded the best explanation is a Planet Nine. Models are great and functional movies are fun, but we’re still waiting for pics of Planet 9 or it didn’t happen.

It doesn’t take an eclipse to remind us that Earth has one big Moon but astronomers often refer to the orbiting space rock Kamo'oalewa as a ‘quasi’moon’ after it was discovered in 2016, but its origin has remained a mystery until recently when researchers at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France's state research agency, noticed its composition is similar to moon rocks and were able to trace Kamo'oalewa (Hawaiian for "an oscillating celestial object") back to the Giordano Bruno crater and surmise in their new study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, that a collision between 1 and ten million years ago created the 14-mile-wide crater and carved out the chunk that became Kamo'oalewa, a rare non-asteroid belt asteroid. Call us when Kamo'oalewa shuts down the entire planet for four minutes.

In recent blog and X social media posts, Christopher Mellon, the former deputy secretary of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), revealed that he has for years been “sitting on” that a “senior government official” uncovered important details about the “management structure and security control systems” of “the recovered UFO that landed in Kingman, Arizona in the 1950s” – Mellon says he “shared an unredacted copy of this message with some staff members and several congressional oversight committees. As far as I know, no one has decided to contact the alleged guardian of the Air Force to verify the veracity of this statement” and he believes “this individual, as well as another very compelling witness, still refuse to meet with AARO because they do not trust the process” but they might “be willing to speak with a small group of members of Congress behind closed doors”. Is Christopher Mellon the person who will finally turn the trickle of UFO disclosure information into a firehose?

Also joining in on the call for UFO disclosure is talk show host John Oliver, who recognizes that the subject straddles the line between “wildly speculative” and “with borderline contempt”, so he looks at how “the government “actively engaged in cover-ups about them” by pointing out that it could be justified for incidents involving top-secret US army air force research projects like ‘Mogul’ (the Roswell incident) or secret manned reconnaissance flights, but he pushes for “honest inquiry” because “because science is all about collecting small answers that eventually help us address big questions”. If comedy shows can get people to notice and expose political cover-ups, why not UFO cover-ups too?

For those fearing that AI chatbots will someday be worshipped as gods or take over from humans as religious leaders, you can rest comfortably for a while as a robot priest created by artificial intelligence for the US religious network Catholic Answers was removed from the pulpit after just one day on the job – over 1,000 an hour used the “Father Justin” app and complained he was creepy, had a weird voice and didn’t act like a priest. Sounds like a bunch of disgruntled people who lost at a bingo night run by a robot priest.

Michelle Reyes was on a commercial airline flight above LaGuardia Airport in late March 2024 when she recorded video footage of a UFO she described as a “flying cylinder” while looking out of her window; another passenger saw it and Reyes decided it was strange enough to email the photo and description to the send to the FAA – while she waits for an answer from the government, Thomas Wertman, the state director of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) in Ohio, reviewed the video and observed it was at an altitude of about 2,500 feet and “relatively close” to the plane as it prepared to land – close enough for Wertman to rule out a news helicopter, a drone or a military-operated aircraft; so far, there have been no reports to the FAA from the pilots. As people flying there know, most of the strange encounters at LaGuardia occur INSIDE the terminal.

Success often comes to those who are patient as we see at NASA where engineers at the Jet Propulsion Lab have been trying to fix a problem on the Voyager 1 space probe which has been sending gibberish messages for months – the researchers determined a faulty chip on the 46-year-old spaceship was the cause and no other chip onboard was large enough to run the code needed, so they partitioned it into smaller code chunks, distributed it to other parts of the Voyager 1 FDS (flight data subsystem ) computer system, sent it to Voyager 1 and then waited 44 hours (22 to get there and 22 more to receive the message back) to find out the fix had worked and the little spaceship that could continue on its voyage outside the solar system. Why can’t we get 46-year-old washing machines, cars and other machines to work like this?

A new UFO whistleblower named Jason Sands claims he was in the US Air Force for 22 years and one of his jobs was trying to understand technology captured from “non-human intelligences" which he learned about while monitoring scientific communications where there were discussions of alien races like “Tall Whites, the Greys … we heard things like that” – Sands claims that “we're not alone” and we “have some contact [with aliens]" but he refused a job offer in a lab examining material retrieved from UAP crashes – however, Sands says one alien "talked to him" telepathically and other people in the program “have seen some things …ghosts and inter-dimensional beings – all kinds of different things." As Fox Mulder might say, the truth is in there struggling to get out.

For those who don’t believe the aliens are already here, Lisa Kaltenegger, the director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell, says in her new book that because the James Webb Space Telescope is designed to detect biosignatures, including organism-produced methane gas, she expects it will find proof of extraterrestrials and “The announcement we’ve found alien life could be just a couple of years away” – she also refers to congressional UFO whistleblower David Grusch, whose claims the government has reverse-engineered "non-human vehicles" and recovered alien bodies to be a "snake oil" salesman. The dilemma of SETI research is that we have so many snake oil salespersons, yet so little snake oil.

Speaking of snake oil, one of those ‘flying saucer towed on the freeway’ stories popped up this week in Argentina, where photos were circulated showing what appears to be a saucer-shaped spacecraft ‘UFO’ being hauled down a road between the towns of Andacollo and Chos Malal southwest of Buenos Aires, by a tractor-trailer – while most suspect it is some sort of telecommunications antenna or military equipment, many others want to believe it is a ship from another solar system being inexplicably towed on a public road in broad daylight. As PT Barnum might say, there’s a snake oil buyer and a UFO believer born every minute.

If you’re looking for extraterrestrials, a new paper by Dr Lisa Kaltenegger and fellow Cornell University astronomers says that they and their planets may be purple because purple bacteria was an early form of life on Earth before plant-type photosynthesis began and it could be better suited for living on planets which orbit red dwarf stars, which are cooler and the most common ones in our galaxy. Those who believe Jimi Hendrix was an alien may have just gotten their proof in the form of extraterrestrial purple haze.

Archeologists researching excavations for the expansion of the Südostlink power line near Oppin, Germany, have uncovered a 4,200-year-old grave from the Neolithic period in Saxony-Anhalt which contains the skeleton of a man apparently feared by his contemporaries to be a zombie – the 40-to-60-year-old male was buried with a heavy three-foot-long stone slab laid across his legs which they believed would prevent the zombie or revenant from digging his way out of the grave to terrorize the town; this may be the oldest known zombie grave found in Germany. Do German zombies prefer the brains of beer drinkers?

This month marks the 90th anniversary of the publication of the famous ‘surgeon’s photograph’ of the Loch Ness Monster which was allegedly taken by London gynecologist Robert Kenneth Wilson and whose long neck and exposed body led many to this day to believe the monster resembles a longnecked dinosaur – unfortunately, the black-and-white blurry photo was debunked in 1994 when a man revealed that his step-brother had fashioned the monster out of a toy submarine, staged the photos and convinced Wilson to sell it to the Daily Mail as authentic; there are still many people who question the hoax explanation. One of them is Eoin O'Faodhagain who owns a double-digit number of sightings via one of the loch’s many 24-hour webcams and this week reported "a spot in the water causing a disturbance at the edge of the webcam screen to the right” which he claims was a creature 18 feet in length” – it doesn’t look like the surgeon’s photo and Eoin thinks it should be investigated. Better yet, let’s find a college to give Eoin an honorary doctorate and create a whole new collection of surgeon’s photos.

A Loch Ness monster photo looking more like the ‘surgeon’s photo’ was taken by Parry Malm and Shannon Wiseman, Canadian tourists visiting Loch Ness recently who captured a shadowy figure with a long neck sticking out above the water’s surface – they say their children also saw it and were excited because they had brought shortbread cookies, said to be a favorite Nessie snack, to lure the monster to the shore; while the photo has made the family famous, the object has not been positively identified as the real monster. It would seem more likely that the lake monster would prefer a more waterproof snack like Gummi bears.

The Baltic Sea Anomaly is an unusual saucer-shaped object discovered on the bottom of the Baltic by divers 12 years but is estimated to be over 140,000 years old and is thought by some to be the wreckage of a UFO-shaped like the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, but the depth and poor visibility of the location have prevented positive identification; now, Volker Brüchert, a Stockholm University geologist, has examined samples of the anomaly and identified them as “granites and gneisses and sandstones" which leads him to conclude it is “a great black stone that could be a volcanic rock” formed “during the Ice Age many thousands of years ago" into a shape that just looks like a flying saucer. Soon to join it on the sea bottom are plans for tourist traps, souvenir shops and submarine tours.

Singing “Ziggy played guitar, jamming good with Weird and Gilly, and the Spiders from Mars”, David Bowie introduced us to the idea of spiders on Mars, but this week the European Space Agency made the song real with the release of photos from Mars of objects resembling spiders on the planet’s surface – the ‘spiders’ actually spider-like formations in the Inca City southern polar region made by seasonal eruptions of carbon dioxide gas (some geysers shooting up to three feet high) which make channels measuring 0.03 to 0.6 miles (45 meters to 1 kilometer) across. “So where were the spiders, while the fly tried to break our balls?”

The Special Model National Secondary School in Batu Kikir, Malaysia, had to be closed after a student claimed to have seen a friend in a field, only to realize that the friend was sitting next to her, causing her to panic and spread a hysterical wave of fear of a supernatural creature or a demon throughout the class, resulting in the entire school being shut down for a week while officials, medical teams and spiritual leaders tried to calm things down. Did anyone check to see if the teacher had just announced a pop quiz?

The many mysterious mummies of Peru keep causing problems as Federal Police, acting on a tip from the Embassy of Peru,  made a surprise raid on the UFO Museum in the city of Victoria, Entre Ríos, and searched for alleged illegal antiquities, especially a mummy’s foot – the police found more than sixty archaeological pieces, including Peruvian pottery; sharply carved stones, probably of pre-Hispanic origin; ceramic fragments of ancient vessels; polished lithic artifacts and fossil remains. But no mummy feet. We saw Mummy Feet open for Talking Heads.

Meanwhile, psychic spoon bender Uri Geller weighed in on the Peruvian three-fingered mummies controversies by stating that they couldn’t be extraterrestrials because they don’t look like the aliens he has seen, which are bigger, taller and fatter than the Peruvian mummies, although he concedes they could be from a different extraterrestrial species – he doesn’t believe they’re hoaxes because Peruvian Ministry of Culture’s officials tried to seize the specimens from the press conference where they were allegedly being displayed (they weren’t). If anyone knows about hoaxes, it’s Uri Geller.

In this week’s ghost news, a night watchman at the famous Railway Museum in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, posted a photo of what appears to be the shadowy figure of a female dressed in black and standing in front of the window of the only room in the building with its lights on at that hour of the night; the watchman swears the building was completely empty, so the woman must have obviously been a ghost – a belief seconded by the state governor, Ricardo Gallardo Cardona, who posted the comment: "Ah wow! I didn't know that in the early morning there were people in the Railway Museum... According to the guard the only thing there is the nightstand!” Was he referring to furniture or accusing the ghost of having a one-night stand?

In a follow-up to the story of the murder trial in Oklahoma where a man claimed he had to kill his fishing buddy because the man was threatening to summon a Sasquatch to eat him and a psychiatrist claimed he was suffering from a "methamphetamine-induced psychotic disorder" that gave him hallucinations of Bigfoot and led him to commit murder, the Pontotoc County District Court found defendant Larry Sanders guilty of the first-degree murder of his high school buddy Jimmy Knighten - Judge Steve Kessinger made the ruling and Sanders now faces a life sentence without parole with his sentencing hearing is set for June 18. Meanwhile, Bigfoot breathed a sigh of relief, paid his lawyer and went back into the woods.