Alien Statues, Possessed Clown Doll, Nuclear UFO Lures, Neanderthal Viruses and More Mysterious News Briefly

Omara Lara was a crewman on board the USS Nimitz in 2004 during the now famous “Tic Tac” UFO sightings and revealed in a new interview that the incident began when an alert was sounded signaling a man overboard; he claims “We actually saw this guy, we went over to the deck edge and we saw this guy floating and the current took him way out. That’s the only reason why we saw this thing” which was the Tic Tac UFO which he and a crew mate named Rick Palmer saw when “It just dropped out from the sky, landed about 40 to 50 feet above the water line and shot off to the right. It made an acute angle and exploded right back to where it came from” at an impossible speed he thought should have made a sonic boom – he thought it could be extraterrestrial, but another shipmate suspected it was a high-tech drone from China or Russia. Is he implying an ET would have stayed until the man was rescued?

British singer-songwriter Brocarde, who has been in the paranormal news for marrying the ghost of a Victorian soldier and later divorcing (via exorcism) the same ghost when he became too controlling, is back with a possessed clown doll she picked up while visiting the Clown Motel in Nevada – Brocarde returned to England with the doll conduct a paranormal investigation it; she claims the ex-husband ghost doesn’t like the spirit in the clown who she has identified as a carnival clown who “was tortured by his dreams of stardom but was condemned to life in the carnival where he was underappreciated”. Brocarde certainly appreciates him, especially for all of the time he adds to her 15 minutes of fame.

Kevin Knuth, Professor of Physics at the University at Albany, told attendees at a Sol Foundation conference in California that U.S. scientists are making small “handheld” mini nuclear reactors and using them to “lure UFOs and work out how to make contact” with extraterrestrials – the experiments are based on assumptions that “UFOs have an interest in, and an ability to detect nuclear weapons – some of them underground, some of them in bunkers or in storage depots” and these mini-nukes will lure aliens to “come down and find out what 'those crazy monkeys' are up to this time” and then we can capture imagery or other data on them. Has he stopped to consider how the ETs might react when they find out they’ve been hoodwinked?

The “Great Migration” theory that humans coming from Asia crossed over the Bering Strait Bridge and settled in the US generally puts that date at about 15,000 years ago, but researcher Darrin Lowery has discovered 286 human-made artifacts in the Chesapeake Bay area, some embedded in charcoal, dating back more than 22,000 years, which pushes the arrival of humans back 7,000 years and makes Maryland a potential pre-Clovis site along with areas in New Mexico showing footprints from 22,000 years ago. The more evidence like this we find, the weaker the European explorers’ claims of ‘discovering America’ become.

Tim Burchett, a US Congress member from Tennessee, continues his quest for full UFO disclosure with his "UAP Transparency Act," which would require the president of the United States to direct all federal agencies and departments to make all documents relating to UAPs available to the public within 270 days and require the president to provide a quarterly report to the U.S. House of Representatives detailing the progress made toward declassifying all of these federal records; as Burchett puts it, "This bill isn’t all about finding little green men or flying saucers, it’s about forcing the Pentagon and federal agencies to be transparent with the American people". What about big green men or medium-sized green women?

According to a new study, the top state for paranormal investigations of the ghost-hunting kind is West Virginia with an average of 403 searches per 100,000 people each month, which is 67 percent higher than the national average of 241 searches per 100,000 residents; West Virginia is followed by Alaska (326), Colorado (305) and Oregon (295); at the other end are Mississippi (161), New Jersey (178), Louisiana (194) and South Carolina (195). Does this make West Virginia’s Mothman the king of paranormal hide-and-seek?

From the “Things are not always as they appear” file comes the recent discovery by utility workers in the Mozimba subdivision of Acapulco of an anthropomorphic humanoid statue having what witnesses described as having ‘alien’ features like an elongated face looking downwards, three fingers per hand,  and two oval eyes oriented diagonally – the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) analyzed it and, while confirming that it indeed depicted something alien-looking, the statue was not pre-Hispanic iconography but a modern sculpture made to look old which ended up in a sewer after a house partially collapsed during Hurricane Otis where a second sculpture was also discovered. Rule of thumb - if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and has three webbed toes, it’s not necessarily an alien duck.

According to new research by Ann Pizzorusso, a geologist and art historian, the mysterious background setting in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is Lecco, a small town in northern Italy’s Lombardy region – the body of water is Lake Garlate, the bridge is the 14th-century Azzone Visconti, and the rock formations are the limestone formations in Lecco – Pizzorusso’s claim to have solved the Mona Lisa mystery is the first to use geology to support the claim. We still don’t know if this is art, a graduation photo or a Renaissance-era mugshot.

Lukáš Machala, Slovakia’s Chief of Staff for the Culture Ministry, revealed in a recent interview that he is open to the idea of the Earth being flat because “Has it been proved that the Earth is round? Have you been into outer space? No, nor have I, I don’t know”, but he says he is “not a conspiracy theorist”. Slovaks are probably glad he’s not the Minister of Defense or head of the space program either.

People in Burley, a village between Southampton and Bournemouth in England are reporting many so-called ‘sacrificial killings’ of animals in the area, including a severed deer’s head found hanging from a street lamp, a lamb bled to death, a sheep with its intestines hanging out, a ewe and her lamb stabbed in their shoulders and more – they’re blaming all of these killings on a ‘white witch’ named Sybil Leek who lived there in the 1950s and was called ‘Britain’s most famous witch’ because she claimed she was a descendant of Molly Leigh who was accused of being a witch during the witch hunts of the 1600s, walked around in a long dark cloak with a pet jackdaw on her shoulder; she moved to America because her landlord refused to renew her lease but residents of Burley fear she’s back and still terrorizing them at the age of 100 or older. Even the local jackdaws think this is a bit absurd.

Fans of the Flintstones cartoons know that Fred Flintstone’s monster burgers are made from brontosaurus and appear to be tasty, at least to Fred and his pal Barney, but Dr. Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, wondered what they might really taste like so he reasoned that Brontosaurus was a plant-eater in the Jurassic Era and consumed mostly evergreen trees and similar plants, so its burgers would taste “like some kind of fragrant, delicious gamey cross between chicken and venison” and would be best prepared like a chicken burger, with arugula, heirloom tomato, a blood orange aioli, Colby Jack cheese, applewood smoked bacon, and a side of yucca fries. That sounds much too frou-frou for Fred.

Cytogenesis fans waiting for the day frozen brains can be brought back to life should be happy to hear that researchers in China claim they used a new technique to successfully freeze and thaw human brain tissue and then demonstrated that it regained normal function – the tissue came from embryonic stem cells grown into brain organoids or mini-brains which were placed in different chemical compounds, including sugars and antifreeze, and frozen in liquid nitrogen for at least 24 hours before being thawed, upon which many of the mini-brains continued to grow for up to 150 days. Let’s hope they can perfect the technique before zombies discover frozen brains on a stick.

Fishermen in Florida have in recent years reported sawfish mysteriously spinning themselves to death, so the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) tested coastal water samples and found "harmful algal species" and "associated toxins" in their tissues - fish anglers, ocean divers, and wildlife officials have reported a spike in spinning deaths for sawtooth fish recently with 47 found dead just since May 8; they’re concerned the algae could be harmful to people eating the sawfish and that it might spread the mysterious spinning-to-death in other fish. We saw Spinning Fish Death open for Blue Öyster Cult.

Scientists analyzing Neanderthal skeleton remains from 50,000 years ago found in Russia’s Chagyrskaya cave found genetic material from three viruses that still affect humans today - adenovirus (causing cold symptoms), herpesvirus (associated with cold sores), and papillomavirus (known for genital warts and cancer); these are the oldest human viruses ever found by 20,000 years and are contributing to speculation that Neanderthals faced the same kind of virus-related health issues modern humans have and were unable to fight them off, leading to their extinction. The Neanderthals may have been smarter than we thought, but they weren’t smart enough to invent chicken soup.

A security camera in the town of Chalatenango, El Salvador, picked up a strange small humanoid being walking through a yard in between some animals and people who saw it speculated that it could have been an alien or the ghost of a boy with a prosthetic leg who died a violent death during the mid 20th century – those who think it’s a hoax point out that the animals are oblivious to the small being as it walks among them. If the animals ignore, don’t look anymore.

Using data from the skull of his mummy, a multinational research team has recreated the face of Amenhotep III, the grandfather of Tutankhamun who is considered by many to be one of the richest men that ever lived – the digital image shows Amenhotep III had a “robust” face due to his heavy weight and short stature but the expression was peaceful befitting the calm economic times he ruled in; the face didn’t show evidence of this sickness and dental problems he suffered before his death. Money can’t buy happiness, but it can give you a face that still looks good 3,300 years later.

The neuroscience and biomedical engineering start-up BrainBridge gives us a peek into the future with a CGI video showing a robotic system removing the heads from two male bodies, movie the donor head to the recipient’s body by conveyor, then attaching it to the torso; the company says this will be a solution for untreatable conditions such as terminal cancer, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and paralysis, and it is looking for doctors to help create the process – one they might contact is neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero, who moved to China to perform the operation on a volunteer, but the man backed out when he fell in love and had children. We are this close to moving Twilight Zone videos from science fiction to documentary.

Tim Gallaudet, an oceanographer and former Naval rear admiral, has been making the rounds discussing his recent white paper, “Beneath the Surface: We May Learn More about UAP by Looking in the Ocean”, and said in an interview that so-called "unidentified submerged objects" (USOs) are "scientifically valid" and have crossed “the air-sea interface in ways not possible for anything made by humans"; Gallaudet also supports the claim recently made by retired Army Colonel Karl Nell at the recent SALT conference that we have been visited by non-human intelligences (NHI) of a higher level. We are this close to moving Jules Verne from science fiction to documentary too.

Barbara Maura Lane, a barrister who works for media firm Thomson Reuters, is also known as the 'White Witch of Rye' and became obsessed with self-proclaimed wizard Alfred Douglas, a world-renowned expert on tarot cards and the occult, to the point that she stalked him broke into his house in Rye, East Sussex, smashed a glass door and a greenhouse, and swamped him with calls and texts to the point that she was charged with seven offenses including stalking, criminal damage and assault; the White Witch of Rye pleaded guilty to harassment without violence and criminal damage and could spend time in jail. Be careful what you ‘witch’ for or you might get a rye witch who isn't so wry.

If you are a user of text-to-image diffusion generative AI models and fear copyright infringement because these models are trained on databases of artists’ images and use them without permission, there’s good news from the University of Texas where researchers have developed the Ambient Diffusion framework which learns only from images that have been distorted beyond recognition, thus ensuring that the model does not remember or reproduce original works – study co-author and computer science professor Adam Klivans says this “could also be useful for scientific and medical applications” where “it is expensive or impossible to obtain a complete set of intact data, from images of black holes to certain types of MRI scans”. Is this good or is the non-distorted cat already out of the copyrighted bag? Can Scarlett Johansson make Open AI close it?

Noland Arbaugh, the first human patient to have a brain-computer interface chip implanted by Elon Musk's Neuralink and then the first to lose his new functions when wires came loose in his brain, is back together again and itching to move past playing video games with his mind, so the quadriplegic wants Musk to give him a Tesla Optimus robot so the Neuralink scientists can hook it up to his brain so it can “do basically everything for me and be a caretaker", thus eliminating “probably 90 percent of the things that I need other people for", including making money, which he hopes to do so he can buy his family a house. If he can convince Elon Musk to give him something for free, he’s well on his way to becoming a billionaire.

The Dragon Man (Homo longi) is an extinct species of archaic human known from a 146,000-year-old skull found in the Chinese province of Heilongjiang (Black Dragon River) and may be the same species as the mysterious Denisovans who lived alongside H. sapiens in Eurasia; now, a new paper suggests that three million-year-old skulls belonging to an unknown human species that were found in Yunyang District of Hubei province in Central China may be closely related to H. sapiens, the Dragon Man and the Denisovans – in fact, the paper states that “It is reasonable to conclude that Yunxian is morphologically and chronologically close to the last common ancestor of the lineages of H. sapiens and Dragon Man.” One of these days, your family reunion will include all of the immediate world.

Spend enough time outdoors looking up at the night sky and you are bound to see plenty of things you can’t identify and are so strange that the only conclusion is that they are extraterrestrial; that happened recently in Daisen, a small Japanese fishing town near Tottori prefecture, when dozens of people saw nine pillars of light beaming down from the clouds to the Sea of Japan below like a fleet of alien craft looking for a base – fortunately, meteorologists were able to calm the nervous residents by explaining that this was a rare phenomenon known as called ‘Isaribi Kochu’ and is caused by the lights of fishing boats reflecting off of the clouds in a most peculiar but non-alien way. But … what if these are alien fishing boats?