Space Pirates, Female Goblins, Brazilian Ufology, Alien Mummies and More Mysterious News Briefly

The Center for the Study of Space Crime, Policy, and Governance (CSCPG) announced it will host the First Annual Space Piracy Conference in early 2025 at the US Naval Academy’s USNI Conference Center in Maryland; the two-day, invitation-only symposium will bring together “experts prepared to review crime, piracy, and smuggling in space" and discuss space piracy “from the perspectives of investment, space law, space policy, intelligence, and the military". Why not just keep an eye out for orders for spacesuits equipped with a hook on one arm?

The most ironic place to find an old chess set would be in a medieval castle and that’s exactly what happened in the Reutlingen district of southern Germany when archeologists from the University of Tübingen, the State Office for Monument Preservation in Stuttgart, and the German Archaeological Institute found a nearly 1,000-year-old collection of well-preserved chess pieces from a time not long after the game was brought to Europe from the Orient – one side had red painted pieces and the knight piece showed wear from movement indicating the rules have not changed much over a thousand years. The real question is whether cheating has changed much over 1,000 years.

The monstrous Loch Ness Monster hunt to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the first organized surface watch of Loch Ness by Sir Edward Mountain and his team of 20 ‘Watchers of the Monster’ took place on the loch recently and most of the groups of volunteers using boats, hydrophones and other sophisticated gear came back empty-handed; however, Alan McKenna from Loch Ness Exploration recorded 10 seconds of a rhythmic pulsing that he will isolate and attempt to identify, while 11-year-old Evelyn Murphy used nothing but her eyes and a cell phone to capture a photo of something breaking the surface of the loch. The Quest Weekend will return next May because, although the monster may not exist, the money it generates does.

Argentine politician Javier Pretto, the current vice mayor of Córdoba and former mayor of the city of La Carlota, revealed in a recent interview an experience he had as mayor when a Tibetan monk took him and his friends to the mountains of Capilla del Monte where the monk prayed, causing a circle five bright oval lights (the smallest was 2.3 feet high) to appear; the monk explained these were peaceful "special beings" and the encounter inspired Pretto to venture to another mountain known as Cerro Alfa, where he found two "extraterrestrial” cities, one of which was “like the entrance to the center of the earth". Isn’t it time he led an official expedition back to one of these sites?

Nick Pope, the UK’s one-time leading UFO investigator for the Ministry of Defence , doesn’t like the idea of revealing the existence of extraterrestrial life to the public because he fears it would fuel dissension between science and religion of the kind we haven’t seen since the arrest and persecution of Italian philosopher and astronomer Galileo Galilei for suggesting the Earth orbited the Sun instead of being the center of the universe; Pope especially fears that an announcement from Russia, North Korea or another radical state would be met with skepticism and even ridicule, whether it was true or not. Is he saying the public won’t believe close encounters of the Third World kind?

Police in Bulilima, Zimbabwe, have abandoned their station because they claim it is haunted nightly by female goblins who harass them, with the officers reporting of “bodies being violated, doors opening on their own, and things climbing on the roof – making it impossible to sleep”; it’s so bad that police from other jurisdictions refuse to work there but no one has been able to identify the cause of the goblins or convince them to leave, voluntarily or by force. This sounds like a job for a medium or shaman who can all the spirits of police officers.

Controversial journalist Jaime Maussan got mixed reactions in 2023 when he unveiled two miniature corpses at a government UFO conference in Mexico and claimed they were centuries-old alien corpses found in Peru; now he’s generating more controversy with new claims that “three more bodies have just been discovered, three more bodies” while performing tests on the body of an alleged alien he calls Montserrat; he claims one of these new discoveries is a male; Maussan says an “anonymous researcher” in Canada has studied all of the alleged aliens, and he is working to have the research peer-reviewed to legitimize the claim that he now has at least six mummified alien bodies. It sometimes seems like these people use an alphabet that is missing the letters D, N and A.

Attorney Daniel Sheehan, who represents some top UFO whistleblowers, says a bill created by a multilateral group of U.S. senators and signed into law on December 22, 2023, has a 300-day time limit which runs out on October 18, 2024, and he believes the government will honor its commitment “that all six of our United States military services, all 18 of our United States intelligence agencies, all 32 of our United States defense department agencies are all ordered to gather together every single piece of information they have acquired pertaining to the UFO phenomenon and non-human intelligence that is understood to be responsible for it” – this has been described as a ‘Catch-22’ scenario where the U.S, government can't declare the information secret without acknowledging that it exists. What we need is a brave new world where leaders ignore Catch-22, crime and punishment in order to release a book of revelations.

Meanwhile, the Brazilian government announced that “the occupation of UFOLOGIST was included in the Brazilian Classification of Occupations (CBO)” in order to recognize “the importance and seriousness of studying phenomena related to unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and promote “the appreciation of professionals dedicated to this area of ​​research” who “play a fundamental role in the investigation, analysis and dissemination of information related to UFO sightings, extraterrestrial contacts and other occurrences related to the UFO phenomenon”; the announcement concludes that the contribution of ufologists “is essential to the advancement of scientific knowledge and to clarifying issues that arouse the interest of society”. Are they going to form a union?

Also in South America, researchers at the National Aviation Reporting Centre on Anomelody Phenomenon (NARCAP) have reopened investigations into a photograph of what appears to be a giant saucer-shaped spaceship allegedly taken in the skies over Chile in 2010 by a family on a picnic at the El Yeso reservoir in San José de Maipo and concluded that “it is a real UFO", not a camera effect, partially hidden in a band of white and red clouds – they recommend that it should be further investigated “if it’s true”. Here’s a better idea – hire some ufologists from Brazil and investigate these anomalies as soon as they happen.

The mysterious sky phenomenon known as ‘Steve’, which stands for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement, is caused by a gas made of electrically charged atoms that glow momentarily when colliding with different magnetic field lines than those causing the Northern lights so they are seen much farther south; astronomers recently discovered that Steve has a fraternal twin (no name yet) which appears closer to the North Pole but is still about 600 miles long, 15 miles wide and moves at more than 13,000 miles per hour. If they’re fraternal, maybe it’s an Eve.

When it comes to embarrassing true confessions of the paranormal kind, it will be hard to top ghost investigator Yvette Fielding who admitted this week that she has been fooled a number of times by strange sounds that she took to be spirits possibly trying to leave their earthly confines but were actually flatulence trying to leave the confines of her crew’s GI tract both accidentally and on purpose just to mess with her; “ We’ve got so many out-takes of a member of the team accidentally breaking wind, me thinking it’s a ghost and then screaming the place down.” If ghosts enjoy a good fart joke, do they laugh or fart along with them?

Professor Robin Allaby from the University of Warwick analyzed a swab sample taken from the carcass of a sheep killed by an unknown animal in Cumbria in England’s Lake District and identified it as 'Panthera genus' DNA, which means the animal was either a lion, leopard, tiger, jaguar or snow leopard and that would make the legendary Beast of Cumbria a real beast – Allaby says he’d like to see more proof, like good photos of big cats in the area; he also says a real big cat would result in “clusters of sheep kills” in a field, not just one. He might like that, but the sheep won’t.

It happens so often that ABC, which normally means Alien Big Cat, could also refer to Alien Big Chupacabras like the remains of a creature discovered recently in the village of Vizimyary in the Russian republic of Mari El which residents photographed and estimated to be 2.3 feet long; the photos were sent to Gennady Bogdanov, a senior researcher at the “Bolshaya Kokshaga” nature reserve, who determined the legs were too long for the creature to be an otter but could not identify the decayed remains; others suspected a lizard, a wolverine, which is not native to the area, or a chupacabra, which would be a looong way from its normal places of sightings in Cuba, Central and South America, and Texas. One thing it was not was anyone’s dinner.

While China has successfully placed a second lander on the far side of the Moon and Boeing has finally carried astronauts to the space station, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa says he’s giving up on fellow billionaire Elon Musk and has canceled his plans to pay for a crew of artists to travel around the Moon in SpaceX’s Starship rocket because it is taking far too long to get the Starship off the ground and into Earth orbit, let alone traveling to the Moon and back. When you have billions of dollars, it must be like an inferno when it is burning a hole in your pocket.

‘B&B’ usually stands for ‘bed and breakfast’ but new research has determined that in the case of the old palace in Abomey, the capital of the ancient West African kingdom of Dahomey, ‘B&B’ means ‘blood and bones’ as a new study of the suspiciously red mortar used by King Ghezo, who ruled from 1818 to 1858 and built the palace, was “made of red oil and lustral water mixed with the blood of 41 sacrificial victims - 41 being a sacred number in voodoo”; this had been suspected because King Ghezo was also rumored to have paved the road to his hut “with the skulls and jawbones of defeated enemies” and sat on a throne resting on “the skulls of four defeated enemy leaders”. Not even the most diehard house flipper wants to buy this place and redo those walls.

Two pilots in different planes both reported the same UFO to Air Traffic Control after seeing it in Irish airspace shortly after midnight on May 29, with one pilot describing it as “an object [that was] there and then it went” and “it was almost like it was staying still then it went really quickly”; the sighting was in the direction of Northern Ireland/Scotland. One person who is a big shot in the cereal business thinks this was aliens trying to find him because “they’re always after me Lucky Charms – they’re magically delicious!”

The French distillery Pegasus has unveiled Shooting Star Vodka, an ultra-premium vodka aged in small batches for a year in large terracotta jars with pieces of an actual meteorite suspended in the middle so they can dissolve and give this $200 vodka a mineral taste from the mineral chondrite, which tasters say allows the flavors to linger on the tongue for longer than other vodkas. If I want a mineral taste in my screwdriver, I’ll stir it with a real screwdriver.

Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, the official royal space expert who advised Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and now King Charles, says he’s convinced there is alien life on “lots of these other planets” and he’s fascinated by the letters he gets “from people who think that they’ve been visited by the aliens or taken away by them” but he doesn’t believe most of these claims because “If the aliens had made a huge effort to come here would they have just met one or two well-known cranks, maybe made a corn circle and gone away again? It seems unlikely.” It’s probably a safe bet that no one has ever asked him about Reptilians.

The Swiss biotech startup company FinalSpark announced it has created the world's first bioprocessor using human brain tissue from brain organoids (lab-grown mini-brains); even more interesting, it claims the bioprocessors consume a million times less power than traditional processors; and if that’s not enough, that low powered bioprocessor is still capable of learning and processing information – the neuroplatform architecture is called "wetware" because it is a combination of biology, software, and hardware which uses four multi-electrode arrays to house the organoids. We saw the Organoids open for Heart and Talking Heads.

Nothing screams “Ghosts!” like an old former insane asylum, so it’s no surprise that security camera footage at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum (TALA) in Lewis County, West Virginia, captured something in a closed and locked souvenir shop after hours that seemingly knocked items off of a shelf hard enough to fly across the room, yet the staff reports that the “doors are locked and the windows are all closed” – it has long been rumored that paranormal activity at the hospital is caused by the restless spirits of thousands of people buried in the asylum cemetery in unmarked graves while the facility was in operation from 1864 to 1994. Would it help if they offered free T-shirts to the ghosts?

Sometime between now and September, an explosion will occur in the sky that looks like a new star forming, but it is actually a binary star system called  T Coronae Borealis, also known as the Blaze Star, located 3,000 light-years from our solar system which has been dim since 1946 but will brighten to the intensity of Polaris, the North Star, because it is a recurrent nova (“new star" in Latin) whose cool, red giant star and smaller, hotter white dwarf star orbit each other in peace and harmony except for once every 80 years when the red giant propels matter onto the surface of the white dwarf, causing an explosion – it will be between Arcturus and Vega (slightly closer to Arcturus) as part of the seven stars of the Corona Borealis. Extra points for anyone who remembers the real Blaze Starr, the American burlesque dancer known for her scandalous affair with Louisiana Governor Earl Kemp Long.

If you are a boat owner in southern Spain, you’ve probably developed a healthy fear of orcas or killer whales over the past few years as reports keep coming in of the giant mammals sinking boats by circling them in gangs and ramming them until the damage causes the boat to take on water; while many have theorized that these orcas are punishing humans for the climate change and pollutants that are destroying the oceans, a new study found that these are most likely teen male orcas who are bored and looking for something fun to do – they don’t realize that banging hulls and knocking against rudders can sink boats, but they’re not being aggressive and mean no harm. Teenage Bored Ninja Orcas sounds like a great idea for a new graphic novel series.