Cryptids with Pizza, Subterranean Martian Mini Cows, Best UFO Photo, Aliens Helping Dogs and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

Aerospace engineer Shreedhara Somanath, the head of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) which is India’s equivalent of NASA and the ESA, went public in an interview with his views on the existence of extraterrestrials, saying: “Absolutely, without a doubt. My conscience tells me yes, although I have no proof. As the chairman of ISRO, I am telling you this. There are definitely aliens out there in the universe”; he also said that they would visit Earth if they were ahead of us in technology by as little as 1,000 years because “For them, our planet is like a zoo”. Someone should check his office to see if he has a sign on his wall that reads: “Attention aliens – do not feed the animals.”

Shreedhara Somanath, the head of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), also said in the interview that "I would be happy to never be in contact with aliens” because they "may not have the same genomic structure or protein structure which can be extremely dangerous” and want to dominate us, explaining that “This is the nature of life – one will not allow the other to survive. It must surpass and destroy the other. Unless these aliens become aware of this and realise that we are different, choosing to remain disconnected in terms of our bodies or chemistry, it will be catastrophic.” This is the same guy who led the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft’s recent soft landing on the Moon’s south pole – did he ever stop to consider what aliens think of him?

The Milano’s Pizza in Morgantown, West Virginia, is proof that cryptozoology and interest in cryptids are on the rise after contracting with local artist Liz Pavlovic, known for her drawings of West Virginia’s cryptids, to adorn the parlor’s walls with paintings of Bigfoot, Mothman, the Flatwoods Monster and the Grafton Monster, a white, seal-like creature with no visible head and said to be between seven and nine feet tall. It’s probably not the pizza at Milano’s that gave you indigestion.

On May 29, 2019, Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster died and was buried without embalming in a wooden casket at the Queen of Apostles monastery in Gower, Missouri; in 2023, her body was exhumed so it could be moved into the Abbey church for interment and it was discovered that her corpse had no signs of decomposition, a sign many attributed to incorruptibility and pushed for her sainthood; the final results of a detailed examination of her body were released recently and the investigators “noted that the condition of Sister Wilhelmina’s body during the examination was notable for a lack of any detected features of decomposition. The lining of her casket had completely deteriorated, but her habit and clothing showed no features of breakdown. The report also noted that the related history of Sister Wilhelmina’s death and interment does not describe conditions that would be expected to protect against decomposition” but “There is no current plan to initiate a cause for sainthood for Sister Wilhelmina”. Couldn’t they at least immortalize her with a movie?

The police department of Exeter, New Hampshire, celebrated the 2024 Exeter UFO Festival with a new one-of-a-kind commemorative Exeter Police patch featuring an alien with its arm around the department’s comfort dog, Maple; the $10 patches go to support the police comfort dog program and the festival commemorates the famous “Incident at Exeter” which occurred on September 3rd, 1965, when 18-year-old Norman Muscarello reported a UFO behind a barn where Exeter police investigating the site also witnessed it. If aliens buy a patch, can they use it as proof of ID to get into the festival?

That meteor you saw in the night sky may have come from Mars according to a new study by researchers at the University of Alberta who found that at least 10 massive objects have slammed into the Red Planet in recent history and the debris from those impacts has escaped Mars’ gravity, made it to Earth, penetrated our atmosphere, lit up our skies and plummeted to the ground; they identified 200 meteorite fragments that can be traced to five craters on Mars, in two volcanic regions known as Tharsis and Elysium, made by these impacts; this may also help reconstruct the volcanic history of Mars before the impacts. Explain again why we need to send astronauts to collect rocks from Mars?

Another strange cause of meteors is NASA, which in September 2022 had the Double Asteroids Redirect Test (DART) collide with the moonlet Dimorphos, which was orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos, to demonstrate the possibility of deflecting potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) with satellites or missiles; it also demonstrated that post-impact debris from Dimorphos is headed toward Mars and Earth, where it would make the first ever man-made meteor shower, according to Polytechnic Institute of Milan, Italy aerospace engineer and astrophysicist and study lead author Eloy Peña-Asensio, who said that “If these ejected Dimorphos fragments reach Earth, they will not pose any risk" because "Their small size and high speed will cause them to disintegrate in the atmosphere, creating a beautiful luminous streak in the sky”. And if you believe that, we have some property on Venus you might be interested in.

Not all asteroids are going to be smashed into little bits, as the California asteroid mining company AstroForge announced it has raised $40 million to launch a mission in 2025 to send its 440-pound (200 kilograms) Vestri probe to dock with a metallic near-Earth asteroid in order to determine the quality and quantity of valuable elements on the asteroid and plan for an eventual mining expedition that many expect will replace the need for mining rare metals on Earth. That will make more money but probably won’t inspire any songwriters to write mining tunes like “Working in the Coal Mine”, “Sixteen Tons” and “Coal Miner’s Daughter”.

While ‘global warming’ gets all of the media and political attention, but a large strip of the Atlantic Ocean spanning several degrees north and south of the equator cooled this summer at a "really unprecedented" record speed according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which cannot explain the sudden drop starting in June from a record monthly average of 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) to 77 F (25 C) by late July at 77 F (25 C); while the temperature of the area is up again, researchers were concerned it might develop into an Atlantic Niña which would affect weather patterns in western Africa, northeastern Brazil and the Gulf of Guinea like La Niña does in the Pacific Ocean. Life was so much easier when all weather forecasters told us “It’s going to be partly cloudy with a chance of rain – now here’s Biff Basher with sports”.

Archeologists checking the construction site of a train station in the southern Mexican state of Campeche found a mysterious ancient complex dedicated to the terrifying Maya death deity known Ah Puch, or Cizin, whose name translates to “stench”, “flatulence” and “The Stinking One”, which explains why he is more commonly known as the god of farts; the site has a small temple containing human remains, including teeth and skull fragments, and a 9.8-inch limestone statue of Ah Puch, showing his large phallus, deformed skull, skull mask, nose adornment, and breastplate; the Maya believed Ah Puch was responsible for burning the souls of the dead, starting with their mouths and anus. With that kind of job, also being god of the farts doesn’t sound so bad.

A video taken by a woman in Chengdu, China, shows what appears to be seven suns of various intensities spread in an arc across the sky and viewers who saw it as the video went viral on the Internet were baffled; scientists explained the phenomena as the product of the layered window glass she shot it through which created a sun for each pane; Chinese mythologists linked it to Hou Yi, the god of archery, who was sent from the Heavens to stop 10 suns from burning up the earth by shooting nine of them down with his magic bows and arrows – the tenth sun begged for its life and agreed to separate the day from the night as punishment for attempting to burn up the earth. In today’s upside-down world, which one do you think more people believe?

Dr. Chenoa Tremblay from the SETI Institute and Professor Stephen Tingay from Curtin University have joined forces to become the first astronomers to search for signs of extraterrestrial technology in galaxies beyond our own by looking for low radio frequencies around 100 MHz using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Western Australia, which allowed them to scan about 2,800 galaxies at a time; any signal detected could come from a supercivilization advanced enough to have the technology to harness the energy of one or more stars to generate a signal detectable between galaxies; while they haven’t found any yet, they believe using the MWA to scan for low-frequency signals “makes it an ideal tool for this kind of research and will guide future searches for other forms of life”. Meanwhile, we’re still here on Earth blowing up asteroids and ducking the debris.

What some are calling ‘the best UFO ever’ is back in the news over 50 years after it was taken by aerial photographer and mapmaker Sergio Loaiza while working on research for a hydroelectric project in Costa Rica in 1971; according to his notes, Loaiza was taking photos at an altitude of around 10,000 feet over Lake Cote when he captured a black-and-white image of a saucer-shaped object hovering over the water; neither the pilot or Loaiza saw the saucer at the time, but Loaiza noticed the single frame later; investigative journalist and paranormal author Leslie Kean wrote about the photo in 2021 and touted its legitimacy since it was “a government photo"; while the Costa Rican government refused to release it to the public until 2022, it is back in the news recently as Oscar Sierra, a UFO researcher based in Costa Rica, reviewed it and said, “It’s one of the most compelling scientific confirmations that UFOs are real”. It has not been proved or disproved, so what we need now is for someone to run for president of Costa Rica on the platform of releasing everything they know about Loaiza’s UFO photo.

Security guards at the Jardines de Montesacro cemetery in Itagüí near Medellin, Colombia, claim they met a mysterious woman one night who appeared suddenly at 2 AM at a fence surrounding the cemetery and asked them for help, then stood silently as they tried to get more information from her; she was silent even while touching the heavily electrified fence and while they recorded her; she eventually left and many, including the guards, are spooked by the video, saying she could have been a ghost, while others think it was a real woman having a mental health crisis. Being a night guard at a cemetery in Colombia doesn’t sound like a dream job, does it?

Researchers looking for evidence of a Loch Ness monster with a state-of-the-art holographic camera got Nessie believers all excited recently when they reported capturing photos of what looks like ‘micro-monsters’ in the depths of the loch; they say the creatures are plankton but refused to release the photos; they plan to go back with biologists to examine the creatures in situ in hopes of identifying them without killing them. Get ready for Loch Ness tour boats to start equipping passengers with magnifying glasses.

The latest TikTok time traveler is @thetimetraveller2582 who claims he comes from, no surprise here, the year 2582 who comes to tell us that “Yes, I am a real time traveler” and offers as proof tales of upcoming events, like a huge boat going missing in the Bermuda Triangle in September 2024, a meteor containing antimatter hitting Earth on December 12, 2025, giving an early Christmas gift to anyone who finds it because the antimatter is worth $64.5 trillion per gram; unfortunately, he also warned that on  August 27th, 2024, “A mysterious gate is discovered in a cave. It is closed but it will be opened. It will lead into an alternative universe with new form of life discovered, some of it will be brought back to Earth” – the date has passed with no gate discovered. A more reliable prediction would be that TikTok will continue to make money giving these ‘time travelers’ a platform.

In what has to be the best explanation ever for ‘burps’ of methane rising to the surface of Mars where they’ve been observed by the Mars Curiosity rover, Chris Lintott, Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University, said in an interview that the burps could be coming from subterranean mini cows, which he then qualified: “That’s not saying that it’s not cows, it’s saying that there are loads of other explanations as well, which I agree with - so it could be geology, or some heating or some chemistry”. We saw Subterranean Martian Mini Cows open for Buffalo Springfield and Rare Earth.

We generally only hear from the dead psychic Nostradamus once a year around January 1, but Brazilian psychic Athos Salomé, who calls himself the Living Nostradamus, is wearing out his welcome with proclamations almost weekly, like the latest where he warns that artificial intelligence could reactivate the Nephilim, the giants mentioned in ancient texts which he calls “ancestral powers that corrupted the world”; he also thinks AI could resurrect the dead and generate even more problems. If only AI had a solution for annoying psychics.

Annoying but entertaining spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller says a recent shutdown of thousands of airline flights due to a computer security software glitch was actually caused by aliens “testing” technology on Earth, which he explains is why so many UFOs have been seen near nuclear facilities; he warns that “I have no doubt in my mind that aliens are testing our sophisticated, so-called sophisticated systems. This is major, lots of UFOs have been spotted over nuclear plants, nuclear submarines and so on, they are doing something, they are testing us” and ultimately planning an invasion. If only AI wasn’t spending all of its time on raising the dead and generating fake nudes.

Kids attending the brand new Watson Mountain Middle School Ain Leesburg, Virginia, were introduced to the school’s new mascot – a Yeti whose adorable furry white face and body adorn signs, shirts and the gymnasium floor while it leads them in cheers and welcomes them back for a new year; while the area has had Bigfoot sightings, it’s unusual to choose the Himalayan version known as the Yeti at an American school, but officials claim it was the overwhelming favorite in a student vote. Sasquatch may be scary, but the Yeti is cooler.