Three-Foot Alaskan Alien, Nessie's Heartbeat, Lemmy's Ghost, Blinking Statue and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

Alan McKenna of Loch Ness Exploration was pulling a hydrophone at a depth of 100 feet below the surface Loch Ness recently when he picked up “a rhythmic pulse or heartbeat”; he had no idea what the source was but said “It's very interesting"; he was in the same location in Urquhart Bay where in 1972 Robert Rines' dropped a strobe camera and picked up what looks to many like a plesiosaur flipper; McKenna says “this is the first time hearing the pulse or heartbeat so clearly” but “I'm not suggesting it's a heartbeat; I'm merely using that as a description". To paraphrase Huey Lewis, they say the heart of Rines’ Nessie is still beating, but from what you’ve seen, do you believe them?

Archeologists have long thought that Stonehenge’s central sandstone slab, referred to as the “altar stone”, came from Wales like many of the other stones, but a new study has determined that it doesn’t match any sandstone formations in Wales and instead the 16-foot (5-meter) stone was quarried in the Orcadian Basin near the tip of northeast Scotland and either ferried or dragged on land more than 460 miles (740 km) to what is now Wiltshire in southern England; the researchers could not damage the altar stone so they analyzed minerals in bits of rock found around it. We saw Bits of Rock open for Stone Temple Pilots.

Astrophysicist and astronomer Adam Frank says on his podcast that he’s not a fan of METI (messaging extra-terrestrial intelligence) because “we don't know what's out there, and it may be that the best decision is to kind of lay low”; he thinks METI is the same as sticking our heads above the grass and saying to aliens, “hey, we're here, we're tasty”, and he predicts “life in general is going to be quite common in the universe”. If aliens can pick up our television signals, maybe it’s time we pulled all of the broadcasts of that classic Twilight Zone episode, “To Serve Man”.

Chris Antoniou is the 60-year-old cousin of the late pop singer, George Michael, and he claims the Wham singer sends “totally amazing “ messages to him through his stereo’s speakers, calling out his name and telling him “I’m free”, which Antoniou takes to mean that Michael in the afterlife is finally free from the pressures of fame, which he found “very hard”. No word on whether Michael still wants your sex – that may depend on where he is.

Scientists exploring the seabed near the east coast of Lanzarote on the Canary Islands' eastern side were watching the feed from a remotely operated vehicle at depths of between 330 and 8,200 feet (100 to 2,500 meters) when they found sunken islands around 31 miles (50 km) in diameter with three inactive volcanoes that they say may have been the inspiration for the story of the lost island of Atlantis even though they sank millions of years ago and are still sinking; the hopeful scientists have named the seamount “Mount Los Atlantes” and plan to return in the future to study the "beaches, cliffs and sand dunes at the flat summit of the seamount". Donovan Leitch is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and sees no need to revise the lyrics of his hit song.

Not all haunted houses are old, as a family in England told the British Paranormal Society that their house, built in 1998, has had strange noises for 15 years and the mystery may have been solved recently when a security camera picked up the shadowy image of a white, spectral standing next to a bed in the main bedroom; the family says the only previous owners had a sick mother-in-law staying with them but they had no information on whether she died in the house; with no other details, it’s impossible to determine if the photo is real without paranormal investigators checking out the house. If you have to pay for security cameras and paranormal investigators, you should be able to declare the ghost a dependent on your tax return.

Gemma Smith and her family were exploring the National Trust's Lanhydrock House in Cornwall, England, when they came upon a large feline Gemma said was “no average house cat" as it appeared to scare deer on the grounds; her video, although not very clear, convinced her that this is the infamous Beast of Bodmin Moor, the alien big cat often seen but never captured or proven to exist – the hundreds of sightings date back to the 1990s. So many people argue over its existence, a more appropriate name might be the ‘Beef’ of Bodmin Moor.

UFO researcher Steve Bassett says in a recent interview that the Catholic Church has long been aware of extraterrestrials “going back perhaps hundreds and hundreds of years” and the Church leaders say they would “be happy to baptize them if they wanted to be baptized", but the Church won’t release its thousands of years of records until the U.S. government formally revealed the existence of aliens. At this point in time, the Pope versus the President has a better chance of happening as a pro wrestling match.

A Boeing 747-400 pilot named Captain Rudd Van Pangemanan posted a video of himself and his fellow pilot encountering multiple UFOs while flying from Saudi Arabia to Nigeria recently; one pilot said the orbs were extremely bright and moved freely as well as in formation as "They seemed to entertain us, dancing, making us awake when we are sleepy", but neither pilot could identify them because they didn’t appear on radar and weren’t Starlink satellites. With the way things are going these days, the last place you want to be is on a Boeing plane with UFOs making the pilots sleepy.

The cryptid world is never lacking for controversies and the latest one concerns a drone video taken unintentionally by filmmakers Richard Rossi and Kelly Tabor who claim it shows a legendary underwater creature in Lake Champlain referred to as ‘Champ’; the pair support their claim with a “preliminary scientific evaluation”, but Katy Elizabeth, an experienced Champ researcher, says the video appears to have been taken near the Champlain Bridge where she has found large rocks and sand mounds which are visible beneath the lake’s surface and could be mistaken for ‘Champ’ – except the object in this drone video is the wrong color because "the coloring would be completely non-consistent with a Champ animal. They are blackish in color with a bit lighter underneath”; she also questions the sudden ending of the video.  Can’t cryptozoology be one place where we all play nice?

British rock singer Peter Andre says in an interview that he believes in alien abductions because “They found people with chips in them that they can’t understand”, the chips are like “nothing of any material they’ve ever seen on Earth” and “when you’ve got thousands of millions of people experiencing stuff, you’ve got to take a bit of notice, I reckon”, although he’s willing to consider that the aliens might be human time travelers from our own future. If they’re from our own future, wouldn’t they be more interested in Taylor Swift or Harry Styles?

If you’re interested in apocalyptic coincidences, consider that heavy rain showers near Lake Pátzcuaro in the Ihuatzio Archaeological Zone in Michoacán, Mexico, caused the collapse of an ancient pyramid just days after the collapse of the 190-million-year-old iconic “Double Arch” in Utah’s Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which fell into Lake Powell; the so-called “Toilet Bowl” or “Hole in the Roof” was affected by erosion from weather and changing water levels from climate change, which also caused the heavy storms that brought down the Mexican pyramid. If you believe apocalyptic events come in threes, stay away from volcanoes.

Gobekli Tepe ancient archaeological site in southern Turkey just keeps surprising us as researchers uncovered pillars with V-shaped symbols carved into them that appear to show this was the world’s oldest lunisolar calendar where each V represents a single day; what was even more exciting to the researchers is that the V shapes seem to record the date in 10,850 BCE when a swarm of comet pieces hit Earth, triggering a 1,200-year ice age that led to the extinction of large mammals like the mammoths and steppe bison; Martin Sweatman, a scientist at the University of Edinburgh who led the research team, says “This event might have triggered civilization by initiating a new religion and by motivating developments in agriculture to cope with the cold climate”. Those who grew up with old-fashioned paper calendars wonder how they flipped over the rock to change months.

A new study titled “Apocalypse When? No Certainty of a Milky Way – Andromeda Collision” predicts that the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are possibly on a collision path that will some day swallow the Earth, as well as all of the planets and stars in the two galaxies to create one super galaxy known as 'Milkdromeda'; fortunately, there is only a 50% chance that the collision will occur in the next 10 billion years because of something called the ‘Four-Body problem’ which shows how the four largest galaxies in the group our and Andromeda belong to are difficult to model because of the same gravitational forces that create the more famous three-body problem. Ten billion years gives us plenty of time to prepare and also produce some good novels and movies based on it.

US Congress member Tim Burchett of Tennessee, a proponent of full disclosure of the US government's UFO secrets, is now promising to assemble “the most important people in the world” to examine the bodies of Peru's so-called three-fingered ‘alien mummies' which some people who claim to have examined them say contain “30 percent unknown” DNA; Burchett wants the examinations to be done at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville which has procured half-a-million dollars from the Department of Justice to study skeletal remains and 'relic DNA' like that of the mummies; this is in spite of the controversies surrounding the mummies stoked by the involvement of journalist and UFO researcher Jaime Maussan. The line to ask, “Don’t congress members have better things to do?” starts over there.

A new study published in Geophysical Research Letters by researchers from Colorado State University found that some species of ponderosa pine trees ‘hold their breath’ during wildfires by closing their stomata, the small pores on the surfaces of leaves that take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen, and shutting down the photosynthesis process in order to keep out smoke particles that would otherwise clog them and cause problems after the trees survived the fires. Do they also hold their breath when the see a logger approaching with a chainsaw?

Italy’s Scent Culture and Tourism Association, researchers from Sivas Cumhuriyet University's Archaeology Department and Milan perfumers joined forces to recreate the scent of “Telinum”, which was considered to be the favorite perfume of Roman emperor Julius Caesar because it made him smell like mint, rose, lemon, bergamot, lavender, jasmine, other flowers and the sweat of Roman gladiators, which was a mix of sweat, olive oil and dirt. This sounds like a perfect side gig for Italy’s now-unemployed Olympic athletes.

British singer Brocarde, who is better known as the woman who married and divorced the ghost of a Victorian soldier, performed a séance at the recent Wacken Open Air Festival, the largest heavy metal festival in the world, and claimed she contacted the spirit of the late great rocker Lemmy from Motorhead after his ashes were spread at the metal festival site; Brocarde said she saw Lemmy’s spirit riding a black stallion horse and holding a slice of pizza. Sorry, Brocarde, it looks like Lemmy prefers pizza and horses to dating you.

It wasn’t bleeding or crying like other so-called ‘miracle’ statues, but a woman visiting the Basilica of St. John the Baptist in Canton, Ohio, to see an Our Lady of Fatima sculpture, which was there on display as part of a world tour, claimed she saw the statue close and reopen its eyes – a phenomenon she captured with her phone in a photo that others agree appears to them as if the statue suddenly has its eyelids shut and mouth slightly open – this statue has been said to cry before, but this single picture is the only evidence of blinking and hasn’t yet been examined by a digital photo expert. If this statue is warning us of impending doom, why be so subtle?

A new documentary called “Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision” interviews Grammy-Award-winning mixer Michael Brauer and others who have worked at the famous Greenwich Village recording studio founded by Jimi Hendrix and have had experiences that lead them to believe the place is haunted — while many artists say they feel the spirit of Jimi Hendrix in the studio, the ghosts seen are of an old man, a woman in a shimmering dress or an engineer. Maybe they should leave a Stratocaster guitar on the floor and see if Jimi sets it on fire or surrounds it in a purple haze.

UFO researcher and photo and video analyzer Scott Waring received a photo taken in the early 1930s of what was said to be a small alien; the photo was sent to him by the grandson of the photographer who told the man the entity was near a lake in Alaska and the man chased it until he got the photo; ironically, the grandfather died the day after turning over the photo; Waring used AI to enhance the photo and speculates the 3-foot ‘alien’ looks like it could be wearing a ‘containment suit’ and using ‘blurring technology’. Does a 3-foot alien abduct milk bottles and jerky instead of whole cows?

Former CIA spy Andrew Bustamante revealed in a recent podcast interview that the CIA, FBI, NSA, police and intelligence agencies around the world are "stumped" by “something strange, some kind of phenomena that is consistent, measurable, witnessable and is happening in our planet's atmosphere. Sometimes that phenomena happens underground, sometimes it happens on the surface and sometimes in the sky"; Bustamante, who is currently exploring the Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, says he’s not convinced the phenomena is aliens but these "energy signatures, transient physical evidence, like somehow you can see gaps in GPS data, gaps in geo-spacial data, gaps in energy returns” cannot be explained by “ technical experts” but “it happens and it's consistent". If aliens are an energy force, should we start looking at them as potential causes of blackouts, Internet problems, energy gridlock and other power-related problems?

OpenAI has released an eerie human-like voice interface for ChatGPT and is now warning users that the anthropomorphic voice may cause some of them to become emotionally attached to their chatbot; early users say they’ve become comfortable with the voice handling problems in a natural and comforting back and forth manner, while some think it sounds overly flirtatious and a few think it is copying their own style of talking in order to gain their trust; OpenAI admits that “Users might form social relationships with the AI, reducing their need for human interaction—potentially benefiting lonely individuals but possibly affecting healthy relationships”. What’s worse: giving your love to a sexy AI voice or your money to a smooth-talking one?