Sugar Cane Bigfoot, Cloud-Walking Humanoids, Chilean Dogman, Shapeshifting Orbs and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

A strange video allegedly from a restaurant’s security camera in Alcones in Ovalles Commune north of Santiago, Chile, shows what appears to be a dog across the street running in front of a house, then slowly growing in size until it suddenly stands up and continues walking as if it shapeshifted into a human; many who commented on the video (dated October 2022 but only made public recently) thought it could be a nagual or nahual, the shapeshifting human-animal being from  Mesoamerican folklore, but others suspected the dog went to a crouching hidden man who then picked it up and walked away carrying it; the quality is unfortunately too poor for a definitive answer. If someone ever perfects security cameras, cryptozoologists and UFO hunters will be on the unemployment line.

If you need something else to lose sleep over, Kobe University planetologist Naoyuki Hirata published new research which shows that a huge asteroid, about 20 times larger than dinosaur-killer that hit Earth 65 million years ago, crashed into Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, the largest satellite in the solar system, about 4 billion years ago with a force hard enough to alter its rotation and create an impact crater nearly 1,000 miles in diameter; Hirata compares this event to a similar impact which altered the rotation of Pluto and suggests we search other moons and planets for similar evidence. Should we continue working on asteroid destroyers and deflectors or hope that Superman is real and on his way from Krypton?

Kushal Kumar, an astrologer who fancies himself to be the "Indian Nostradamus" when it comes to forecasting world events, has predicted, using the Vedic astrology chart known as the chard, that the war between Rusia and Ukraine is about to get worse, but he assures us that “calm may descend across the major warring fronts in and around May 2025, somewhere anytime between mid-May to mid-October in 2025”; this would be promising if Kumar had not also predicted four times already, and been wrong on all four, ending dates for that conflict. With that kind of track record of being wrong, maybe this astrologer should switch careers and become an economist.

If you’re wondering what ever happened to the Havana syndrome which dominated the news from 2016 to 2021 after diplomats, CIA officials and other government employees in Cuba and other locations experienced mysterious debilitating brain injuries and mental health issues, CNN reports that the National Health Institute’s research on the still unresolved syndrome has ended “out of an abundance of caution” after an internal probe found that some research subjects had been “coerced” into participating, and other participants in the program “claimed that the CIA made them join the research as a prerequisite for getting health care”; the NIH’s study concluded that it found no evidence of significant brain injuries, but independent studies suggested that brain injuries were observed in patients and that Havana Syndrome might be caused by some sort of electromagnetic weapon. That puff of smoke and wicked laughter you hear is probably coming from Fidel Castro’s ghost.

In San Pablo, Tucumán, Argentina, a young farm worker harvesting sugar cane with a female partner claims he was accosted by a "Chato y oscuro" (flat and dark) shapeless figure that fell out of nowhere, then dragged him several meters away from his tractor, beat him and left him face down and unconscious; upon coming to, he told his partner the figure had shapeshifted into a human from but had tremendous strength; the partner posted photographs of the bruises on social media, where many suggested the man was attacked by a goblin (‘el duende’) that lurks on the farms, or an ucumar, a South American Bigfoot; whatever the case, they say the man is now branded with the "mark of the harvest." Sounds like it’s time to switch to harvesting whatever goes into sugarless soft drinks.

Proving once again that seeing is not always believing, a man in Handan, China, posted a video he took of what looks like a giant white humanoid figure walking or moving stiffly across the top of a cloud; some commenters think it was a giant alien cloud walker, while others suggested it was a supernatural figure or a sign of something big about to happen, while skeptics concluded it was merely a piece of a second cloud moving in the opposite direction behind the first one. All they could agree on is that the forecast for Handan is partly cloudy with a chance of apparition.

This month marks the 85th anniversary of the Oppenheimer-Snyder model (yes, THAT Oppenheimer)  which proved for the first time in contemporary physics how black holes could develop following Einstein’s field equations describing the collapse of an object of extreme mass into a black hole, even though the term ‘black hole’ had not yet been coined to describe the phenomena; J. Robert Oppenheimer and physicist Hartland Snyder published their paper in 1939, then Oppenheimer moved on to building the atomic bomb. If only he had stuck with black holes.

Believers in the biblical Hell don’t want to go there, but scientists continue to trek across Siberia to the Gateway to Hell, known to them as the Batagaika Crater, to study the massive hole in the Yana Highlands southeast of Batagay that measures 200 acres wide and 300 feet deep in a horseshoe crab shape that has tripled in size in the past 30 years and is now visible from space; new research shows this thermokarst depression or megaslump deepening because permafrost melt has nearly reached the bedrock as the result of the volume increasing by about 1 million cubic meters per year; the width and depth of the Batagaika Crater terrify locals as it edges closer to their homes and impacts the flow of nearby Batagay River. Some say the real Gateway to Hell is the hole in our brains that causes us to ignore climate change.

Glasgow resident Gearóid Cearr was on a local football field shooting photos of the Aurora Borealis when he captured what appeared to be a line of red and white lights blinking in a repeated pattern as they crossed the night sky; he posted the photo on social media and noted that it couldn’t be Starlink satellites because they’re not red, and it looks nothing like the running lights of planes, but no one seemed to have a solid explanation, so Cearr believes he photographed a UFO until proven otherwise. Someone could make a fortune (and settle a lot of arguments) by invented a camera and cell phone lens with a Starlink filter.

A Frontier Airlines pilot posted a video on r/UFO on Reddit (under the name thtflyingguy) about a UFO encounter he had recently while flying over the Grand Bahamas International Airport in Freeport; he and his captain saw “these orb of lights that kept moving around each other and one point we saw them move at incredible speeds and stop and hover instantaneously”; he says “Through out the night we kept seeing them” and he claimed to have “another video showing two of them and I turn the camera showing another group to the South”; The Daily Mail checked flight tracking data and the plane may have been flight FFT3572 which departed from San Juan, Puerto Rico; some commenters thought the pilots saw “twinkling stars”, which is a phenomenon astronomers call astronomical scintillation, that is caused by the passing of light through layers of a turbulent atmosphere. Now I can’t get that nursery rhyme out of my head.

Norway’s Princess Märtha Louise, who claims she can talk to angels, recently married American Durek Verrett, who claims to be a sixth-generation shaman from California who can communicate with a wide variety of spirits and wears a medallion that wards off spells and cures diseases; the princess is fourth in line to the Norwegian throne but has no official royal duties. If they cross their psychic streams, they could probably give Norway’s government an extra layer of military intelligence protection.

If you’re looking for a building for your UFO club meetings, the United Sabaeans Worldwide Temple is up for sale in Brooklyn, New York, for $6 million; that price may seem steep, but the building is covered with ancient Egyptian motifs, and for 40 years has been home to the UFO-believing Nuwaubian Nation group whose founder, Dwight York, claimed he is a god from outer space, but that didn’t help him stay out of prison, where he lives today; York and his followers left their building in Brooklyn for a complex of two pyramids in Putnam County, Georgia, called Tama-Re. If it has rent controls, it could be a great apartment building for alien visitors.

Yet another person claims to have solved the mystery of the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 in 2014 as Vincent Lyne, an adjunct researcher at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Arctic Studies, explained in a social media post that his research shows that “a mastermind pilot almost executing an incredible, perfect disappearance in the southern Indian Ocean”; that pilot was Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who Lyne claims knew about a 20,000-foot sea floor hole surrounded by high ridges and other deep holes that he believed would conceal the debris of his Boeing 777; Lyne’s research paper has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Navigation, and he claims he can take rescuers to where the plane rests on the floor of the eastern end of the Indian Ocean’s Broken Ridge and “that location needs to be verified as a high priority”. Why is it so easy to find “masterminds” to commit crimes but not to solve them?

One of those hard-to-believe yet hard-to-debunk paranormal videos was posted on X by @EarthquakeChil1 who described it as footage from a security camera in Mexico showing “an #Orb turns into two children”; the video is dated August 22 and shows early morning footage of a bright light moving over a field, then changing into what looks like one small person or child, who stops and then walks until it appears to spawn a second person or child; both beings then disintegrate before they can walk out of the field of vision of the camera; comments run the gamut from CGI hoax to ghosts or supernatural beings to aliens to a camera glitch, but there is too little data to make an accurate determination. Who needs scary movies and mystery novels when you have X and TikTok?

It’s essential to the plot of all Planet of the Apes movies but no one has seen monkeys naming each other in real life until researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem studied tiny common marmosets in South America and found that they make specific sounds called “phee-calls” to “label and address specific individuals”; the researchers expected this to be limited to close family members of the marmosets but were surprised to discover that adults learned the names of individuals they weren’t related to by blood; their paper explains that marmosets “live in small monogamous family groups and take care of their young together, much like humans do” and suggests that “they faced comparable evolutionary social challenges to our early pre-linguistic ancestors, which might have led them to develop similar communicating methods”. What does it mean when the goofy, overweight marmoset who keeps falling out of the tree has the same name as you?

British singer and former wife of a ghost Brocarde has used her experiences to become a paranormal investigator and reports that she was visiting the Nevada State Penitentiary in the US when she encountered the spirit of mass murderer Carroll Edward “Eddie” Cole – Cole was convicted of killing two women in Nevada, three in Texas, and was suspected in 30 more murders – who then tried to take possession of her body in the prison execution chamber on death row; Brocarde claims the possession happened after she “made the huge error of conducting a dousing rod session” and she “really had to fight hard to stop the spirit his possessing me”. Maybe she should practice some more dousing for water.

The latest time travel news comes from Michael Koropisz, whose friends found a photo of his doppelganger taken in 1905 which he says explains why he’s always been obsessed with the 19th-century era and has dedicated his wardrobe and lifestyle to Victorian styles and customs; he now believes that it is “because of my past life" and wonders if what many say about him is true – that he’s a time traveler from that era; psychiatrists call seeing your doppelganger “heautoscopy” and say it is a symptom of schizophrenia and epilepsy, but the phenomena has been reported for thousands of years. Doppelganger would be a great name for a band – and also for its tribute band.

If you fear having an encounter with a Flat Earther, a British study on conspiracy theories using TikTok data and a poll of 2,000 people found that 3% believe the Earth is flat and, when the data is broken down by sex and name, 72% of men named Andy ascribe to this and other conspiracy theories, followed by Craig (67%), Fred (60%) and Thomas (60%); among women, the believers are named Sophie (59%) and Lorraine (56%). This might be a good time to revise your baby names list.