Another Pentagon UFO Department, Evidence of Two Lake Monsters, Flying Humanoid, Jack the Ripper Identity, and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

Reporter Michael Shellenberger revealed on his blog that a whistleblower gave him the name of what he claims is an “active and highly secretive” U.S. military program investigating UFOs; he says the program, called ‘Immaculate Constellation’, was established by the Department of Defense in 2017 after The New York Times revealed the existence of a different UFO program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP); Department of Defense spokeswoman Sue Gough immediately issued a statement denying Shellenberger’s claims, saying “The DoD has no record, present or historical, of any type of SAP called ‘Immaculate Constellation’” while Sean Kirkpatrick, the former director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), said There’s no such thing. I had access to all of the unacknowledged SAPs and reviewed them with the SAPCO director” (SAPCO is the Special Access Program (SAP) Central Office); the whistleblower was said to be “a current or former US government official” who described a number of UFO encounters, including one where an F-22 fighter jet was “intercepted and boxed in” by three to six orbs, and another where the crew of a Navy aircraft carrier saw an orange-red sphere with a surface “roiling like the sun” rapidly descend from high altitude to about 100-200 yards over the flight deck. It sounds like the Pentagon may be covering up Immaculate Conception with a less-than-immaculate deception.

From the “Beyond faces on tortillas” file comes a photo taken by NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover showing a rock that looks a lot like the head of a human statue lying on its side, with hollow eye sockets, a nose and a mouth; the face anomaly is in the Jezero Crater where Perseverance roves and while it certainly could be a case of pareidolia, interpreting random shadows and shapes to be something real, many say the photo taken by the rover’s Right Mastcam-Z camera seems to resemble a Neanderthal or early human skull or possibly an ape or even a Sasquatch. Maybe if we tell him Bigfoot is on Mars, Elon Musk will leave for the Red Planet sooner.

Champ, the Lake Champlain monster, is another step closer to identification after Katy Elizabeth, the researcher who has scoured the lake with the latest search equipment, made some unusual underwater echolocation recordings of an unidentifiable sound, so she turned them over to Marine Biologist Cindy Joli of Perth, Australia, who compared them to known cetacean Echolocation recordings, fish that inhabit Lake Champlain, and manmade sounds; Joli stated that the sound was not from a marine mammal since it would have to come up for air and be seen; nor was it any other known freshwater lake animal or amphibian; she concluded that “The audio shows there is the possibility of an unknown species unlike anything known from a freshwater lake” and that “the theory that there may be a highly evolved “ectothermic animal”, that can produce complex clicks residing in the lake is possible” and should be investigated. Champ may be cold-blooded (ectothermic) but it sounds like Katy Elizabeth’s search for it is definitely getting hot.

In what might be called a case of ‘dueling lake monsters’, The Loch Ness Centre in Drumnadrochit, Scotland, revealed that one of its daily Nessie-hunting Deepscan cruises, captained by Alistair Matheson, recently recorded a “sizeable reading" on one of its advanced radar scanners; the "distinct anomaly" is said to show "substantial underwater presences or potentially large aquatic creatures" on the loch bed; the crew is "currently working with Loch Ness researchers to conduct further analysis of these readings which hopefully mark a major milestone in the search for Nessie". If advanced technology and artificial intelligence find lake monsters and other cryptids, will ChatGPT suddenly cop an attitude?

Add the name Russell Edwards to the list of researchers who believe they have discovered the identity of the notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper; in his new book, “Naming Jack the Ripper: The Definitive Reveal”, Edwards explains how he used “DNA analysis of blood and semen samples obtained from a shawl known to have been found at the scene of the killing of Catherine Eddowes, on the night of the 29th September 1888, which now positively links a Mr Aaron Kosminski to that killing”; he then used “cutting-edge facial reconstruction technology” to create a black and white image of Kosminski, showing him to be a young Polish man with a faint mustache; forensic experts question the validity of the DNA on a shawl that is well over a century old. For now, we still don’t know jack about Jack.

Hannah Rose saw a ghost when she was seven and that inspired her to research all things paranormal but focusing on haunted dolls; she reveals in an interview that the dolls can "wreak havoc" and she was scratched by Louise [one of her dolls] but we made up after a communication session; another doll named Mildred “likes to hide important things like my house keys or makeup”; Hannah acts as a therapist to her dolls, explaining that “Louise then told me she felt threatened as she suffered a lot of abuse in life and is cautious around people. I explained to her that I was approaching her with respect and she has never hurt me again, although she had scratched some of my friends who have been in the house as a warning to them”. If Kesley Grammer decides to do a paranormal version of “Frazier”, this could be his new angle.

Jeremy Garcia of Burlen, Washington, says he was driving home from a fishing trip on a recent afternoon when he spotted an Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) hovering over a grocery store parking lot; Garcia estimated the object to be 300 to 400 feet in the air and resembled a flying, or at least floating, humanoid; his photos published in the local newspaper indeed look like a floating human but are not clear enough for a positive identification, and no local authorities or representatives from the nearby Sea-Tac Airport offered an explanation, leaving it open to speculations ranging from a person in a jetpack to a balloon to an alien. If it followed Garcia from his fishing spot, maybe it was a ‘fly’ fisherman.

A lake in Slovakia may be home to a monster according to Pavol Jackovič and his friends who were hiking in the northern Tatra mountains and stopped at the country’s largest and deepest alpine lake, Veľké Hincovo pleso, where they claim to have seen “something rising to the surface from the lake” measuring “at least three to four meters long” (9.8 to 13 feet) that he says he and his fellow hikers were too stunned to photograph; the mountain protection administration (TANAP) said that although it initially believed they had seen a shoal of sturgeon, it has rejected that theory since “sturgeon live in warmer waters and the altitude of 1,946 meters, where Hincovo pleso is located, is too high for it to survive”; locals think it’s “a marena whitefish may have grown to gigantic proportions”. One thing is certain – whatever it is, Slovak grandmas have a recipe for cooking it.

From the “This is why we can’t have nice ancient things” file comes word from Chile that 1,000-year-old geoglyphs made in the Atacama Desert by the region’s Indigenous people between 900 and 1450 CE have been damaged and destroyed by auto racing, including the Atacama Rally, off-road motor vehicles driving around the desert illegally, and trucks and other heavy-duty vehicles taking shortcuts off the main roads; the Alto Barranco geoglyphs are not as famous as the Nazca Lines in Peru and don’t have UNESCO World Heritage Site protection, but they are important historical and cultural carvings of figures of animals, humans and objects that deserve respect and preservation. Maybe Kevin Costner can help by memorializing them in a movie called “Desert of Dreams”.

A strange security camera video from Veracruz, Mexico, appears to show a dog running before it “turns” or shapeshifts into a human and continues running out of the camera’s field of view; www.tcsahora.com called it a paranormal event and speculated the being could be a nagual, the mythical human shapeshifter of Mexican folklore; nagual, a camera glitch or a hoax were the primary speculations among social media commenters, many of whom noted that this phenomenon has been appearing on surveillance cameras regularly recently with no plausible explanation. Ironically, owners of these ‘security’ cameras are suddenly feeling less secure.

Dr. Olaf Witkowski is a Leader of Technological Change and an Ambassador for Ethical AI and Artificial Life Research, based in Kyoto, Japan, and in a recent interview he warns that extraterrestrials must be understood in order to deal with them, and he suggests that the best way to understand a living entity is to kill it or at least hurt them; he explains that they are probably “replicating or maintaining themselves in a homeostatic loop” and “they will be experts at detecting threats to survival” so by hurting them, we can help them survive; he also believes that extraterrestrials are trying to understand us too and are invading Earth and trying to kill people as a way of saying, “We just want to talk”. As the author of “What Would You Say to a Naked Space Alien?”, I’d rather invite them to join me in a hot tub with an adult beverage for some conversation and laughs.

The search for Bigfoot took a weird turn recently in Oklahoma when content creator @E_ManAlfaro posted a video on TikTok of what he claimed was an encounter with a possible Sasquatch in the Parallel Forest in Lawton, Oklahoma; the video shows the alleged cryptid sitting underneath a tree, then looking at the camera, upon which the person shooting it appears to run away; @E_ManAlfaro says “I really think I caught a f–king Bigfoot on camera” and many early commenters agreed, although the creature had a costume-y look about it; that look was explained eventually when it was revealed the video was an ad for the Bigfoot Head Shop in Lawton. While no one thought Sasquatch was finally found, it turns out the sighting was all part of an ad campaign for the Bigfoot Head Shop in Lawton, voted the “Best Vape Shop in SWOK 2023”; some suggest one had to be high to mistake the video for an actual Bigfoot encounter. Recreational marijuana is illegal but medical pot is OK in OK.

The worst place to encounter a ghost just might be in the bathroom, which is where a tourist from Newark-on-Trent named Maxine met a poltergeist while visiting the Earl Grey Tea Rooms in York; Maxine told the management she tried five times to open the loo door before it finally opened, and she was shocked that there was no one on the other side holding it; the café is on Shambles street, the inspiration for Harry Potter's Diagon Alley, and the staff claims the ghost might be the spirit of a woman who haunts upstairs rooms; they also report the account of a woman who claimed the ghost of a child grabbed her leg while she was washing her hands in the loo; paranormal investigators confirm the building and the street have had many paranormal events. If the water suddenly starts running, it’s a ghost washing their hands before going back to work.

The unsolved disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in March 2014 enters its 10th year with yet another attempt to solve it as science journalist and private pilot Jeff Wise announced his new experiment that starts with the plane's flaperon, which was the first piece of the plane’s debris found; he plans to place a replica of the flaperon in the likely crash site in the Southern Indian Ocean 11 years to the day of the crash, remotely monitor barnacles marine growth on it and track its location as it drifts across the water; after 15 months, the flaperon will be recovered and the barnacles compared to samples from  more than 1,000 buoys currently in the world's oceans; Wise thinks the barnacles grow all over the flaperon, it means the plane landed in the Indian Ocean after one of MH370's own pilots hijacked the plane to carry out a mass-murder-suicide; however, if the barnacles only grow on the section that's in the water, it indicates the debris was placed in the Ocean at a later date and the crash was the result of a hijacking from a third party. It is an interesting experiment and theory, but this is becoming the DB Cooper of plane disappearances.

From the “Fortean phenomena or mysterious mutation?” file comes photos from a farmer in Edmonson County, Kentucky of a two-headed calf that was born alive even though it had two heads, four eyes, four ears, two mouths, two noses, an abnormal spine, a cleft palate, arthrogryposis in its legs, and an underdeveloped rectum; it’s being called a ‘one in 400 million birth’ by owner and agriculture student Cassie Tarter, who took the corpse to class at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green where an autopsy determined the cause of the two-headed deformity was caused by DNA RNA replication, not twins that stopped growing and started to be 'absorbed' because there were only organs for one calf. Once again, nature proves that two heads are not better than one.

Aliens may one day reach the bright lights of Broadway if the Claybody Theatre's new play, “Bright Lights Over Bentilee”, is a success; the play is inspired by a UFO sighting on September 2, 1967, near the Bentilee housing estate in Stoke-on-Trent when a number of children and adults reported seeing a glowing object fly over the houses and land in a field, only to quickly take off in a blaze of white light and disappeared from view; witnesses said it resembled a saucer and it “It changed like... red and then it... come into like a greenish colour and then a blue" while not giving off any heat; cast member Jack Wilkinson says: "The idea that something might be out there in general and that this is like a.... kind of world where people on a mass scale saw something in our area, I think that's kind of like really kind of wild and magical"; the play is being staged at The Dipping House, Spode Works, Church Street.

In yet another response to the Fermi paradox and the search for signs of intelligent life from other planets visiting Earth, Antonio Gelis-Filho, a researcher in public policy at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation at the School of Business Administration (FGV EAESP) in Brazil, proposes in a new paper that the reason we haven’t been visited by aliens may be due to “a Universal Limit for Technological Development (ULTD)” which “prevents extraterrestrial civilizations of reaching a technological level that allows for space colonization”; in two more bits of bad news, Gelis-Filho says that “there has never been, there is not and there will never be something like an interstellar civilization, or anything similar to an 'interstellar conversation" and “the principle of mediocrity suggests that we may be close to the ULTD”. We had a principal of mediocrity in charge of our high school.

If an ant in the kitchen or a spider in the bathroom bothers you, be glad you didn’t live during the late Paleozoic era near the equator between 346 million and 290 million years ago when a car-sized insect known as the Arthropleura roamed the forests; this arthropod had the body of a millipede in a 100 pound package and a new study revealed that researchers have finally found enough fossil remains to recreate its head; the giant bug’s head looked like a round bulb with two short bell-shaped antennae, two protruding eyes like a crab, and a small mouth adapted for eating leaves and bark. A bug that size today would laugh at our puny windshields, zappers and rolled-up magazines.