Bigfoot Guards Gold, ET Landing Strip, Anti-Gravity Bubbles, Ghost Comedian and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

The Phoenix Lights, a collective description of a variety of V-shaped UFOs and orbs in formation, were only officially seen and reported on March 13, 1997, but that hasn’t stopped the city of Pheonix, Arizona, from having so many other UFO reports that a new survey lists it as the top city in the United States for total number of UFO sightings with 323 since 2013; second is New York City with 313, followed by Las Vegas, Nevada, with 309, Portland, Oregon, with 279, and Tucson, Arizona, with 244; the survey also notes that 9:00 pm is the best time to spot a UFO and July is the best month for watching. Is the top spot due to the number of military bases in Arizona, or do aliens have allergies and prefer its dry climate?

A video uploaded by someone in the municipality of Axutla, Mixteca Poblana, Puebla, Mexico, shows what appears to be an unusual saucer-shaped  UFO with points like a sunflower or a saw blade on the outer circumference; the clip lasts about 30 seconds and the Facebook page Axutla Agua que Brilla says the object was witnessed flying and descending over a rural area; the web site Azteca Puebla reports there has been no statement by government officials on the video, which was uploaded in late September, 2024. A flying saw sounds like the perfect craft for aliens looking to build homes on Earth.

From the “Sometimes it’s not a monster” file comes an honest report from Loch Ness of an alleged monster sighting in mid-September 2024 by prolific webcam watcher Eoin O'Faodhagain who initially pegged the cause of a large wake picked up by the VILN Lochend Webcam to be an “Unknown 8 foot long animal with hump rising out of the water 3 feet back from the front of the wake, and as it turns to the left, its reddish brown hump can be clearly seen out of the water”; O'Faodhagain reported the sighting, but a week later  he took it down, saying “The object is clearly a swimmer dragging a pale orange float behind him” and apologized to the Nessie-loving public, stating “It was not my intention to mislead the public, as it was a genuine misidentification." Did he make this decision himself or did he hear the screams of skeptics all the way from Scotland to Ireland?

A Bigfoot researcher named Stacey Haslet attended the recent annual Pennsylvania Bigfoot conference where he made an interesting claim that Sasquatch was brought to Earth millions of years ago by aliens who came to mine gold and used Bigfoot to protect them from the dinosaurs; he knows this because he claims to be part of the Bigfoot “clan” which he refers to as the “first people”; he also claims a Bigfoot accompanies him wherever he goes (no word on whether anyone saw the Sasquatch at the conference) and that they have opinions on current U.S. politics. If Sasquatches could vote, would they support environmental issues? Would they be required to dress before entering the polling place?

In his new book, 'Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs', Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), claims that the absurdly impossible maneuvers made by some UFOs could be due to an anti-gravity device which forms a “bubble” around the ship and negates the forces of gravity on it; the bubble would also negate time dilation for the beings inside the ship, thus making time much faster for them and causing them to see humans moving at a fraction of their speed; the bubble would also distort light moving through It, masking which direction the object is traveling. This is all speculation on Elizondo’s part, so some bookstores may be confused as to whether the book belongs in non-fiction or science fiction.

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” is a quote from the movie “Godfather III” but could just as easily have been said by Brazilian UFO researcher Edie Meireles, who took an early “selfie” photo of himself with a UFO in the sky over his shoulder, making it the "first selfie with a UFO" in his estimation; he claims that shortly after taking the pic, his car’s electrical system shut down while the UFO hovered above him; he also claimed that armed soldiers raided his home allegedly killed two members of his UFO research group; it’s understandable he might not want any more attention, but he got it recently when the photo and his story reappeared on the Internet, generating renewed claims the pic is a hoax and the story is fabricated; Meireles has moved on and now claims to have had many encounters with extraterrestrial beings in the park as they try to prevent Earth from a global environmental disaster. Be careful what you selfie.

A man fishing near Tsalie Lake on the Navajo Nation reservation in northeast Arizona claims he saw movement in 5-foot-tall sage bushes which looked to him like a Bigfoot with reddish hair standing 6 to 7 ft tall and walking about 250 yards away; he sent the photo to the Rocky Mountain Sasquatch Organization, which confirmed this was in an area with many Bigfoot sightings, so it could be legitimate; its report also noted that in this part of Arizona around the forests of the Mogollon Rim, the creature is known as the Mogollon Monster and can weigh up to 400 pounds. If this guy was a fisherman, should we believe his size estimates?

The headlines refer to it as a “Loch Ness Monster” but what Dean Beattie saw and recorded off the Atlantic coast of County Donegal in the province of Ulster, Ireland, should more accurately be called a sea monster, if the short video Beattie took before his phone battery ran out is a recording of a Nessie-like creature with a long neck sticking high out of the water; Beattie claims he and another witness “sat and watched it for 20 minutes at least; going under water then resurfacing a minute or so later, around 20 yards away” before it disappeared. If it was green, Ireland may have a new St. Patrick’s Day mascot to sell souvenirs of and name craft beers after.

Tommy Cooper was a famous tall (6 foot 4 inches) comedian and comedy magician who died in 1984; his over-the-top personality and mannerisms inspired many to impersonate him, including John Hewer, who claims the ghost of Tommy Cooper has visited him many times while he’s playing him, sometimes even putting words in his mouth that he wasn’t planning to say but are perfect Cooperisms; Hewer says he thanks Cooper’s ghost after every show and has spoken to the spirit many times. You may want to think twice about doing your Jeffrey Dahmer impressions at the Halloween party.

Kushal Kumar claims to be a Vedic astrologer and calls himself the Indian Nostradamus even though he admits he is frequently wrong, like with his many incorrect predictions for the start of World War III; now he’s jumped into the presidential prognostication profession and predicts that the winner in November’s U.S. presidential race will be the current vice president, which may be good news for her opponent of Kumar is wrong again. If he’s a Nostradamus who’s always wrong, a better name would be the India Not-stradamus.

Halloween is coming so eerie videos are making the rounds, including a popular TikTok video from Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, Mexico, of what the uploader claims is a ghost girl running from behind a pillar at 3 am in an OXXO convenience store; while the comments run the gamut from believers to skeptics calling it a hoax perpetrated by the parent of the child who should be in trouble for letting them run around in empty convenience stores at 3 am, one interesting suggestion is that this is a real ghost and a common occurrence in OXXO stores because many of them are in old, abandoned houses which are often haunted. If the Slurpee machine suddenly begins making strange moans, you may want to check if that 7-Eleven is built on an old insane asylum.

In a recent interview, UFO researcher Bill Birnes makes claims like “An officer with Eisenhower, who was then a colonel, saw debris” from an alien ship, “President Bill Clinton investigated Roswell”, “Strom Thurmond took it (Roswell UFO debris) to defense contractors to reverse engineer it” and “a NASA researcher saw dark side of the moon photos showing triangular spacecraft on a crater’s edge”; Birnes claims photos and other evidence is “airbrushed” out because “ETs don’t want us exploring their bases”; he even claims that “I’m told ETs throughout our government exercise higher security than the president. They track those who believe they have UFO parentage someplace”. If they’re tracking UFO parentage, shouldn’t they be living with the British royal family? (Asking for a conspiracy theorist friend.)

Another possible answer to the Fermi paradox (where are the aliens?) comes from University of Edinburgh theoretical physicist Latham Boyle, whose new paper presents the idea that  ETs are calling home and using “interstellar quantum communication” which we have not yet developed the capability to capture the qubits; He estimates that any quantum transmitting and receiving dishes would need to be more than 60 miles (100 km) wide to ensure enough quantum states survive the transmission from another solar system or galaxy; however, aliens smart enough to develop quantum communications are also smart enough to see we can’t pick it up so they don’t even bother trying. Is this a win for Fermi?

In 2022, researchers mapping the seabed of the Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast National Marine Sanctuary in Lake Michigan, a protected area with 36 known shipwrecks and potentially many more, found strange circles that looked natural rather than human-made; this summer, underwater explorers visited the site with a remotely operated vehicle and determined that these huge circles are enormous, naturally-occurring craters or sinkholes range in size from 300 to 600 feet across and are oxygen-deprived so no living creatures occupy them; only 15% of the bottom of the Great Lakes has been mapped in high resolution so there could be more of these craters in Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes. No aliens or lake monsters but still an interesting discovery.

The search for Champ, the creature long rumored to live in Lake Champlain, got some new evidence from Champ hunter Katy Elizabeth, who released underwater echolocation recordings of something that defied comparisons to various other underwater sounds made by fish known to live in the lake, mammals, boats and humans; while not conclusive proof, it’s the kind of evidence that warrants more searches for the creature whose legend dates back to the local Iroquois and who has had over 300 reported sightings, including Samuel de Champlain, the founder of Québec. Whoever proves it exists becomes the Champ champ.

The search for Nessie also has some new evidence from Loch Ness cruise boat captain Shaun Sloggie and maritime pilot Liam McKenzie, who were making their 29, were making their rounds when Sloggie's sonar picked up a large object at a depth of around 98 meters (321 feet) which he described as “the biggest thing I've ever seen”; it had an elongated shape like some descriptions of the Loch Ness Monster and the sighting took place almost exactly four years after the last sonar sighting; Sloggie says he returned to the site but has not detected the object again. Sonar, photos, echolocation – it’s all an ironic blur.

From the “This changes everything” file comes a study published in the journal Antiquity about work in Oued Beht, Morocco where archaeologists have discovered the earliest known farming society in northwest Africa in a region known as the Maghreb, making it the earliest and largest agricultural complex in Mediterranean Africa beyond the Nile corridor, dating back to the 4th millennium BCE; this means the Maghreb was instrumental in shaping the western Mediterranean through agriculture and trade between Africa and Europe during the Neolithic period.  Now they need some pyramids to get more tourist traffic.

The German state of Baden-Württemberg, which borders France and Switzerland, has a skilled labor shortage that it is attempting to solve with extraterrestrials – the state’s Minister-President Winfried Kretschmann authorized the building of world's first-ever, purpose-built landing strip for extra-terrestrials; the strip is adjacent to a welcome terminal and a “Land Here” sign that the government hopes will attract aliens to fill the expected 500,000 job openings it predicts by 2030 at  Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Bosch and other companies in the area; Eva Bankoley, head of marketing for the State Ministry, says "We thought if we made the sign big enough, it would attract attention from the universe". If they’re serious, they need to start making three-fingered work gloves, XXXL helmets and oversized eye goggles.

Many people believe there is a link between crop circles and aliens and one was Queen Elizabeth II who in the late 1980s, according to the new documentary “King of UFOs” by Christopher Lee, sent her chief scientific adviser in the middle of the night to investigate a then-recent crop circle formation in Wiltshire – the incident was confirmed by crop circle researcher Colin Andrews, who was at the crop circle with a Japanese film crew at the time. King Charles seems to be more interested in UFOs – perhaps he’s too square for circles?

Researchers from Heriot Watt University using new high-resolution, 3D seismic images of the Nadir Crater have confirmed that it was made by an asteroid 1,640 feet  wide that struck Earth just off the coast of the Republic of Guinea in West Africa around 66 million years ago at about the same time as the dinosaur-killing Chicxulub asteroid; measurements reveal its low angle, high speed and size would have caused “an 800-metre-plus high tsunami that would have travelled across the Atlantic ocean”, earthquakes, large landslides and “a train of tsunami waves going away from, then back towards the crater, with large resurge scars preserving evidence of this catastrophic event”. There’s nothing worse for a dinosaur than a sigh of relief also being your last breath.

The paranormal world of West Virginia is not just Mothman and Point Pleasant as evidenced by the announcement from Gov. Jim Justice and the West Virginia Department of Tourism of a statewide Paranormal Trail which is a digital link with descriptions and directions to the state’s many paranormal sites, including the haunted Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, Lake Shawnee Abandoned Amusement Park and West Virginia Penitentiary; the Mothman Museum; the Flatwoods Monster Museum; the Shepherdstown Mystery Walk; the Flinderation Tunnel; and the Elk River Trail with its giant Bigfoot statue; The West Virginia Paranormal Trail online allows visitors to earn points and unlock exclusive Paranormal Trail prizes – including an official sticker, beanie, and limited-edition print by West Virginia artist Liz Pavlovic. Mothman would be proud.

Elton John sang that “Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids, in fact, it's cold as hell” and NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover, which has roamed 20 miles on the Red Planet since 2012, is living proof of just how hard life might be there as NASA released new photos taken by Curiosity's Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) which shows giant holes in the rover's middle right aluminum wheel which can cause poor traction and make it difficult to make turns; NASA won’t say how much longer the wheel can hold up but Curiosity has outperformed many used cars on Earth. After 12 years, a mere hole in its wheel probably makes Curiosity agree with David Bowie: “It’s a god-awful small affair”.