Gas Station UFO Encounter, Ghost Footprints, Arizona UFO Base, ETs Without a Planet and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) had to issue an embarrassing apology after he unveiled a photograph of what he claimed was a UFO mothership “caught in Romania in 2022” by the “US Embassy” which he described as a “huge mini city floating in the sky” and just days later was told by John Greenewald, Jr. of The Black Vault that a reverse image of the UFO showed it to be the reflection of a chandelier on a window; an embarrassed Elizondo issued a statement saying there was “a good lesson here, just because someone in Government gives me something, due diligence and scrutiny is always a good idea”. Once again, the biggest UFO threat we’re facing is fakes.

Halloween comes but once a year in most parts of the world, but Poland could celebrate it all year round based on the number of vampire graves discovered there, as evidenced by the latest find in a medieval graveyard in Pień, Poland, where researchers led by archeologists Dariusz Polinski and Magda Zagrodzka found the remains of an 18-year-old woman buried with a padlock attached to her big toe and a sickle across her neck in the belief that the lock would keep her from rising from the grave and the sickle would cut off her head if it didn’t – the woman had fair skin, blue eyes, short hair, a single protruding incisor tooth and a silk cap which signified a high social status that still didn’t protect her from being treated like a vampire. It’s not clear if these tricks worked but they certainly must have made for interesting conversations at the funeral.

The Shroud of Turin is believed by many to be the cloth used to wrap the boy of Jesus after his crucifixion because of the image of a body and a face imprinted on it, but scientific analyses on the shroud have been inconclusive; a new study was conducted by Cicero Moraes, a Brazilian forensic expert and 3D illustrator, who created a virtual simulation in which a similar cloth was placed over a body and then absorbed an image of the person – when the cloth was virtually spread out, the image was distorted and wide as it attempted to give a 2D picture of a 3D body, thus leading Moraes to conclude that the ‘Xerox copy’ image on the Shroud of Turin is impossible and likely a hoax; he notes that skeptics can recreate his simulation at home “by painting your face with some pigmented liquid, using a large napkin or paper towel or even fabric, and wrapping it around your face, then take the fabric out, spread it on a flat surface, and see the resulting image, this deformation is known as the 'mask of Agamemnon' effect, as it resembles that ancient artifact'.  Cicero probably won’t have anyone sitting next to him in church on Sunday.

If it seems to you like there are fewer ghost sightings today than in the past, paranormal researcher Brian Sterling-Vete, PhD, agrees and blames it on his theory that ghosts have a “limited lifespan” and their maximum life expectancy is about 100 years, so many of our best known ghosts, such as Grey Ladies, haunted hitchhikers and celebrities are dying again due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, stating: “I would argue that our findings show ghosts do conform to the second law of thermodynamics as they appear to run out of energy” after a century of spooking. Unfortunately, this 100-year limit doesn’t pertain to bad ghost movies.

Residents of Cuernavaca in the south central Mexican state of Morelos are debating videos of what appears to be a flying saucer-shaped UFO hovering over a gas station long enough for a number of people to see and record it on their cellphones; some social media commenters claim an alien was seen in the city while skeptics think it resembles a drone or a weather balloon but no officials have confirmed any explanations. Did anyone think to check the restrooms at the gas station?

Researchers have been studying a 3,000-year-old Babylonian tablet known as the Imago Mundi (“Babylonian Map of the World”) since it was discovered in 1882 in Sippar, an ancient Babylonian city near present-day Baghdad, Iraq, but it was only recently that a team from the British Museum deciphered the cuneiform script on the tablet's back and discovered a reference to a Great Flood story similar to the Biblical account of Noah’s Ark; it refers to the remains of an ark built by Utnapishtim on the Urartu mountain, called Ararat in the Hebrew bible; the story is similar to the biblical account: the god Ea sends a flood that wipes out all of humanity except for Utnapishtim and his family, who ride the ark and end up safely on a peak of Urartu; while some experts hope this helps find the remains of the ark, others point to similar flood stories in Gilgamesh and other religious texts. Is more than one a ‘flood’ of arks?

Attorney and UFO researcher Danny Sheehan appeared on the Julian Dorey podcast recently and made a number of shocking claims, starting with the statement that he’s seen evidence of at least “six other non-human species” in our galaxy; he also claimed that recent wars and threats of nuclear weapons usage have caused aliens to panic, but they are hesitant to “intervene in an aggressive enough way to shut off our nuclear weapons capacities in both the East and West” because “that's going to reveal their presence – we aren't ready for that yet”; these aliens may be the ones he claims to have a base “outside of Sedona, Arizona, over by a place called 'secret mount' wilderness – a totally desolate area” where “the craft are”; he notes that there was “US military” all around the base, “big triangles going in and out of there” and aliens of the form of “tall whites or tall greys there, along with the mantis people”. Is it more than a coincidence that the alien base is located close to where the Sedona Desert toads live and excrete the enzyme that converts bufotenine into 5-MeO-DMT, a powerful hallucinogen related to the psychedelic drug DMT?

Armchair Loch Ness monster watcher Eoin O’Faodhagain was watching the VILN Clansman webcam by the Clansman Hotel on October 25 when he saw what he claims was a “25 foot monster” “swimming against the current” before submerging “while heading north down the middle of the Loch over a half a mile away from the webcam”; he likens its movement to a serpent or an eel, not a fish or a seal, and compared it to a similar sighting in July also near the Clansman Hotel; O’Faodhagain recently apologized for mistakenly reporting a monster that turned out to be a swimmer, so he apparently studied this one carefully before posting the video on his YouTube page. The Clansman Hotel is certainly happy to have these sightings, whether real or mistakes, as tourism drops while the number of cameras increases on Loch Ness.

Professor John Zarnecki is the coordinator of the ESA’s ExoMars mission to put a rover on Mars but he believes that there is "life everywhere - and probably lots of it" and the planets where they reside do not have to be Earth-like; in fact, he says “It will be the ones that are completely different like in sci-fi movies"; it would be a great coincidence if one of them was the Zarnecki Asteroid, formerly Asteroid 17920, which was renamed in his honor by the International Astronomical Union in recognition of his work in developing “spacecraft instrumentation to study the surfaces and atmospheres of planets, satellites and small bodies”. Will he be held liable if his rover runs over a life form on Mars?

Astrophysicist Paul Sutte writes in Space.com about his interesting theory that intelligent life forms may not need a planet to live on, thus taking the ‘terrestrial’ from ‘extraterrestrial’; he explains that these ‘extras’ would need a shell to maintain an interior pressure against the vacuum of space; the shell would need a temperature warm enough; the colony of living creatures in the shell would need a way to replenish the loss of lightweight elements which are held on Earth by gravity; finally, the shell would need to orbit in the habitable ‘Goldilocks’ zone of its star and have a closed-loop system to recreate carbon, oxygen and other essential elements to sustain itself. If this is an intelligent life form, it will probably decide that living in a shell is too hard and look for a planet to take over.

Joshua Dairen recently purchased a coffee shop in Opelika, Alabama, which he believes is haunted after hearing rustling sounds and footsteps in the empty building; an employee saw a “soldier” walking towards them before it disappeared; and Dairen went to clean up a milk carton that spilled and found “a boot print on the carton. It was an old army boot or something, nobody in our shop has ever worn combat boots”; the building was erected in the 1800s and Darien believes the boot print belongs to the ghost of a Confederate soldier who died in the area during the Civil War. If he didn’t like milk, it may have been a vegan ghost.

In a conversation with NASA filmmaker Simon Holland that was leaked in an email, Nick Pope, the former UFO researcher for the UK's Ministry of Defence, considered Holland’s recent statements that extraterrestrial life has already been discovered via a message and an announcement is being planned, warned that disclosure may not happen if the message “contains a truth too terrible to be told", such as evidence that humanity is simply "a science experiment" or that "aliens are demonic"; Pope also says that he was in favor of disclosure until he saw how people responded to Covid and realized he “overestimated societal resilience and underestimated the panic generated by something unfamiliar and threatening". Sounds like Pope is paraphrasing Jack Nicholson’s famous line: “You humans can’t handle the truth!”

Besides UFOs, Nick Pope also likes to weigh in on Identified Flying Objects as he did recently with his warning to astronauts on the International Space Station that the leak on the Russian side of the ISS is so bad, they should abandon ship as soon as possible because “Leaving it too late could lead to a disaster that would kill not only the astronauts but also NASA's reputation”; the leak, discovered in 2019, is in the Russian Zvezda Service Module Transfer Tunnel which provides station living quarters, life support systems, electrical power distribution, data processing, flight control and propulsion systems; space scientists say the hatch to the module can be closed fast enough to avoid danger should the leak become dangerous. Sorry, that sounds too much like a disaster movie plot.

Sad news for Sasquatch fans in Santa Cruz as the Bigfoot Discovery Museum is closing after 20 years in business; owner and museum curator Michael Rugg is selling the property and most of the Bigfoot exhibits and memorabilia; Rugg first saw a Bigfoot when he was four so the sale is bittersweet and he hopes someone like Cliff Barackman of the North American Bigfoot Center in Boring, Oregon, will take the displays of Sasquatch news stories, figurines, plaster casts,  the Patterson–Gimlin film and a jacket worn by the crew of the movie Harry and the Hendersons”. The property is now zoned residential only so there is still the possibility a Bigfoot family could move in.

Those who believe crop circles are alien-made will be disappointed to learn that the group Revista UFO, led by UFO researcher Rafael Amorim, investigated an unusual crop circle that appeared recently in the city of Ipuaçu in Santa Catarina, Brazil, and found “there was the use of stakes here in the field”, noting was symmetrical in the design, evidence showed “that an instrument was used to lay the wheat”, the remains of a trail was found that would have been used by people who used a “mysterious” red truck seen parked in the area for hours; Rivosta UFO issued a statement saying “So with absolute certainty, with 90% certainty, this drawing was made by human hands” and it pledged to “find out who and why”. This proves once again it doesn’t take much evidence to turn a crop circle into a crap circle.

In a strange conflux of gruesome unsolved murder cases, Steve Hodel, a retired homicide detective in the Los Angeles Police Department, claims he has evidence that his father, Dr. George Hodel, was responsible for the infamous 1947 Black Dahlia murder, in which the body of Elizabeth Short was found in Los Angeles cut in half, the Zodiac serial killings in the San Francisco area in the 1960s, and a total of 50 murders in 50 years around the world; Hodel says the evidence includes a note by the Black Dahlia killer matched his father’s handwriting, a secret District Attorney file showed his father was a suspect in the murder but never arrested, a woman in the Philippines was found murdered and bisected at the time his father was in the country, a police sketch of the Zodiac killer matches his father, a note from the Zodiac killer matches his father’s handwriting, and much more; he is now using his own funds to conduct DNA tests of samples in hopes of finally confirming George Hodel as the murderer in any or all of these cold cases. While we wait, someone needs to turn this into “The Fugitive 2.0”.

From the “News We Wish We Hadn’t Heard” file comes a new study by Adriano R. Lameira, an associate professor of psychology at England’s University of Warwick, which found that kissing may not have started as a sign of affection between humans but instead was part of the lice-removing regimen of early humans who inherited it from humanoid ancestors as “a surviving devolved, vestigial form of primate grooming that conserved its ancestral form, context and function” dating back approximately 2 million to 4 million years ago; the earliest record of humans kissing is found occurs in Mesopotamian texts from 2500 BCE, but Lameira says kissing with “sexual intent” is “a special case” of this behavior and more research is needed to pinpoint when it became sexual. That sounds like a study that will have no trouble finding volunteers.

UFO investigators were hard at work in Kokomo, Indiana, recently after many people witnessed and recorded videos of what appeared to be a fleet of at least six yellow-orange UFOs hovering over the area in what some described as a “huge rectangle” with a “clearly defined vapor shock wave” which allegedly showed up on doppler weather radar and was estimated to be “approximately 20 miles in length” - Alejandro Rojas, an advisor to the UFO research organization Enigma Labs, looked at the videos and determined that the orbs “look very clearly to be military flares”, probably from the Grissom Joint Air Reserve Base, which is a mere 13 miles from Kokomo and known to have aircraft drop flares which Rojas says are easily identifiable: “The tell-tale signs are the lights being in a row and lighting up and disappearing in succession”. If it was aliens, they’d go to the other Kokomo where they could get ”a tropical contact high”.