Pickled Dragon, Kentucky's Whooping Bigfoot, Antarctic Door, Steamy Planet and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

Senior ex-Pentagon security official Chris Mellon claims that multiple noisy, small UFOs were spotted at dusk for nearly 17 nights "moving at rapid speeds" and displaying "flashing red, green, and white lights" in highly restricted airspace above Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, incidents one general allegedly called "Close Encounters at Langley", and that "mother ships" were seen "releasing swarms of smaller craft" as part of " a much larger pattern affecting numerous national security installations" which makes it clear that " our drone signal-jamming devices have proven ineffective and these craft are making no effort to remain concealed"; while Mellon would not get more specific, he told DailyMail.com that "I make no claims regarding their origin, perhaps many are Chinese drones". Why do those in charge drone on and on about these drones rather than doing something about them … or are they ours?

Longtime Bigfoot researcher Charlie Raymond, the founder of the Kentucky Bigfoot Research Organization, revealed in a recent interview that one item in his large collection of recordings of Bigfoot howls came from the Pine Ridge forest near where he lives and is unusual in that it sounds like the Sasquatch is whooping rather than howling, a noise that resembles a celebration rather than a warning or a form of communication; the sound is not unique because Raymond thinks it is exactly like well-known recordings of Bigfoot captured by researcher Ron Moorehead in the Sierra Nevada Mountains; he notes that “It’s an exact match, and not human. These whoops are almost 50 years apart and over 4,000 miles away”. Maybe they went to the same Sasquatch college and it’s their fight song.

In yet another theory on where and why Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 crashed and disappeared on March 8th, 2014, as it flew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people onboard, Dr. Usama Kadri, a professor of mathematics and engineering at Cardiff University has analyzed hundreds of hours of hydrophone data from the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization’s (CTBTO) hydroacoustic stations and found the sound of other known plane crashes; he believes one could be the last sound of MH370 so he’s working with the underwater robotics company to convince the Malaysian Government to allow them to set off a series of controlled underwater explosions or airgun fire along the Seventh Arc (an area of the ocean where the last known satellite communication with MH370 occurred) to see if they can identify the sound of MH370 and pinpoint its location; if the government agrees, the experiment could begin in November 2024 and take three months to complete. Big Brother is listening underwater too.

Most hoaxes are forgotten once their secret is known, but the “Pickled Dragon” hoax from 2004 has taken on a new life as a museum exhibit, highlighting just how easy it was for the media and the general public to believe that inside a large jar allegedly found by Allistair Mitchell was a preserved  dragon fetus, complete with wings, claws and a tail, that was created by German scientists in the 1890s as a hoax designed to fool British scientists; this hoax of a hoax was actually created by Mitchell himself to promote a fantasy novel he had written about dragons; the dragon was made by a prop artist from the BBC series ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’ and placed in a made to order old-looking jar; Mitchell hired a photographer and says "I sent those photos to the Evening Standard who published the story on the Friday - on the Saturday, it had gone all over the world." That could never happen now … gotcha!

If you had a nickel for every pub that declared itself to be “one of the most haunted buildings in Britain”, you’d have enough to fly first class to visit Ye Olde Kings Head in Chester, a former brothel which now has security cameras everywhere to capture ghost activities; recent footage shows a doll being thrown from a shelf and startling customers and a child’s "disembodied voice" on a staircase saying what sounds to some like “My name's Billy"; in addition, paranormal investigators claim they’ve encountered a "ghost monk" and a different possessed Annabelle-style doll saying: "I want to burn your eyes out". Frustrated pub owners don’t mind these ghosts but probably wish they’d say things like “The bangers and mash here are really good”.

A week after publishing his accounts of the alleged government UFO data collection program called 'Immaculate Constellation', whistleblower and investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger told podcaster Joe Rogan that some of his sources claim to have 'direct evidence' that the U.S. has 'mastered anti-gravity' propulsion; Shellenberger admits he’s skeptical because “it would take a huge amount of effort” and those with the purported evidence are refusing to reveal it because they “want stronger whistleblower protections to be able to come forward”, something Shellenberger is in favor of. Sadly, the UFO disclosure world seems to be becoming a ‘protection racket’.

In a discussion about another UFO incident involving the U.S. military, a retired Iraq War veteran and UFO researcher named Brandon (no last name given) revealed on a podcast that in 2004 he and other military personnel had seen “several of these spheres floating above” his ship, performing intricate maneuvers and then “one of these objects came out of the sea and deflected missiles that tried to shoot it down”; they saw others “appearing suddenly, hovering for a while, and then instantly accelerating so fast that it seemed like they disappeared into thin air” at speeds estimated between 230 and 345 mph; Brandon said he reported one incident to a superior officer and was told to “forget about it”. We are fortunate that some are brave enough not to “forget about it” but bring these reports to the public.

Phoenix Nightingale of Minnesota has a condition known to her friends as “vampire disease” and to her doctors as “acute intermittent porphyria”, a very rare metabolic disorder that is triggered when she ingests garlic; the sulfur in it gives Nightingale pain, migraines and constipation while causing her to vomit for days; she has two children and says the suffering is far worse than childbirth; the legend of Count Dracula and other vampires’ aversion to garlic goes back to farmers hanging garlic in barns to protect horses from bites by repelling insects and vampire bats. We should be grateful vampires don’t vomit while flying.

In news of not-so-close-encounters, Professor Simon Holland, a science filmmaker who has worked with the BBC and NASA, claims that two groups of astronomers are within weeks of publishing their findings confirming the existence of a possible non-human extraterrestrial civilization in our galaxy; Holland got this tip from someone working with Breakthrough, the privately funded SETI scientific research program aimed; the other group is in China using the FAST [Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope] program and is pushing to be first to reveal the signal picked up in a narrow electromagnetic spectrum emanating from a single source in a region around Proxima Centaur about 4.2 light-years from Earth. Don’s say ‘Wow!’ because that exclamation has already been used.

According to a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers have long theorized that planets with an atmosphere made entirely of water vapor exist and they’ve finally found one; it’s named GJ 9827 and is twice the size of Earth and located about 100 light years away; astronomers at the University of Montréal’s Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets used a technique called transmission spectroscopy to measure the atmospheric composition of GJ 9827 d and found it was “rich in heavy molecules like the terrestrial planets of the solar system” and not loaded with the lightest elements—hydrogen and helium—like the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system; they call GJ 9827 d a “steam world”. You can tell an alien comes from one of these steam worlds if their hair is frizzy and their uniform has no wrinkles.

At the 2024 edition of the annual Pennsylvania Bigfoot convention, Bigfoot researchers Brian and Terrie Seech told a reporter that the elusive Sasquatch is rarely seen by humans because “they’re smarter so they know that’s a good thing to keep their distance”, but witnesses in Ohio and West Virginia see them “all over the place’ and say they “look like a giant ape that is “six to eight feet tall” but are unable to follow them because “They’re interdimensional, which is another reason why we can’t see where they’re going. We can’t see where they’re going or where they are coming from” and even if we could follow them, it would be nearly impossible because “Some can run up to 100 miles an hour and keep up with cars”. Could this be the reason for that strange odor you smelled and the odd ‘whoosh’ you heard while running your last marathon?

Julie Birkett-O'Loughlin, a self-described paranormal enthusiast, claims she was walking her dog Ralphy recently and decided to take some random photos with her phone; she claims she was alone but one of the pictures shows a figure she describes as a 6-foot-5-inch “ghost” where she swears there was no one or no creature standing; she thinks it might be the ghost of a monk because “I can see a large, wide figure with a white hood but I couldn't see any feet, it was hovering above the ground. It's a tall figure, over 6.5ft tall, dressed in robes”; while some social media commenters think it’s a wheeled garbage can or a person, Birkett-O'Loughlin swears it was neither, so “I'd describe it as a spirit". No word on what Ralphy thinks, but it probably won’t stop him from wanting to go for a walk again.

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but we’ve since learned that much of what we thought was true about explorer Christopher Columbus is questionable at best; recently, forensic medical expert José Antonio Lorente analyzed a partial set of human remains housed in an elaborate catafalque at the Seville Cathedral in Spain, compared them samples taken from Columbus’s son, Fernando, and one of his brothers, and confirmed that the cathedral is definitely the final resting place of Columbus; this DNA testing also identified Chris’ nationality, which was long believed to be Genoese and Italian but he was confirmed by Lorente’s team to be of Spanish Sephardic Jewish origin. Sounds like it’s time to add matzo ball soup to your Columbus Day menu.

Many cities require full disclosure of the history of houses being sold and that often includes whether they are haunted, which explains why a two-bedroom home in St Osyth, Essex, took 12 years to sell the last time and is still on the market after four years this time – the property is “The Cage”, a well-known haunted house that was once a prison for "witches" waiting to be burnt at the stake or hanged; the current owner reports seeing the ghost of a man disappear into an eerie mist, finding blood on the floor, being pushed to the ground while pregnant by an unseen force and spotting a ‘satanic goat’ wandering around; a mere £250,000 ($324,690) will buy this “cozy and eccentric holiday let". This is not the house where you want to hear a guest ask, “What’s that smell?”

From the “23andMe meets Astronomy” file comes a discovery by astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile to observe Gliese 229B, the first known brown dwarf (also called a failed star) discovered 30 years ago; the researchers thought the brown dwarf was too big for its mass and used light and chemical clues to determine it is actually twin brown dwarfs orbiting each other every 12 days; this “shows you how weird the universe is, and how different solar systems are from our own”, said study co-author Rebecca Oppenheimer with the American Museum of Natural History and points the way to the discovery of more. It would be even more weird if they found out they were related but separated at birth.

We haven’t reached the new year yet but predictions are already coming from Nostradamus and Baba Vanga and their interpreters warn that the two famous dead psychics have a number of matching predictions for 2025, including another deadly war breaking out in Europe next year and a plague that devastate the population; on the bright side, Nostradamus sees an end of the Russia-Ukraine war being facilitated by either France or Turkey, while Baba Vanga predicts aliens will arrive at a major sporting event while a  Martian war breaks out. Should Kendrick Lamar prepare for some special guests at the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show?

Antarctica is home to many mysteries and the latest is what looks like a strange door in the ice that keen-eyed observers found in East Antarctica just southeast of Japanese research outpost Showa Station using Google Maps; while some see a door, others see a Star Trek shuttle; Bethan Davies, a professor of glaciology at the University of Newcastle, and other experts see “an iceberg that became grounded and is now stuck and melting out [in place]” formed by “ice flow around a solid subglacial obstacle, influenced also by melting and re-freezing of ice and by katabatic winds”, a phenomenon that is “an interesting pattern, but not unusual or surprising glaciologically”. Nothing like science to ruin a good conspiracy theory.

The U.S. Space Force doesn’t seem to have many functions but an important one is being responsible for the top-secret un-crewed X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV-7) which it is directing into some maneuvers called aerobraking which will put it in a series of passes using the drag of Earth's atmosphere to allow the spacecraft to change orbits while burning minimal fuel; Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman calls this a "first of a kind maneuver from the X-37B” and “an incredibly important milestone for the United States Space Force as we seek to expand our aptitude and ability to perform in this challenging domain”.  It’s big news, but not for those who thought the Space Force would be chasing Klingons by now.

Archaeologists digging beneath "Al-Khazneh", known as the “treasury of the pharaoh”, in the ancient Jordanian city of Petra, which is one of the New 7 Wonders of the World, discovered a 2,000-year-old tomb containing 12 skeletons, one of which was holding a ceramic cup resembling the “Holy Grail” as depicted in the movie "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade", which by coincidence was filmed at the site; Sediments and artifacts from the burials date to sometime between the mid-first century BCE and the early second century CE when the site was most likely constructed as a mausoleum for the Nabataean king Aretas IV Philopatris. Don’t worry Doctor Jones – no snakes were found there.

According to a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, mysterious giant white worms have been discovered living and breeding beneath the seafloor at hydrothermal vents in the eastern Pacific near the Galápagos Islands, a cramped and inhospitable underground environment where scientists thought only microbes and viruses could live; a Schmidt Ocean Institute exploration last year found these giant pale tube worms of "record sizes" measuring 8 inches (20 cm) long for one species (Oasisia alvinae) and more than 19 inches (50 cm) long for another (Riftia pachyptila); they were discovered under slabs of solidified lava along the East Pacific Rise where several tectonic plates meet off the coast of South America. We saw Giant Pale Tube Worms open for Whitesnake.