Leaping Bigfoot, Amelia Earhart Update, Presidential UFO Disclosure, Huge Terror Bird and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

Just when it looked like the 87-year-old mystery of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart was about to be solved by an exploration company that claimed to have found the famed aviator’s plane 16,000 feet deep on the floor of the Pacific Ocean, Tony Romeo, the founder of Deep Sea Vision, issued a statement and photos taken by an underwater drone revealing that what looked like Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10-E plane was actually just an aircraft-shaped rock formation; a disappointed Romeo admitted that "This outcome isn't what we hoped for" and the company still planned to search for another month in the 1,500 square miles of ocean floor around the rock. Somewhere on a nearby island, giant crabs move a pile of bones around and smile.

The Rocky Mountain Sasquatch Organization posted a video from a game camera purported to be from Connersville, Indiana, (66 miles (106 km) east by southeast of Indianapolis) of what the witness, Josh Banker thinks is “a freakin' Sasquatch!" walking upright through some woods on his property; Banks claims that "neighbors said that they have heard weird screams at night" which he initially thought was dogs barking at deer but now thinks it’s a Bigfoot that caused one neighbor to say, "no more going to the woods without my .45". His success or failure in capturing Bigfoot might depend on whether he’s referring to the gun or the malt liquor.

Now that the U.S. presidential election is over, UFO researcher Nick Pope says that there is a strong possibility that President-elect Donald Trump will make a huge UFO announcement soon after his inauguration that will “have seismic implications for Disclosure. It's the perfect storm: a maverick, populist President in his second term, and – thus – not up for re-election. For those in the UFO community who believe there's been a decades-long conspiracy to cover up the truth about an alien presence, Trump in his second term offers the best-ever hope for pushing back against the Deep State and delivering Disclosure”; according to Pope, Trump “has dropped heavy hints that he knows some big secrets” and “I believe Trump views the subject in the same way as he views the JFK files, where, if there's top secret information still being withheld, it should be declassified and released”. Will we find out once and for all if aliens are controlling our ruling class or will they stop this from being released? 

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Jazz Shaw, a frequent contributor to Mysterious Universe, who passed away at the end of October 2024 from a sudden illness. Jazz was a U.S. Navy veteran and a journalist whose writings covered politics to the paranormal and whose interests ranged from animals to horseradish farming to finding the perfect martini. Jazz will truly be missed.

Alan McKenna is the head of Loch Ness Exploration, a voluntary research group in Scotland, and a leading authority on the monster, so his announcement that he saw something in the loch at Urquhart Bay while conducting hydrophone recordings and searching the darkness with infrared and night vision that “paralyzed” him with fear immediately piqued the interest of Nessie hunters and fans around the world; unfortunately, after consulting with colleagues searching with him, McKenna was forced to admit that it was actually "a hilarious and slightly embarrassing moment where an underwater weed caught us off-guard”; McKenna blames the misidentification on thalassophobia, the fear of deep dark water he is afflicted with. Is a fear of shallow dark water a coffee-phobia?

Stone cylinder seals engraved with designs and then rolled across clay tablets to print their motifs onto them are being called ‘the first text messages’ after a new study, published in the journal Antiquity, found a link between the 6,000-year-old cylinders from Urek, an area in southern Iraq, and proto-cuneiform, a symbol-based script which emerged 1,000 years later and is believed to be the first form of human writing, predating the Egyptian hieroglyphics which were first used around 3250 BCE; Professor Silvia Ferrara, co-author of the study, says, “The conceptual leap from pre-writing symbolism to writing is a significant development in human cognitive technologies. The invention of writing marks the transition between prehistory and history, and the findings of this study bridge this divide by illustrating how some late prehistoric images were incorporated into one of the earliest invented writing systems.” We’ll believe it’s the first texting when they find a symbol that means ‘LOL’.

The quest for the de-extinction of Tasmanian tigers, wooly mammoths and other extinct species got a boost recently when an endangered black-footed ferret named Antonia, which was created from genetic material from another black-footed ferret, was successfully mated and produced two healthy pups; there are only about 400 black-footed ferrets in the wild and about 250 in breeding programs, so Paul Marinari, senior curator at the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (NZCBI) where the breeding pair is kept, is justified in saying that “The successful reproduction of a cloned endangered species is a landmark in conservation genetic research, proving that cloning technology can not only help restore genetic diversity but also allow for future breeding, opening new possibilities for species recovery”. It’s good to see this science being used for something besides lab-grown hamburgers and hotdogs.

Missouri is the ‘Show Me’ state so Missouri resident Justin Johnson has been showing everyone the video he took with his cell phone three years ago of “a cube with lights” spinning in the Missouri sky a few hundred feet above him before shooting off at a speed to fast for him to follow in his truck, but no one has been able to identify it, so he turned it over to Enigma Labs, which is building a comprehensive database of sightings that is easy to upload to and convenient for researchers to make comparisons to known entities and isolate the ones that could be something else and force government officials to investigate or answer tough questions; they don’t have a theory yet on Johnson’s cube or another video he submitted. Wouldn’t it be nice if Apple put this app on every phone it makes?

Paleontologists digging in the Tatacoa Desert in Colombia discovered a fossilized leg bone that has been identified as belonging to the largest known ‘terror bird’ or phorusrhacid; this bone’s owner was 20% bigger than the previously discovered terror birds which ranged in size from 0.9 to 2.7 m (3-9 feet) tall and weighed up to 70 kg (154 pounds); this particular bird was so big, bite marks suggest it was felled by a Purussaurus, an extinct species of caiman that may have been 30 feet long; living 12 million years ago, these terror birds co-existed with primates, hoofed mammals, giant ground sloths and armadillo ancestors as big as cars. If these terror birds were around today, they’d be no match for a grandma with 30 relatives coming over for Thanksgiving.

Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) announced that archeologists digging at a ball court in the Dzibanché Archaeological Zone on the Yucatán Peninsula found stucco reliefs from the Kaanul Dynasty, which ruled from about CE 250 to 650, showing two guardians guarding glyphs that name a ruler of the Kaanul Dynasty, ancestors in the night sky surrounded by stars and snakes, and a group of mythological animals associated with constellations; the archeologists say the intertwined snakes in all three reliefs were used by rulers to reaffirm their lineage as representatives of the gods on Earth. In 2,000 years, archaeologists digging in our modern ball courts will look at pictures on the wall and think our leaders got their power from telling people where the restrooms were.

Pike County, Missouri, is a hotbed of Bigfoot activity according to the Bigfoot Research Organization and a man named William (first name only given) claims he saw one of them there on a creek bottom in an area near Bowling Green, Missouri, that was so surprised to encounter a human, it jumped eight feet into the air, then ran off into the woods; as he describes it in a video, "I'm driving along the creek and there's a bend in this creek. The creek is about an eight-foot drop off from where I'm at...as I get to the bend in the creek, I look over and there it is. It's squatting...it's on two legs...squatting down like a man would squat down...covered in hair...it was in the creek...it turns its head and makes eye contact...for what seems like an eternity"; unfortunately, William froze and didn’t get a photo or video, but he believes this is a bigfoot migration path, so there should be more opportunities for sightings. If Bigfoot was squatting, maybe he was startled while using the bathroom. 

The Black Vault website unveiled briefing documents released by the U.S. Navy under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA ) concerning a number of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) sightings investigated by the now defunct UAP Task Force (UAPTF); the documents were created in 2020 and 2021 by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and the UAPTF for high-level defense committees and officials, including the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), U.S. Marine Corps, and the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence (DDNI) and are heavily redacted; they include reports of a “spherical” object that moved toward the water’s surface before disappearing and sightings of “triangular” objects near U.S. military training areas; The Black Vault notes that these briefings reveal that the UAPTF was actively working with multiple agencies to “cue various other advanced means of tracking and analysis” and show “the high priority given to understanding and mitigating the risks associated with UAP encounters”. Kudos to the Black Vault for its work in identifying the unidentified.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory digging through images taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft discovered evidence of a giant deep ocean that once existed beneath the icy surface of Miranda, the smallest moon orbiting Uranus, and there are spots where it still exists today and it may contain active life forms or evidence of past life 100-500 million years ago; the researchers suggest this evidence is strong enough to justify an alien-hunting mission to Miranda to collect more data, although they don’t say if a probe would land on the tiny (300 miles in diameter) moon and either sample the ice or even return with it. Landing might be legally impossible since Miranda could have Miranda rights. 

Some celebrities are going to NFL games, others are endorsing presidential candidates, but rapper and actor Ice-T is warning us about AI-powered robots; the longtime star playing Odafin Tutuola on ‘Law & Order: Special Victims Unit’ said in an interview he believes the future will not be pleasant because robots will soon take over the world and “I don’t think there’s anything we can do to stop technology coming to eat us. Have you ever seen a movie about the future where it was happy?" Can we get a second opinion from Mariska Hargitay as Olivia Benson?

For those of us who write books about what they might say to a space alien, a new study in the International Journal of Astrobiology describes an interesting experiment by University of Haifa psychologists Ilan Fischer and Shacked Avrashi, who simulated our first contact with aliens by having a computer play about 100,000 rounds of a version of the classic ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ game where two players must each choose to either cooperate with or confront their opponent - if both players choose to confront each other, they lose points, but if each player picks a different option, the confrontational player gets a small reward, and . And if both players cooperate, they both get a larger reward; Fischer and Avrashi suggest that a SETI researcher trying to compose a message to an alien intelligence that they know nothing about should say as little as possible because any detail they share about humanity could let slip that we’re different from the aliens. In other words, loose lips sink spaceships.

Speaking of alien messaging, the father-daughter team of Ken and Keli Chaffin spent over a year to become the first people to decipher a simulated alien signal beamed from Mars in May 2023 by the European Space Agency's (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) as part of an art project called "A Sign in Space" developed by media artist Daniela de Paulis, who is artist in residence at both the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute and the Green Bank Observatory; the Greens looked at the signal, which appeared as white dots arranged in five distinct clusters against a black background, and determined they represented five amino acids, the fundamental building blocks of life, and the message contained movement patterns suggesting cellular formation and life forms. That beats ‘take us to your leader’ or ‘To Serve Man’. 

Debris from the thousands of satellites orbiting Earth is becoming an increasingly dangerous problem that may be solved by the world’s first wooden satellite developed by scientists at Kyoto University and launched recently on a SpaceX rocket as part of a resupply mission to the International Space Station; the wooden satellite will burn up when it re-enters the atmosphere, thus creating no dangerous debris falling to Earth; the LignoSat measured just 10 centimetres (four inches) across and will be tested by ISS astronauts before being tossed out and destroyed by the atmosphere. Will IKEA become the next private space company? 

Attorney and UFO researcher Danny Sheehan continues to make news with his new revelations about U.S. military technology being used to bring down UFOs when he said this recently: “They've (the US Government) developed technology to knock these, some of these things down. It's an extraordinarily powerful technology, we'll call it, that is capable of disabling the craft, [and forcing] them down. It's an extraordinarily sophisticated technology that's been developed to take them down"; he claimed “there were a number of the vehicles that were recovered, intact vehicles, that were forced down by this technology”; in another interview, an anonymous US Army veteran verified Sheehan’s claim and said, “The tech mentioned was initially developed during WWII after it was discovered that EMPs emitted from nuclear testing brought down craft”. If this technology exists and has been available for so long, why haven’t we seen it being used against the Tic Tac UFOs or other mysterious craft penetrating the U.S. airspace recently?

Brittany Keller was driving through Ritter Park in Huntington, West Virginia, when she saw “something I had never seen around here before" that she was able to record on her phone and upload to social media, where the world of Internet experts responded with comments that the creature was a lemur that was either thousands of miles from its home in Madagascar or at least dozens of miles from the home or zoo it escaped from, while others identified it as a coatimundi, a cryptid or an alien; a wildlife expert said it was a fox with mange, which would make it look like a Texas chupacabra that was also far from home. Proving once again that an eyewitness is not as good as a ‘catch it in a net’ witness.

The question of whether stressful things are caused by outside forces or stress causes us to imagine outside forces arose again in Spain during the recent devastating floods when a video taken in Barcelona a few days before the storms appeared to show a fleet of UFOs flying between the beams of a rare double rainbow, causing people already overwrought by the weather to speculate they could be aliens “carrying out surveillance on us, analyzing what happens and how we react to tragedy”, while others thought they were merely seagulls or other birds reflecting light from below. If it was aliens, it would be nice if they let us know what grade they gave the emergency response teams.