Baby Werewolves, Earworm Remover, Aliens Arrive in 2025, Baba Vanga Predicts World War III and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

Philip Mantle, the former Director of Investigations for the British UFO Research Association, reveals in a new interview his skepticism about the 1980 Rendlesham Forest incident, considered to be Britain’s Roswell, basing his conclusion on the fact that Jim Penniston, the US airman who claimed to have seen and touched the craft, altered his testimony over the years; Mantle supports theories like the one that military witnesses could have hallucinated due to plasma emitting electromagnetic energy or lights; he also believes the stories have changed due to “a thing called confabulation, where sometimes you’ll take in information from an external source but over time come to believe it actually happened to you”; finally, he says “I can confirm that the events in Rendlesham Forest 40 years ago remain unexplained". One thing we can explain is that Rendlesham locals don’t want to lose all of their UFO tourism business.

It is clear that Siberia, Tibet and parts of Asia were once home to Denisovans and Neanderthals living together with humans, but University of Hawaii at Manoa anthropologist Christopher Bae and Chinese Academy of Sciences paleontologist Xiujie Wu propose in a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications that another group of humans called the Juluren, which means “large head people”,  lived in Eastern Asia and northern China between 200,000 and 160,000 years ago; they base this theory on bone fragments found at the Xujiayao site which indicate the Juluren possessed skulls significantly larger than other early human species and modern humans; they also possessed a mix of features of Neanderthals, Denisovans, early humans and modern humans, which the study suggests will change the way we look at evolution. It doesn’t change the fact that all of these early species seemed to have plenty of sexual relations between them and size was important in heads too.

Oxford University biology professor Tim Coulson predicts that a World War III with global nuclear conflicts would create a post-apocalyptic world where assuming we survive, humans will undergo a natural selection process to survive that will change us “beyond recognition”, evolving us into “superhumans” with advanced toughness and fitness, "hyper intelligence" for developing new survival skills and new science, and possibly a smaller body size with protective skin and wings to "fly like a bat" and avoid predators; sadly, he says that without this war and its evolutionary restart, “Civilization may select for greater stupidity and sloth”. We may need a new version of Edwin Starr’s classic “War” with the lyrics: “War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing but evolution”.

One of the most famous “Is it or isn’t it?” UFO photos first appeared in 1990 when Patrick Marechal claimed to have captured the image of a triangular UFO with three red lights in Petit-Rechain near Liège, Belgium, using a Kodak Ektachrome camera; the photo was examined by UFO researchers and military experts who supported its authenticity but others believed it to be a secret military plane; In 2011, Marechal admitted the photo was a hoax he created using a Styrofoam model and flashlights; however, in 2024, he rescinded that testimony in an interview with MUFON and claimed he was paid to lie about it in 2011 because it was featured in UFO researcher Leslie Kean’s book, “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record”; now, MUFON’s Roger Stankovic, who interviewed Marechal, has posted on social media that the photograph was real and Marechal was paid to lie about it. This concludes another episode of everyone’s favorite paranormal soap opera, “As the UFO Turns”.

From the “This is the kind of invention we need more of” file comes news that the software company Atlassian has developed the “Earworm Eraser” – a 40-second audio track designed to remove those annoying songs that worm their way into your brain so that you hear them (and nothing but them) on an endless annoying loop; the “Earworm Eraser”, developed by Kelly Jakubowski, an associate professor of music psychology at Durham University in the UK, is pseudo-music that switches from fast to slow tempos, changes time signatures and flips musical styles from electronica to classical to others every few seconds; most people who listened to it said it worked, although a few claimed it was useless. Barney, the Muppets and other children’s music makers are surely not happy about this.

In a new interview, filmmaker Randall Nickerson, who produced “The Ariel Phenomenon” about a mass UFO and alien sighting by African schoolchildren in 1994 and was the subject of Dr. John Mack’s book “Abductions”, discussed being abducted many times, often by the same team of four aliens, remarking that “There’s something special about four. Always four”; his research into other abductions revealed a common trait among abductees: “Some of these abductees are off the chart geniuses. They have photographic memories. I think it's a mix of range, and I think there's multiple reasons. But I definitely noticed the brain part, because I've met so many crazy intelligent people. Females and males, and then there's another element that maybe they picked, I don't know, for genetic reasons". Maybe they travel in fours so they can play doubles pickleball to pass the time.

Alan McKenna, founder of Loch Ness Exploration, an independent voluntary research group with a mission to preserve Loch Ness, its natural environment, its ecology, and its mythical monster, thinks many of the sightings of Nessie can be written off as “standing waves” which occur when “two boat wakes of the exact same frequency and amplitude are moving in opposite directions on the loch surface. When the two boat wakes finally meet and interfere with one another the results have the potential to create a standing wave”; those two waves rising above the otherwise calm waters of the loch can look like two humps, according to McKenna, and fool even the best watchers; he hopes to prove this theory using two boats and recording the phenomena but admits that getting the right size boats traveling at the right speeds in opposite directions and close enough to create standing waves will be a challenge; even if he does, McKenna admits that “Truth be told, none of us have the correct answer and that’s what keeps this mystery going”, That plus all those tourism dollars.

Sgt. Jeremiah Holmes of the Wheeler County Sheriff's Office in Oregon has investigated five mysterious cattle mutilation cases in six years and said in a recent interview that "there's more questions in this thing than there are answers" because he’s never had any substantive leads and never find tracks or blood; his experience living in the area helps him rule out animal predators, saying he’s seen what bears and cougars can do to cattle and this isn’t it; he doesn’t understand why humans would mutilate animals like this for a ritual or research but has become open to the possibility of aliens or other “unidentified creatures, even on this earth, that are doing this that we haven't identified yet"; Colby Marshall, a former ranch manager, agrees, saying that while he doesn’t believe aliens would use their sophisticated technology just to kill and mutilate bulls, he thinks “if they are coming across the galaxy to come and get beef in eastern Oregon, that means we've got pretty darn good beef and maybe the best in the galaxy". If that’s the reason, why aren’t they abducting steakhouse chefs?

Unless you are looking to raise a family of werewolves, the European Medicines Agency has issued a warning to parents to stop putting Minoxidil on the heads of their babies to stimulate hair growth because infants in Spain are reportedly developing hypertrichosis or 'werewolf syndrome' and causing uncontrollable hair growth all over their bodies, especially on their legs and backs; officials at the Pharmacovigilance Center of Navarre traced the 'werewolf syndrome' to 11 children whose parents rubbed them with Minoxidil and the infants possibly accidentally ingested the drug from their parents’ hands or their own; the excess hair stopped growing and fell out when the parents stopped rubbing on Minoxidil. This would have made for some pretty strange photos with Santa.

We are nearing the end of 2024 so the psychic predictions for 2025 are pouring in, including some depressing forecasts from blind Bulgarian psychic Baba Vanga, like her prognostication that World War III will be started by the fall of Syria, an event many say is already underway with insurgents occupying most of Aleppo, the country’s largest city, including the airport; Baba said, Syria will fall at the feet of the winner, but the winner will not be the one” and “As soon as Syria falls, expect a great war between the West and the East. In the spring, a war in the East will begin, and there will be a Third World War. A war in the East that will destroy the West”; many people believe Baba Vanga predicted 9/11, the death of Queen Elizabeth II and Brexit, so this forecast is worrisome.  If Baba Vanga is a blind psychic, does that make her a non-seer?

Meanwhile, TV psychic and former Real Housewives of Cheshire star Deborah Davies has a more positive outlook for 2025, at least when it comes to close encounters – she forecasts that aliens no longer fear humans so they will pay us a visit in 2025 and will attempt to stop us from destroying the planet via climate change; Davies notes we shouldn’t be surprised the extraterrestrials are so friendly and helpful because many years ago "they helped us build civilization"; in 2025, there will be an increase in UFO sightings and “then towards the end of 2025 we will see a big increase in physical contact from them, despite efforts from people in power trying to keep it quiet”. If they want cooperation, maybe they should announce their arrival on a show called “Real Housewives of Outer Space”.

A popular relationship book in the 1970s was titled ‘Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus’ but it should have been placed in the fiction section according to Ivan Rudoy, ​​a senior lecturer at the Moscow Aviation Institute, who says Venus is uninhabitable by humans even in the most sophisticated spacesuits because its temperature exceeds 400 degrees Celsius (725 F), the atmosphere is mainly carbon dioxide and the planet is covered with a thick layer of sulfuric acid clouds, the atmospheric pressure is 90 times that of Earth, and Venus has no electromagnetic field to block cosmic radiation; Rudoy says no humans can survive on Venus so “From a scientific point of view, it is much more logical to send robots equipped with the most modern devices to Venus rather than humans”. If you ask a female space scientist who read the book, she’d probably suggest sending men anyway.

Archeologists digging in Roman-era burial sites in modern Scandinavia, Germany and Poland have been finding tiny (1.6 to 2.8 inches in length) spoons attached to the belts of males but had no idea what they might be for until recently when biologists Anna Jarosz-Wilkołazka and Anna Rysiak, and archaeologist Andrzej Jan Kokowski of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Poland determined they were ancient ‘coke spoons’ used by Roman era Germanic warriors to take stimulants before going into battle; the researchers explained in their study that the stimulants used included those extracted from funguses, opium poppy, hops, hemp, henbane, and nightshades such as belladonna and datura. You knew you were in trouble if the soldiers on the other side were using tablespoons.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence depends heavily on radio telescopes listening for signals that could be signs of alien communications and Penn State University astronomer Nick Tusay has developed a new technique that can identify signals being sent between exoplanets – his system involves watching for exoplanets passing in front of other exoplanets but not blocking them completely; Tusay speculates that messages sent by aliens on the hidden planet to those on the blocking planet could bounce off the blocker into space where our radio telescopes could eventually receive them; Tulsay thinks these could be “the kind of signals we emit all the time, from an alien civilization going about their business, doing their job, with no intention of signaling anyone”. How disappointing it will be if the first signals we receive from aliens translate to: “I’m just sitting here doing nothing. What are you doing?”

Marco McDewey has hunting cameras set up in the woods near his home in Newport, Washington, and one of them recently recorded the image of what he believes to be a ghost wolf running past deer who notice something but don’t flee themselves; he describes it as “a wolf spirit guarding my property" and possibly the deer too as their eyes appear to follow the blurring white specter until it disappears; while some commenters agree with McDewey, it could also be a camera malfunction or a double image. We saw Ghost Wolves open for Steppenwolf.

Dr. Sreedhara Somanath, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, was asked in a podcast if Earth had been visited by extraterrestrials and he replied, “Absolutely, no doubt about it” but he warned that they might be from a civilization 10,000 years or more ahead of us so we might not even be able to see them; he also expressed concern about meeting any aliens because while “We (humans) are evolved out of a common biology on Earth, there is no nature that is a protein that is different in nature on Earth – we are all connected in some manner”, the visitors might be “something evolved on another planet that would have been synthesized in an entirely different manner. It may not have a similar genome structure or protein structure, and it is entirely dangerous for two foreign lifeforms to come into contact with one another”; the end result would be that the meeting “will cause either destruction to them or to us”. Once again, many episodes of ‘The Twilight Zone’ will be proven correct.

A UFO on the ground should properly be called an Unidentified Parked Object (UPO) but a person using the name @CaptainBiggalow called the orb he allegedly photographed on the runway of Manchester Airport is calling the small, spherical, “car-sized” object a UFO; according to the social media post, Air Traffic Control (ATC) was notified, and an operations vehicle was dispatched to investigate but the spherical object suddenly took off vertically when approached; while many thought it was a wayward and partially deflated balloon, @CaptainBiggalow said the object was not normal and he should know because “I have been an airline pilot for a UK operator for several decades, and we know what is normal and what isn’t”; after the report, the account of @CaptainBiggalow was mysteriously shut down, causing a flurry of conspiracy theories; UFO researcher Mark Christopher Lee disagreed, saying "This blue orb sighting reminds me of UK researcher Timothy Good who wrote about the Australian government capturing an alien sphere in 1957 - it was made of an unknown substance and had no visible means of levitation. It was captured at the Nuclear test facility in Woomera, Australia and eventually was transported to Wright Patterson Airforce Base in the United States". Balloons have become the 21st-century version of the “swamp gas” of the 20th century.

Before a certain space company billionaire sends a million people there, he might want to read a new study by Andrea Butturini and a team of scientists at the University of Barcelona which shows that a prime spot for looking for life on Mars may be on the ancient plain known as Acidalia Planitia – well, not ON it but UNDER it; Butturini says the subsurface zone between 4.3 and 8.8 km (2.67 to 5.5 miles) below the plain is sheltered from harsh surface conditions and has enough residual geothermal heat and traces of water that it could be teaming with microbial life right now, just waiting to be discovered (disturbed? destroyed?) by a lander or rover capable of drilling that deep and retrieving samples; the study suggests they could be “cold-adapted Methanosarcinaceae-like and/or Methanomicrobiaceae-like methanogens". If they live on methane, they may not be happy to see electric cars on Mars.